Is there a glass ceiling in “network engagement”?

James Glassman’s first speech on his vision for Public Diplomacy, hosted at the Council for Foreign Relations, provides an interesting view of the tensions that arise when the US perspective on Public Diplomacy is articulated. To be fair to Glassman, the tensions he faces are not unique to the US. They are problematic for any Government engaging in forms of Public Diplomacy that emphasise cooperation, collaboration or network engagement, while justifying that engagement to the taxpayer as part of a national interest. The difficulty of engaging with the network comes down to a question of power, actual and perceived, and the articulation of that network by those spending government money.

The dilemma for the Government practitioner is this: to realise the true power of a distributed (or dispersed) network online, an international actor must give up the image of hierarchical position so ingrained in the methodology of the traditional diplomat. Otherwise, any engagement is predicated on the Government official as leader. The ensuing tension which faces Glassman (amongst many others) is that, while domestically there is a need to appear to be a powerful influence leading the war of ideas, within the networked engagement they need to be acting as a peer.

This difficulty with political rhetoric about network engagement is best outlined through the same example Glassman used when talking about networks in Public Diplomacy, specifically the suggestion by Daniel Kimmage of engaging with networks online as part of the public diplomacy effort.

First was everyone in this exercise on the same page? Kimmage wrote “we should do everything we can to empower them” whereas Glassman argued that the US would lead “them”. If empowerment, outside a centralised network model, requires an engagement with members of a network on the basis of being a peer, it probably wasn’t the best idea to repeat Senator Joe Lieberman’s comment that James Glassman was “the supreme allied commander in the war of ideas”. Such an attitude, even in jest, may be ill-suited to the engagement or empowerment of peer networks who do not take kindly to the idea that they ultimately work for America.

Of course, public diplomacy may be concerned with the achievement of goals in the national interest. The problem is not with that goal per se but with the blurring of the national and global interest amidst the assertion of leadership. Glassman’s ill-defined invocation of a “we” leading the war of ideas could be read as the United States or perhaps more narrowly as him and his colleagues. It cannot realistically be any broader than the US, however, as this would beg the question, “who are the followers?”

There’s a fair chance that some of those non-Americans who, like Glassman, want to see an end to the violent extremism do not want to have their efforts undermined by a) being told America is leading the struggle in which they are engaged and b) having their arguments challenged not on their merits but on the basis of American policy. The power of a genuinely networked approach is that each actor is independent, each engages on the basis of being a peer, and each makes his/her own arguments. The power of this approach is fundamentally undermined if one group claims that they are leading all the other groups.

This flaw in Glassman’s presentation is particularly unfortunate, since he has edged closer to the networked approach in his hope for spontaneous support of US Government projects or the creation of independent ones by business and academia. Such initiatives lose any potential benefit from being ‘independent’, if anyone opposing them merely needs to look on CFR.org, or America.gov to find a quote which, taken in context, claims that the US Government is leading the war of ideas.

Why does independence matter? As Glassman noted in the speech, the most “credible voices are Muslim voices” or, to put it more generally, local voices (locality being the perception of geographic, ethnic, religious or cultural proximity). Nick Cull made this point in Engagement: Public Diplomacy in a Globalised World when he wrote “Sometimes the most credible voice in public diplomacy is not one’s own.” The negative corollary of this is that claiming the voice as your own will undermine its credibility.

Ironically, Glassman’s speech highlighted a good example of where the image of independence was important. In claiming the network of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a cold war success, Glassman overlooks an important aspect of that organisation – its funding from the US Government was covert, as indeed was Washington’s support of the British journal Encounter and many other “cultural” outlets. Today we have the reverse, and perverse, situation of a network of organisations and individuals who are taking on violent groups not only without US funding but with the handicap of American officials claiming leadership over them.

This is one of the core tensions for the traditional Public Diplomats and their attempt to engage in the non-centralised networks of the 21^st century. They have to lose any hierarchical notions and be prepared to engage as an equal in a peer to peer environment. If they can prove themselves worthy, they may be able to have higher than average influence in the network. That has to be earned during the engagement, however; it is not inherited because the traditional influence of the diplomat’s position.

To engage with the true power of the dispersed network to take on violent groups, those public diplomats who work in the political sphere must find a way of articulating the collective which does not damage the ability of independent groups to appeal to their audience. While it is useful to claim that everyone works for you, there are times when “they” will only work for you if you can subsume the national into the collective, rather than branding the collective as ‘American’.