The US State Department dictionary defines public diplomacy as “government-sponsored programs intended to inform or influence public opinion in other countries; its chief instruments are publications, motion pictures, cultural exchanges, radio and television.” The effort is made considerably more difficult, and becomes correspondingly more important, when US foreign policy is as widely reviled as it is today.

But in what has emerged as the traditional Bush administration response to critical challenges, public diplomacy has either sunk without a ripple or, as with last year’s appointment of Bush confidante Karen Hughes to the top public diplomacy spot, made an embarrassing splash.

Fortunately, a group of academics led by University of Michigan professor Juan Cole have stepped up to fill at least part of the gap (in this instance one that was precipitated by a Clinton administration misstep). Together with a few of his coworkers, Cole — who runs the indispensable Iraq commentary site, Informed Comment — has formed the Global Americana Institute “to translate important books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively.”

Here’s what he had to say upon announcing the launch of the initiative.

Frankly, we have been failed by our government and foundations in getting the message of what America really is out to the rest of the world. We have no ministry of culture, unlike France, and no British Council or Goethe Institute. The United States Information Agency was gutted in the mid-1990s, virtually defunded, and folded into the State Department as a poor sister. Its libraries, with American books, in Amman, Istanbul, and elswhere, were shut down and the books remaindered. The AMPART program to bring American lecturers to the Middle East has been slashed to the bone, and politicized (when USIA went into State, it gave the ambassadors more say over who gets invited, and many ambassadors are political appointees). Our major foundations avoid the Middle East as a program priority for the most part. There are dedicated people in the US government who try to make a difference, of course, and there are small publishing programs in Cairo and Amman, though they don’t seem to me to get good distribution.

[...]

What is not available in Arabic is startling. American political thought is almost completely absent. You cannot go into a bookstore and get Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, John Dewey, W. E. B. Dubois, or Martin Luther King. I was told the story of how a Lebanese professor went looking for the Arabic text of the US constitution and could not find it. Of course, it exists. I complained to a State Department official about this sort of thing, and he replied that he used to give out pocket copies of the constitution in Arabic to visitors to the US embassies in the Middle East all the time. He didn’t seem to grasp that the text is not in the bookstores or in the libraries, and so is essentially inaccessible.

There is also little history, even recent historical works that are accessible and get on the US bestseller lists. Despite the obsession with the Israel lobby, there are no good translations of recent histories of the American Jewish community, or of solid histories of the Holocaust by American historians. It is like a black hole. If Arabic speakers do not know English or French, they only know about the United States what is in the Arabic newspapers or on television and radio– mostly US soldiers killing Arabs in Iraq or US money and weaponry being used by Israeli troops against Palestinians. The US government in its wisdom even abolished the Arabic service of the Voice of America soon after 9/11!

Piling on the failure to make a body of American political and cultural thought readily available in the Middle East, the Bush administration have made other exchanges of ideas more difficult. Restrictive visa policies make attending US colleges more difficult for foreign students, an opportunity that in the past has provided the US with a ready avenue for exporting American ideas and culture back to the home countries of visiting students. In January of this year, Knight Ridder highlighted one facet of the Bush administration’s allergy to intellectual and political challenges when they reported on a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in connection with the denial of a visa for an Islamic scholar invited to teach at Notre Dame. A month before, Knight Ridder reported on State Department efforts to exclude administration critics from a department-sponsored speakers program.

It may be impossible in the near term to overcome the damage inflicted upon our national image by our war, by Abu Ghraib, by Guantanamo, by “extraordinary rendition” and other actions, but presumably the Bush administration will leave town at some point; laying the ground work for a recovery is a valuable undertaking, and Cole deserves an enormous amount of credit for recognizing the problem and doing something about it.

For more on public diplomacy in the news, visit John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Review at USC’s School of Public Diplomacy.

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