A Tout France

Sometime correspondent (and blogger on all things culinary near Puget Sound) Ronald Holden is in New York for French Affairs, a conference put on by the French Government Tourist Office.

Although Ron rightly complains about this agency's overly busy Web site (although I love that it leads to a vlog called Lost in Francelation), he finds much to admire about France's unified national program for attracting tourist dollars:

France was the first country to target a wide variety of niche travel markets: gay & lesbian, Jewish, religious, Hispanic, luxury, first-timers, retirees, French expats. Theme travel, too: culinary, wine, ski, spa, and so on. There's no comparable agency promoting the entire USA; individual companies (airlines, hotel chains, Disneyland destinations) and individual states and cities are expected to do their own marketing campaigns. The Sarkozy government pitched in to help France's embattled hospitality sector by cutting the VAT on restaurant meals by 75 percent, but hotel revenues, in the world's most visited country (77 million foreign tourists a year) are still down 13 percent.

So: Not only does France go out of its way to welcome everyone and tempt them with everything, it's also applying good old-fashioned tax policy to make eating out cheaper across the entire country.

That can only encourage longer stays and accomplishing something I was unable to do last year: tear myself away from Paris proper and see the countryside.

It makes me wonder who could possibly take the reins and promote Brand America with one voice, 'round the world. I mean, besides Disney.

"Media as Global Diplomat"

SUDDENLY, NO ONE IN D.C. IS AFRAID TO STATE THE OBVIOUS: POLICY DRIVES PERCEPTION.

House-hunting has kept me from commenting sooner on last Tuesday's "Media as Global Diplomat" session, put on by USIP on the breathtaking seventh floor of the Newseum. A few brief notes:

Ted Koppel moderated and told a story I'd heard him use before: A BBC documentary heightened U.S. policymakers' concern about Somali starvation in the early 1990s. The U.S. sent troops there, with an outcome we all remember (1x U.S. troops died, roughly 50x Somalis died, Pres. Clinton pulled everyone out). As a result, the U.S. and other nations refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide. Koppel tells this story to illustrate the power of unintended consequences.

Amb. Edward Djerejian was the first to state what it had been unwise to say during the Bush administration: Policy makes up 80 percent of other publics' perceptions of U.S., while our explanations of that policy make up just 20 percent.

Amb. James Glassman, the former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, was so in command of his facts and such a realist that I'm sorry he, like Robert Gates, wasn't just kept on at State. Start with our goals, Glassman urged: What are we trying to do? He also noted that the U.S. "can achieve a lot even without people liking us"; respect, he seemed to be saying, should precede affection.

But it was James Zogby who really impressed me: I'm paraphrasing here, but he felt free to say that repeating the word "water" slowly enough in Mexico so that the poor, dumb foreigners will understand is unlikely to get you a glass of agua. He also took poor, abused Charlotte Beers to task by saying, "You don't need to 'brand' America, it's already branded."

But because of that brand--what other people think of American values--expectations of U.S. behavior are very high. "People want to like us, they want to believe in us, and we continue to hurt them," Zogby said.

Google director of global public policy and government Andrew McLaughlin provided some unintended comic relief by trying to convince the group that he was from the future, where apparently there are no radio or television, only the Internet. U.S. efforts that revolve around an "authoritative speaker and unwashed masses will fail," he intoned, adding that he found the whole conversation about what to do with U.S. radio and TV broadcasting "stale." I won't go further into McLaughlin except to say the jeans they wear in the future look very sturdy.

A videoconference with Oscar Morales, credited with the Facebook campaign that brought millions into Colombia's streets to protest the FARC, had some technical glitches but Morales still managed the audience a hit of the possibilities of grassroots, self-organizing civic action.

In the audience was Amb. Cynthia Schneider (former envoy to the Netherlands), who noted that the mere idea of merit-based competition such as American Idol--duplicated several times already in the Middle East--was radical. Another speaker noted that Beijing attempted to suppress mobile-phone voting on a Chinese Idol-type program for a couple years before giving up and allowing it to happen.

Edward Borgerding, CEO of Abu Dhabi Media Co., outlined the problem traditional media face: Not only are non-traditional media taking share from traditional broadcasters, the total number of dollars in the media system overall may be shrinking.

I was surprised by Smita Singh, director of the Global Development Program at the Hewlett Foundation, and MTV's president of global digital media Mika Salmi. The two of them convinced me that large philanthropic NGOs are much bigger do-gooders on the world stage than I'd thought, and focus on amplifying their impacts through partnerships with for-profit media. (Salmi's company partners with the Kaiser foundation, for example, on an anti-AIDS program in Africa.)

Finally, I had to leave before the screening of the 1982 Lebanon War-focused Waltz with Bashir, but my colleague Cady Susswein seemed to find it worthwhile, a "beautifully constructed cultural piece dealing with lingering emotions from war memories and Israeli guilt."

The Heart of the Matter

Brief piece over at the Council on Foreign Relations regarding "nation branding," quoting not just founder-of-the-field Simon Anholt but my occasional colleague Joshua Fouts from USC's Center on Public Diplomacy.

The article ends with a quote from Anholt that sums up how policymakers should think about public diplomacy:

Anholt [argues] that nation branding is not the answer unless it is pursued alongside policy changes. “I don’t tell countries how to do marketing,” he says. “I advise them on what sorts of policies they need to undertake in order to earn the reputation they feel they deserve.”

It's that simple. Feel like your nation is the sole heir of Enlightenment rationality? Then act it.

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

The Universal Symbol

WALT DISNEY CO. WELCOMES FOREIGN VISITORS WITH SEVEN MINUTES OF SMILES, BUT NO WHITE HOUSE.

Anxious about declining numbers of foreign tourists to the U.S., Walt Disney Co. has created a seven-minute film for the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to welcome visitors from overseas.

Backed by some very upbeat, Aaron Copland-esque orchestral music, the film’s hundreds of Americans pause for a moment to smile for the camera. Cuts of these welcoming, diverse mugs are interspersed with photos of famous American landmarks (the Chrysler Building, Hancock Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Lincoln Memorial, Statue of Liberty) and landscapes (canyons, forests, seacoasts, painted desert, amber waves of grain).

The film portrays an almost exclusively blue-collar America at work: cooks, waitresses, building framers, showgirls, cowboys, truck drivers, baristas, farmers, fishermen. Only a few shots—a businessman walking down a city street in his suit and a shot or two of ministers, for example—reveal a white-collar world, and these images are general enough to be understood immediately.

There are problems with portraying white-collar work in a photograph or two. For example, a photo of me pausing from my work would show me turning my head to glare at the camera, never taking hands from the laptop’s keyboard except to gulp coffee. These actions would not be accessible to the casual foreign visitor in a second or two of screen time: What is that man doing?

Focusing on visible, blue-collar America serves two purposes: It portrays occupations that foreign visitors can connect with immediately regardless of their own station in life, and indirectly shows Americans as more down-to-earth and humble than many foreign visitors may think from portrayals in their own media.

There are no shots of office workers, none of the White House or U.S. Capitol, none of Disney properties, and none of any famous American.

The film, which Disney produced entirely on its own dime, is currently being shown at entry points at the Washington Dulles and Houston airports; see State’s press release for more details.

Global Hopscotch

EYEBROW-RAISING DISPATCHES FROM THE U.S. PRESS.


First, the silly: The U.S. and UN are threatening to cut off North Korea’s 600-odd ruling families from importing certain luxury goods. Here's a Chicago Tribune editorial on the subject:

On the U.S. list, according to the Associated Press, are such Kim favorites as Johnny Walker scotch whiskey, Cadillac cars, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, yachts, plasma TVs, Rolex watches, Segway scooters, Jet Ski personal watercraft and iPods. Japan includes beef, caviar, fatty tuna, expensive cameras and cars on its list of banned items. Many European nations are still working on their lists.

This just proves Thomas Friedman’s old point about how warfare is evolving from state-vs.-state to state-vs.-man. We’re not even trying to kill a single guy, like Usama bin Ladin, in this case; the U.S. is reduced to attempts to keep Kim Jong Il from getting bombed on the wrong scotch—a brand that, incidentally, is available in every airport duty-free store in the world.

Second, Arianna Huffington continues her march from bluster toward substance with a modest proposal:

Well, it appears [Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s] government wants us out six months from now. And what about the Iraqi people, those purple-fingered symbols of democracy in action? What about what they want?

If Bush is all about the Tenacious D(emocracy), why not have the Iraqi people "express their desires and wishes" and hold a plebiscite on the most pressing question facing the country: Should the United States withdraw its troops from Iraq -- Yes or No? (Talk about your Pick of Destiny).

Simple, in a vicious sort of way, with all parties in Iraq having to do something they don’t want to: Sunni insurgents would be discouraged from trying to stop the election, since it would likely go their way (U.S. out!). The al-Maliki government would be embarrassed into a get-of-the-vote effort to counter a high Sunni turnout. And the U.S., when its troops are told to go, has to leave, except for whatever right it asserts to protect Iraq’s oil wealth for export.

Finally, Minnesota congressman-elect Keith Ellison wants to be sworn in this January with his hand on a Qur’an, prompting predictable outrage from Christian conservatives. One of the most prominent has been pundit Dennis Prager, who called Ellison’s proposed action "an act of hubris ... that undermines American civilization. ... Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress."

Prager’s remarks are resounding throughout the nation and around the world, which must be extremely interested to see how America’s most prominent Muslim elected official (Zalmay Khalilzad is an appointee) is treated.

Of course, it turns out that Prager is Jewish, meaning he has not only soured the fragile U.S. reputation for religious tolerance in the Muslim world, he has managed to single-handedly unite the ADL and CAIR for one glorious moment:

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement calling his argument "intolerant, misinformed, and downright un-American." Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, says the text used should be that which "is most sacred to the individual taking the oath. To ask ... otherwise is not only disrespectful to the person and to an entire religious tradition, but is asking the public official to be hypocritical."

The Council for American-Islamic Relations has called for Prager to be dropped from his recent presidential appointment to the Holocaust Memorial Council. "He is trying to marginalize Muslims by making it seem as though any practice of American Muslims is different or 'other' than what America stands for," says Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR's legal counsel.

(Thanks to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the Tribune and Huffington items.)