Public diplomacy' is a term increasingly used among policy makers and academics, yet its meaning is ambiguous and contested. Advocates proclaim it as a new approach to statecraft entailing a participatory approach of shared meaning-making between politicians and the public markedly different from the elitist, Machiavellian inter-governmental practices of traditional ('Westphalian') diplomacy. The European Union (EU) has embraced these ideals, proclaiming public diplomacy a cornerstone of European external relations policy. We examine these claims in the context of the EU's delegations to Australia and New Zealand. Using three ethnographic case studies, we highlight discrepancies between official discourses on public diplomacy and its practice. The participatory ideals of EU public diplomacy, we argue, are undermined by the EU's preoccupation with image and branding, public relations and marketing techniques, and continuing reliance on traditional 'backstage' methods of diplomacy. We conclude by outlining the implications of these paradoxes for both anthropological research and EU external relations.
The Australian state’s hostile deterrence policy toward people arriving by boat who seek asylum evokes polarized public sentiments. This article, which ethnographically follows a humanitarian NGO campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 Australian election, examines how citizens who opposed deterrence sought to affectively and morally influence the state and the public. Building on anthropological theories of the state and feminist scholarship on the sociality of emotion, I develop the notion of ‘affective relations’. Distinguishing from nationalist, humanitarian, and activist relations that set up divisive dynamics, campaigners invoked ‘humanizing’ to create affective relations based on common values, personalization, and responsiveness. Although the desired election results were not achieved, the focus on humanization represented a long-term shift to an inclusive alternative politics based on the transformation of power relations.
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