| bibo:abstract |
I. Devising a Conceptual Typology of Public Diplomacy
II. Overview of South Korean Public Diplomacy 2018-2022
Ⅲ. Typological Analysis of Central Administration’s Public Diplomacy Programs
IV. Policy Considerations
Public diplomacy is widely understood as non-traditional diplomatic practices to inform, persuade, influence, and engage targeted foreign publics eventually to build foreign support for achieving a country’s foreign policy goals and advancing national interests. This state-centered and self-centric understanding of public diplomacy originates from the primary political dynamics of the 19th and 20th centuries shaped by the construction and evolution of nation-states.
The old notion of public diplomacy, however, appears to be unfit and antiquated for the 21st century’s new realities dominating world politics and communication dynamics. With great powers fiercely vying for predominance in the realms of hard power and soft power, public diplomacy, as a toolkit for their geopolitical statecraft, has made inroads into the central arena of their contention. Great power competition critically deepens global conflict and confrontation, while diminishing the political space for international cooperation and collaboration. The new dynamics of digital communications of this century, on the other hand, render public diplomacy focusing on the unilateral dissemination of self-centric information obsolescent. Today’s contexts of world politics and global communications urge us to revisit the conventional meanings and understandings of public diplomacy, as well as its role in the international society.
Against this backdrop, this paper aims to draw policy implications by raising the following questions: what are and should be the roles of public diplomacy in today’s global context? Is public diplomacy nothing but an instrument for advancing a country’s parochial national interests, thereby deepening global conflict and confrontation? What should be the role of public diplomacy of non-great powers including South Korea? In what directions should the South Korean government steer its public diplomacy?
This paper introduces two perspectives on public diplomacy to formulate a conceptual typology to classify diverse public diplomacy programs. After a brief overview of South Korea’s public diplomacy during the five-year period of 2018 and 2022, we classify public diplomacy programs rolled out by the country’s central administrative agencies along the conceptual typological framework. Finally, to flesh out feasible policy directions, the pressing issues at hand and challenging tasks ahead of South Korean public diplomacy will be discussed.
I. Devising a Conceptual Typology of Public Diplomacy
There could be two complementary perspectives on public diplomacy. The instrumental perspective, which is a rather conventional view, understands public diplomacy as non-traditional diplomatic activities orchestrated to inform, persuade, influence, and engage foreign publics eventually to build foreign support for achieving a country’s foreign policy goals and advancing national interests. The primary constituents of the public diplomacy toolkit aim to help a government induce targeted sectors of foreign opinion to craft and implement policies favorable to its national interests and strategic aims to raise its global profile and reputation. This view postulates that public diplomacy focuses on the content of messages to be disseminated and the projection of desirable national images and brands.
The identity perspective, on the other hand, underscores the aspect of public diplomacy as communicative and discursive practices engineered to earn recognition of a political collective’s identity, or some specific elements constituting the identity. As the subjective identity of self is not received in the international society as initially conceived by the self, states and non-state actors engage in the recognition-seeking process through material and discursive practices, the latter of which is the central area of public diplomacy. When one’s recognitive practices earn empathy and recognition through interactions with others, the subjective self-identity eventually gains currency as “recognized identity” in the international society. A particular emphasis in the identity perspective goes onto the process of nurturing intersubjective meanings, namely, shared understandings and meanings, with others on specific phenomena, objects and issues, such as climate change, peace, security, and nuclear non-proliferation, as well as identities. By doing this, public diplomacy is expected to facilitate the social construction and elaboration of inter-state and international relations.
When the instrumental and identity perspectives are combined, we could hammer out an analytical typological framework, which consists of four ideal types of public diplomacy, as shown in [Figure 1].
[Figure 1] Conjunction of the two perspectives on public diplomacy
The horizontal axis of [Figure 1] indicates the spectrum of the instrumental perspective all the way from unilateral information dissemination to medium- and longer-term relation-building via persuasion and engagement. In contrast, the vertical one represents the spectrum of the identity perspective ranging from a narrowly defined subjective identity to a transcendent one as one expands the boundaries of identity by nurturing shared meanings and understandings with its counterparts, thereby reconstituting one’s subjective identity.
Monologic public diplomacy in Quadrant I represents a focus on self-centered unilateral information delivery, while Quadrant II, dialogic public diplomacy, is an approach underscoring relation-building with foreign publics or counterparts through dialogues and exchanges, however asymmetrical they might be. As we move down along the vertical axis, we expand the perimeters of our identities. And Quadrant III shows transnational public advocacy, under which an emphasis is placed on sharing and disseminating non-self-centric information as in such cases of international campaigns on pandemics and climate change. Co-constitutive public diplomacy in Quadrant IV represents an approach, in which we are prepared to compromise our own subjective, self-centric identity and willing to construct a community on the basis of shared meanings, common interests, and common identity. Each approach is a conceptual ideal type, while in reality, different types are simultaneously used in combination.
II. Overview of South Korean Public Diplomacy 2018-2022
From 2018 to 2022, with some yearly variations, South Korea’s 19 central administrative agencies including the Korea Foundation, together with 17 metropolitan local governments, participated in the annual public diplomacy implementation plan, which commenced for the first time in 2018 on the basis of the Public Diplomacy Act and The ROK’s First Public Diplomacy Masterplan 2017-2021, as shown in [Table 1].
[Figures 2 – 5] show the numbers and budgets for the public diplomacy programs planned and implemented by central administrative agencies and local governments. While the number of local-government programs (1,928) more than doubles that of the central government (937), the latter’s budgets (1,710 billion Korean WON) quadruple those of local governments (454 billion Korean WON).
[Figure 2] Numbers of public diplomacy programs 2018-2022
[Figure 3] Shares of five-year public diplomacy programs: central administrative agencies versus metropolitan local governments
[Figure 4] Public diplomacy budgets (by year)
[100million Korean WON]
[Figure 5] Shares of five-year budgets: central administrative agencies versus metropolitan local governments
The distribution of five-year public diplomacy budgets for both levels of government is shown in [Figure 6]. Cultural diplomacy takes up 53% of the total budget, while knowledge diplomacy and policy advocacy take up 28% and 13%, respectively. The share of policy advocacy, however, has consistently increased from 2.2% in 2017 to 20% in 2021 in terms of budgets as shown in [Figure 7], and from 7.9% in 2018 to 27%, or 135 programs in 2022 in terms of program numbers.
[Figure 6] Distribution of five-year budgets between subfields
[Figure 7] Budgets trends of public diplomacy subfields
Ⅲ. Typological Analysis of Central Administration’s Public Diplomacy Programs
This paper classified public diplomacy programs of central administrative agencies during the five-year period of 2018 and 2022 listed in The ROK Annual Public Diplomacy Implementation Plan, employing the typological framework in [Figure 1] and according to indicators for each type as shown in [Table 2].
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