From “stardust” to statecraft: The Canada Council for the Arts and the evolution of Canadian cultural diplomacy

Conceptualizing culture in foreign policymaking

There remains considerable semantic confusion about the role of culture in foreign policymaking. ¹⁰ The scholarly literature appears to classify the concept and practice of culture in a foreign policy context either as an instrument, forum, or platform of the national interest to express normative ideals, making it an expression of national values or, in some cases, national interpretations of so-called humanistic “international values” that have been enshrined in, for example, international declarations and covenants, such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. ¹¹ The terms used, respectively, to define these expressions are cultural diplomacy and the promotion of international cultural relations (sometimes also framed as the promotion of inter-cultural dialogue).

Many examinations of the role of culture in foreign policymaking also begin by framing culture in the discourse of soft and hard power. A nation’s cultural resources, policies, ideas, and values can certainly be used for international leverage—for good or ill. Unfortunately, the concept of soft power—associated with the work of Joseph Nye Jr.—has often been misapplied and misinterpreted to mean the power to attract global positive attention to free societies characterized by free markets, freedom of expression, political stability, and respect for individual rights—all entrenched in classic, liberal Enlightenment values. ¹² Not coincidentally, these norms support American and, broadly speaking, Western political and economic interests. Soft power became identified—particularly in the context of the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s “end-of-history thesis”—with the triumph of Western values over other value systems, since the world (judging by immigration flows) was attracted to these Western values as opposed to, for example, the nihilism or suppression of individual freedom embodied by other belief systems. Thus, the concept of soft power has been criticized as being ethnocentric and a way of justifying American interests. ¹³ Caitlin Byrne observes that part of the problem is that soft power is weighted with normative assumptions ¹⁴ about “good” and “bad” power, with the latter associated with the coercion and threats of hard power and the former anchored to willing followership and “attraction.” The role of culture is, thus, identified with soft power—a positive form of power—since, presumably, bombs and guns oppress and kill, and culture does not. Cultural institutions are, thus, disassociated from the practice of hard, coercive power. This logic is based in a faulty understanding of soft power and an ahistorical “culture as benign” approach that is convenient for nation-states as they seek to reinforce or reconfigure their economic and political interests on the world stage. Culture can be and is a direct site of hard power, as any history of autocratic, totalitarian, and illiberal regimes shows.

It may be less ethnocentric and more politically useful to refer to what Nye calls meta soft power and which Ien Ang, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and Philip Mar define as a, “nation’s capacity and introspective ability to criticize itself that contributes to its international attractiveness, legitimacy, and credibility.” ¹⁵ This is a more nuanced and less tendentious reading of the power of soft power and, by extension, the power of culture in foreign policymaking. It is this ability to project introspection and, at times, profound and deep self-criticism, that sets apart the cultural diplomacies of, say, the member states of the Group of Seven (G-7) and those of less liberal countries. ¹⁶

Cultural diplomacy as a form of statecraft

If public diplomacy is the harnessing of a nation’s soft power in the national interest and cultural diplomacy is a component of public diplomacy (along with international broadcasting, exchange programs, branding, advocacy campaigns, and nation-branding), then government-financed international cultural programs must be a form of statecraft. Even if a country’s cultural agencies receive no explicit direction on the themes or geographic priorities of the government, the choices that an agency makes will nevertheless signal the national interest as perceived by foreign audiences. Moreover, the programming choices will also affect the perception of whether the cultural exchange reflects hard or soft power and, in some cases, it will represent both since multiple audiences with different interests (e.g., authoritarian governments versus human rights groups) will be aware of the exchange.

To illustrate this duality of cultural diplomacy and its relationship to statecraft, it is worth referring back to the exhibition of Miss Chief’s Wet Dream at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. That same exhibition in a country in which legislation does not adequately protect the LGBTQ or Indigenous communities may be perceived as a deliberate threat to the social mores of that society and possibly its sovereignty in the face of “foreign interference.” Indeed, Monkman’s artistic work ratchets up the cultural diplomacy “stakes” by integrating the LGBTQ and Indigenous themes, which may affront the sensibilities of more conservative-minded foreign audiences, possibly including some segments of foreign Indigenous communities. Such cultural programming supported by a foreign country could be considered by the host government to be an intentional effort by the foreign government to subvert local morality and sow divisions in that society by “legitimizing” homosexuality. It could be construed as part of a “hard” diplomatic effort by the foreign cultural institute, and, by extension, the country that funds this institute, to interfere in the host nation’s domestic affairs by upending social norms in that society. In fact, from the receiving country’s perspective, this form of cultural statecraft could be seen as a “malign” form of power projection that uses arts and culture as a Trojan Horse to interfere in domestic politics by promoting the strategic interests of foreign powers under the veil of promoting the norms of universal human rights and cultural citizenship.

The host government may perceive the cultural exchange as hard power, but the target audience may welcome it as soft power—a validation for a part of their society that already exists and, in some cases, is quite well accepted by the public (e.g., the LGBTQ community in Singapore is active and visible, even though homosexuality is still technically illegal). One could argue that, in the globalized context, this public exchange actually moves a country forward by providing international opportunities (social and economic) to its citizens that the country’s government has heretofore withheld. In this context, the promotion of cultural exchanges is hardly benign; it is a form of a nation-state’s power projection of its norms, even if such norms are framed as “universal” and even if exhibits, such as the Miss Chief’s Wet Dream, are not “directed” by the sending state (in this case Canada). This leaves open situations in which the sending state thinks that its cultural “export” will start a bilateral diplomatic conversation and that the host country will receive this cultural overture, at worst, benignly, only to find that the sending state’s messages, embedded in the independent artistic expressions of its creative community as a form of cultural diplomacy, are not received as intended. ¹⁷

For the reasons above, national cultural institutes, such as Germany’s Goethe Institute ¹⁸ and the British Council, find themselves navigating this semantic confusion about the place of culture in foreign policy: Are these cultural institutes instruments of foreign policy, or, in a more altruistic fashion, do they express societal values by building international relationships of trust through their programs and activities? Or, is it really a matter of how and where a national government chooses to use these institutes to engage in a bilateral or multilateral dialogue through which to express its society’s values that is the expression of statecraft? Milton Cummings is able to reconcile these two functions when he defines cultural diplomacy as

… the exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding which can also be more of a one-way street than a two-way exchange, as when one nation concentrates its efforts on promoting the national language, explaining its policies and point of view, or ‘selling its story’ to the rest of the world. ¹⁹

Early foundations for Canadian cultural diplomacy

In 1951, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences published the Massey–Lévesque Report, which was the catalyst in the establishment of the Council, among other cultural supports and institutions. More specifically, it stated, “That a body be created to be known as the Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Letters, Humanities, and Social Sciences to stimulate and to help voluntary organizations within these fields, to foster Canada’s cultural relations abroad [my emphasis], to perform the functions of a national commission for UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization], and devise and administer a system of scholarships.” ²⁰ The Commission directly addressed the importance of international cultural relations, noting that Canada was still largely an “unknown” country. ²¹ To address the gap in the world’s knowledge about Canada, it advocated the creation of a national commission for UNESCO. ²²

Although the Massey–Lévesque Report did recognize the importance of culture as a facet of international relations, as Mary Halloran writes, “[little] was said about the ways in which culture could be used to serve Canadian foreign policy interests.” ²³ When the report was published, Canada’s cultural diplomacy infrastructure consisted primarily of Radio Canada International, the National Gallery of Canada, and the National Film Board, along with the ad hoc support of the Department of External Affairs, which loosely coordinated Canadian cultural activities abroad under “information services.” The creation of the Council in 1957 augured a new era in Canada’s cultural life. Monica Gattinger refers to the Massey–Lévesque Report as a “watershed” in Canadian arts, education and cultural history and notes that the, “question of peace was also high on his [the then, Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent’s] mind,” with respect to giving the Council a broad mandate to enter into exchanges with other countries. ²⁴ It is significant that many of the prominent Canadians (such as Vincent Massey and Brooke Claxton) who would be key figures in the Council’s “origin story,” to use Gattinger’s term, were strong supporters of the postwar international system and Canada’s role in it. ²⁵

From the beginning, the Council supported the international cultural relations of Canadian artists and arts organizations, responding to the section of the Canada Council Act that directed it to, “ensure cultural exchanges with other countries as well as the projection of Canada abroad in the fields of the arts, humanities, and social sciences.” ²⁶ Support for the international exchange activities of Canadian universities and scholars in the humanities and social sciences continued until 1977, after which time the programs of the humanities and social sciences division of the Council were transferred to the newly created Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which began operations in 1978. ²⁷

It is beyond the purview of this article to provide a detailed history of the Council’s international activities, but suffice it to say that, although the agency consistently supported international cultural relations, the demand for public funds to support the already active and rapidly growing arts infrastructure across the country meant that the scope of the Massey Commission’s original international vision became tangential to the Council’s vocation as a national institution. ²⁸ Despite its roots in the “golden age” of Lester B. Pearson’s liberal internationalism, the Council did not have offices abroad like a British Council or Goethe Institute, nor was it funded to do so. Mary Halloran’s comprehensive history of Canada’s cultural diplomacy during the era of Pierre Trudeau (1968–1984) paints a picture of Canadian cultural diplomacy being very much a sideline to the main game of Canada playing its functional role as a mediator or “helpful fixer” (East–West and North–South) during the Cold War.

The creation of a cultural relations division in the Department of External Affairs in 1966 was a political reaction to the rise of Quebec nationalism and the province’s projection of its distinct identity on the world stage through cultural relations and educational exchanges starting with France, Belgium, and Switzerland. ²⁹ This period witnessed an increase in Canada’s cultural outreach to francophone nations in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, in particular, as an integral part of Canada’s foreign policy. Nonetheless, as Halloran writes, two seminal federal government statements—“Foreign Policy for Canadians” (1970) and Secretary of State for External Affairs Mitchel Sharp’s “Third Option” paper in 1973—identified Canada’s major European allies and historical partners (United Kingdom, France, Italy, the then, West Germany, and Netherlands) as the mainstay of Canada’s emergent cultural diplomacy. ³⁰ The Third Option proposal sought to orient Canada’s foreign policy away from the United States, using cultural relations abroad as a way of projecting Canada’s distinctness. It was during this period that the Council’s Touring Office opened in 1973 to, “enable artists and arts organizations to tour more extensively and broadly than had been otherwise possible in order to expand Canadians’ access to the arts and international audiences’ access to Canadian art abroad.” ³¹

Despite this burst of cultural diplomacy prompted by the exigencies of domestic Canadian politics and symbolized by Canada’s role as host of the International and Universal World Exhibition (Expo 67) in Montreal and the opening of the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris in 1970, throughout the ensuing three decades there was little evidence to demonstrate that Canada considered cultural diplomacy to be an essential element of its foreign policy. Maxwell catalogues how Canada’s cultural diplomacy, anchored by cultural relations resources in the Department of Foreign Affairs, suffered ongoing cutbacks and a lack of direction, and was periodically targeted for almost complete cuts. ³² Needless to say, Canada’s expenditure on cultural diplomacy was the lowest among its G-7 counterparts by a significant magnitude. ³³ Throughout this period, the Council’s Touring Office continued to support the international tours of Canadian performing arts organizations, and other programs supported the international circulation of visual arts exhibitions; readings by authors invited to international festivals and events; and travel for creative residences, exchanges, and professional opportunities.

The end of the Cold War portended a reconceptualization of security and a recognition that hard power alone could not address global challenges such as the environment, international migration, and ethnic conflicts (the Balkan wars and the genocide in Rwanda). In this context, a new direction in Canadian foreign policy was charted by the Chretien government in its “Canada in the World Government Statement” (1995), which sought to marry Canadian values and culture through the metaphor of culture as a “third pillar” of Canada’s foreign policy:

Foreign policy matters to Canadians. They have deep-rooted values that they carry over into the role they want Canada to play. Our principles and values—our culture—are rooted in a commitment to tolerance; to democracy, equity and human rights; to peaceful resolution of differences; to social justice; sustainable development; and to easing of poverty. Canadians wish these values reflected and advanced internationally. They also understand that culture helps to bind societies together at a time of rapid change and the emergence of new threats to security such as ethnic strife rooted in exclusionary visions of civic life. ³⁴

Despite the government’s 1995 assertion of the centrality of culture to Canadian foreign policy as its third pillar, ³⁶ over the next 20 years this would be belied by facts on the ground. Further deficit-reducing government cutbacks in the late 1990s disproportionately affected government communications and culture programs; a new government foreign policy statement in 2005 did not mention culture at all but talked about pursuing a “more robust and aggressive public diplomacy strategy, to ensure that Canada’s voice and ideas are heard and understood.” ³⁷ The prospect of culture being able to advance global civic goals, and, in so doing, to promote international security, as stated in the 1995 “Canada in the World Government Statement,” was put aside by a Conservative government that was perceived by the Canadian media as viewing culture as elitist. Instead, the government focused its attention on “hard” foreign policy assets, such as rebuilding Canada’s military and increasing trade advocacy. Between 2006 and 2015, it is estimated that some C$40 million was cut from Canada’s public diplomacy programming, effectively hollowing out the Canadian government’s cultural diplomacy capacity. ³⁸ This included cutting Trade Routes, a program to promote and build business opportunities for Canadian creative industries abroad, which was administered by the Department of Canadian Heritage, and two long-standing programs administered by Foreign Affairs and International Trade (now Global Affairs Canada): PromArt, which provided international exposure to Canadian artists; and Canadian Studies, which supported scholarship and teaching about Canada at foreign universities. ³⁹

Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2010s, as Gattinger describes, the Council navigated these shifting political sands, being careful not to alienate Ottawa’s political leadership. The Council’s “arm’s-length” status as a Crown corporation reporting to Parliament through the Minister of Canadian Heritage provided a measure of security for the Council’s international activities. Nevertheless, the government of Canada’s already modest cultural diplomacy infrastructure atrophied. Although there was regular coordination between the Council, Canadian Heritage, and what would become Global Affairs Canada, it was mostly ad hoc. As Gattinger writes, although the Council always saw itself as more than an arts-granting organization, “its commitment to international outreach ebbs and flows with the priorities of its directors, board, funding level, salient issues of the day, and the federal government’s own level of cultural engagement internationally.” ⁴⁰ An example of this was the First World Summit of Arts and Culture, hosted in Ottawa in November 2000 by the Council, under the leadership of its then director, Shirley Thomson. ⁴¹ It was at this gathering, attended by 300 delegates from 55 countries, that participating councils and funding bodies unanimously supported the formation of an international association of arts and culture agencies. By the end of 2001, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) was created with 21 country members and a Secretariat based in Sydney, Australia. Thomson chaired the interim board that developed the constitution for this new entity, which was formally adopted in 2003. Subsequent Council directors also served as board members, including Simon Brault, who was appointed Chair in 2019, having already served on the IFACCA board for over two years. ⁴²

The arrival of Simon Brault to lead the Council in 2014 would push the Council in a new direction, one that not only saw a doubling of the Council’s budget in 2016 by the new Liberal government and, consequently, a significant increase in funds allocated to international activities but, even before that, a strategic commitment to enhanced support for the international activities of Canadian artists and organizations. There was also, crucially, a larger international leadership role for the Council itself. When Brault was elected Chair of IFACCA in 2019, the Council put out a news release on his behalf: “I have been deeply committed to the idea that the arts hold the power to renew cultural diplomacy and foster relationships that make it possible for peoples and nations to work together and build a shared future. We can unleash this power all the more strongly when we work together, above and beyond the borders of our respective countries.” ⁴³

The Council and the revitalization of cultural diplomacy (2015–2018)

In 2015, a new Liberal government signalled that “Canada was back” on the world stage. At a meeting of Canadian ambassadors, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exhorted his envoys to communicate by all means possible. ⁴⁴ The mandate letter of Stéphane Dion, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, called explicitly for the “revitalization” of Canada’s public diplomacy and to “increase Canada’s interaction with the world through culture and education.” ⁴⁵ Further, the Prime Minister expected his foreign and trade ministers to support his Minister of Canadian Heritage in restoring the international cultural relation programs that had been cut in the previous decade. As a result of the Trudeau government’s 2016 budget, the government allocated C$1.9 billion over five years to Canadian culture, largely to increase the budgets of the Council, Telefilm Canada, and the National Film Board. Included in this amount was C$35 million over two years (2016–2018) to promote Canadian cultural industries abroad, of which C$15 million was received by Global Affairs Canada to invest in cultural trade positions at Canadian diplomatic missions abroad as well as C$1.75 million annually (Mission Cultural Fund) to support embassy-based, cultural programming. ⁴⁶

Certainly, Canada’s reinvestment in its cultural diplomacy was almost on par with an accounting error when compared to the billion-dollar budget accorded to international education alone by the German government. That being said, it would not be fair to compare Canada’s approach to cultural diplomacy given the different histories and geopolitical realities: Canada is not a Great Power nor a country with Great Power aspirations; Canada does not have the same twentieth century history as Germany does, which necessitates Germany’s more prominent cultural diplomacy; and Canada’s cultural diplomacy is expressed not only at the federal level but at multiple levels of government. The sum total of Canadian investment in cultural diplomacy is larger when other levels of government are taken into account.

But, as discussed earlier, a nation’s global influence can be a form of meta soft power, making the total state expenditure on international cultural and educational programming somewhat less important than the type of cultural diplomacy that is practised. It is here that we find some parallels between German and Canadian cultural diplomacy that allows cultural practice to evolve into a form of cultural statecraft. Germany foregrounds rather than avoids discussions of Nazism and its responsibility for the genocide of European Jews in its cultural diplomacy. In recent years, Canada has chosen to encourage discussions abroad of its own dark history of discrimination against its Indigenous people following the completion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. In this way, Monkman’s work abroad could be perceived as a form of Canadian meta soft power.

For its part, the Council increased grants for international projects from C$10 million to C$20 million. This increased investment was part of a broader transformation of the Council’s granting programs and operating structure. The impact of this transformation on the Council’s relationship with both the arts community and the Canadian government cannot be overstated. In terms of the Council’s international supports, the previous array of arts-discipline-based funding options were consolidated and enhanced in one non-disciplinary program specific to international activities, called “Arts Abroad.” An additional option allowed Indigenous artists and arts organizations to access funds for their international projects through the new, Indigenous-led program titled, “Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples.” In terms of the Council’s operating structure, the previous Audience and Market Development Office, which had managed an international travel grants program as well as a number of international strategic initiatives, was closed. A new office was designed to provide corporate oversight of the Council’s international activities, partnerships, and networks, in particular its relationships with Global Affairs Canada and IFACCA. Accompanying this transformation was a specific international commitment that, “supports the strong and sustainable presence of Canadian artists and organizations and their work in the world.” ⁴⁷

The Council’s strategic plan (2016–2021) indicated that the Council planned to play a larger role in Canada’s cultural diplomacy. In 2017, an inter-departmental coordinating group (Global Affairs Canada, Canadian Heritage and the Council) was created to facilitate discussions on increased cooperation on cultural diplomacy. In 2018, Brault stated that the Council’s international vision, “expresses the aspirations and public accountability inherent in the Council’s role; supports the free and diverse expression of the various voices that support democracy, human development, and democratic renewal; is based on cultural rights, democracy, citizenship, and diplomacy; reflects the reality of ordinary citizens in Canada and around the world; nurtures a diversity of cultural expressions; recognizes the cultural sovereignty of Indigenous peoples; respects the self-determination of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis; … supports the dissemination of their arts and culture; [and] encourages collaboration, partnering and reciprocal cultural exchanges.” ⁴⁸ He explains that this vision of international arts and culture, “draws on full-fledged cultural citizenship,” and he sees the potential for artistic and literary creations to create space for discussion and mediation and, thus, ultimately supporting cultural diplomacy. ⁴⁹ He is careful to note that, “this does not mean using artistic creation to serve special interests”; rather, he sees the power (meta soft power?) of artists in that, “they often represent divergent voices that are critical of our realities and express concerns that politicians often dare not voice but which resonate with their audiences both within and outside their own countries.” ⁵⁰ It may seem paradoxical but the “leveraging synergies” in the cultural and arts sphere (among departments and agencies and arts organizations) to help, for example, a country promote human development and democratic renewal is a function of a cultural agency’s ability to manage its programs and initiatives independently. This generally enhances the credibility of the country in the eyes of foreign audiences and decision-makers, and points to a new model of cultural statecraft. ⁵¹

At its core, the conceptual foundation of the Council’s international strategy was the promotion of cultural citizenship and cultural freedom as a means of empowering individuals to create, express their distinct identities, and act collectively. The unifying principle is that, in an era of global political and ideological polarization and growing inequality, intercultural understanding—where people and countries can find common ground for engaging in dialogue—is essential to making progress on global challenges, which is consistent with efforts to make a nation’s broader public diplomacy more collaborative. The Council’s international strategy stresses a dialogic or symmetrical approach to cultural promotion.

The Americas Cultural Summit

The inaugural Americas Cultural Summit in May 2018 took place in Canada and was hosted by the Council in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, Argentina, and IFACCA. The Summit convened cultural leaders and decision-makers from 33 countries, including 25 in the Americas. Delegates comprised government and public cultural funding representatives, artists and arts organizations, cultural associations, academic scholars, and private cultural foundations.

In October 2016, Brault and Ivan Petrella, Secretary for Federal Integration and International Cooperation at the Ministry of Culture of Argentina, were both elected to the board of IFACCA. ⁵² One month later, in November 2016, Brault was invited to Argentina to participate in the “International Forum on Public and Private Investment in Arts and Culture,” hosted by Argentina’s National Arts Fund, and he returned to Buenos Aires in April 2017 for his first IFACCA board meeting. ⁵³ The efforts of Simon Brault, Ivan Petrella, and the IFACCA Secretariat led to the co-creation of the Americas Cultural Summit that would be hosted in Ottawa the following spring.

The overarching theme of the Americas Cultural Summit was cultural citizenship, a concept that merged Brault’s long-time passion for the subject and also aligned with the efforts of Argentina’s Ministry of Culture to promote free cultural expression and access to culture as a democratic right. ⁵⁴ Cultural citizenship, as a concept, has been defined in various ways. In the context of the Americas Cultural Summit, it was defined as, “the expression of diverse cultural practices and identities alongside full participation in cultural life.” ⁵⁵ The Americas Cultural Summit participants engaged with this broad theme by exploring seven subthemes: arts and social change; diversity and inclusion; cultural rights; Indigenous rights; participatory governance; creating commons for digital inclusion; and truth, memory, and reconciliation. Across the many keynote speeches and panel sessions over two days, one of the recurring themes was that civil society could transform public space and effect social and political change through culture and that this transformation be free from coercion. Cultural freedom was framed as a normative value and, as such, it could be seen as a strategic asset for those nations that chose to configure their cultural diplomacies around it.

The Americas Cultural Summit encouraged conversation among government representatives and cultural leaders about how to engage the concept of cultural citizenship in practice to produce more “vibrant, prosperous, open, and inclusive societies,” and to create the conditions to continue dialogue and build collaborations and partnerships beyond the Americas Cultural Summit event. The central involvement of IFACCA in pre- and post-planning provided an international convening force because they supported their country members from the Americas to develop an ongoing regional network, and they also developed the theme of cultural citizenship among other regional networks at the 8th World Summit on Arts and Culture, hosted in Malaysia in March 2019.

The Americas Cultural Summit’s purpose, in keeping with UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was to advance the right of all peoples to exercise freedom on artistic expression; foster open and inclusive societies that engage civil society; embrace the spirit of peoples in the region of the Americas to share cultural goods, practices and ideas; acknowledge the “urgent” need to respect and promote the inherent right of indigenous peoples; and cultivate diversity of cultural expressions across the Americas. ⁵⁶ Of particular significance was the Americas Cultural Summit’s focus on Indigenous rights. Gattinger leaves no doubt that the Council had embraced the role of providing exposure and development opportunities to Indigenous artists and creative communities.

The Americas Cultural Summit set the agenda for a new form of indirect Canadian cultural statecraft, one that can draw on the Council’s growing international role in articulating a norms-led process of developing cultural citizenship as one avenue for responding to complex, global, socioeconomic challenges such as inequality, women’s rights, and the protection of human rights.

Conclusion

The traditional model of “selling or branding” a country through its culture is being replaced by a cultural citizenship model that is similar to the approaches used by Germany and the United Kingdom, which conceptualizes cultural relations as being a more symmetrical form of diplomacy in which the sender (foreign ministry, embassy, or cultural institute) can co-create meaning (citizenship) with the receiver (foreign government or foreign cultural producer). The new cultural statecraft is as much about listening as it is about telling. However, the temporal problem of cultural statecraft will remain. Many artists who perform internationally work on long time frames, with performances often planned years in advance; governments, on the other hand, are on much shorter time frames, seeking artists to support particular foreign policy objectives.

This article raises the fundamental question about whether there is really a dichotomy between cultural diplomacy and cultural statecraft. It is a bit of cliché to say that cultural diplomacy builds a foundation of trust in an effort to forge deeper economic and political ties; however, like every cliché, it contains an essential truth. It is the argument of this article that, in the Canadian context, Canadian cultural diplomacy for most of its history (with the exception of wartimes and periods of rising Quebec nationalism), has at times been seen as “stardust” and has not always been treated like statecraft, a strategic resource for advancing the national interest over the long term. The value of international efforts of publicly-financed and independent, domestic cultural agencies such as the Council, but also other federal cultural entities as well as provincial and municipal cultural organizations, for advancing Canada’s overall strategic interests (economic prosperity and international peace and security) is an important step. It advances thinking on how traditional Canadian cultural diplomacy can evolve into more of a bottom-up—from the artistic community “up”—process of applying statecraft to the abundant cultural resources at hand.

Statecraft is about hard policymaking—leaders face the realpolitik of military conflict, hostage negotiations, deciding which ethnic and religious strife to intervene in, tariff wars, uncontrolled refugee flows, disintegrating rules-based norms, and a myriad other, ever-changing “events” that consume their attention. Countries that sprinkle occasional “stardust” in the form of culture—a ballet here, a film, string quartet, or panda there—to remind each other of their essential humanity renders cultural diplomacy as not only the weak stepchild of diplomacy but so circumscribed by its very instrumental nature as to be practically irrelevant to the national interest. If cultural statecraft is rendered largely as an episodic instrument to encourage “people-to-people” ties, a bit of lubricant for the diplomatic machinery, then it is destined to remain largely irrelevant for those countries choosing to use it as such. For others, particularly west European countries with long histories of active international cultural institutes and, in more recent years, the People’s Republic of China with its funding of Confucius Institutes worldwide to, in part, support its global development/expansion strategy (Belt and Road Initiative), culture is seen as essential to the achievement of a range of very “hard” goals, running the gamut from creating a foreign opinion environment less resistant to your country’s economic and political aspirations to more “boutique” bottom-up cultural initiatives, such as using cultural exchanges for peacemaking among warring factions or bringing about new norms to control online hate. Cultural diplomacy becomes cultural statecraft and is tied directly to the pursuit of the national interest.

Anglo-American diplomats, in particular, have in the course of the twentieth century been conditioned to see cultural diplomacy as a “soft” tool that can be precisely calibrated to not offend and to soften the harder edge of a country’s public image with respect to coercive trade negotiation tactics or perhaps its poor record on human rights (e.g., discrimination against minority populations and Indigenous rights) or the environment. However, cultural diplomacy as facilitated and enacted by national arts and cultural agencies, such as the Council and a myriad other “arm’s-length” (from government exercising control of creative output) cultural agencies, offers a means of reconceptualizing the role of culture in foreign policy. It does so by: (a) offering extremely valuable institutional attributes, such as maintaining the creative independence and freedom of the artistic community that they represent; (b) developing this artistic community through training/education/apprenticeships and international exposure as expressions of national excellence; and (c) intensifying an international presence through international, cultural, institutional boundary-spanning and alliance-building to operationalize ideas such as cultural citizenship. A condition for the successful re-conception of cultural diplomacy as statecraft—in the sense of having clear objectives, developing synergies by drawing on the full array of a country’s cultural resources, and achieving specific normative outcomes (e.g., relating to human development and democratic renewal)—is that this existing potential for culture to be part of “hard” approaches and outcomes (i.e., definable and related to a country’s interests) is framed and protected by the principle of cultural and artistic freedom. Otherwise, the, “deeper power in the field” as Nicholas Cull notes, cannot be fully and appropriately leveraged. ⁵⁷