I

If opinion was ever mistress of the world, it would seem to be singularly so in the contemporary world. The global proliferation of modern means of communication has given masses of ordinary people an unprecedented access to information and ideas, while the spread of literacy and of education at all levels has profoundly altered social and political relationships both in advanced and in underdeveloped countries. Partly as a result, ideologies incorporating a more or less elaborate system of opinions continue to have a major role in forming the political understanding and allegiances of much of contemporary humanity.

Yet in spite of all this, the sway of opinion remains a phenomenon remarkably understudied and underappreciated in the West. This is true above all with respect to international affairs. Social scientists may acknowledge the growing importance of the media as a factor in American domestic politics; they rarely pay attention to the international media environment. And the students and practitioners of international relations remain preoccupied with the themes and instruments of traditional diplomacy.

It should not be surprising, then, if the revival of “public diplomacy” by the Reagan administration has stirred less than intense interest in political or academic circles in America. This is unfortunate, not only because of the intrinsic importance of the issues involved, but even more because of their significance for understanding the foreign policy and national strategy of the United States as it has taken shape under the Reagan Presidency.

What is “public diplomacy”? The term—of relatively recent coinage—is not altogether a happy one, but has the signal advantage of calling attention to the inadequacies of traditional diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy in a world where many governments are weak or evanescent, or else uninterested in a genuine resolution of international disputes. As it has come to be used in the Reagan administration, public diplomacy encompasses not only informational and cultural activities, but all public or (in a broad sense) political aspects of foreign policy—speeches, trips, and other public appearances by the President and other senior officials, and the support and cultivation of political groups and forces abroad that may serve the long-term interests of the United States and the West generally. And because it has involved the doings and words of high officials, public diplomacy has inevitably tended to extend itself into the domestic arena as well. Though in no sense replacing the time-honored “public-affairs” function discharged by the White House and by individual government agencies, public diplomacy has been conceived as providing a focus and direction all too often lacking in public-affairs operations (which tend to be reactive, “damage-limiting,” and oriented to the short term, their agenda fixed by the American media), as well as better coordination with international information and political activities and with overall policy.

The most radical departure of the Reagan administration, however, has been in the area of international political activities. In his speech to the British Parliament of June 8, 1982, the President sketched the broad outlines of a strategy of American assistance in “building the infrastructure of democracy” around the world. Inspired in part by the international activities of the “foundations” (Stiftungen) operated with public funds by the West German political parties, in part by the traditional international involvement of the American labor movement, the President’s initiative aimed to provide or facilitate American support for the typical institutions of democracy—political parties, a free press, free labor unions, youth organizations, and the like—in areas of the world where they are nonexistent or weak. Although certain of these activities were at one time carried out covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, and some have maintained a marginal presence in American diplomacy, the Reagan initiative amounts to a qualitative break with past practices and assumptions.

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II

The elevation of public diplomacy to a position of major importance in American foreign policy reflects a fundamentally new attitude toward the role of opinion and ideas in international politics. This attitude derives in part from a reading of world political developments over the last decade, but in part also from an appreciation of the defects of certain of the characteristic assumptions of the American foreign-policy establishment and of the American political class generally.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed a century and a half ago, Americans are an individualistic people whose basic outlook on the world was decisively shaped by the rationalism of Descartes and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Central to the Enlightenment project was a reorientation of political life away from “opinions” concerning intangible matters such as God or the next world and toward the individual or material “interests” of men in this world. While many of the Enlightenment thinkers had a healthy respect for the strength of opinions divorced from interests (Europe had after all just been convulsed by a century of religious warfare), they seem to have believed that a new politics based on the security of life, liberty, and property could permanently turn men away from the politics of ideological or religious struggle.

This vision has seemed—and still seems to many—on its way to realization in America, if not elsewhere in the world. Although they fought a bitter civil war over an ideological issue, Americans have tended to view politics primarily as an arena of competing yet ultimately reconcilable material interests. They have considered it a sign of the health of the American polity that its political parties do not resemble the “great parties” of Europe, whose principled conflicts have always threatened the civil order and frequently jeopardized international peace.

World War I and the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson represented an important turning point in the theory and practice of American democracy. On the one hand, the war itself, its increasingly ideological character, and—particularly—the appearance on both sides of a vicious and mendacious propaganda effort, raised many questions about the rationality of man in mass society and the future of democracy. On the other hand, Wilson’s ideas concerning presidential leadership and the deficiencies of “interest-group” politics of the Madisonian variety decisively contributed to the rise of the ideological liberalism which has dominated American political thinking until only very recently.

The American experience during the decade of the 1930’s, when liberalism elsewhere was hard-pressed to survive the challenge of totalitarian ideological movements of the Left and Right, seemed to confirm the basic soundness of the traditional American approach to politics, as modified by an overlay of Wilsonian progressivism. The emergence of the United States at the end of World War II as leader of the liberal democracies and a global military power was widely seen as heralding a new era in which a triumphant liberalism (with the United Nations as its key vehicle and guarantor) would insure international tranquillity for the indefinite future.

The Soviet Union quickly assumed in the early postwar period the proportions of a major threat to this millennium. The immediate result was a countermobilization of American liberalism in a political offensive against world Communism in its various incarnations both domestic and international. It was at this time that the United States Information Agency (USIA) was launched, that Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL, originally Radio Liberation) were created by the CIA, and that covert funding was provided to moderate political parties in Western Europe as well as to a variety of intellectual and journalistic undertakings. With the experience of wartime propaganda and psychological operations still fresh, President Truman established a Psychological Strategy Board in the White House to coordinate government efforts in what was regarded as a critical arena of struggle.

In all of this, however, there was something less than met the eye. Entirely apart from the self-destruction of domestic anti-Communism at the hands of Senator McCarthy, the international activism of cold-war American liberalism was an anomaly which could not sustain itself against the weight of American political habits. The 1950’s proved to be less the decade of cold war than the decade of the “end of ideology,” as economic prosperity at home seemed to doom whatever hopes left-wing intellectuals continued to harbor for the radicalization of American politics, and at the same time lent plausibility to the notion that the global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would eventually be resolved by a peaceful convergence of Communism and liberal capitalism engineered by the internal dynamics of the process of modernization. It was similarly assumed that traditional regimes and practices in the Third World would be swept away in the course of things, and the adherence of these areas to the West insured, by a combination of economic development and the attendant spread of liberal political ideas and practices.

USIA or RFE-RL might indeed assist these processes; they were never thought to be critical to them. “Enlightenment” of the peoples with regard to their true interests was assumed to be a world-historical process which could be accelerated but not fundamentally altered by the purposeful action of governments. In this view, rarely articulated though it was, Americans revealed themselves to be as captive to a notion of historical materialism as the Marxists—only more so.

The revived international activism of the Kennedy years cannot be taken as a renewal of the ideological struggle in any fundamental sense. Military and paramilitary force and massive economic aid were the preferred instruments in containing Communism in the 1960’s. This strategy provided, of course, the formula for disaster in Vietnam, discrediting in the process the entire enterprise of cold-war liberalism. But the catechism of the limits of American power was the wrong lesson to draw from the Vietnam debacle. The real lesson of Vietnam was the limits of military and economic power not firmly guided—as Hanoi’s plainly always was—by a political strategy anchored in the psychological and ideological dimension.

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American assumptions about international politics have changed little in more recent years. A close linkage between economic modernization and progress toward liberal political institutions is still widely accepted as axiomatic. Americans are still inclined to look on foreigners individually as being much like themselves, with fundamentally similar needs and interests that are immediately comprehensible across barriers of language, history, culture, and ideology. All this points to the continuing strength of the core assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism. If anything, developments in the ideology of liberalism over the last several decades—notably, the increased prominence of themes such as sensitivity or compassion—have only further reinforced such thinking. Americans tend to be very reluctant to believe that human beings, apart from a small minority of the psychologically disturbed, can be motivated in their political behavior by opinions or ideas alone.

The argument implicit in the foregoing account could be elaborated at length, but one point should be particularly underlined. While the “interest-group” model undoubtedly reflects the way many Americans continue to think about American politics, it has become increasingly remote from the reality. The sustained economic boom of the postwar period meant, not indeed the end of ideology, but a transformation of the American political scene in which the traditional economically-oriented interest groups lost much of their former importance. The spectacular expansion of education and of the “post-industrial” sectors of the economy beginning in the 1950’s laid the groundwork for the emergence of a “new class” whose political opinions were shaped much less by narrow economic interests than by the ideology of progressive liberalism. This class, with its increasingly complete domination of education, the media, and the active cadres of the Democratic party, has been responsible for a general ideologization of American society which has little precedent in the history of the republic. Like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, who never knew that he was speaking prose, many Americans have come to think ideologically without realizing it.

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III

Developments of the last decade or so have strikingly revealed the inadequacy of traditional American assumptions about international affairs. Soviet Communism has manifestly failed to converge with the economic and political systems of the West, and Marxist-Leninist ideology has demonstrated surprising resilience as an operational tool both within and outside the Soviet sphere, in spite of its virtually total intellectual ossification.

Once it became clear that Communism was largely irrelevant to contemporary world problems and that it would not sweep triumphantly through Western Europe and the Third World, Americans have had great difficulty taking it seriously as an ideology. As a result, they have greatly underestimated its continuing ability to mobilize and harness political passions and to shape fundamental perceptions of the world, and have failed to grasp the extent to which the very irrationality of the ideology lends it a strong appeal, particularly among Western intellectuals seeking an exit from the spiritual deserts of contemporary positivism and historicism.

As for the role of Marxism-Leninism within the Soviet empire itself, the Soviets and their clients have thoroughly digested the lesson taught by Machiavelli to the founders of new political orders—that “the nature of peoples is variable: it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion; thus things ought to be ordered in such a way that, when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.” Contrary to what is often assumed in the West, police measures can be very effective in preserving not only the façade but even the reality of belief. Lack of access to external sources of information and constant repetition of official views have a cumulative effect in forming basic categories and tendencies of thought which are to some extent independent of the will of the individuals involved.

But the most striking development of recent years has been the worldwide revival of religion, or more precisely of fundamentalist religious impulses. This development, wholly unanticipated as it was by the American intellectual and foreign-policy establishment, raises profound questions regarding the link between modernization and secularization, and poses a challenge of potentially major proportions both to the Communist world and to the West.

Most obvious, of course, is the resurgence of Islam as a moral and political force in the Third World. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1978 by a popular movement dominated by the Shi’ite clergy only brought into relief the Islamic awakening—a movement of extraordinary breadth and depth affecting not merely the Middle East but the entire community of Muslims from Mali to Indonesia—that had been set in motion by the oil embargo and the growth of Arab oil wealth after the Yom Kippur War. Though certainly encouraged by the political activity and financial support of Libya and Saudi Arabia, there can be little doubt that this awakening represents a spontaneous impulse of resistance against modernity in either its liberal or its Marxist interpretation. Whether this impulse can be translated into a coherent political ideology very much remains to be seen, though interesting efforts are currently under way to rethink in Islamic terms the social and economic problems posed by modernization.

More amorphous and harder to analyze in terms of its political implications, but possibly of ultimately greater importance for international politics, is the religious revival in the West and within the Communist world. The exhaustion of Marxism-Leninism as a source of spiritual inspiration—perhaps even more, the growing evidence of its compatibility with or active promotion of gross forms of moral and political corruption—has given a strong stimulus to religious belief and practice both in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union itself. In Poland, the Catholic Church virtually forms an integral part of the regime. In the hands of a Polish Pope who is also well versed in moral philosophy and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the Church seems once more on its way to becoming an independent ideological force in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In East Germany, the regime recently astounded observers by mounting a major celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. In the Soviet Union, fundamentalist Protestant sects have undergone a phenomenal growth in recent years, Orthodoxy shows signs of stirring in connection with the continuing revival of Great Russian national feelings, and the specter of Islam haunts Soviet rule in the Caucasus (Sufi brotherhoods there constitute the only mass organized resistance to the regime) and Central Asia.

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As for the West, the clearest development is the rise of fundamentalist Protestantism within the United States, in a form which in some respects directly challenges the longstanding assumptions of many Americans regarding the role of religion in politics. This movement was, and remains, of course, an important component of the conservative coalition which elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. Too often unrecognized, however, is the fact that the fundamentalist surge is by no means confined to the political Right. Evangelical Christians in America and Europe have proved at least as open to the appeal of liberal as of conservative political ideas.

In many ways the most significant development of recent years, though, has been the gradual convergence of an increasingly liberal Christian establishment with a secular Left that is increasingly infused with ersatz religious impulses and ideas. This working alliance of the religious establishment and the political Left is nowhere clearer than in the anti-nuclear movement. That the vision of the anti-nuclear activists has emotional roots going beyond the principle of self-preservation of classical liberalism should require little argument. At the same time, the support of the religious establishment for a concern which in traditional theological terms amounts to heresy can only be understood as a manifestation of the acute crisis of belief which continues to grip Western elites.

That a quasi-religious ideology of the Left could develop into an independent political force in the West is a possibility that seems decidedly less fantastic since the rise of the “Greens” in West Germany. A politico-religious movement in which “the fate of the earth” has replaced both God and the fate of the soul would seem a logical development for a Christianized West convinced of the death of God; and Tocqueville had long ago predicted that pantheism would become a characteristic mode of belief in democratic epochs. It is also important, however, not to lose sight of the specifically German roots of the Green phenomenon and associated political sentiments in West Germany. Martin Heidegger could speak in the 1930’s of the 20th century as an age of “darkening” marked by the flight of the gods, the destruction of the human world (Umwelt, the contemporary German term for the environment), and the standardization of humanity by modern technology; for him, the “inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” lay in its resistance to the triumph of the spirit of technologized modernity as embodied in the United States and the Soviet Union, which held exhausted Europe in a “great pincers.”

Yet if German romanticism has an apocalyptic vehemence peculiar to itself, similar currents of feeling are certainly in evidence throughout the West today. The extent to which they are capable of organized political expression is quite unclear at present; but their larger ideological impact is surely beyond dispute.

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IV

It is apparent that recent developments in the ideological dimension of international politics fully justify increased attention to the way America communicates with the world. It is also clear that these developments will require significant adjustments in American policy and strategy. At the same time, there are formidable obstacles in the way of a revitalized and reconstituted public-diplomacy effort.

The unfortunate use of the term “propaganda” to refer indiscriminately to American and Soviet information efforts, apart from blurring a moral difference that is as fundamental as the difference between the two societies, has served to obscure the considerable evolution that has taken place in American international-information programs, particularly over the last ten years. Mirroring changes in the American political climate and in American foreign policy, these programs have progressively shed the ideologically aggressive approach of the era of cold-war liberalism in favor of a nonconfrontational tone and greater emphasis on cultural affairs and on the reporting of news.

In 1973, Congress came close to eliminating all funding for RFE-RL after its CIA connection was exposed by Senator Clifford Case; and neither RFE-RL nor USIA enjoyed great favor in the executive branch during the Kissinger era, when public diplomacy was virtually foreclosed by a Realpolitik-style diplomacy, and the very existence of an émigré radio broadcasting to the Soviet Union and its satellites seemed to threaten the possibilities of détente. Under the Carter administration, USIA was given a new mandate to promote greater understanding of foreign peoples in the United States, and a new emphasis was placed on the Third World at the expense of coverage of East-West matters. At the same time, the policy, practices, and ideological outlook of these organizations came to be modeled increasingly on those of the American elite media.

Although there has always been significant bipartisan and liberal support for U.S. international-information efforts on Capitol Hill, congressional liberals tend to oppose these efforts if or to the extent that they are “propagandistic” or ideological in content and “shrill” in tone, insisting that they respect the standards of “professional journalism.” Journalists have also taken up this cry, and shown themselves eager to defend colleagues in government whose work is “censored” by the authorities for not being in step with American policy.

Liberal distaste for official information programs was particularly evident in the recent extended congressional battle over authorizing legislation for Radio Marti. Liberal attempts to derail the administration’s proposal for a new broadcasting station for Cuba led eventually to a compromise bill establishing a new Cuban service within the Voice of America, on the theory that VOA legislative guidelines mandating accuracy and objectivity would keep the effort within the pale of journalistic respectability. Some liberals would almost certainly prefer to jettison official information programs altogether in favor of purely apolitical cultural exchanges, scholarship grants to foreign students, and the like.

Lost in all this is any sense of a positive objective or strategy that could direct public-diplomacy programs. If the purpose is merely to execute a perfect imitation of the CBS Evening News, the question arises whether it would not make more sense to save the taxpayer the money and broadcast translations of Dan Rather scripts. If public diplomacy is to act as advertiser of record for the American way of life, it has to be asked whether the instruction of Soviet dissidents or African tribesmen in the cultural significance of Elvis Presley or beer-can collecting—to cite two actual VOA programs of the past—is likely to produce any effect other than incomprehension, ridicule, contempt, and confirmation of the worst stereotypes of America current in the world.

There is surely an element of disingenuousness in treating journalistic enterprises such as CBS News and the New York Times as models of ideological innocence. In fact, one does not have to look far to realize that liberal reservations about official information programs have a large political component. Such programs tend to be seen as vehicles, actual or potential, for promulgating essentially conservative ideas, and hence as a disruptive factor in liberal efforts to maintain a dominant role in the conduct of American foreign policy. Needless to say, liberal feelings on this score have intensified considerably under the Reagan administration.

Precisely because of the inescapably ideological nature of international information and political activities, the absence of a workable bipartisan consensus on these matters within the United States government and the American political class as a whole is an even more serious handicap than in other areas of foreign policy. Perfectly illustrative of the problem is the continuing dispute in Congress over another Reagan initiative, the proposed National Endowment for Democracy. In spite of the fact that the administration went to great pains from the beginning to obtain bipartisan participation and support in developing this proposal, partisan opposition to the Endowment has come from both ends of the political spectrum, owing to insuperable mutual suspicions concerning the likely eventual beneficiaries of its programs.

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Although it is difficult to overestimate the hostility of many liberals in Congress to anything resembling a coherent and effective foreign policy, there would seem to be little reason in principle why a new bipartisan consensus cannot be forged in the area of public diplomacy. It is an area of little domestic political importance—if anything, support for it is politically popular, and intensely so among concentrated groups of ethnic voters who are as likely as not to support Democratic candidates. More importantly, there is considerable room for agreement on a common ideological strategy as well as on a common understanding of operating policy and practices.

To take the latter issue first, there is no reason why liberals should not be persuadable of the inappropriateness of measuring the information efforts of the United States government by the yardstick of American journalism. The fact is that the American media operate on commercial principles, not as a public service; and American news reporting is shaped nearly as much as anything else by the requirement to sell newspapers or commercial air-time. This means that the selection and presentation of news and other information by the media are determined principally by a view of what Americans want, not by some abstract notion of accuracy and objectivity. Not to put too fine a point on it, the American media are wholly a product of the American marketplace and of American political culture. The standards by which they operate have little to do with the requirements of information programs intended for a wide variety of foreign audiences, all of them with intellectual levels and interests, cultural values and political outlooks that differ significantly from those of Americans. Precisely “professional journalists,” let alone the makers of national policy, should acknowledge as much.

As for the concern that American information programs are or could be purveying “shrill propaganda,” it is a canard. No one advocates the use of Soviet-style propaganda by the United States. In spite of periodic alarums raised against the right-wing exiles who are supposed to populate RFE-RL, anyone even minimally familiar with these radios knows that they have acquired over the years a distinguished reputation for scholarly analysis of the Communist world. For that matter, the level of their broadcasts generally equals and not infrequently surpasses in balance and sophistication—dare it be said?—the public-affairs programming of CBS News. It is universally recognized that nothing would so doom such programs to ineffectiveness as the hectoring or hortatory tone of classic Soviet propaganda. The same applies to the information programs of USIA.

For many, however, the issue is less the tone than the fact of propaganda—that is, the very existence of an official information effort that touches on controversial political and ideological topics. This distrust of propaganda as such seems to reflect firmly rooted (if not always consistent) American tendencies. The fundamental tendency is to see propaganda, or political speech altogether, as an affront to the spirit of rational individualism—to the democratic presumption that everyone can and should make up his own mind about the important issues of the day. A more extreme version of this holds that a liberal state should be ideologically as well as religiously neutral, and hence that it is illegitimate for the American government to promulgate any “values”—substantive interpretations of political principles or of the world generally—for any purpose whatever. This view is buttressed by American skepticism of commercial advertising, coupled with a belief in the vulnerability of mass opinion to more or less subtle manipulation.

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Congressional sensitivity to all this has led to special legislation severely restricting dissemination of USIA material in the United States. Internationally, congressional and liberal critics have sometimes acted as if it were enough to provide—on the model (if not necessarily the reality) of domestic public-affairs efforts—simply “factual” information, the apparent assumption being that if only people have the facts, the values will take care of themselves.

This view is as inadequate as the distinction on which it is based. All facts must be selected and organized; this can only be done with reference to values of significance for human life. In general, people are interested in facts only within a larger context of values. To attempt to present the facts and only the facts, while eschewing discussion of the controversies of value surrounding them, is ludicrous and self-defeating. There are many societies where forthright presentation of an ideological viewpoint is admired and expected, and its absence interpreted as weakness. Particularly when the societies in question are very different from our own, it is essential that we be as explicit as possible concerning fundamental Western principles as well as the assumptions and background of all factual reportage.

This is by no means to dismiss all concern over the morality of propaganda. It is only to argue that the concern has been inflated out of all proportion owing to factors internal to the political culture of democracy. The fact is that America and the West do not need to resort to the tricks of totalitarian propaganda (or of commercial advertising), because the case for democracy is intrinsically superior to the case for the alternatives to it. The point is nicely stated by Aristotle in his Rhetoric—the oldest and still probably the best treatise on this entire subject: “The things that are truer and better are more susceptible to reasoned argument and more persuasive, generally speaking.”

It should be added that there is no reason for American information programs to reflect a single political or ideological line. Indeed, as it is one of this country’s strengths that it can abide political controversy without fear of encouraging anarchy or revolution, there is every reason to demonstrate this process to foreigners, while at the same time recognizing the misinterpretations to which it is sometimes subject. How to define the boundaries of respectable opinion on any given issue will always pose delicate problems; these boundaries could well differ as between an American and a foreign audience, as well as among particular foreign publics. Nevertheless, the point remains valid and significant. An intelligent policy of this kind can reduce to manageable proportions the liberal-conservative frictions that are bound to affect any ideologically ambitious public-diplomacy effort.

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V

Behind the fear of “propaganda,” however, lie two concerns of a strategic order regarding public diplomacy that are not peculiar to liberals. To a very considerable degree, these concerns are shared by the American foreign-policy establishment as a whole. One is the feeling that public diplomacy is an intrusive, not easily controllable, and fundamentally unnecessary instrument which only obstructs what is seen as the central business of foreign policy—the creation of an international climate congenial to negotiation, and the actual process of negotiation. The other is the strong doubt that the promotion of American political ideas and practices abroad is in fact in the real interests of American policy.

The history of American information programs has been in large measure the story of the struggle between traditional diplomacy and the spirit of journalism. Diplomats are understandably reluctant to see relations with particular countries jeopardized by the purveying of information that serves little visible purpose; journalists are understandably concerned to preserve the credibility of the overall information effort. Too often, however, both sides in this dispute have tended to lose sight of the larger strategic goals that public diplomacy should serve.

The case varies greatly, of course, for different countries. It is certainly possible to imagine circumstances where a clumsy or ill-timed broadcast might touch off a political crisis in a country with a weak and unpopular government heavily dependent on American support. On the other hand, the idea that an aggressive information effort significantly damages relations with Communist countries is simply unsustainable, and amounts to little short of appeasement in the face of the extreme (if admittedly not complete) reluctance of such regimes to moderate their own ideological attacks against the West. The fact is that Communist governments will negotiate with the West whenever it suits their interests, regardless of the invective level of the moment. By manifesting political resolve, a tough public line if anything only serves to strengthen the hand of our negotiators—a maxim of general application which unfortunately seems little heeded in today’s State Department.

Yet there is more to American national strategy than the negotiation of agreements. An aggressive public diplomacy demonstrates American self-confidence and political will to allies, friends, and the undecided, and to the Soviets and the international Left it shows that the United States has at last begun to take seriously a dimension of strategic competition which they have long had to themselves. Moreover, it imposes added costs and constraints on Soviet repression at home, as well as threatening the grip of the Soviet Union on critical components of its global empire. In so doing, it contributes to our ability to deter or moderate Soviet international adventurism.

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Harder to handle is the objection to promoting American ideals around the world. Indeed, this brings us to what is in many ways the crux of the matter. It is useless to deny that Americans have in the past frequently harbored utterly unrealistic expectations as to the prospects for liberal democracy in the Third World, or that these expectations have created difficulties for the conduct of a sensible American foreign policy. As indicated above, Americans have often been slow to acknowledge the fundamental differences in culture and historical experience which limit the applicability of the American model elsewhere in the world. Yet this does not mean one is necessarily driven to an extreme version of Western exceptionalism or cultural relativism. As Peter L. Berger has recently argued,¹ it means that careful discrimination is necessary between those elements of American or Western liberal democracy which are relatively exceptional and those which are of more universal applicability.

In the area of political practice, the critical question is the extent to which democratic political institutions can be grafted onto societies that are less developed economically and socially than the West and lack cultural traditions supportive of political freedom and participation. The generally accepted view in this country, to state it again, is that the key obstacle to democratic politics is economic underdevelopment and its social concomitants. This view is unable to account for the case of premodern democracies like Athens or the Swiss cantons, which arose in poor, agriculturally-based societies; and it does not account very well for modern cases either of democratic success (India) or of democratic failure (Argentina or Chile).

It would seem, rather, that political culture is the key factor supporting or limiting democratic development. Political culture is the amalgam of customs, beliefs, political opinions and practices, ideologies, and styles of thought that constitutes the politically relevant way of life of a society. It is made up of disparate and not infrequently contradictory elements, differing substantially in their strength and relative weight. An approach to democratic development that stresses the importance of political culture can in some cases be more optimistic about the prospects of democracy than the alternative approach. At the same time, it serves to moderate expectations of the full-blown implementation of a democratic polity once a society reaches a certain median income level, recognizes that throwing money at such problems will not solve them, and remains sensitive to cultural diversity.

This is precisely the approach marked out by the President in his London speech of last year in which he pledged assistance in developing not democracy simply but “the infrastructure of democracy,” which he described as “the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” The “infrastructure of democracy” is made up of those mediating structures or institutions, whether public or private, which connect the individual to the state, develop habits of political participation and responsibility, and form a democratic political outlook—that is to say, which create a political culture of democracy even in the absence of democratic political institutions.

This approach is intended to avoid directly challenging the legitimacy of existing political institutions in the Third World. It recognizes that democratic political institutions are most likely to endure if they emerge from an indigenous development rather than if they are imposed under pressure from the United States or under conditions of internal political turmoil or insurgency. And it recognizes the legitimacy of a variety of institutional solutions to the problems which democracy poses in different cultural and political contexts.

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In the area of political opinions and ideas, it is necessary to strike a balance between the universalist premises of liberal democracy and the indifference or hostility to important elements of democratic or Western political culture that is widespread in the Third World (and to an important degree among the populations of Communist states). Particularly in view of the resurgence of traditionalism and of fundamentalist religious impulses, it is essential that the United States be able to present itself, and liberal democracy generally, as an ally of tradition and religion. To do this will plainly require a significant shift in the substance as well as the emphasis of American public-diplomacy programs.

Accustomed as Americans now are to couching all political issues in terms of individual rights and entitlements, they find it difficult to realize how distasteful and threatening such a view of political life is for the great majority living in non-Western societies today. Yet Americans have a unique history of activity in private associations of all kinds (including religious and eleemosynary associations), as well as in local government, that runs wholly counter to the stereotype of ruthless individualism with which they are routinely taxed. This history could be highlighted. As Peter Berger has shown, a convincing case can be made for democracy as providing institutional and political safeguards for the traditional structures which have served as the focus of communal life in the Third World—and as the chief protection of individuals from the arbitrary action of the state. It is also essential that treatment of human-rights questions and of Communism and its works lay particular stress on the moral dimension of these issues.

It is undeniable that such a strategy will require greater attention to themes and arguments associated with American conservatism. At the same time, values such as community, family, and justice are by no means a preserve of the Right; indeed, they are likely to be significantly more congenial to certain kinds of liberals than to certain kinds of conservatives. To this extent, the strategy in question would not appear to be doomed in advance by the fissures of domestic American politics.

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VI

The most difficult task facing American public diplomacy is not in the Third World or in the Communist sphere, however, but in the West. It is here that official information efforts tend to be least effective; and it is here that domestic political sensitivities are most likely to become engaged. For the problems American foreign policy is encountering in Western Europe today are caused principally by political forces that until recently have been generally friendly to the American presence and global role—and that have a marked and increasing affinity with the ideology of contemporary American liberalism. If the United States could be said to have had a public-diplomacy strategy in Europe in the past, it was the strategy of alliance with the democratic Left against domestic and international Communism, as exemplified in the history of CIA support for labor unions and social-democratic parties in a number of European countries in the immediate postwar years.

Such a strategy ceased to be viable with the general shift to the Left in European political culture that has occurred over the last several decades, and the growing susceptibility of the social-democratic parties to neutralist and anti-American impulses. Yet it is far from clear what might replace it. Particularly given the conspicuous role of essentially apolitical movements like the Greens, it seems doubtful that ideological counterargument by itself can accomplish much. The Soviets seem to have long since concluded that crude manipulation of European fears is a more effective tactic than preaching the virtues of Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, the European scene today strikingly confirms the prediction made thirty years ago by the sociologist Hans Speier: “The future of propaganda to foreign masses may belong to threats and speechless horror rather than to ideologies in an epoch in which at moments of greatest turbulence the masses do not act but merely suffer.”

It is difficult to visualize how the United States could in any way compete with the emotional appeal of the Western anti-nuclear movement, or with the cynicism of the Soviets in their efforts to enlist the moral energies of that movement. At the same time, it is not difficult to identify in general terms what is needed to address the root causes of the disaffection of much of European youth and the European political elite with America and the West. It is a reaffirmation and revitalization of belief in liberal democracy as a political system and a way of life that is morally superior to the Eastern alternative—or to any alternative that is likely to be realizable in the conditions of modern life. But this is something that will come, if it comes, from within Europe and Europeans, and not primarily through the agency of the United States government. Nevertheless, there remains much that can be done to encourage and facilitate private efforts in this direction.

With respect to Europe as well as the world generally, what is wanted is not an undifferentiated, still less a shrill, ideological crusade. What is wanted is a strategy for presenting the case for liberal democracy in a manner which engages the understanding and respect, if not the active support, of a variety of peoples and groups who do not share or who have come to doubt its fundamental premises. Such a strategy is plainly ambitious. For it to succeed, a degree of domestic consensus will be necessary which can scarcely be said to exist at the present time. The creation of such a consensus poses nearly as much of a challenge to American conservatives as to American liberals; but of neither does it require the impossible.

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¹ “Democracy for Everyone?,” COMMENTARY, September 1983.