Chapter 1. Introduction
1.4. Theoretical Framework
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of public diplomacy in it. The systematic approach in international relations research field was developed by R. Aron (1966), B. Buzan (2000), A. Bogaturov (2002), K. Waltz (1979) and others.
The research will follow the next steps:
1. Analysis of literature and other sources dedicated to public diplomacy.
Determination of its basic concepts.
2. The study of Russian and American approaches to public diplomacy and its comparative analysis.
3. Texts collection related to national news networks and analysis of the concept of "Telediplomacy".
4. The study of CNN and Russia Today news reports and a comparative analysis of the methods of their presentation and interpretation.
The empirical basis of this study can be divided into the following thematic categories:
1. Official documents of the Russian and the United States offices of state (the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, the Ministries of Defence, the Ministries and Departments responsible for information policy and security), heralds of statistical yearbooks and annual reports.
2. Transcripts of speeches and statements by government leaders, public officers, and diplomats.
3. Publications of analytical centers, expert reports, mass media printed and online materials.
The theoretical basis of this paper is presented by the concept of force in international relations and analysis of the mass media as an actor of international relations, developed by J. Nye within the framework of his concept of "soft power"16. The study also analyzes the agenda of various websites, speeches and statements of the first persons on the public pages, constant monitoring of social networks.
1.4. Theoretical Framework
This study aims at determining the characteristics of impact of CNN and Russia Today as the national news networks on the formulation and implementation of the USA and
16 Soft power is a concept developed by Joseph Nye of Harvard University to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than by coercion (hard power), using force or giving money as a means of persuasion. Soft power is the ability to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. A defining feature of soft power is that it is noncoercive; the currency of soft power is culture, political values, and foreign policies.
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Russia Federation foreign policy strategy. Therefore, the framework of this paper is based on four dependent variables.
1. Public Diplomacy
In the context of changing the geopolitical picture of the world under the influence of diverse global processes, public diplomacy, as an important additional tool for achieving foreign policy goals of the state, becomes especially urgent. The term "PD" was first used in 1965 by E. Gullion, defining it as "a program funded by the government and aimed at informing and influencing public opinion in other countries" (Nikiforova & Mazurenko, 2013;
p.188). Later this term was studied in detail by the American political scientist, the professor at Harvard University and author of the concept of "soft power" Joseph S. Nye. According to his assessment, public diplomacy is one of the most effective methods of building of American "soft power" (Nye, 2004). The central role in its implementation belongs to the information resources and control over information flows.
J. Nye distinguishes three dimensions of PD:
1. Daily communication, including the explanation of domestic and foreign policy decisions, and also the preparation for crisis response.
2. Strategic communication, which implies a focused discussion of the most important political topics, like political or advertising campaigns.
3. Development of strong relationships with key individuals by virtue of scholarships, exchange programs, training, seminars, conferences and access to media channels.
Public diplomacy can be seen as actions aimed at building long-term relationships, the protection of national foreign policy objectives and a better understanding of states’ values and institutions abroad. PD promotes national interests and ensures national security by examining the attitude of foreign public opinion, informing them and impacting on those who form this attitude.
The main objectives of public diplomacy are17:
• ensuring national interests and protection of the national foreign policy objectives, national security;
• strengthening of the targeted impact on foreign audience, establishing a better understanding among people of different nationalities;
• formation of the positive attitude of the foreign audiences toward goals and progress of the domestic and foreign policy implementation by a particular state;
17 Krajnc, K. (2005). Public Diplomacy: Basic concepts and trends. Retrieved September 20, 2016, from http://www.ifimes.org/en/8020-public-diplomacy-basic-concepts-and-trends
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• improving countries’ image and attractiveness.
2. New Public Diplomacy or PD 2.0
"Public Diplomacy 2.0" is a relatively new trend in the framework of public diplomacy, representing the way of communicative impact on foreign audiences through Web 2.0 technologies (social networks, blogs, video sharing, etc.). New PD is greatly important in modern world politics due to the increasing number of World Wide Web (WWW)18 users and declining popularity of traditional media and rapid spread of new media.
By the reason of globalization of economic interdependence among countries, foreign states have intensified their foreign policy actions in order to strengthen "soft power" in situations where the use of military action or economic coercion looks doubtful. In this context, PD 2.0, one of tasks of which is the formation of a positive image of a state abroad, can be seen as an extremely useful tool for foreign policy.
There is a number of key components of new PD that also can be found in the traditional public diplomacy (Cull, 2013, p.125-126). Firstly, those are the records of public opinion, where service agencies track the number of comments, tweets, likes, retweets, etc.
Secondly, it is the information campaign to shape a positive opinion in foreign countries.
Thirdly, it is cultural diplomacy, which uses social media to convey information about the cultural heritage of peoples. Fourthly, it is an international broadcasting. And finally, it is the establishment of closer ties between the foreign audience and population of a particular state (or face-to-face contacts) with the help of social networking sites, such as "Facebook",
"Google+"19, "Vkontakte".
Mass media is one of the major subjects of the new PD 2.0, focusing on foreign audiences through television channels, broadcasters, news agencies, print media, which have its own accounts in social networks and microblogs (U.S. Department of State, 2008).
Among the well-known TV channels involved in international broadcasting are British
"BBC"20, American "CNN" and Russian "RT", etc.
18 The World Wide Web (WWW) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URLs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet.
19 Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus) is an interest-based social network that is owned and operated by Google. A Google+ User profile is a public visible account of a user that is attached to many Google properties. It includes basic social networking services like a profile photo, about section, background photo, cover photo, previous work and school history, interests, places lived and an area to post status updates.
20 The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. It is headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, and is the world's oldest national broadcasting organization and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, with over 20,950 staff in total, of whom 16,672 are in
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"Public Diplomacy 2.0" is a very promising direction in the framework of public diplomacy, whose value in states’ foreign policy in the nearest future will only increase. The development of
Information and Communication Technology
(ICT) and the growing popularity of social media in the world actualize the need of using the Web 2.0 technologies in diplomatic practice.3. Nation branding
The problem of state image is not new to political science. Throughout world history, leaders were interested not only in building a strong nation, powerful ally, and center of the world but also in getting a certain attitude towards their countries. Development of political knowledge gave several approaches which help analyze processes of constructing a country’s image. The most interesting, in my opinion, is the branding approach that gives the value of social/cultural element to the "brand" category. Here the "image of the state" is equivalent to the understanding of "the brand of the state."
This concept unites a whole nation by the sense of national pride, stimulates the movement towards common ideals and goals, as well as contributes to the dissemination of information about the state, which, first and foremost, has to improve the public perception about a particular country and, consequently, contributes to its development (Nagornyak, 2013; p. 157).
The process of transfer of the national brand, of course, is widespread and is done through the channels that cover a large social audience. The most effective channels of this kind of transmission are the foreign policy, investment policy, tourism, cinematography, literature and, of course, television21.
The process of forming a nation branding requires maximum coherence and consistency. Only one event, which is out from the general concept of the branding, can lead to the destruction of a holistic image of the country. For this reason, the process of the public broadcasting brand is always preceded by analytical work, which allows figuring out attitude towards a state in the international society and finding out the reasons for the formation of positive and negative opinions. In general, the national brand is determined by the perception of any country based on six factors: tourist attraction, human capital, quality of the exported public sector broadcasting; including part-time, flexible as well as fixed contract staff, the total number is 35,402.
21 Teslik, L. H. (2007). Nation Branding Explained. Retrieved September 20, 2016, from http://www.cfr.org/diplomacy-and-statecraft/nation-branding-explained/p14776
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goods, government equity, the attraction of culture, sport and investment environment, and the country’s attractiveness as a place of residence. (Anholt, 2003, p. 226)
4. Nation-state’s control over media
There is a process of creating a huge global communication system. It involves the national governments, international agencies, multinational media corporations, non-governmental human rights organizations, etc. This help to build a global media market, or
"an increasingly interdependent site for the development and application of formal and informal rules that shape common narratives, a space in which ideologies compete and forge allegiances that ultimately determine the persistence of governments and nations themselves, and an arena where imagery becomes a supplement or substitute for force" (Monroe, 2002, p.315). One of the consequences of this process is rethinking of governments’ role in relation to the information and mass media. States cannot further remain indifferent to the mass media, mainly because information is becoming a source of power.
In this regard, national states have developed two types of response to the information flows. Firstly, they protect its information space from external intrusion. Secondly, nation-states try to have an impact on the information environment and media structures of other states. A state’s attitude to the information field is determined by its history and present day, depended on the degree of development of democratic institutions in the past and present, the level of media communication privatization, the influence of religious tradition, the technical base of media and the scale of implementation of new technologies (p. 317).
New technologies, speed, scale and nature of their information implementation have a huge influence on the process of providing information, which sometimes lead to countries’
loss of control over it. Other countries, on the contrary, because of using such technologies, successfully monitor domestic information and strengthen their superiority with respect to those states, which consume their information products22.
Nation states can also control the information sector through the adoption of certain laws, entering into negotiations and making appropriate arrangements, implementation of technologies needed for control and the use of force. Sometimes a supranational control can also take place, what is also can be called as "information intervention", the measures taken by a group of states or the international community to change the content of the information
22 Ogunsola, L. (2005). Information and Communication Technologies and the Effects of Globalization: Twenty-First Century "Digital Slavery" for Developing Countries--Myth or Reality? Retrieved September 20, 2016, from http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v06n01/ogunsola_l01.htm
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media in any country if it is deemed incompatible with the interests of the international community.
Based on the Realism theory in international relations, an ideal situation for any state is the control over public opinion. In this situation, governments try to build a hierarchical system for control over social opinion in order to prevent civil unrest against the existing political order. Such systems operate in countries with a totalitarian regime of power.
Since this study is focused on the research of CNN and RT, we may note that there is no total control over the media in the US. Some American sources of media can openly criticize the actions of the government and their political course. Despite the fact, there are the widespread opinions that Russia is a totalitarian state, where mass media is tightly controlled by the government, no one still can confidently assert that it is true. According to Article 1 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation "The Russian Federation - Russia is a democratic federal law-bound State with a republican form of government"23. Article 32.1 states that "Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to participate in managing state affairs both directly and through their representatives"24. Thus, a civil society in Russia does exist, and despite the fact that currently there is government control of the media, we cannot call it as a total one.
Thus, public sentiments, especially among socially mobile population groups (students and people at the age of 35-40 years old having neither spouse nor children) may have an influence on the government control over the media.
Almost all states conduct purposeful foreign policy in the information sphere, especially in the case of a global fight against terrorism. The government simply cannot afford to remain passive: they must define its place in the global information and media environment, and to use this environment for personal purposes.
Public opinion to certain international events and its influence on changing the political course of local governments are the independent variables.