The launch earlier this year of the Cultural Diplomacy pamphlet from the thinktank Demos at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Raphael Gallery was a blizzard of suspiciously sexy buzz words - digital repatriation, the Olympiad, cultural ambassadors, soft power, diasporic global networks - but hubristic speeches from museum directors and government ministers aside, the big idea seems quite straightforward, and even old-fashioned.
Globalisation has irreversibly complicated international relations and identity politics is increasingly influencing domestic and international exchanges. The crude instruments of treaties, laws and military capability can only achieve so much in brokering international relations.
'In the 21st century, it will be the countries that manage to make hard and soft power work together, hand-in-hand, that will succeed in achieving their goals,' argue the pamphlet's authors. As such, culture, with its 'wider, connective and human values', is becoming more important than ever in international relations.
The Ferrero Rocher model (as the Demos team jokingly call traditional diplomacy as practised by elite professional diplomats at 'the ambassador's ball') has had its day; cultural diplomacy, which targets the public directly, is the future.
The cultural plane is particularly useful in countries such as Iraq, where the UK has suffered 'reputational damage', as Demos delicately puts it, because it enables conversations to continue across national boundaries when 'politics is fraught'.
So where do museums fit in? According to Demos, museums, galleries and libraries provide the means by which a nation represents its relationship to its own history and to that of 'other' cultures.
Eight of the top ten British visitor attractions are museums, yet in 2006 the UK appeared only once in the 50 top-ranking (in terms of attendance) exhibitions globally, according to Art Newspaper figures. This was the Kandinsky show at Tate Modern.
Demos warns that the global potential of British museums is being wasted, because of under-investment in acquisitions and a lack of government engagement and leadership.
It calls for the creation of a cultural diplomacy team in the Foreign Office's Public Diplomacy Group and recommends that museums and other cultural leaders should take seats at international policy-making tables, to enable museums to 'do' cultural diplomacy more strategically in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
Jack Lohman, the director of the Museum of London (MoL) and the chairman of the International Council of Museums UK, agrees that it's time for British museums to become 'active players' on the international circuit. He cites the fact that the Musée Carnavalet in Paris makes 2,000 loans a year, compared to MoL's 70.
'They say they use culture as their ambassador,' Lohman says. 'We want to grow our reputation internationally but we have regional obligations as well as international ones; I can't send stuff out that hasn't been seen here yet.'
He says the usual rationale behind culture's international role - supporting economic and political relations - is not enough. He is more interested in the 'moral obligation to help redress some of the imbalances of the past and to focus in particular on supporting the developing world'.
Jonathan Williams, an international policy adviser at the British Museum, points to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's sponsorship of the ambitious 2006 Hazina exhibition as an example of state support enabling the museum to deliver its international responsibilities and at the same time enhance diplomatic relations.
Improving the infrastructure of the partner museum in Nairobi was a key element of the Hazina partnership between the British Museum and the National Museums of Kenya and it met the government's wider development priorities.
African audiences got to experience the British Museum collections as interpreted by a local curator. But for some visitors the loans were seen as a booby prize in place of full repatriation and some African museum professionals criticised the Eurocentric conceptual framework of the show.
But Williams says they are not scared of controversy. 'We see ourselves as having been set up with an international remit and we want to do more. In order to do things internationally we need government resources.'
Others are suspicious of recommendations to narrow the distance between cultural institutions and government. Tiffany Jenkins, the director of arts and society at the debating body the Institute of Ideas, says these diplomatic ambitions reflect a deeper crisis of legitimacy in museums, which leads to them being over-flattered by government attention.
'There's a real question over whether cultural institutions should do this sort of work,' Jenkins says. 'There's a danger it will compromise the artistic and intellectual integrity of what they are showing and museums are already too geared towards social and political outcomes.'
She's particularly disturbed by the implication in the report that 'government foreign policy is a given good and not up for debate' and questions why museums should save the government when their 'hard policies have failed'.
International collaboration, sharing curatorial expertise, promoting a sense of global citizenship are unarguably laudable aims. But they are nothing new, and national and regional museums are already practising them, albeit in an ad hoc fashion.
Demos is calling for a more strategic approach and closer involvement of government. The thinktank stresses the difference between working 'in alignment' with government and being 'directed by government' but in practice these subtleties can easily be lost. Culture is most useful to government when it's independent of it.
Sara Wajid
Globalisation has irreversibly complicated international relations and identity politics is increasingly influencing domestic and international exchanges. The crude instruments of treaties, laws and military capability can only achieve so much in brokering international relations.
'In the 21st century, it will be the countries that manage to make hard and soft power work together, hand-in-hand, that will succeed in achieving their goals,' argue the pamphlet's authors. As such, culture, with its 'wider, connective and human values', is becoming more important than ever in international relations.
The Ferrero Rocher model (as the Demos team jokingly call traditional diplomacy as practised by elite professional diplomats at 'the ambassador's ball') has had its day; cultural diplomacy, which targets the public directly, is the future.
The cultural plane is particularly useful in countries such as Iraq, where the UK has suffered 'reputational damage', as Demos delicately puts it, because it enables conversations to continue across national boundaries when 'politics is fraught'.
So where do museums fit in? According to Demos, museums, galleries and libraries provide the means by which a nation represents its relationship to its own history and to that of 'other' cultures.
Eight of the top ten British visitor attractions are museums, yet in 2006 the UK appeared only once in the 50 top-ranking (in terms of attendance) exhibitions globally, according to Art Newspaper figures. This was the Kandinsky show at Tate Modern.
Demos warns that the global potential of British museums is being wasted, because of under-investment in acquisitions and a lack of government engagement and leadership.
It calls for the creation of a cultural diplomacy team in the Foreign Office's Public Diplomacy Group and recommends that museums and other cultural leaders should take seats at international policy-making tables, to enable museums to 'do' cultural diplomacy more strategically in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
Jack Lohman, the director of the Museum of London (MoL) and the chairman of the International Council of Museums UK, agrees that it's time for British museums to become 'active players' on the international circuit. He cites the fact that the Musée Carnavalet in Paris makes 2,000 loans a year, compared to MoL's 70.
'They say they use culture as their ambassador,' Lohman says. 'We want to grow our reputation internationally but we have regional obligations as well as international ones; I can't send stuff out that hasn't been seen here yet.'
He says the usual rationale behind culture's international role - supporting economic and political relations - is not enough. He is more interested in the 'moral obligation to help redress some of the imbalances of the past and to focus in particular on supporting the developing world'.
Jonathan Williams, an international policy adviser at the British Museum, points to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's sponsorship of the ambitious 2006 Hazina exhibition as an example of state support enabling the museum to deliver its international responsibilities and at the same time enhance diplomatic relations.
Improving the infrastructure of the partner museum in Nairobi was a key element of the Hazina partnership between the British Museum and the National Museums of Kenya and it met the government's wider development priorities.
African audiences got to experience the British Museum collections as interpreted by a local curator. But for some visitors the loans were seen as a booby prize in place of full repatriation and some African museum professionals criticised the Eurocentric conceptual framework of the show.
But Williams says they are not scared of controversy. 'We see ourselves as having been set up with an international remit and we want to do more. In order to do things internationally we need government resources.'
Others are suspicious of recommendations to narrow the distance between cultural institutions and government. Tiffany Jenkins, the director of arts and society at the debating body the Institute of Ideas, says these diplomatic ambitions reflect a deeper crisis of legitimacy in museums, which leads to them being over-flattered by government attention.
'There's a real question over whether cultural institutions should do this sort of work,' Jenkins says. 'There's a danger it will compromise the artistic and intellectual integrity of what they are showing and museums are already too geared towards social and political outcomes.'
She's particularly disturbed by the implication in the report that 'government foreign policy is a given good and not up for debate' and questions why museums should save the government when their 'hard policies have failed'.
International collaboration, sharing curatorial expertise, promoting a sense of global citizenship are unarguably laudable aims. But they are nothing new, and national and regional museums are already practising them, albeit in an ad hoc fashion.
Demos is calling for a more strategic approach and closer involvement of government. The thinktank stresses the difference between working 'in alignment' with government and being 'directed by government' but in practice these subtleties can easily be lost. Culture is most useful to government when it's independent of it.
Sara Wajid