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Britain To-day (1945-1954)
Alice Byrne
To cite this version:
Alice Byrne. Periodical Journalism as an Instrument of Cultural Diplomacy or Informational Diplo- macy: the Example of Britain To-day (1945-1954). Nathalie DUCLOS, Nathalie RIVÈRE DE CARLE. Formes de la diplomatie (XVIe-XXIe siècle), Presses Universitaires du Midi, pp.253-271, 2015, 978-2-8107-0424-8. �hal-01304204�
Periodical Journalism as an Instrument of Cultural Diplomacy or Informational Diplomacy:
the Example of Britain To-day (1945-1954)
Alice BYRNE∗
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article explore les notions de diplomatie culturelle et de diplomatie informationnelle à travers l'exemple de Britain To-day, une revue publiée par le British Council entre 1939 et 1954. À la fin des années 1940, Britain To-day fut l'objet d'un conflit entre le Council et le Central Office of Information (successeur du ministère de l'Information créé pendant la guerre), chacun voyant dans la revue un moyen important pour suivre sa mission respective. Cette histoire illustre à la fois la contiguïté des deux organisations et leurs divergences. Elle met également en lumière le rôle spécifique joué par les périodiques dans le domaine des relations internationales, même à l'ère des médias de masse.
Keywords: Periodical journalism, Britain To-day, Cultural diplomacy, Informational diplomacy, British Council, Central Office of Information, Ministry of Information, World War II, Post-war.
This article aims to explore the notions of cultural and informational diplomacy and relate them to government-sponsored publishing in the UK in the years immediately after World War II. It is specifically concerned with the periodical journalism produced by the government publicity service the Central Office of Information (COI) and the UK cultural relations organization the British Council, with a focus on a publication entitled Britain To-day. This magazine was the
∗ Université Rennes 2.
subject of a protracted dispute between the Council and the COI that serves to highlight both the proximity of the two organizations and their points of divergence.
The work of both organizations can be described using a range of terms that are not necessarily associated with diplomacy. The COI grew out of the World War II Ministry of Information and as such its roots lay in wartime propaganda. The British Council was set up in the 1930s with the aim of countering the Nazi and Fascist threat through cultural propaganda. After the war it redefined its mission as one of cultural relations, a term which was far more congenial to liberal internationalists and less likely to arouse suspicion among those on the receiving end of British Council programmes. Unlike the Institut Français however, the British Council has never described itself as an organization dedicated to cultural diplomacy, which smacks of government control and the use of culture to further foreign policy objectives.
It is tempting to consider that the Council evolved from being a propaganda agency to its current status, following the schema proposed by J. M. Mitchell: 1
Cultural propaganda is at one end of a scale that passes through cultural diplomacy to cultural relations at the other end; the progression is from the use of culture as a force to advance national ends, through the association of culture with current diplomatic aims, to an open collaborative relationship (Mitchell 28).
Yet reciprocal cultural relations can be used for propaganda purposes, and the divide is not as clear-cut as it might at first appear. To confuse matters further, some present-day definitions of cultural diplomacy tend to conflate it with cultural relations or use it as a catch-all term to cover a variety of practices and actors (ICD website; Cummings 1).
Nevertheless, the term cultural diplomacy does present certain advantages: it reminds us that the practices we will be looking at were ways of 'managing' international relations (in the words of the Oxford dictionary definition of diplomacy) and also it draws our attention to the connection between international cultural relations and the support
1 Mitchell was assistant director-general of the British Council at the time.
given to them by states, whether directly or indirectly, as a means of pursuing foreign policy objectives. For Anthony Haigh, a former head of the Foreign Office's Cultural Relations Department, writing in the 1970s, cultural diplomacy concerned the "activities of governments … in the sphere of international cultural relations" and he considered the British Council the UK's government's "principal agent" in this respect (Haigh 28, 12). This has been reconfirmed by a recent Foreign Office report which defines the British Council as "the main official body for UK cultural diplomacy," perhaps signalling a renewed interest in cultural as opposed to public diplomacy (FCO 3). In this sense cultural diplomacy may be perceived as a way of increasing a country's 'soft power' (Nye). Informational diplomacy uses the systematic provision of information (which although factual may be biased) to foreign audiences with the aim of shaping international relations and can be considered a euphemism for propaganda. Finally, both cultural and international diplomacy may be seen as sub-sets of public diplomacy.
Although diplomats have always used culture, these forms of diplomacy are off-shoots of the new diplomacy which began to emerge in the early twentieth century (Hamilton and Langhorne 141- 142). If world public opinion was henceforth to be seen as an important force in international relations, then no country could afford to ignore any means by which such public opinion could be both informed and influenced.
The American historian Frank Ninkovich used the concepts of cultural and informational diplomacy to analyse US foreign policy and cultural relations over the period 1938-1950. Ninkovich recounts how, in the years immediately after World War II, the USA converted its wartime information machinery into a peacetime operation and describes the split between those who considered that informational and cultural diplomacy were fundamentally different, and those who considered them complementary means to achieving a common objective. Some of those who argued in favour of separating them gave the British Council as an example of a body dedicated to purely cultural activities, working at arm's length from government (Ninkovich 133-134). But in fact the lines between both were equally blurred in the UK and this, as we shall see, was in part due to the Council's origins in the pre-war period. This article will therefore
adopt a chronological framework, starting with the UK's first initiatives in this field, immediately before and during World War II, before focusing on the crucial post-war period. The example of Britain To-day will enable us to chart the transition from wartime to peacetime publishing and then to draw some tentative conclusions regarding the use of periodical journalism as a tool of cultural diplomacy.
The inter-war period and World War II: The British Council as a cultural / informational hybrid
The experience of World War I gave impetus to the new diplomacy and to the expansion of state propaganda. Although the British government dismantled its propaganda services at the end of the war, there remained an awareness within the Foreign Office (FO) of the importance of maintaining at least a skeleton information service, which it did in the form of the News Department. It was this department which made the first forays into cultural diplomacy, despite strict instructions to the contrary from the Treasury (Taylor 1981, 138). In the early 1930s, Rex Leeper of the FO News Department finally persuaded the government to provide limited funding for a new semi-autonomous organization to promote British culture and 'way of life' abroad. Founded in 1934, the British Council's original mission was "To make the life and thought of the British peoples more widely known abroad; and to promote a mutual interchange of knowledge and ideas with other peoples" (White 7).
Two differing, though not necessarily opposing, philosophies were at work: liberal internationalists believed that mutual comprehension would foster peace, whereas a more nationalist school argued that projecting Britain (the term coined by Sir Stephen Tallents) would help the UK to compete politically and economically, and perhaps even militarily, with rivals. As Europe slipped into war, the latter perspective became dominant. The British government's commitment to appeasement nonetheless acted as a brake on plans to set up an official information or propaganda department. Up until the outbreak of war, the British Council was therefore the only public body specifically geared to carrying out both cultural and informational
diplomacy. The former included, for example, putting together art exhibits, setting up British institutes and providing scholarships to foreign students while the latter included stocking reading rooms, producing newsreels and the launching of a newsletter, Britain To- day, in March 1939.
The British Council was closely associated with an information role, to the extent that some considered it an embryonic Ministry of Information (Willcox 105). Clashes with the Ministry of Information (MOI) that was actually established on the outbreak of war were therefore inevitable. It was finally decided that the Council would continue as a separate organization but would only undertake cultural and educational activities, leaving publicity and information work (or political propaganda) to the Ministry of Information. In practice it was of course often difficult to draw a line between these fields and pragmatic agreements were reached. For example, the Council was allowed to operate in the Colonies on the understanding that the MOI would retain responsibility for the Dominions (Eastment 133). Some issues—such as responsibility for films—were never resolved. In the case of publishing, the Council retained some periodicals, while others, such as its Arabic Quarterly, were transferred to the MOI (INF 1/246A). The Council was also involved in publishing certain books, but was hampered by the fact that it only received a paper quota for this in 1942 (Holman 124-126).
Britain To-day's wartime mission was later described as "to disclose what is really going on in Britain (as an indirect reply to German propaganda) to people who count in neutral countries" (M. C.
H. & R. H. J. 171). This suggests that it was primarily intended to inform. Nonetheless, a special deal struck early in the war left Britain To-day under Council control even though the press department of which it was a part was transferred to the Ministry. There was even a degree of collaboration between the Council and the MOI: for example the Ministry at times suggested articles that it wished published in Britain To-day and also used some of Britain To-day's articles in its own publications destined for the Soviet Union (Report for third quarter, 1943, BW 82/9). But a good deal of conflict remained. In the US, for example, the Council suspected that the MOI's failure to promote sales of Britain To-day was due to the fact
that it published a similar rival magazine (Kennedy-Cooke to Gurney, 7 May 1944, FO 370/890). The Foreign Office tried unsuccessfully to convince both organizations to replace their competing publications with one targeted specifically at an American readership (J. Balfour, 27 May 1941, FO 371/26185).
This episode tells us something about how the Council conceived its role. For the Council, the informational/cultural divide was to an extent a question of form as much as content. Britain To-day clearly carried war propaganda and contained political pieces, particularly in the early years of the war,2 but had to do so in a particular way; it was to be sober ("dreary" was the word a FO official used), worthy, and if not exactly high-brow then certainly not accessible to all. It was not just a question of snobbery but also one of audience. Britain To-day was aimed a "people who count," at opinion- makers rather than public opinion itself (M.C.H. & R. H. J. 171). In practice one of the Council's distinguishing features compared to the MOI was its reluctance to target a mass audience, even though it might use mass media. This divide would resurface in post-war struggles over government-sponsored publications.
Post-war developments
The Labour government elected in 1945 was committed to carrying out an ambitious programme of reform and reconstruction even though the war had left the country weakened. Its mandate was marked by austerity as well as by the construction of the welfare state.
It was hardly a favourable climate for obtaining funds for cultural diplomacy initiatives whose benefits were nebulous and long-term.
Yet the government was determined to maintain a world role for the UK, which meant retaining its capacity to influence international public opinion. It was, moreover, particularly keen to cultivate US public opinion since the loss of American support would have jeopardized its whole programme (Anstey). Informational diplomacy, geared at achieving short-term political objectives, was therefore a far
2 For example, the contents page of issue number 40, November 1940, reads: "The Empire East of Suez," "The Military Outlook," "Planning for Town and Country"
and "Women Making Munitions."
more attractive prospect than cultural diplomacy. Hence the Labour government's decision not to dismantle the Ministry of Information completely but to convert it into the Central Office of Information, a service department ostensibly intended to provide technical support to all ministries, though one which in practice was active in defining overseas information policy (Grant). The government was less whole- hearted in its support of the British Council, which in 1946 was guaranteed five years funding and the promise of a future review; it was strictly limited to cultural and educational activities and was instructed to transfer all its production departments to the new Central Office of Information. Labour's policy was to demarcate informational and cultural diplomacy more clearly, while favouring the former. Yet once again, it proved impossible to enforce these boundaries satisfactorily, perhaps because it was not in the Council's interest to do so. Given the traditional British scepticism of state intervention in cultural matters, the Council was less likely to secure funding if it allowed itself to be confined to a narrowly construed cultural role but it also risked being sanctioned if it strayed too far into the COI's territory.
By the latter part of the war, various government departments as well as the arms-length British Council were producing a wide range of periodicals in different languages destined to carry British propaganda all over the world. Clearly the British state's straitened finances would not allow for such an ambitious programme once the war was over. Equally, the Foreign Office opposed maintaining covert funding of print media in peacetime as a matter of principle (FO 930/437). Government-sponsored periodicals were seen as a wartime expedient and as such Britain To-day, along with other titles, seemed set to disappear with the arrival of peace. However, the producers of these publications, after spending years establishing them and expanding their readerships, were loath to abandon them, especially at a time of such great uncertainty when international relations were in a state of flux. Early in 1945, the MOI, the FO and the Council began negotiations with an eye to ensuring that the periodicals they considered the most important would continue to appear once victory was achieved (INF 1/246B).
Having obtained a Royal Charter in 1940, the Council was, in theory at least, a permanent institution, even though a large question mark hung over its future funding. It had already been agreed in 1943 that the Council would cease all its production work after the war.
Nonetheless, the Council resolved to retain responsibility for all its periodicals and to continue publishing them. British Book News and the British Medical Bulletin were specialized publications which were less obviously informational. Britain To-day, however, was already something of an anomaly. By the end of the war it had developed into a composite publication. It still carried many articles dealing with domestic politics, especially the proposed reforms in town planning, social security and education, as well as articles related to current issues in international relations, such as the creation of the UN.
However, under the editorship of R. A. Scott-James, it had also increased its coverage of British cultural and artistic life. Scott-James had previously edited the London Mercury, one of the many cultural periodicals which had fallen victim to the war and had ceased publication in 1939. Unlike the more famous of these, London Mercury had attempted to span middle- and high-brow culture. It was also internationalist in outlook (Huculak 244, 257). Both of these characteristics must have made the London Mercury an interesting model for the Council and it was presumably with its backing that Scott-James gradually refashioned Britain To-day along these lines. In 1942 Britain To-day had become a monthly magazine, similar in format and content to the Mercury—carrying for example a section devoted to book reviews—and using the same pool of contributors as well as famous literary and artistic figures such as Cyril Connolly, John Piper and Cecil Beaton. It was surely in anticipation of post-war changes that the Council continued to modify Britain To-day in the final year of the war, further shifting its emphasis towards cultural topics by adding regular columns on theatre, art and cinema.
From early on in the war, the Council had experimented with selling Britain To-day in the United States, partly for reasons of economy, but also to prove its credentials as a 'genuine' magazine.
Subsequently a deal was struck with the publishers Dent in Toronto to supply all of North America. It was also placed on sale in Australia and New Zealand and even in French North Africa in 1943. In
liberated Europe, where paper shortages, disrupted distribution networks and lack of foreign exchange all hindered the resumption of the free circulation of printed materials, Britain To-day was frequently the first British periodical to become available to buy (Quarterly Reports 1945, BW 82/9). It was, however, far from a commercial proposition: at the end of the war only around 7,000 copies of each number were sold and over 100,000 given away free. It remained, in the words of a FO official, "in essence a propagandist magazine"
(Sturt, 28 May 1945, FO 924/37).
The Foreign Office did not in fact foresee a peacetime role for Britain To-day and it repeatedly advised the Council to wind it up or at the very least to reduce its running costs. The FO nevertheless entered into protracted negotiations with the Treasury and the Ministry of Supply in order to gain the official permits and paper ration which would allow the Council to put the magazine on a commercial footing by increasing sales and carrying advertisements.
By the end of 1946, little progress had been made and Britain To-day's running costs were still over ten times its income (INF 12/32). The end result was that by the time the magazine was finally able to carry advertisements in 1947, it had been forced to take other measures which reduced its appeal to potential clients. It had cancelled its foreign language versions, drastically cut back its free distribution thereby leading its circulation to plummet, and reduced the magazine's scope in an attempt to hold off a takeover by the COI.
All of this gives some idea of just how big a challenge it was for the British Council to keep this publication going. At a time when the Council was adjusting to peace and taking on new roles—such as establishing its presence in liberated Europe, helping in the creation of UNESCO and negotiating new bilateral cultural conventions—all on a limited budget, we can wonder why it attached so much importance to this magazine. Internal documents argued that Britain Today was "of great value to the Council"and highlighted "the special relationship of this periodical to the Council's work" ("Transfer of production departments", 1 March 1946, BW 2/381; Kennedy Cooke to Fraser, 13 March 1946, INF 12/499).The exact nature of this relationship was never expanded on but there was nevertheless a general consensus
within the Council that Britain To-day's conversion to a peacetime publication should be pursued under its auspices.
The Council's executive committee doggedly fought off repeated attempts by the COI to take control of Britain To-day, indicating that its members did not believe that the COI would content itself with a merely technical role. From the very beginning of the negotiations, the COI's reluctance to keep R. A. Scott-James as editor set Council alarm bells ringing as they considered his role essential, possibly for questions of prestige. He could be considered, by this time, an elder statesman of the cultural establishment. Indeed, his most notable publications (including a work frequently cited as one of the first instances of the term 'modernism') dated to before World War I.3 From the COI's point-of-view, he was clearly not capable of producing an updated version of Britain To-day. The Council, on the other had, considered his status an asset. The publication of Britain To-day under the editorship of R. A. Scott-James connected the British Council to the tradition of modernist magazines that had so marked the cultural life of the 1930s. Positioning Britain To-day as a cultural periodical in this vein appeared the best means of reaching an international cultural elite, given that periodical journalism, in the words of Stefan Collini, is the "intellectual's natural habitat" (Collini 435).
In June 1946 the British Council took the offensive, sketching out a new "purely cultural" role for the magazine, which would make it both commercially attractive and capable of advertising the Council's work overseas (Adam to Kirkpatrick, 21 August 1946 FO 924/466). The COI offered an emollient response, claiming that the transfer of the production process into its hands would not entail a change in approach. However, the COI's own report on Britain To-day makes it clear that its objectives were quite different to those of the Council. The Head of the COI's publications division, J. McMillan, argued that the title Britain To-day suggested a publication with a far broader scope than the Council was proposing. He implied that the Council was in effect sacrificing the general interest publication that
3 Modernism and Romance, London: John Lane, 1908 (cited by the OED); The Influence of the Press, London: Partridge & co., 1913.
was needed to serve British interests: it was what the FO needed to replace wartime publications in the Middle East, and what the Board of Trade was looking for to boost exports. In his opinion the Council was not the right body to produce such a magazine and should remain free of the commercial influence induced by running advertisements.
Scarce resources needed to be directed to priority needs, which, he argued, meant information work (16 September 1946, INF 12/32).
While the Council was attempting to redefine the magazine as a tool of cultural diplomacy, the COI was clearly pulling in the opposite direction, and wished to take over the title in order to develop its potential as a channel for informational diplomacy. By this point Britain To-day had existed for six years already, and although its subscription base was relatively small it had nonetheless gained readers all over the world. This would have offered the COI a sound foundation on which to build a flagship publication.
Financial rather than policy issues resolved the tussle between the British Council and the COI. By 1947, the Council had finally managed to balance Britain To-day's books, thanks to a little creative accounting: the remaining free distribution was now handled by the periodicals department which bought copies of Britain To-day to send free of charge to readers abroad, predominantly members of Anglophile societies in South America. Britain To-day's deficit was instantly transformed into a profit4 of almost £2,000 which in effect made the Treasury loathe to force the Council to relinquish its control.
McMillan's plan to turn what he scathingly called a "paltry pseudo- academic trifle" into a more appealing and accessible magazine was quietly shelved and the COI concentrated on producing its own publications (McMillan to Hadfield, 27 April 1949, INF 12/381). The Council had won, but it was a hollow victory. Year after year of cuts would subsequently force the Council to make savings wherever it could and Britain To-day was an obvious victim. When the periodicals
4 According to the editor, in the first half of 1947 subscribers had bought £2,000 worth of copies, while the periodicals department was expected to spend almost
£12,000 over the year on cost price issues for free distribution. Although expensive, this free distribution did enable the editor to keep the printing runs artificially high, thereby making Britain To-day more attractive to advertisers. "Report on Britain To- day prepared by the Editor" 20 August 1947, BW 68/5.
department was forced to suspend its free distribution, Britain To- day's subscription base, which peaked at 13,400, was still insufficient to cover costs. Internal reviews of the magazine in the early 1950s made similar criticisms to those levelled by the COI: Britain To-day was "smug" and overly consensual, it lacked visual appeal (Executive Committee, 24 November 1953, BW 2/511). Ironically, Britain To- day was finally axed in 1954, at a time when increased prosperity and the impact of the Drogheda Report were about to lead to increased government spending on both informational and cultural diplomacy.
The cultural periodical as a medium for cultural diplomacy This brief history raises some questions concerning the relationship between a given approach and the choice of media. Was periodical journalism an appropriate channel for informational and/or cultural diplomacy? Why were the COI and the British Council both so determined to run this magazine? Traditionally, practitioners and historians have tended to use the choice of media as a way of distinguishing between informational and cultural diplomacy. The former has favoured the use of fast media–radio, television, newspapers and nowadays the internet—to reach a mass audience and achieve short-term results whereas the latter has preferred the slow media of exhibitions, exchanges and books. These categories are not hard and fast: Ninkovich classes film among the fast media, whereas a recent book on communication theory considers them slow (Ninkovich 119, Windahl 192). The appeal of periodical journalism is due precisely to the fact that it lies in a grey area between these two categories. As a form of print journalism, it was able to be more reactive than books: it could supply relatively up-to-date news and comment that could be frequently adapted to changing circumstances.
But it also shared a characteristic of books, that of permanence.
Separating cultural and informational diplomacy simply according to their choice of media would be reductive. The question of audience is also key: the British Council produced films but not ones aiming to have mass appeal, and equally the head of the COI, Robert Fraser, had successfully developed illustrated books aimed at a mass audience during his time at the MOI (Holman 104). Whilst
informational diplomacy was mostly interested in harnessing the power of mass media to inform and influence a mass audience, cultural diplomacy traditionally preferred to target an elite with decision-making power and/or the capacity to influence public opinion in their country. The expansion of mass communications in the inter- war period led to concerns about the abilities of media such as radio and cinema to directly affect the behaviour and attitudes of their audiences. Their use by Soviet and Nazi propaganda heightened these fears (Taylor 1983). In this context, the Foreign Office's traditional elite-based approach could appear dated. However, empirical studies carried out in the 1950s would subsequently suggest that individuals had greater influence than the mass media. Following the publication of Katz and Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence in 1955 the two-step flow of information theory became communication orthodoxy, making faith in the capacity of the mass media to influence individuals directly (the so-called hypodermic view) appear naïve (Signitzer and Windahl 70- 72). From this perspective, limiting the readership of Britain To-day to those who could then relay its message to a wider audience made perfect sense, both politically and financially.
Periodical journalism offered a means of connecting mass media and more personalized forms of communication. Britain To-day made it possible to supply information that could then be circulated in different forms: articles were reprinted or used as source material by journalists but also by teachers; one example is even given of a Britain To-day article leading to legislation in the parliament of Queensland, Australia, suggesting that it was indeed reaching a small but influential readership (M. C. H. & R. H. J. 172). This is doubtless true of other forms of media, but to a lesser extent as they are more ephemeral and less likely to be used as reference material. The FO's Cold War propaganda branch, the Information Research Department, functioned in a similar way, passing "research material" directly to selected individuals abroad and targeting its publications at opinion- formers (Defty 116-117; Smith 120).
At the same time, Britain To-day did not see its readers as merely passive recipients into whom information could be poured, but as active members of a community. This was particularly true once the magazine reduced its free distribution. Henceforth, the majority of its
readers would be people who had taken the active step of subscribing to the magazine, both a mark of their approval and a commitment to supporting the publication. The editor of the magazine fostered this sense of community, as the following example taken from Britain To- day shows:
Robert Louis Stevenson regarded his books as "circular letters to his friends", and that is how we like to think of Britain To-day, a journal read by people interested in the things and ideas with which we are concerned, month by month. Our printed pages go out across the world and provide, in proportion as they find welcome, a link between people of many different races, living under different circumstances, but united in having certain interests, certain tastes in common. However small this link may be it may prove to be a real one, and the more so if readers of Britain To-day will occasionally pause to reflect that thousands of other readers far away are joining them for a short time in perusing it. Together, editor, contributors and readers, we become a group, transcending for a moment the boundaries which separate the human groups, racially and nationally … May not our growing band of readers be a community within the communities, helping to stimulate and cement that higher unity which is the hope of the modern world? (Britain To-day 176, December 1950, 5, 8)
By comparing Britain To-day to a letter, R. A. Scott-James depicted the magazine as constructing an intimate, personal space different to that offered by print journalism more generally. In this sense, Britain To-day consciously styled itself as a very different proposition to the slicker, more professional magazine which the COI had hoped to use to conquer a large international readership. Britain To-day wanted its readers to feel and behave as members of a club, not a mass audience.
Benedict Anderson argued that print media played a key role in forming imagined national communities (Anderson 44). In the case of Britain To-day, it could be argued that the British Council employed periodical journalism as a means of consolidating an imagined international community. Beyond its common interest in things British, this community was also defined by its internationalist ethos, though whether Britain To-day's readers actually recognized themselves in this portrait is impossible to say. Cultural internationalism was one of the tenets of the British Council's approach and distinguished it from the COI. Through its promotion of cultural internationalism Britain To-day served as an organ of the
Council and not just as a means to project a positive image of the UK abroad. But, as the conflicting opinions about the ideal form of Britain To-day demonstrate, producing a cultural periodical for a heterogeneous international readership was a delicate balancing act.
As Stefan Collini also noted, periodical journalism is "the noise made by a culture speaking to itself" (Collini 435). To be effective, a cultural periodical had to be able to draw on a shared culture. The extract quoted above demonstrates that Britain To-day was predicated upon the existence of such a culture. Despite the occasional inclusion of non-British cultural productions, this culture remained firmly Eurocentric and tended to reinforce British values (Said 51). Although the idea of an Arnoldian universal culture still seemed plausible in the late 1940s and early 1950s (providing the foundation for UNESCO's initial projects), it was becoming increasingly untenable, not least due to the impact of decolonization (Maurel 575).
By the time it ceased publication in 1954, Britain To-day did appear rather anachronistic, a throwback to the pre-war years. By then the Cold War was in full swing, with each side seeking to win hearts and minds through all the means at their disposal. Yet this was a conflict of print media as much as of the airwaves or cinema screens, not least because the Soviets sought to prove their superiority through demonstrations of high culture. The example of Encounter, one of the most influential 20th century periodicals, which was secretly funded by both the CIA and the Foreign Office (along with other Congress for Cultural Freedom publications such as Preuves, Quadrant and Der Monat), shows that cultural periodicals have played a role in international relations deserving greater attention.5 This should also caution us against seeing cultural diplomacy as a gentler version of informational diplomacy. It is equally, if not more, concerned with influencing as well as informing its target. Certainly, former British ambassador Anthony
5 A sizeable amount of literature has already been produced in relation to Encounter.
For two contrasting assessments see Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, London: Frank Cass, 2003 and Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta Books, 1999. It is to be hoped that a publication will result from the conference "The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A Global Perspective on the Cultural Cold War"
held in Munich in 2014.
Parsons' 1984 plea in favour of cultural diplomacy was based on a thoroughly realist analysis of its usefulness:
It is really dazzlingly obvious. If you are thoroughly familiar with someone else's language and literature, if you know and love the country, the arts, the people, you will be instinctively disposed to buy goods from them rather than a less well known source, to support them actively when you consider them to be right and to avoid criticizing them too fiercely when you regard them as being in the wrong (Parsons 6).
Cultural diplomacy and informational diplomacy are both concerned with influencing public opinion abroad in such a way as to support a given state's foreign policy objectives. They are different approaches but ones that inevitably overlap with one another, leading to both collaboration and competition between their respective agencies. In the case of British cultural and informational diplomacy, what was actually produced in the immediate post-war period was as much the result of inter-departmental rivalry combined with financial restraints as of high policy.
The conflict that had arisen between the British Council and the Ministry of Information during World War II was prolonged despite the post-war government's attempts to delineate the roles of the Council and the newly created Central Office of Information. This conflict centred on the transfer of the Council's production departments, with certain media proving particularly contentious.
Film, as is well-known, was one of them, but periodical journalism was another. This, it has been argued here, was partly due to the fact that the latter shared characteristics of fast and slow media: it carried the weight and permanence of books combined with the reactivity and immediacy of news journalism.
The COI and the Council differed over the purposes to which they wished to harness this potential. The COI was determined to reorient the Council's magazine Britain To-day with the aim of influencing public opinion abroad on issues related to the UK's trade and foreign policy concerns. Although the Council also attempted to increase Britain To-day's readership in order to make it commercially viable, it was happy to limit its appeal to certain kinds of readers who could play the role of opinion-makers in their respective countries.
Like its model, the London Mercury, Britain To-day sought to mediate between different levels of British culture and the resulting mix was laced with an internationalist ethos. Going beyond the simple 'projection of Britain' the magazine sought to unite its readers by cementing their allegiance to a shared (Eurocentric) universal culture.
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