This chapter explores how Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette (also known as the Marquis de Lafayette) eased previous Franco-American hostility after the Seven Years’ War through his diplomacy, celebration of American values, and ability to acquire extensive political, military, and financial aid from the French government. Moreover, Lafayette’s continued cultural flattery soothed the American inferiority complex toward France and resulted in a massive rapprochement. In addition, an increasingly repressive British presence before, during, and after the American Revolution – that is, a common enemy – brought French and American political and military leaders ever closer, resulting in the 1778 commercial and military Franco-American alliance and massive French support of the revolution. This support culminated in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which secured American independence. One key individual and a common enemy would thus lead France to evolve from the United States’ most bitter enemy to its strongest ally.

This chapter explores how the American Federation of Labor (AFL) used humanitarian aid as an instrument of postwar diplomacy in occupied Germany. Through thousands of Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) packages sent to German trade unionists between 1945 and 1949, the AFL sought to promote liberal-democratic labor ideals and counter Soviet influence during the early Cold War. These packages, nominally gifts of solidarity, functioned as vehicles of ideological persuasion and channels of transatlantic communication, allowing the AFL to bypass official state diplomacy while shaping the reemergence of German unionism in an “American image.” Central to this effort was Jay Lovestone and the Free Trade Union Committee, whose anticommunist agenda intertwined humanitarianism with propaganda and intelligence-gathering. The chapter demonstrates how material relief became a form of “humanitarian diplomacy,” blurring the boundaries between altruism, ideology, and power in the reconstruction of Europe’s labor movements after World War II.

This chapter examines how US post-conflict diplomacy toward Italy evolved from the final phase of World War II to the early Cold War. Initially shaped by the need for wartime stabilization, the American “good occupiers” gradually shifted from providing tentative support for antifascist moderates to adopting a proactive strategy of anticommunist containment. The chapter demonstrates how the Italian case fits the broader pattern of American post-conflict diplomacy, which involves transforming former adversaries into partners. However, it also highlights the essential role of Italian agency in this process. As the Truman administration came to view Italian stability as vital for Western security, Italian pro-Western moderates, in turn, used US aid and political support to secure reconstruction and international rehabilitation. Finally, the chapter highlights the contribution of official and unofficial diplomatic networks, including labor and cultural exchanges, to shaping US–Italian relations during this process.

This chapter examines the institutional, economic, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped musical exchange between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. As a form of soft power that projected both the Axis alliance and its underlying rivalry, cultural diplomacy in realms such as opera, touring, and international festivals generated performative displays of unity and opportunities for propaganda that extended beyond live audiences. Both regimes mobilised the musical canon to assert cultural dominance, with Germany emphasising composers such as Mozart and Wagner while Italy highlighted Verdi, Puccini and an openness to novelty that distinguished it from the German skepticism of modernism. Composers of new music likewise became symbolic assets in transnational exchange, and institutional frameworks for contemporary music became new venues in which to compete for cultural hegemony. Despite differences in policy and aesthetics and growing wartime constraints, Italy and Germany sought to position themselves at the centre of a new European cultural order, a diplomatic dynamic with intriguing continuities into the Cold War.

Chapter 1 analyzes the new balance of power emerging in the world of cultural property between source countries and market countries. It begins with a case study of the Benin Bronzes and the recent measures of “cultural diplomacy” employed between Nigeria, as the source territory of these objects, and governments and cultural institutions located in Western countries. It then explores cases where cross-border collaboration takes place to address real-time or recent acts of illegal excavation, looting, and smuggling of cultural objects across national borders. With these in mind, the chapter introduces the concept of new cultural internationalism, suggesting that these changing dynamics should not be seen as leading to “isolationism” or a backlash against globalization. This is particularly true as the cross-border nature of cultural property markets is probably more dominant than ever before, though it now bears more complex and multidirectional traits compared to the traditional categorical division into source countries and market countries.

Over a century and a half, expos have been used by the Japanese state, local authorities, and private companies, not to prescribe meaning, but to aggregate interest – to accommodate the multiple demands of organizers, exhibitors, and visitors – and thereby to foster development. After three decades of economic stagnation, the age of regional expos in Japan seems to have passed, though ‘expo’ (haku) remains a useful, protean term. Japan also remains a reliable participant in international exhibitions overseas, rehearsing an old story about harmony between nature and culture, first retailed in the late nineteenth century. The Japanese state also continues to use expos at home to promote its vision and plans for the future. The next world expo will open in April 2025, promulgating the United Nation’s sustainable development goals and the Japanese government’s vision of Society 5.0, while also promising Osaka’s neoliberal ‘restoration’. Meanwhile, the Japanese lesson about the utility of expos for development has been absorbed elsewhere. Shanghai in 2010 and Dubai in 2021 deployed, Riyadh in 2030 and possibly Busan in 2035 will riff on, a template first made in Japan.

Put simply–although nothing about it is simple–public diplomacy is diplomacy carried out in public, as opposed to most of diplomacy, which is done in private. It is a set of activities that inform, engage and influence international public opinion to support policy objectives or create goodwill for the home country. It is important to understand what public diplomacy is not. It is not an advertising campaign to get foreigners to like your country–even if they dislike it, they can still support, or at least accept, a particular policy or action. It is not a propaganda effort to mislead or lie to audiences for tactical or other advantage. It is a sustained endeavor that advances your country’s policies and reflects a solid understanding of the host-country’s language, culture, history and traditions. Both public diplomacy and propaganda are means to project power.

This chapter examines Bernstein’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union. Born four years before the creation of the Soviet Union and dying eleven months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his life story, including his rise to global prominence, paralleled the history of the Soviet republics. As an American of Ukrainian heritage, the composer had personal ties to the region. I examine these family connections and their complexities; his lifelong interest in Russian classical music; his period of attraction to Communism as an ideology, its consequences, and his statements in support of US–Soviet peace; and his 1960 cultural-diplomacy-related tour of the USSR with the New York Philharmonic. Ultimately, I argue that the United States’ relationship with the USSR had a profound impact not only on his family life and conducting career, but also on his attitudes to music-stylistic choices.

The introduction argues that Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov’s 1935 American road trip offers a fruitful and innovative means of identifying the mediators who engaged in building friendly Soviet–American relations. Such means are necessary because unlike the Soviet state, the American government in the 1930s did not guide or systematically track Soviet visitors. Providing a brief overview of Ilf and Petrov’s biographies, the introduction highlights the mixture of fact and fiction in their American travelogue. It concludes with a sketch of their American itinerary and the wide range of sources employed to reconstruct their contacts with Americans.

This chapter documents the constellation of films and literary works extending outward from the Eastern international in the late- and post-Soviet years when socialist internationalism pivoted from an east–west to a north–south axis and then dissipated (1960s–1990s). It affirms the enduring coherence of the Persianate literary space, now bound together by Soviet models of literary representation. The chapter samples the occasional poetry produced by Eastern literary representatives involved in Soviet–Third-World cultural diplomacy at Cold War literary congresses, especially through the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. However, it also shows how artists gripped by classical Persianate forms continued to find and respond to each other after Soviet-backed literary institutions lost international legitimacy. The chapter discusses several Persian and Uzbek texts from the Soviet–Afghan War, including a leading Afghan communist literary bureaucrat’s mystical love poem to an Islamist insurgent, written continuously from 1980–2020. Its other central case study is the impact of the Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s film The Color of Pomegranates as a model for Persianate poetics on film, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran, including in the art films of Muhsin Makhmalbaf. The chapter tempers the elegiac impulse of the post-Persianate left with an affirmation of the tradition’s continued vitality.

The conclusion reviews the arguments developed throughout the book. This summary is framed by a consideration of the changing meanings of the poetic figures of the rose and nightingale in the Persianate twentieth century. Accordingly, each chapter is elucidated through a reading of that chapter’s classical Persian or Turkic epigraph.

This chapter explores the displacement of knowledge following the First World War in two ways. First, it focuses on the displacement of people, specifically the Russian refugees displaced by the civil war in the early 1920s. It shows how thousands of intellectuals were combed out of the wider body of displaced people and relocated in sites across Europe and the wider world. Second, the chapter looks at how other forms of intellectual capital were displaced following post-war treaties and the redrawing of international borders, such as Hungarian institutions that found themselves ‘displaced’ in Czechoslovakia and Romania. Arguments about the displacement of knowledge demonstrated how individuals, institutions, and even modes of thinking were portrayed as synonymous with certain national identities in order to effect political change. The chapter explores the tension between the nationalization of knowledge and its simultaneous claims to universalism.

Making the People’s Republic of China appear great after 1949 was a technically and organizationally complex problem that required the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize all of the cultural resources at its disposal. Messianism about China’s greatness was an important aspect of Mao’s charisma as a leader, and this message was in turn disseminated internationally through repeated reference to the uniqueness and success of China’s revolutionary “path,” particularly within decolonizing Asia. When confronted with the dilemma of how to engage with nonsocialist countries, or those for which revolution was a more distant concern, the CCP’s response was instead to engage in more generic forms of cultural diplomacy which highlighted China’s achievements as a great and developing nation. International cultural display was therefore a relatively low-cost approach to signaling greatness and earning respect even in settings where relations were not carried out on a basis of socialist “fraternity.”

This chapter examines the resulting sequence of steps taken by the CCP to globally communicate China’s greatness and legitimacy. Its main focus is the film industry, which played a significant role in the dissemination of information about China’s post-1949 reconstruction during the politically turbulent Korean War period. By the mid-1950s, the PRC’s nascent international cultural infrastructure stretched from Geneva to Jakarta, underpinned by cultural industries and politically directed exchange networks at home. Mao’s promise to make the world see China as civilized first required that the world be made to see – as influence expanded, recognition of China’s greatness would surely follow

This chapter surveys various forms of identification with and consumption of K-pop idol celebrity and youth culture, from reactions on video logs to K-pop music videos, to theorize the particular forms of vicarious experience that bind K-pop idols to their fans and fans to each other. Vicarity relies on the ubiquitous reflexivity that defines social media platforms as sites of subject formation via media production and consumption. Social media participation constitutes an immersive, everyday form of meta-media, by which vicarious substitution through the consumption of vlogs/reactions induces acutely affective experiences of identification. Vicarious media seem to suggest a proxy for politics as an expression of collective sentiment – the ways in which media platforms bridge the private and the public through the increasingly complex arena of the social. Yet traditional modes of political organizing, remain recognizable in the activities of fan collectives. This chapter thus articulates how K-pop sheds light on the contradictory impulses for intense individuation – through the atomized personas overdetermined by social media and the vlog form – and the corresponding longing for ideals of collective agency and community that we see across multiple nodes of media consumption.