Chapter 1. Introduction
1.3 Theoretical Framework
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The main research objectives are to:
1. explore how the image of the Russian Federation had been changing since the dissolution of the USSR up through the beginning of Putin’s latest office in 2012;
2. identify the main features of Russia’s public diplomacy;
3. summarize the current public attitude towards Russia on the international arena;
4. define the spheres of international cooperation or domestic development which provoke concern of foreign audiences;
5. offer the blueprint for Russia’s successful image-building and a better understanding of her policy abroad.
1.3 Theoretical Framework
The given paper aims at determining the correlation between the foreign policy, domestic policy line of the Russian Federation, persuasion technologies used by international mass media and the impression they leave on global public, which further shapes the attitude towards the country and its people. In order to exercise the research, theoretical framework of the study bases on five variables.
I. Public diplomacy
The first usage of the notion of public diplomacy (PD) dates back to 1965, when the US diplomat Edmund Gullion defined it in the pamphlet of the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tuft’s University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Badie, Berg-Schlosser, Morlino, 2011; p.
1269). Public diplomacy was referred as “the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy…[including] the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with those of another…(and) the transnational flow of information and ideas”.
In comparison to traditional state-to-state diplomacy, which is aimed at engaging into negotiations, meetings and communication only with the counterparts’ authorities and official representatives, which are rarely revealed to general public, the public diplomacy attempts to foster positive relations and cooperation between government officials of a country with the public of another country. Nicholas J. Cull (2009) emphasizes that public diplomacy approach draws influence through the selected tools or organizations for establishing cordial relations. The essential instrument incorporated in public diplomacy efforts is media. Media can affect people’s thoughts and perceptions significantly.
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He also sets out the main components of public diplomacy (Ibid.; p. 10):
1. Listening is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by collecting and collating data about publics and their opinions overseas and using that data to redirect its policy and PD approach;
2. Advocacy is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by undertaking an international communication activity to actively promote a particular policy, idea or that actor’s general interests in the minds of the foreign public;
3. Cultural diplomacy is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment through making its cultural resources and achievements known overseas and/or facilitating cultural transmission abroad. This work often overlaps with cultural exchanges, but these two terms must be distinguished;
4. Exchange diplomacy is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by sending its citizens overseas and reciprocally accepting citizens from overseas for a period of study and/or acculturation;
5. International broadcasting (news) is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by using the technologies of radio, television and Internet to engage with foreign publics.
According to Hocking (2005) public diplomacy obtains several functions:
1. influential – orientation of the public diplomacy on changing people’s mindset to form positive attitude of the foreign audiences towards goals and progress of the domestic and foreign policy implementation by a particular state;
2. communicational or informational – the ability of the public diplomacy to deliver the initial message to the recipient audience;
3. relational – the ability of PD to provoke personal attitude among the members of the foreign audience;
4. promotional – the ability of the public diplomacy to improve a country’s image among international public;
5. convincing – the ability of the policy to persuade the target audience to freely enter into the dialogue with the PD creator.
II. New public diplomacy
The “new public diplomacy” 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.).
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governmental and scholarly discourse during the following decades and was eventually superseded by the paradigm of the new public diplomacy in the early 21st century.According to experts and observers (Pamment, 2012), globalization and new media landscape challenged traditional understanding of international relations, as solely the business of acting diplomats and governmental entities, partially devolving the right of communicating foreign policy into the hands of non-governmental structures. Nowadays, diplomacy is increasingly accountable to public debate, interest-group lobbies, and new ways of assessing influence over international agenda.
The new public diplomacy is dialogical, collaborative, and inclusive. It represents the shift away from ‘broadcasting’ models and makes use of social media to establish two-way engagement with the public.
Gyorgi Szondi (2008; p. 11) listed differences between the public diplomacy and the new public diplomacy in nine spheres.
Traditional Public Diplomacy
21st Century Public Diplomacy Conditions Conflict, tensions between
states Peace
Goals To achieve political change in
target countries by changing behavior
Political and economic interest promotion to create receptive environment and
Direction of Communication One-way communication (monologue)
Two-way communication (dialogue)
Research Very little, if any
PD based on scientific
Budget Sponsored by government Public and private partnership Table 1. Traditional and 21st Century Public Diplomacy Compared (Szondi, 2008)
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One of the distinguishing features of the new PD is its interconnectedness with the term
‘soft power’ formulated by Joseph Nye at the end of the Cold War. It is an ability of an actor to realize its interests on the international arena, for its culture is rather more attractive than its military or economic leverage (Nye, 2004).
In addition to the previous factors, Joseph Nye (Ibid.) has ascertained three dimensions of the public diplomacy. They stem from the quality of the information communicated to the target audience of the policy.
1. Regular relationship. This dimension implicates clarification of positions and actions in a state’s foreign policy to the counterparts and their nations.
2. Strategic communication. Focused discussion of the highest priority issues.
3. Long-term communication building international ties with people responsible for the decision-making process in foreign states. Such ties-creation is not limited by the communication with acting career diplomats, authorities, leaders of popular movements and cultural ambassadors. The investment into the future amicable relations environment could be done via scholarships, exchange programs, seminars, conferences, and advanced training courses.
III. Nation-branding
As a consequence of globalization, all countries are competing with each other for the attention, respect and trust of investors, tourists, consumers, the media, and the governments of other nations. A powerful and positive nation brand provides a crucial competitive advantage.
During the latest decade governments of many countries started to use unconventional methods and tools to manage their reputations. In many cases, governments now hire public relations firms and apply brand management theory, which was formerly the domain of corporate communications departments and business-school seminars.
Kerr and Wiseman (2013; p.354) define nation branding as “the application of corporate marketing concepts and techniques to countries, in the interests of enhancing their reputation in international relations.”
Branding efforts have branched out beyond simple efforts at attracting tourism. States now hire expertized companies to help them launch sophisticated branding campaigns aimed at luring foreign investment, facilitating trade, improving private-sector competitiveness, or even securing geopolitical influence.
As Dinnie (2008) notes, nation-branding is a complex and controversial phenomenon:
complex, for it encompasses multiple disciplines beyond the limited realm of conventional brand
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strategy and controversial, because it is a highly politicized activity that generates frequently conflicting viewpoints and opinions.
The notion arises from the relative concept of ‘brand’. Doyle (1992) gave his definition to the brand, claiming that a successful brand is a name, symbol, design, or some combination, which identifies the ‘product’ of a particular organization as having a sustainable differential advantage.
Nevertheless, the brands do not exist in vacuum, thus, increased cooperation of global community contributed to the appearance of the nation brand. As Simon Anholt10 (2013) puts it, the nation brand is the sum of people’s perceptions of a country across six areas of national competence: tourism, exports, governance, investment and immigration, culture and heritage, people. Together, these areas make the ‘Nation Brand Hexagon’.
Figure 1. The Nation Brand Hexagon, Anholt (2000). Retrieved November 20, 2016 from Anholt – GfK Nation Brands Index, http://nation-brands.gfk.com/
In contrast to public diplomacy, the nation-branding accentuates a country’s identity, reflects its aspirations, but could not move beyond the margins of existing social realities. Nation-branding only projects national identity onto the international level and tries to make its image acceptable abroad, while public diplomacy creates a smooth environment for international relations in different spheres of cooperation. To put it differently, a good ‘marketing’ strategy of
10 Simon Anholt is an independent policy advisor who has worked to help develop and implement strategies for enhanced economic, political and cultural engagement with other countries. He is the founder and publisher of the global annual research studies: Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index and Anholt-GfK Roper State Brands Index, three major surveys which use a panel of 30,000 people in 25 countries to monitor global perceptions of 50 countries, 50 cities and the 52 States of the Union.
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a state cannot solve problems caused by inconsistent foreign policy and premature public diplomacy, while it rather creates a beautiful wrapping for selected course, than a policy itself.
4. International image of a country
The image building as the targeted perception management, which now has been enriched with other functions and transformed into the public diplomacy, has accompanied humankind from the advent of its evolution. However, the earliest lines of discourses about public images belong to the scholarly of public relations and political studies, and the notion of ‘image’ has become a subject for studies only in the first half of the 20th century, when the aftermaths of both World Wars uncovered the cost to be paid for creating, promoting and spreading an ‘image of an enemy’
(Ayvazyan, 2010).
Zamyatin (2003; p.93) defined political and geographical image of a country as
“compaction and concentration of leading characters, symbols and features of individual countries, regions or political and military alliances in political terms”.
Nurtazina, Zhumashov, Tomanova (2014) add that image is a purposefully created concept granting political object (person, organization, country, etc.) certain social and political values and promoting more emotional perception.
Many of the works dedicated to the concept of international image have a conceptual focus.
For example, Kunczik (1990; p.44) elaborates that “an image of a nation constitutes the totality of attributes that a person recognises (or imagines) when he contemplates that nation.”
The scholar proceeds his research with the idea that such image presupposes three analytically distinguishable components:
I. a cognitive component relating to what we know;
II. an affective component relating to how we feel about the nation;
III. an action component that relates to actual behavior towards the nation.
Meanwhile, with the development of international society structure, globalization acceleration, and the spread of modern media societies marketing and social psychology have devoted some attention to the constitution and effects of country images from their fields’
perspectives.
Alexander Buhmann (2016; p. 16) presented the four-dimensional model (4D Model) of the international image of a country, which is “a subjective stakeholder attitude towards a nation and its state, comprising specific beliefs and general feelings in a functional, a normative, an aesthetic and an emotional dimension.”
Notwithstanding the fact, that IR scholars agree on international image’s sociological components, there is no widely accepted model and measurement instrument available. That is
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why the concept of international image of a country is as controversial and multilayered, as the plurality of opinions and beliefs it consists of.
1. People-to-people diplomacy11
With the expansion of transport infrastructure all over the globe costs of shipment and travelling relatively decrease, and the variety of the means of transportation strikes with abundance.
Computerization of education and its internationalization makes it affordable and accessible worldwide. Not least, visa regime among the certain states has been simplified or even denounced.
All in all, nation borders became more transparent, travelling abroad is now not only a prerogative of the rich, and many people are now able to speak the most widely spoken languages, like Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic.12 The rise of peoples’ exchange gave rise to the term people-to-people diplomacy.
The US Center for Citizen Diplomacy (2016) defines the term as follows: “citizen diplomacy is the concept that every global citizen has the right, even the responsibility, to engage across cultures and create shared understanding through meaningful person-to-person interactions.”
Federal Agency for Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)13 Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation of the Russian Federation
“Rossotrudnichestvo” (2016) offers its own rendering: “People-to-people diplomacy is the range of multifaceted activities aimed at cooperation with the civil society of foreign states for expansion of a country’s international links. The tools of such diplomacy include twin-towns and sister-cities contacts, sociopolitical movements, and international non-governmental organizations.”
Unofficial contacts like in the former definition, or the structuralized exchange, like in the latter, they both imply face-to-face personal contacts, which makes diplomacy more approximate to general publics.
Some scholars are sure (Walker, Gaynor, 2014), nations that invest in people-to-people diplomacy are better positioned to reap the awards of the information economy. With advancements in communications technologies, nations would be wise to bring their citizens into the fold, particularly through international exchanges in fields like entrepreneurship, science and technology.
11 Also known as the ‘citizen diplomacy’
12 Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2016. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Nineteenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.
13 The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is a regional organization formed during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nine out of the 15 former Soviet Republics are member states, and two are associate members (Ukraine and Turkmenistan). Georgia withdrew its membership in 2008, while the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) refused to participate.
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To put it in a nutshell, people-to-people diplomacy could unleash a new wave of innovation and economic growth in the century of global transfusion.