PR جدید ایالات : چگونه شیوه های نام گذاری تجاری (برندینگ) ملی بر تابع امنیت دیپلماسی عمومی اثر می گذارد ؟

This paper investigates how the role of public relations practice in public diplomacy is undergoing a transformation as a consequence of the influence from nation branding. A case study of the Danish government's response to the so-called Cartoon Crisis illustrates how the threat from international terrorism to national security initially served as a catalyst for new public diplomacy initiatives. But as the initiatives were implemented within a framework of nation branding the focus on risk reduction became subjected to a marketing logic and a new focus on economic objectives took over. The paper points to a possible future status of public diplomacy under the influence of nation branding: Public diplomacy may maintain a function pertinent to national security but as this function is incapable of managing real risks it will only serve as auto-communication that legitimizes security policy towards a domestic audience. In the public diplomacy efforts towards transnational publics the link to national security will completely disappear whereby the public relations of states is transformed to the marketing of states.

The efforts of states to promote national interests abroad at citizen level have traditionally been conducted within the disciplinary framework of public diplomacy, a discipline closely affiliated with public relations (van Ham, 2002 and Wang, 2006). Public diplomacy as a scholarly field is built on the theoretical traditions of international relations and international communication (Gilboa, 2008 and Szondi, 2008) and for communication scholars the natural host discipline is international public relations (Kunczik, 1997 and Yang et al., this issue). From this perspective, studies of governments’ increased citizen-level diplomacy have been conducted through the lens of image-building and more recently relationship management (e.g. Fitzpatrick, 2007 and Taylor, 2008). Thus, public diplomacy can be seen as a part of the successful expansion of core public relations practices such as relation building (cf. Ledingham & Bruning, 2000) and image making (cf. Hutton, Goodman, Alexander, & Genest, 2001) into many societal institutions as a specific mode of governance (Crouch, 2004). The expansion of public relations has for the past two decades been accompanied by a convergence. In this the traditional boundaries between public relations and marketing are dissolving as new organizational practices and theoretical frameworks such as corporate communication and corporate branding have emerged (Christensen et al., 2008 and Cornelissen, 2011). These developments have, together with the past decades of changes in the more general field of strategic communication (Hallahan, Holtzhausen, van Ruler, Verčič, & Sriramesh, 2007), undoubtedly contributed to the identity crisis of public relations (Hutton, 1999) but it has at the same time kept the field vibrant (Gregory, 2012). However, public relations practice may be facing some limits to its allegedly successful colonization of other societal modes of governance as foreign policy security issues are increasingly handled through reputation management practices (Fan, 2008, Hopf, 1998 and Rasmussen, 2010). By theorizing the current influence of nation branding on public diplomacy and further the way governments are increasingly relying on risk management in their policy making, this paper argues that the traditional link between public diplomacy and efforts to enhance national security may be undergoing a transformation where it is gradually being replaced by a new link between nation branding and efforts to increase national prosperity. By examining the events that followed Denmark's so-called cartoon crisis the paper points to how this shift may have severe consequences; firstly for the way governments respond to national security risks, and secondly for the role of public relations practice in what has become known as ‘new public diplomacy’ (Melissen, 2005, Seib, 2009 and Szondi, 2008). The overall argument of this paper is twofold: (1) When security risks are redefined as reputational risks public diplomacy practitioners will be directed into governing those risks through market economy metrics. (2) In the process of that redefinition the relationship building function of public relations loses terrain to a brand management function to an extend where new public diplomacy becomes the marketing of states rather than the public relations of states.1 The argument of the paper falls in six sections. The first section outlines the scope and structure of the paper. The second section explains the role of public diplomacy, including its historical heritage in propaganda; its modern link to public relations; and the contemporary influence from the marketing logics of nation branding where reputation metrics play an increasingly important role. By referring to some of the current discussions in the risk management literature, the third section examines how the adoption of risk management practices by governments is likely to result in a focus on reputational risk rather than societal risks. This section further argues that the increased focus on reputation, which resembles the shift from public diplomacy to nation branding, jeopardizes the rational foundation for risk management. The fourth section presents findings from a case study of the Danish cartoon crisis that show how the impetus for implementing a new public diplomacy strategy based on nation branding was founded in a security policy need. But the influence from nation branding on public diplomacy was accompanied by increased attention on marketability at the expense of the traditional security function. The fifth section discusses the practical implications of basing public diplomacy efforts on nation branding methods. The section discusses the limitations of handling the security dimension of public diplomacy with nation brand metrics and points to how metrics for measuring the national reputation transform the nation brand into an independent risk. A final section concludes the paper by pointing to a possible future status of public diplomacy within the nation branding framework: The security aspects of public diplomacy will only serve as a way of legitimizing policy making towards a domestic audience whereby public diplomacy as the international public relations of states is transformed to the marketing of states.

Nation branding has been much in vogue the recent decade and as argued in this paper it has been successful to a degree where it has, in more than one sense of the word, incorporated (new) public diplomacy. The rebirth of PD was a direct result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks where U.S. policy makers re-adopted PD in order to boost the national reputation (Hocking, 2005, Melissen, 2005 and van Ham, 2008) and as shown in the cartoon crisis case the Danish government's impetus for implementing a new PD strategy based on NB was also founded in security policy with a direct link between reputation and security. But in the actual implementation of the strategy the security aspects became subordinated economic objectives. Thereby the direct link between the management of real security risks and reputation management disappeared and the PD function was transformed into brand reputation management. And once established through nation branding tools and metrics the national reputation became a risk of its own kind. Within the practice of PD reputation has always been crucial but faced with the security threat from international terrorism NPD armed with a NB toolkit falls short: The nation brand is an aggregate created by opinion polls in which the opinion of the individual, potential terrorist or not, disappears in the sheer amount of data. Nevertheless, in the landscape of international politics where political decision makers are confronted with new, multiple and complex risks the holistic nature of NB appears to be a panacea: it may not actually solve all the foreign policy problems that it promises to do, but as long as its promise is successful in convincing the domestic political constituencies the appeal to political decision makers will be high. However, when PD becomes subordinated to NB, which was what happened in Denmark in the government's attempts to counter the cartoon crisis and what has also been the case in many Central and Eastern Europe countries (Szondi, 2009) as well as most of the Nordic countries (Rasmussen, in press), it will have important consequences for the political function of PD: PD can maintain a function pertinent to national security but as this function is incapable of managing real risks it will only serve as domestic auto-communication that legitimizes security policy. But in the public diplomacy efforts towards transnational publics the link to national security will completely disappear whereby the public relations of states is transformed to the marketing of states.