REASSESSMENT OF EU PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN THE UNITED STATES

1. The EU needs a fundamental re-balancing of its public diplomatic offer and a larger investment in it.
2. The EU does not pay enough attention to the way that stories are received in the U.S. The main way to engage with mass audiences in the U.S. is not through Embassies on the ground, but by working through U.S. correspondents in EU capitals, primarily London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.
3. The EU needs to change the tone of public diplomacy - so that it is less about winning arguments and more about engagement.
4. Those involved in EU public diplomacy need to be much more interactive - building long-term relationships and understanding target groups rather than delivering one-way messages.
5. Conspicuous EU involvement in public diplomacy can be counter-productive. By working through parties that people will trust – from NGOs and Diasporas to brands and political parties – the EU is more likely to build trust and achieve its objectives than by acting as spokespeople themselves.
6. The EU Delegation to the U.S. needs to be retooled to become an advocacy and policy-exchange organisation; creating an infrastructure to link up political parties and NGOs  to create a common policy space; and planning proactive communication campaigns.

There are three dimensions of public diplomacy activities:

• Reacting to news events as they occur in a way that tallies with EU strategic goals;
• Proactively creating a news agenda through activities and events which are designed to reinforce core messages and influence perceptions;
• Building long-term relationships with populations in the U.S. to win recognition of EU values and assets and to learn from theirs.

News Management

The first dimension of public diplomacy is the management of communications on day-to-day issues, reflecting the growing need to align communications with traditional diplomacy. Public diplomacy is the public face of traditional diplomacy. Traditional diplomacy seeks to advance the interests of the EU through private exchanges with foreign governments. Public diplomacy seeks to support traditional diplomacy by addressing nongovernmental audiences, in addition to governmental audiences, both mass and elite. It works very much in coordination with and in parallel to the traditional diplomatic effort. This implies that  the EU delegation in Washington DC must plan public diplomacy strategies for all of the main issues they deal with – and explore the communications angles of all their activities. News management needs to be flexible, reactive and plugged into the EU machine. Proactive communications demands highly developed communications skills, strategic planning and the budgets, resources and the expertise to organize events that can capture the imagination. Building relationships depends on earning high levels of trust, creating a neutral and safe environment, and can often best be done at one remove from government.

Strategic Communications

The EU has traditionally been good at communicating its stances on particular issues, but less effective at managing perceptions of the EU a whole. One of the reasons for this is the fact that different institutions have been responsible for dealing with politics, trade, tourism, investment and cultural relations. But on many issues, it is the totality of messages which people get about the EU  which will determine how they relate to the EU.

Relationship Building

The third dimension of public diplomacy is the most long-term: developing lasting relationships with key individuals through scholarships, exchanges, training, seminars, conferences, building real and virtual networks, and giving people access to media channels. This differs from the usual diplomatic practice of nurturing contacts as it is about developing relationships between peers – politicians, special advisers, business people, cultural entrepreneurs or academics. It is aimed at creating a common analysis of issues and giving people a clearer idea of the motivations and factors effecting their actions so that by the time they come to discussing individual issues a lot of the background work has been done already. It is important not just to develop relationships but to ensure that the experiences which people take away are positive and that there is follow-up afterwards. Building relationships is very different from selling messages because it involves a genuine exchange and means that people are given a ‘warts and all’ picture of the EU.

The challenge for EU public diplomacy is to link competing national debates and map out a path for change. The goal is not just be to win the battle for public opinion at home - but to ensure that publics abroad see the issue from an EU perspective and exercise pressure for change on their national governments. Achieving these objectives demands a good deal of co-ordination between advocates of change - governmental and non-governmental. 

Questions that need to be addressed:

1. Does the EU commit enough resources to the U.S. given its importance in the world, and the kinds of relations it wishes to foster with it?

2. Is the EU clear about what its strategic messages should be, and how successful has it been so far in putting those messages across?

3. Should the EU be seeking to act competitively or co-operatively with other countries in delivering its messages?

4. How successfully does the EU span the three dimensions of public diplomacy – from news management and rebuttal, through medium term strategic message delivery, to long-term relationship building? Also, how well do EU institutions mesh together in covering that spectrum?

5. Is the EU seeking to develop relationships and foster trust with the right non-governmental partners in the U.S. ?

6. Is the EU targeting audiences and issues correctly, and utilizing the correct platforms for its messages?

7. Does the EU have the skill sets that it needs in place to carry out public diplomacy on a professional basis?

8. Are EU responses to crises in the relationship between the EU and the U.S. in line with its long-term goals?