The Mechanics of Cultural Diplomacy: A Comparative Case Study Analysis from the European Context

ABSTRACT

The National Institutes for Culture have not attracted much scholarly attention examining their managerial practices. The aim of this article is to explore how the state expresses its agency over the Cultural Institutes of six European countries: the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, and Greece. Agency presents varying modalities, making instrumentalism more multifaceted than has been implied so far. The authors are introducing here a framework of five “touchpoints” to capture and analyze instrumentalism in cultural diplomacy. Funding, agenda setting, evaluation, hierarchy, and appointment power constitute the typical system of interactions between the Cultural Institutes and their reporting authorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• arms' length principle
• cultural diplomacy
• Cultural Institutes
• instrumentalism
• international cultural relations

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments which helped make this article considerably more sophisticated and well-grounded.