INTRODUCTION: THE FLOWERING OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

In the aftermath of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, public diplomacy has become a bit of a buzzword, not only among scholars but in the media and among watchers of and commentators on international relations, foreign policy and diplomacy in the general public. Much of the foreign policy behaviour of governments intended to 'win hearts and minds', which has been described by Nye as 'soft power' is in these times often categorised as 'public diplomacy' (Nye, 2005). According to Melissen, who describes soft power as 'the postmodern variant of power over opinion', political communication in general, and public diplomacy in particular, are key instruments of soft power (Melissen, 2005). Governments in the first decade of the 21st century increasingly need to reckon consciously with the need to engage in public diplomacy, and to be seen to be doing so by their own citizenry and the global public.

This phenomenon has occurred for a number of reasons, among which include the growing importance for governments, elected and otherwise, of securing popular legitimacy for particular foreign (and domestic) policies and, closely related, the growing influence of global media and communications networks. But it has been brought to the attention of the global public most dramatically by the perceived failure of the US government to win the backing of Arab and Muslim publics for their project of overthrowing the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and replacing it with a newly elected government under a new constitution. The perceived US failure to win hearts and minds across the Middle East extended to a much broader failure to convince public opinion across many of the world's nations of the wisdom of the US-led war and was rendered more vivid by the juxtaposition of a growing awareness of and eventual admission by the George W. Bush Administration that more and better public diplomacy was needed. This realisation led to the adoption of new public diplomacy tactics, but in turn was followed by a series of striking debacles, such as the torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison and the revelation that evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was largely if not completely spurious (van Ham, 2005).

One of the Administration's major early attempts to remedy their weakness in public diplomacy after 9/11 was the appointment in late 2001 of private sector public relations expert Charlotte Beers to serve as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Beers, who had headed such advertising giants as Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson, was tapped to bring the public relations expertise of Madison Avenue 'in house' and to develop a strategy to 'sell' the war and the project of democratising Iraq to the person in the Arab street and to the global public more generally (Business Week, 2001). Within a fairly short space of time, Beers's 'Shared Values' project was perceived as not gaining any traction, and by March 2003 she was gone (Olins, 2005). Critics of the Administration blamed the general incommensurability of strategies and methods for selling consumer products with those for selling the United States, its values and objectives (Jurgensen, 2003). Many public relations professionals, however, explained at the time that the problem with Beers's approach was not her introduction of strategies and tactics used by private PR and advertising firms, but by the way in which she decided to implement these strategies. As communications expert Nancy Snow stated, Washington has to 'tap into the voluntary organisations and the thousands and thousands of US citizens [Fulbright scholars, academics, business people] in constant contact with the world who can effectively communicate outside the bounds of government'. In addition, Jack Leslie, chairman of PR firm Weber Shandwick Worldwide, stressed that 'the lesson you learn when you're communicating on behalf of a government is that you have to use a holistic approach. You can't divorce the issues from the message' (Jurgensen, 2003).

Following a similarly brief tenure in the public diplomacy and public affairs post at the State Department by Margaret Tutwiler, former press secretary to Secretary of State James Baker under President George Bush the Elder, in 2005 Bush the Younger appointed Karen Hughes to the job. Hughes, former White House counsellor to the President and head of the Office of Communications, was a long-time Bush insider and confidante and was considered a 'safe pair of hands' for a brief that was bound to be challenging at best. Hughes had come from a background in television journalism and politics, and like Beers, Hughes was a skilled political communication professional (US Department of State, 2006). Hence, the appointments of Beers and Hughes are emblematic of the global migration of methods and techniques from the private sector world of public relations, marketing and advertising into the very public realm of public diplomacy, once the preserve of diplomatic corps, many of whose members had been conditioned historically to disdain business and particularly the ensemble of practices actually connected with selling (Platt, 1968).

As governments have come to need the methods and techniques of public relations to communicate to the publics in an increasingly competitive and media-intensive global environment, the instrumentalities of the trade have been followed closely by the arrival of trained public relations experts and political communications professionals to execute on behalf of and teach their skills to governments seeking to communicate better and to 'win hearts and minds' to their foreign policy (and military) objectives. One approach by governments in recent times has been to hire private sector professionals to join the government at a fairly senior rank, bringing their ideas and talents to an area of diplomatic practice still in its early days and yet nonetheless having to respond to rapidly changing media and global public opinion.¹ Yet possibly what the perceived lack of success of Charlotte Beers inside the US State Department really revealed was the preferability of an alternate method of public–private engagement in diplomacy that is also growing in popularity: contracting out, or the hiring of private firms and diplomats to act on behalf of a government.

Our contention is that, as the global media environment becomes more competitive and global publics gain greater access to streams of information, it is becoming progressively more difficult for governments to undertake public diplomacy successfully on their own, using only their own diplomatic personnel (Nye, 2005: 106). Governments of small and/or poor states may face a lack of talent and skills in-house to undertake successful public diplomacy campaigns. But governments of large and/or dominant powers may suffer from the very weight that their exercise of power has upon the credibility of the stories that they seek to tell the world about themselves. As Nye observes, 'postmodern publics are generally sceptical of authority, and governments are often mistrusted. Thus it often behooves governments to keep in the background and to work with private actors' (Nye, 2005: 113)

Different types of private actor, however, have different skills to bring to the table when it comes to engaging in public diplomacy. Van Ham argues that 'marketing experience teaches that it is more important to show, than to tell' (italics original) (van Ham, 2005: 63). Hence, in our view, the public diplomacy of governments of all sizes and degrees of power may actually benefit not only from the methods and techniques of public relations but also from the process of working directly with external public relations and political communications professionals in the client–consultant relationship. One of the key elements in that relationship, for example, is the ability of the consultant to view the client's problem, or objective, with 'fresh eye' and 'fresh brains', and, in working with the client to develop a project proposal to which the client will agree, to help the client to see their own problems differently and modify their objectives accordingly. Another important element is the ability of private firms to develop and employ metrics for evaluation of the success of their work, which they can present to clients and subsequently use as they attempt to seek follow-on business.

In the section that follows, we examine more closely the methods and techniques of public relations and political communication in an effort to clarify how the client–consultant relationship can produce a different and arguably more credible approach to public diplomacy. In the subsequent section, we examine the expanding activity of private actors in diplomacy using specific examples, which provides an opportunity to assess how their methods and techniques are used and their impact upon the contemporary practice of public diplomacy.

UNDERSTANDING THE METHODS AND TECHNIQUES OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

The introduction of one of the many public relations professionals' handbooks begins by asserting that 'America was founded by a public relations campaign' (Fitch, 2004). While some may disagree, we see it as a perfect example from which one can illustrate and explain the methods and techniques used in the public relations field. Interestingly, even some 230 years ago the line that divided public relations from public diplomacy was a thin one. Today that line exists almost solely in name.

Irrespective of charisma, media knowledge or, for that matter, a firm's network and account experience, public relations campaigns have had little success if the messages disseminated were based on half truths and misrepresentations. Solid foundations are the basis for successful campaigns whether in consumer public relations projects or governmental public diplomacy campaigns. In today's interconnected world that is only amplified. The paramount ideal that each public relations professional must abide by is that of honesty. As Abraham Lincoln stated: 'Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute' (Fitch, 2004: 3).'

As expressed earlier, the technologically advanced information age in which we live today does not lend itself to the keeping of secrets. Each day another scandal breaks, but it is rarely the daily newspaper's headline that informs the citizenry. Owing to blogs, podcasts and the ever-expanding internet, almost daily another citizen becomes this generation's Upton Sinclair. Therefore, today, without honesty a cause also lacks the ability to gain the backing of the public sentiment of which Lincoln spoke.

Once it is clearly understood that every message disseminated needs to be founded in truth and supported by action, public relations professionals are charged with the task of creating a comprehensive multifaceted strategy designed to deliver results. Public relations is usually a comprehensive, all-encompassing, public awareness and information programme or campaign directed to mass or specialty audiences (Henry, 1995). Depending on the particular client, that strategy will aim to drive individuals to seek further knowledge, give information to empower individuals to act or compel citizens to align themselves with a particular viewpoint.

Public relations professionals use a number of methods and techniques to implement campaign strategies, including but not limited to the following: publicity, advertising, sponsorship, special events, printed materials, electronic media, audiovisual materials, media relations, partnership development and government relations. Each of these techniques is fairly self-explanatory, but all require a special ability in order to conduct the task accurately and to achieve quality results. For example, when working with media it is not enough simply to have a well-written pitch. You must know the publication to which you are reaching out, be aware of the types of stories that the publication covers, understand the topics that interest the editor or journalist that you are contacting and be able to explain why the information or messages you are looking to include are valuable to the readership (Henry, 1995: 29). Of most importance, however, is to have experience with media and savvy to grab the editor or journalist's attention and capture their interest.

Even before a public relations firm can enact any strategy, however, it must impress upon a prospective client's executive leadership that it has the ability to reach the appropriate audience and influence this audience to a specific end, thereby attaining new business. For the most part, public relations firms acquire new business either by responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that are made available for bid or through developed social networks. How can public relations firms illustrate that they have the ability to reach the appropriate audience and influence this audience successfully when, for the most part, success and failure within the field of public relations is based highly on subjectivity? This is by no means an easy question to answer, but there are a number of questions that each public relations professional must assess before deciding to present to a prospective client and/or take on new business.

First and foremost, the individual(s) or company to whom a presentation is being made should understand the importance of public relations and communications and support public relations as a primary business function. The organisation should have a leading marketing or communications executive within the executive team and regard the input of these executives as highly as that of other integral business departments. The success of public relations campaigns depends on dedication to the importance of public opinion and the dissemination of appropriate messaging. If the executive team does not back public relations fully as an integral piece of its financial success, there is little chance that efforts will be effective.

Secondly, expectations must be outlined and analysed. Budget often limits what a PR professional or firm can or cannot do for a client. Understanding the results a prospective client is seeking allows a PR professional or PR firm the ability to decide whether it is possible to attain such results and therefore whether or not it is worthwhile to take on such a project. Budget is, however, not the only thing to consider. More importantly, the message(s) or information that a client wishes to disseminate must be examined. If the message is unimportant, out or date, not newsworthy or a misrepresentation, then attracting attention from the general public, media and important audiences will be difficult if not impossible. In today's global market, original content becomes even more sought after (The Economist, 2006).

Thirdly, the PR firm must assess the expertise that will be necessary to carry out a client's PR campaign and ask questions of itself, such as: does the firm currently have experts who understand this industry sector (ie healthcare, finance, consumer products etc)? If we do not, can we easily seek out such expertise? Does the firm have the resources to complete this campaign (ie staff size, geographic reach, tools etc)? Does the firm agree with the messages of the campaign (ie moral/ethical questions, corporate mantras etc)? Does accepting this client represent a conflict of interest with any current clients (ie representing two competing corporations)? While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it outlines the types of questions an upstanding PR firm would address before presenting to a prospective client and before accepting new business.

Once a public relations firm has assessed these issues internally, the next step is to create a proposal for the prospective client. A proposal is, primarily, a project outline and should represent the best thinking of the PR firm. The proposal should illustrate how the firm will highlight the client's strengths, garner interest in the client company's message or product and ultimately increase the profits and/or notoriety of the client's product and company or organisation. Typically, a proposal will include the following sections: a preliminary budget, a timeline or overview of campaign milestones and an industry analysis (ie analysis of the financial industry for financial clients). This helps make the client aware that you are not working in a vacuum and creates a contextual picture of the landscape. Also, a proposal would normally include an overview of the client's goals as understood by the PR firm, a section that explains the strategies and tactics that the PR firm will use to attain these goals, and finally an outline of how the PR firm and client can measure success.

As noted earlier, measuring the success of a PR campaign is not an easy task. Most campaigns work to influence public understanding or public knowledge by offering information on new products or services or by explaining the benefits of a particular product. Measuring whether or not people understand the messages or whether an increase in profits is related to a PR campaign is difficult at best and outright impossible at worst. So how do PR firms measure success? As the importance of public relations has grown, there have been many discussions about how to measure campaign success. In order to create a metric that is appropriate to measure for each client, the PR firm must understand what the client views as the most important metric. Each client focuses on something different. Perhaps it is unit sales or profit gains. Whatever the measurement, the PR firm should correlate its measurement to these metrics. Some of the standard measurements include: number of media impressions and buzz generation: does the general public use corporate or product terms in everyday speech?

While historically there have been differences between public relations and public diplomacy, today those differences have all but disappeared. In both a public relations campaign and a public diplomacy campaign, there is little difference in process. Both require research on the prospective message, organisation of the strategies and tactics that will best achieve expected goals and the creation of a measurement structure to analyse the success of a campaign's strategies and tactics. The following section explores the rise of private actors in public diplomacy. From the insight gained in this section there is little wonder that PR professionals, PR firms and national governments have begun working together in greater numbers. With similar processes and methods, it is surprising that they seemed to remain mutually exclusive for so long. It is perhaps a great tragedy that governments ignored the expertise of private PR professionals in the past, for an outsider's perspective is usually a saving grace.

THE RISE OF PRIVATE ACTORS IN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

Private actors have taken on an increasingly significant role in public diplomacy in recent times, either by serving as venues for political communication by governments or by supplying the human resources and doing the actual public relations work that governments are no longer choosing to do 'in-house'. This expanding activity takes three principal forms: (1) private actors serving as venues for public–private diplomatic interaction, such as the World Economic Forum, are growing in influence; (2) public–private partnerships engaging in national brand-building are becoming more common; and (3) private individuals and firms increasingly are engaging in public diplomacy on behalf of governments.

Private venues for public diplomacy

For many decades, private, non-government-sponsored venues for diplomacy, such as the World Economic Forum, have provided venues where governments and firms alike can engage in public diplomacy. The World Economic Forum, an organisation whose members are drawn from the 1,000 largest global firms, hosts regional 'summits', as well as the Davos, Switzerland Annual Meeting, at which global business leaders, political leaders, academics, journalists and leaders from civil society gather to discuss and seek solutions for global problems. These multi-stakeholder events attract global media attention and in many respects are ideal venues for a government to promote its national brand and focus public attention on its image, especially if a government is seeking to change its image significantly. At a Forum regional meeting, and even more so at the Davos Annual Meeting, a government has what is in effect of a captive audience of regional and global opinion leaders, with the added advantages of extensive media coverage and the inevitability that the assembled opinion leaders will interact with one another as they receive new information.

The Government of Pakistan has used World Economic Forum events particularly effectively to shift the focus of public attention from political instability in its tribal regions and to refocus global business leaders, academics and the media on the story of Pakistan's accelerating economic growth of the past few years. The Davos Annual Meeting and other Forum meetings serve as occasions when media attention is focused on leaders who are attending and what they are saying. Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz used a media interview at Davos in January 2005 to announce that the following week he would propose to India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a new set of bilateral confidence-building measures without prejudicing the resolution of their dispute over Kashmir (Guha, 2005). Aziz also took advantage of the attention from global business leaders at Davos to market the Pakistani government's economic reform programme, including the planned privatisations of all Pakistani state-owned firms, and the recent successes of Pakistan's economy, with 2004 growth reported at 6.4 per cent and 2005 growth of 7 per cent targeted (Weber, 2005). At the 2005 World Economic Forum India Regional Summit in New Delhi ten months later, the governments of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka each made extensive presentations promoting the merits of their nations as attractive for trade, investment and tourism. The presentations included the sponsoring of meals and live entertainment for conference attendees. At the 'Pakistan Lunch', government diplomats and Pakistani business leaders followed up on the Davos themes of Pakistan's rapid increase in economic output the contribution of increasing political stability to a business-friendly investment climate (Pigman, 2006). At an invited breakfast for Davos attendees in January 2007, Prime Minister Aziz promoted the positive impact of Pakistan's enactment of gender reform liberalisation on the investment climate in Pakistan. Following the formal presentation, female Pakistani attendees of the breakfast reinforced the Prime Minister's message effectively, in informal conversations with non-Pakistani attendees, that the gender reforms are substantive and not just window dressing.

Public–private partnerships and brand building

Another result of the growing awareness by government officials of the importance of how a nation is perceived by foreign publics is the emergence of public–private partnerships for building one's national 'brand' or marketing identity. This trend has emerged from the much older business practice of national chambers of commerce operating as information portals for foreign firms wishing to do business with domestic firms. Olins contends that governments too have long been in the business of projecting to the outside world a national image that is distinct and readily identifiable. He cites the repeated undertakings of successive French regimes to reinvent France for outsiders with new symbols and images representing revolutions, empires, restoration and republics, and Ataturk's careful and aggressive project to reinvent Turkey's image following the fall of the Ottoman Empire as western, secular and technologically advanced (Olins, 2005). A vivid, if darker, contemporary version of this type of brand-building can be viewed in the public relations campaign of the Lebanese-based transnational political organisation Hezbollah, which aspires to seize control of the Lebanese government. Hezbollah has paid to line Lebanese motorways with billboards selling their summer 2006 attack on Israel as a national triumph for Lebanon. With bold slogans proclaiming 'la Victoire Divine' (divine victory), Hezbollah seeks not only to claim credit for the victory, but to cast enemies of Hezbollah both domestic and foreign as enemies of God himself (Ibrahim, 2006).

Olins's consideration of national brand building is self-consciously limited to the three most traditional primary business objectives for building national brands: promoting exports, foreign direct investment and tourism. To the extent that this is the extent of the function of national branding, then a government's branding activities must be understood as functioning in the service of its businesses. Yet, recent evidence suggests that governments and business associations (such as chambers of commerce) have come to see significant synergies in strategies for achieving their respective objectives of public diplomacy to promote a positive image of the state abroad and positive brand awareness of the nation by potential external investors, importers and tourists.

A best-of-breed model for how public–private collaboration in building a national brand and undertaking public diplomacy together is the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), a collaborative venture between India's Ministry of Commerce and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), one of India's leading business associations. IBEF serves as a forum for brand vision development, coordinates strategic marketing initiatives and operates a resource centre for firms that wish to trade with and invest in India. In their own words: 'Achievements. Successes. Growing consuming class driving demand. Vibrant democracy. People who dare to dream. Indians and India have a story to tell. IBEF collects, collates and disseminates accurate, comprehensive and current information on India' (India Brand Equity Foundation, 2006).

Among many publications, IBEF publishes India Now — a perspective, a glossy bimonthly magazine featuring business success stories and opportunities in India, and thick pamphlets such as 'UK Companies in India; Success Stories', illustrating how British firms have succeeded in investing in India. IBEF has played a leading role in the discursive construction of India as an emerging great power in the eyes of the global public since its economic liberalisation took off in the early 1990s, prominently featuring brand identifiers such as 'India: fastest growing free market democracy'. At the World Economic Forum 2006 Annual Meeting in Davos, IBEF launched what they characterise as India's most ambitious brand-building campaign yet, entitled 'India Everywhere'.

Failure to build a positive national brand image can have a serious negative impact. By 2001, many US diplomats and members of the public had begun to realise that the image of the United States around the world was less lustrous than they had imagined. To others, the message was brought home all too belatedly after 9/11. One week before 11 September 2001, Charlotte Beers brought in Ogilvy & Mather branding expert Steve Hayden to lecture to State Department staff on how firms and countries can escape their reputations for dominance. Telling his audience of diplomats that consumers prefer leadership to dominance, Hayden advised them to adopt a public relations strategy similar to that followed by Nike in the early 1990s, after public perceptions of Nike's market dominance and unfair labour practices in developing countries caused them to lose market share. Hayden advised the State Department to undertake an emotional campaign, enlisting the support of intellectuals, writers and thought leaders to make the US case to the global public — in effect, to enlist others to make a case for the United States that the US Government would be less effective at doing itself.²

From the private side, another collaborative approach to public diplomacy has been undertaken by Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), an organisation that characterises itself as a private sector task force whose mission is 'to enlist the US business community in actions to improve the standing of America in the world with the goal of once again, seeing America admired as a global leader and respected as a courier of progress and prosperity for all people' (Business for Diplomatic Action, 2006). The impetus for BDA has arisen from growing business perceptions that the US Government for many years has been failing to conduct successful public diplomacy on its own. Weber Shandwick Worldwide CEO Harris Diamond observed: 'As a person who makes his living from building reputations, I would argue that neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations have had a comprehensive public diplomacy or brand-building strategy in place, or an experienced, capable team to implement one.'³ BDA seeks to address the problem of rising anti-Americanism around the world, which its member firms have identified as a threat to US interests both public and private. Headed by Keith Reinhard, Chairman Emeritus of leading advertising agency DDB Worldwide, and with a membership of major US firms with global presence across a range of industries and an academic advisory council packed with heavyweight names, BDA seeks to generate and disseminate ideas for improving the global image of the United States utilising all Americans who travel, particularly businesspeople and students, as 'ambassadors'. On their website BDA frame the problem thus: 'This effort is not about ads or selling — it's about sensitizing Americans to the extent of anti-Americanism today and its implications, transforming American attitudes and behaviors as necessary, building on the many positive perceptions of America that still exist, and building new bridges of cooperation, respect, and mutual understanding across cultures and borders through business-led initiatives.'⁴

BDA have assembled a formidable archive and database of research on public diplomacy, all of which are available for downloading by the public. They have prepared 'World Citizens' Guides' for business travellers and students, in which they impart common-sense advice on how to behave abroad to reinforce positive images of the United States. While much of what they write might seem to many to be self-evident, the guides were prepared in response to research documenting a link between behaviours by Americans abroad and negative foreign perceptions of the United States. Other principal causes of negative perceptions identified by the research include US foreign policy, negative effects of globalisation and the pervasiveness of US popular culture (World Citizens Guide, 2006).⁵

Traditional lobbying and 'private diplomacy'

Private consultants with backgrounds in political communication and public relation have become visible as actors in public diplomacy in two ways: more traditional lobbying and a newer phenomenon that has been labelled 'private diplomacy'. By the more traditional route, for several decades governments have employed public relations firms to engage in lobbying of foreign governments on behalf of their policy agendas and often on behalf of business interests based in the home country. Firms skilled at lobbying offer the advantages to clients of being able to provide in-depth knowledge of the operations of a particular political system, as well as what is often of greatest value to a foreign government, personnel on staff, often retired elected officials or senior administrative officials, with a network of high-level political contacts. This political lobbying activity has long been a part of the political cultures in many countries, particularly those with democratic political systems requiring the building of legislative support for policy objectives, but nowhere has it been more important than in the 'K Street' political lobbying environment in Washington, D.C.

In the 1930s, as the role and scope of activities of the US federal government grew dramatically under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, public perceptions increased that private lobbying on behalf of foreign interests was being conducted secretly. These concerns led to the passage of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 1938, which requires public disclosure by all private actors representing foreign governments in the United States of the identity of those for whom they contract, the type of services provided and fees paid. FARA's objective of promoting transparency has generally resulted in public acceptance of a 'business as usual' environment for private lobbying for foreign government and business interests in Washington. When international conflicts arise that potentially pit the interests of foreign governments against those of the United States, however, lobbying firms and their US employees can face criticism from the US public for their service to a foreign employer. Information collected under FARA can be used to fuel media-fed criticism of such representation, which can end up harming the interests of the foreign government and the US-based lobbyists representing them.

In a recent case, one such public relations firm engaged in traditional lobbying, Qorvis, was the subject of a compliance investigation under FARA in 2004 regarding whether the government of Saudi Arabia had paid for a radio ad campaign in 2002 by a US-based interest group, the Alliance for Peace and Justice, promoting an Arab League-sponsored Middle East peace plan, without identifying to the public the foreign funding of the ads.⁶ Qorvis, a Washington-based PR firm, in addition to serving a range of business clients, has done public relations work for the governments of Haiti and Saudi Arabia. The Qorvis investigation was reported in numerous US publications, including Newsweek, the New York Sun and the Washington Post, which noted that Qorvis had received $14.6m for a six-month period in 2002 from the Embassy of Saudi Arabia to engage in public diplomacy intended to increase perceptions in the US public that Saudi Arabia was committed to supporting the 'War on Terror' and Middle East peace in general. According to the New York Sun, the $14.6m payment was the largest ever received by a US firm to represent a foreign government in a given reporting period (Starks, 2002). Qorvis, according to the Post report, lobbied Congressional staffers, Bush Administration officials and US journalists on general Middle East issues and specifically on a political communication strategy for the Saudi crown prince's meeting with President Bush (Horwitz and Eggen, 2004).

In the second and newer phenomenon, governments have begun to employ private individuals and firms to represent them officially to other governments rather than using 'in-house' diplomatic personnel. This outsourcing of diplomatic representation has been dubbed 'private diplomacy' by Gregory Minjack, a founding partner of the global political consulting firm Capitol Links LLC. Coming from a background in public relations, political communication, lobbying and political campaigning, Minjack is a leading example of this new breed of a 'private' diplomat who undertakes diplomatic representation as one of the briefs of his political communication business. Capitol Links represents a range of private and public clients, specialising in international political consulting, political party building and elections management and legislative and issue advocacy campaigns, and with a regional focus on the European Union, the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. In 2005, Minjack served as general consultant to the Democratic Party of Albania during the Albanian parliamentary election campaign. But Minjack's most illustrious client is the Government of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb republic within Bosnia-Herzegovina, for whom Minjack acts as an official representative in Washington.

On its face, for a government to employ a private foreign firm to represent their diplomatic interests to a foreign government in a foreign capital might seem counterproductive. But Minjack invokes the same logic to rationalise this approach that motivates governments and firms to employ private consultants to do other public relations and political communication tasks. Minjack and Glen Cowan, CEO of Democracy International, a democratisation and elections consulting firm, addressed these issues at a workshop on 'The Business of Democratization' held at Bennington College, Vermont, in November 2006. When asked why a client would value outside advice over the wisdom of domestic consultants with extensive local knowledge, Minjack commented that the fresh eyes and fresh brains of advisers not burdened with particular ties to local interests is often exactly what clients are seeking and what is most useful in helping them to gain a new perspective on their objectives and how to achieve them. Cowan pointed out that the method that consultants use for serving clients public and private is broadly applicable: 'everything is reducible to a process that will always work irrespective of location, profession, and society'. Too often, people spend their time learning facts, solutions and prescriptions, rather than learning processes for understanding problems and developing solutions that are broadly transferable, Cowan observed. Asked whether democratisation is perceived around the world as synonymous with Americanisation, Minjack commented that the increasing shift by international organisations and governments to using private firms to do the work of democratisation results from the loss of credibility of governments, particularly the US Government, in winning the 'hearts and minds' of foreign publics to US Government democratisation objectives. This ongoing failure of US public diplomacy has created a growing and lucrative space for private diplomacy, which Minjack sees as the effective 'farming out' of democratisation work to the global marketplace of political consultants (Pigman, 2006).

In line with our contention that firms doing public relations and public diplomacy work need to evaluate their work in terms of how clients perceive it, private firms engaging in diplomacy have developed evaluation models and techniques to assess the performance of projects on which they consult. Glenn Cowan and Neil Nevitte have developed a project evaluation method for USAID 'Democracy and Governance' programmes that they call a 'client-based approach', in which they rank the perceptions of a programme's accomplishments by the target groups higher than objective measures of the programme's success: 'For a program manager to believe that their program has significantly contributed to the promotion of human rights (or fairer elections/greater access to information etc) is one thing. It is far more useful to know, surely, whether the program's clients share that belief' (Cowan and Nevitte, 1998).

CONCLUSIONS — PR IN PD FROM EMBEDDED TO OUTSOURCED

At the core of our preliminary conclusions is the finding that there is no dominant model for interaction between the government and the private sector on public diplomacy. What does tend to emerge is a sort of taxonomy of how official government diplomatic personnel are engaging with private sector public relations professionals to achieve public diplomacy and nation-branding objectives. The taxonomy can be articulated along a continuum of business relationship structures extending from a more 'embedded' model to a more 'outsourced' approach. At the embedded end lies foreign ministries hiring staff trained in public relations away from the private sector or engaging PR professionals to assist in training official diplomats, as the US State Department practices of hiring Charlotte Beers and Karen Hughes and employing the training services of Steve Hayden illustrate. Weber Shandwick CEO Harris Diamond stressed that the US State Department shows no sign of a move towards contracting out official US public diplomacy functions to private firms.⁷ Towards the centre of the continuum lies government use of private-sponsored venues such as the World Economic Forum to undertake public diplomacy objectives using government diplomats. Towards the outsourced end of the continuum lies the newer practice of governments contracting with private firms to do public diplomacy, as in Greg Minjack's work for the Republika Srpska government. At the far, completely outsourced end of the continuum would lie the privately undertaken public diplomacy of BDA on behalf of, but without being employed by, the US Government.

The taxonomy highlights the degree to which traditional boundaries between the public and the private in diplomacy have been eroded. This blurring of borders between diplomacy inevitably raises ongoing issues about conflicts of interest, the potentially competing loyalties of personnel and the power of the profit motive as a motivating force. To meet these concerns the most obvious observation is that transparency for global publics about who is performing which services for whom, and how and by whom they are being compensated, is key. As noted above, one of the most important lessons from public relations for public diplomacy is that the success of any project is dependent on the public perceiving its objectives as honest and sincere. Relationships between foreign ministries of governments and private businesses offer no guarantee of transparency, but prospects for transparency are just as good as when government diplomacy is conducted entirely in-house, as the long record of exposed government propaganda undertakings has revealed. Ultimately, in our view private diplomats may be better positioned to mediate estrangements between their clients and others — global publics, other governments — precisely because they are most likely to be motivated by the desire to achieve good results for the client, as perceived by the client, and thus to position themselves better to sell more follow-on business.

Notes

¹ Interview with Harris Diamond, CEO, Weber Shandwick Worldwide, 3rd January, 2007.

² 'Brand U.S.A.', Foreign Policy 127, November/December 2001, p. 19.

³ Remarks by Harris Diamond, CEO Weber Shandwick Worldwide, at USC Annenberg School for Communication, Los Angeles, 14th November, 2005.

⁴ See footnote 3.

⁵ Business for Diplomatic Action, Learn, Overview, http://www.businessfordiplomaticaction.org, accessed 10th December 2006, World Citizens Guide (2006).

⁶ 'Qorvis Communications', Sourcewatch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Qorvis_Communications, accessed 10th December, 2006.

⁷ Interview with Harris Diamond, 3rd January, 2007.

References

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