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The Danish cartoons' controversy of 2006-2008 was not a unique storm that has fortunately passed over the world into history. It exhibited reactions that had much in common with previous transnational disputes involving satire, such as the movie Life of Brian and Holocaust cartoons, but there is now the potential for global communications to accelerate and exacerbate such clashes. The media amplify clashes between the various actors and the taboos involved in such disputes. There is also a 'dialogue of the deaf', in which political elites are more concerned with speaking to their own constituencies or refuse to withdraw from problematic statements and policies rather than engaging in dialogue. Such discursive conflict has implications for transnational democracy and public diplomacy.

Summary Many calls have been made since 2001 for a ‘new public diplomacy’ of the information age that utilizes the internet to reach public opinion. They have been especially forthcoming from the Obama administration, although they have been just as popular with the political classes in the United States and elsewhere. However, such recent calls form only the latest instalment of a rhetorical tradition of public diplomacy that stretches back to Woodrow Wilson and beyond to the 1790s. There is a thematic recurrence in the rhetoric of public diplomacy, as there is in the rhetoric of democracy, and for the same reason: representative democracy has always involved a complex tension between, on the one hand, the political class of politicians and diplomats and, on the other, public opinion, which needs to be appeased since it confers legitimacy on representatives. This results in a recurring pattern of language involving suspicions of the political class, declarations of a new era of diplomacy and claims to credibility. There are hence frequent bouts of anti-politics politics and anti-diplomacy politics, sometimes utilizing a discourse of technological optimism, which politicians and diplomats attempt to assuage with similar calls for new political dawns.

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