Sunday, June 10, 2012

Taiwanese Public Diplomacy

In his article Gary Rawnsley discusses Taiwan’s approach to public diplomacy.  He begins by framing the argument in terms of what countries should be focusing on.  One of Taiwan’s major challenges is gaining recognition in the international community.  In order to do this they need to focus more on the appeal that they have to Western nations. 

This is the tactic that Joseph Nye argues will work the best because currently it is Western countries, like the U.S. that are dictating the global norms.  “The countries that are likely to be more attractive and gain soft power in the information age are those with multiple channels of communication that help to frame issues; whose dominant culture and ideas are closer to prevailing global norms.”  Basically if Taiwan wants gain recognition they need to be focusing their public diplomacy on the characteristics that will appeal to the West.

For Taiwan they need to be emphasizing their democracy over other characteristics. By doing this they will be more appealing to other countries and will have greater success in raising their profile internationally.  Previously they had focused on the idea that they were preserving the traditional Chinese culture, but this is something that is going to be harder to understand for western audiences.

Most importantly Taiwan needs to scale back its public diplomacy focused on culture.  Rawnsley describes Taiwan as having “electoral volatility”, the polarization of their parties makes it difficult to create a cohesive Taiwanese identity.  There is no clear vision on what being Taiwanese is.  There is revolving debate about who it is that gets to create this identity.  As the parties in power change so does the current identity; making it incredibly difficult to place brand.

As a result Taiwan hasn’t been utilizing soft power to its full extent.  By focusing more on characteristics that appeal to the West it has a chance of regaining ground.  Especially for a smaller country like Taiwan, soft power and public diplomacy is one of the best ways they can gain influence.

2 comments:

  1. I wonder what alternatives Taiwan actually has - given the fact that there are aspects of Chinese culture that Taiwan is preserving and, the kind of pressures that make a focus on democracy promotion hard to do. I tried to make this argument at Brookings (Rawnsley's), and the audience seemed cool to it. I guess this case also highlights the fact that ministries of foreign affairs are not always free to recognize the most compelling aspects of a foreign policy. But I also wonder - is it the West that they need to appeal to?

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  2. I agree that cultural diplomacy is only getting Taiwan so far. As I've been doing research for our group project on Brazil and for my individual project on Mexico, I've really come to the realization that this is a problem for many countries worldwide, many of which could be considered middle powers. For Taiwan, Brazil and Mexico, cultural diplomacy is easy. They all have these interesting, cultural heritages that are easy to share. But outside of culture, there are many things these countries would like to avoid. For Mexico, it’s the drug war. For Taiwan, it’s more complicated, I think. It’s not that they have anything to hide. In fact, they have democracy, which would be great to show off! But they have these contentious domestic elections that prevent them from fully displaying their democratic system.
    So while I agree that cultural diplomacy just isn’t cutting it, I think it’s really hard to just say that they need to focus less on cultural diplomacy and more on democracy. If they were to do that, they could possibly sacrifice domestic harmony for global power and that’s something that could be a very difficult decision to make.
    I’m also just curious why you think they need to appeal to the West? I don’t necessarily disagree and I think it would be great for them to try and appeal to the U.S, whether through democracy or something else. But what about the rest of Asia? Do you think it’s important to appeal to either China or other Asian powers who could support them in their attempt to become more internationally recognized?

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