Diplomacyby Design.

Foreign policy is usually imagined as something that happens between states: ambassadors, treaties, a flag on a car. By that definition, a very large share of the world's people have no foreign policy at all. Regions, cities, minorities, diasporas and stateless nations have interests in the world and no embassy to carry them.

I come from one of those places, so I have had reason to think about what such a people can actually do. My conclusion is simple, and I want to argue it carefully. A people with no embassy budget still has a foreign policy, whether it knows it or not. It is carried by what its people make: the objects, books, films, songs, food and festivals that leave its territory. The only question is whether this is happening by accident or by design.

Joseph Nye gave this territory its modern name around 1990: soft power, the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment. It is a useful concept, and it has been badly abused. In the hands of ministries it often turns into a marketing budget. Soft power is not advertising. A country cannot be made attractive by claiming to be. The attraction has to be earned, and it has to be real.

Soft power is not advertising. A people cannot be made attractive by claiming to be.

What interests me is the practical problem of the small actor. Great powers run cultural institutes in a hundred cities. They fund languages, scholarships and broadcasters. How does a region of a few million people compete with this, with almost nothing? I believe the answer lies in design, in the fullest sense of that word: the deliberate arrangement of limited means for maximum meaning.

There is one thing I should state at the start. Cultural diplomacy is not a substitute for politics, and it will not resolve a conflict. A beautiful festival does not change a border. What it can do is to change who is in the room, how a people is imagined, and what becomes thinkable. Those are slow and modest effects. Over a generation, they can be decisive.

I find it useful to see soft power as a stack, because it shows where programmes go wrong.

Substance is the base: the culture and the conduct that are really there. It is the one layer that cannot be designed. It can only be cultivated and told truthfully. A region with a living musical tradition has something. A region that has allowed its craft to die has lost something no agency can replace.

Narrative is a truthful account of who you are. Most small actors have either none or several, in conflict. It should be possible to say in a paragraph what your people have given the world and what they care about. This is a surprisingly difficult exercise, and a very revealing one.

Presence is the layer of festivals, prizes, books, films and exports: the things that actually appear in the world. This is where most money gets spent, because it is visible. Reputation is what strangers assume about you, built from repeated contact with that presence. Relationships sit at the top: real people abroad who will take your call.

Failed programmes start at the top. They host a reception, invite the ambassadors, and hope for relationships, with nothing underneath. It lasts for one evening. Strong programmes work upward, and that is slow. Reputation is not a thing that one launches. It accumulates.

The chart shows the logic. Paid promotion can move perceptions fast, and when the money stops, those perceptions fall back. Cultural presence is slow in the early years, frustratingly so, and that is why it is hard to fund. But it keeps its height. A novel in translation stays on the shelf. A scholar who spent a year among you remembers for a lifetime. The graduates of a fellowship programme tend to become, in time, the people who run things.

A scholar who spent a year among you remembers for a lifetime.

This is the most important fact about the whole field, and it is the hardest to sell. The return comes after the term of whoever paid for it. Anyone who has argued for a translation fund in front of a budget committee knows the feeling. So the first task of a serious cultural programme is to build a structure that survives political cycles, because the benefit will arrive in someone else's.

What are the actual instruments, and which do what? I think of six, and they are not interchangeable.

Symbols and protocol come first. The flag on a table, the quality of a letterhead, the design of a passport, the way a delegation presents itself. Nobody writes articles about these, and everyone reads them. A small delegation with an impeccable visual language is taken more seriously than a large one with a muddle. This is the cheapest instrument there is, and the most neglected.

Festivals are the most concentrated instrument. A season of a people's music and film in a foreign city, done with high quality, creates an event that the local press can write about. The key words are one city. It is much better to be unmissable in a single place for a fortnight than to be faintly present in twenty.

Prizes are underrated, as I argue in my essay on the Kurd Prize. A serious prize, given to a respected foreign translator or scholar of your culture, turns an outsider into an ally. They have something on their shelf with your name on it. They are now part of your story.

Books and translation are the slowest and deepest instrument. Think how much of what the world knows of any culture has come through a small number of translated works. A people's literature in the major languages is a permanent embassy. A translation fund is probably the highest-value line in any cultural budget, and usually among the smallest.

Film is the instrument with the greatest reach. A single good film can do what ten years of official communication cannot, because it lets a stranger feel what it is to be someone else. It cannot be commissioned as propaganda, because audiences can smell that at once. It can only be supported, and then left alone.

Exports and food are diplomacy at the level of daily life. An object in a home abroad, or a dish that a city learns to love, is a form of contact more intimate than any speech. I argue in my essay on national branding that three words on a product can be the most honest form of nation branding there is.

Scholarships deserve a seventh line. They work slowly, and they work on the people who will one day run the institutions on the other side.

A translation fund may be the highest-value line in a cultural budget. It is usually among the smallest.

The table is a judgement, and you should argue with it. Its main message is the same whichever way you adjust it: no single instrument reaches everyone. A programme built only of receptions speaks to officials and nobody else. Young people live in film, food and music. Scholars live in books and prizes. Design here means deciding who you are trying to reach, and in what order.

For peoples without a state, the most important instrument is one that is often left out of the textbooks. It is already deployed, and it costs almost nothing.

A diaspora is a population of citizens and descendants who live, work and vote inside other countries. It has doctors in their hospitals, students in their universities and shopkeepers on their streets. Every one of them is being read by their neighbours as an example of where they come from. They are, in effect, the embassy. They just do not know it, and nobody has told them what the message is.

Most homelands treat their diaspora in one of two ways. They treat it as a source of money, or as a source of worry. Very few treat it as a partner in a shared project, and that is the opportunity. What a diaspora usually wants is simple: a real connection to the place their parents left, and a way of being proud of it that goes beyond nostalgia. What it can offer is equally clear: languages, networks, credibility and an understanding of how the host society thinks.

A well-designed programme gives diaspora communities something to do. It gives them things to host, to translate and to show their colleagues. It treats the second generation with particular care. These young people often hold the key to the whole enterprise, since they are native in both worlds. They also tend to be bored by folklore. Offer them traditional dance and they will politely leave. Offer them a serious contemporary art exhibition in the city where they live, with their own name on it, and something different happens.

A diaspora is an embassy that nobody has told what the message is.

It is also the case that a diaspora is not one thing. It holds political, generational and religious divisions, and an official programme that serves only one faction will be rejected by the rest. The rule that follows is a hard one. Cultural work has to be genuinely open. As soon as a festival becomes the property of a party, it stops being diplomacy and becomes domestic politics conducted abroad. The audience will notice immediately.

Independence is the deep condition of all this work. Cultural institutions that are seen as arms of a government lose most of their power. The most successful national institutes in the world have kept a real distance from their foreign ministries, and that distance is what makes them believable. For a small actor, this is doubly true. Anything that looks like propaganda will be discounted, even when it is good. Anything that looks like art will be given a hearing.

Let me make this concrete with a shape I would propose to a small actor starting from nothing.

It begins with an audit, and the audit has two halves. The first is an honest inventory of what you have: living artists, writers, crafts, food, music, scholarship. The second asks how you are currently read abroad. Search for yourself in the major languages. Read what the encyclopaedias say. Ask foreign friends what they associate with your name. The gap between those two halves is the brief.

Then build the symbol system, because everything that follows will carry it. Translation and fellowships must start early, and they appear on the chart as long bars, because they are slow. It is a mistake to wait for the big event. By the time a season abroad arrives in the second year, you want translated books on the table and partners in place.

The partner institutions are everything. A small actor should almost never go alone. Your exhibition in a respected local museum, curated with their people, is worth ten times your own rented hall. It lends you the partner's credibility and puts you in front of their audience. This requires patience and a willingness to let somebody else have a real say. Control is the enemy here. A programme that insists on approving every caption will be politely declined by exactly the institutions you need.

The season abroad is the concentrated moment. Choose one city, and be excellent. Then the review, the part that is nearly always skipped. What changed? Which relationships are real? What should stop? I would much rather have an honest failure report than a triumphant one, since only the first is any use.

The matrix explains why any of this is available to you at all. A large budget with a thin story produces a showroom, a pavilion that everyone visits and nobody recalls. The great powers occupy the top right. But the bottom-right corner is real, and I find it the most hopeful thing in the field. A small people with a deep culture can have an influence far beyond its size. History is full of cities and small nations whose cultural weight far exceeded their military or economic weight.

A small people with a deep culture can weigh far more than its budget.

A word on measurement, since funders will ask. Do not count attendance and call it impact. The honest indicators are slower: books in translation, foreign scholars working on your culture, references in serious press, invitations that come without your asking. If the invitations start arriving, you are beginning to succeed. It takes years, and it should be budgeted that way.

I want to close by naming the thing that lies under all this technique.

To be without a state in the modern world is to be spoken about. Others write your history. Others name your places and describe your people, in languages you did not choose. You appear in the news as a problem to be solved, or a tragedy to be regretted, or a card in somebody else's game. There is a long experience of this among my own people, and among many others.

Cultural diplomacy is, at its heart, the slow act of becoming a subject rather than an object. It is the moment when a stranger in a distant city reads your novelist, hears your musician or tastes your food, and thinks of you for the first time as a person who makes things, and not as somebody to whom things happen.

That shift cannot be forced. But it can be designed for. It calls for quality, because nothing less is taken seriously. It calls for patience, because the effect is generational. It calls for honesty, because a culture that lies about itself will be found out. And it calls for generosity, because the most powerful cultural diplomacy offers something to the other side, and does not only ask to be admired.

This last point is the one I would underline. The weakest form of cultural work says: look at us. The strongest says: here is something that may be useful to you. A poem that helps someone in another country through a bad year has done more for your people than any pavilion. The best ambassadors have never known that they were ambassadors. They were only trying to make something true and beautiful, and the world took notice.

The work of the designer here is a humble one. It is to build the rails on which such things can travel: the translation fund, the fellowship, the prize, the archive, the visual language, the season in one good city. None of these will appear in a treaty. All of them, over time, will change what a treaty can say.

There are no ambassadors in this story. There is a craftsman, a translator, a film-maker, a student who stayed a year. Taken together, and arranged with some care, they are a foreign policy.