Reinvention and Fragmentation

This chapter shows how public diplomacy practitioners in the 1990s dealt with “reinvention” in a post-Cold War world, the demise of the US Information Agency (USIA), and the State Department’s problematic reckoning with diplomacy reforms and foreign affairs consolidation. Diplomats Donna Oglesby and Barry Fulton mapped change within USIA. Republican Senator Jesse Helms and Democratic Senator Joe Biden, strange bedfellows, drove outcomes shaped by partisan conflict and bureaucratic rivalries. Diplomats Thomas Pickering, Patrick Kennedy, and Kenton Keith negotiated consolidation agreements that changed structures for US embassy Public Affairs Officers, information programs, cultural diplomacy, and international broadcasting. At decade’s end, practitioners debated two visions: (1) restoration of public diplomacy as a diplomatic practice with specialized skills in an autonomous entity within the State Department, and (2) transformation of diplomacy’s public dimension in the face of global trends that were profoundly consequential for institutions and processes. Ascending globalization, permeable borders, “wicked” transnational problems, digital technologies, whole of government diplomacy, and growing numbers of sub-state and non-state diplomacy actors were creating a new paradigm for diplomats worldwide.