policy and advocacy

Issue Brief - Cultural Exchanges through the State Department

Strengthening Ties Between the United States and the World

ACTION NEEDED
We urge Congress to:

• Increase funding by $10 million for the Cultural Programs Division of the State Department’s Office of Citizen Exchanges in the FY06 Commerce-Justice-State appropriations bill.

TALKING POINTS

• Cultural exchange is critical to our security efforts around the world.  As Chairman Thomas Kean of the 9/11 Commission noted, “The United States should rebuild the scholarship, exchange, and library programs that reach out to young people and offer them knowledge and hope.”
• There is broad bipartisan support for improving public diplomacy.  Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Russell Feingold (D-WI) have co-sponsored a resolution calling for increased coordination of international exchange programs.  Several highly respected organizations and commissions from across the spectrum agree on this point, including the Djerejian Commission on Public Diplomacy, the Heritage Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Center for Arts and Culture.
• International cultural exchange carries an economic benefit. According to a report by the National Governors Association, state governments find that incorporating arts and cultural exchanges in their international trade and business development serves to expand trading relationships with other nations and open markets abroad as a complement to more traditional efforts to generate exports.
• A strong program of public diplomacy and cultural exchanges equips the United States to respond to challenges abroad.  Without adequate funding and an information base for cultural programs in the State Department, and at state and local levels, the United States is unprepared at a time when American values, culture, and society are misrepresented, maligned, and criticized.
• Programs in exchange and collaboration in the arts and cultural fields enable people to communicate on human terms, identifying the common elements that unite them.  For example, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) supports the International Partnerships Among Museums (IPAM), which encourages the creation of links between museums in the United States and similar institutions around the world. Ninety percent of the institutions that have participated in IPAM are still in contact.

BACKGROUND
According to a 2000 State Department survey, American embassies value cultural programs as ways to “open doors to sometimes hard-to-reach audiences,” to “help counter the persistent impression of the U.S. overseas as an insensitive giant,” and to “emphasize that American culture is diverse and vibrant and reflects American values.”

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the State Department is responsible for the public diplomacy activities of the United States, including international cultural exchange programs.  Authorized by the Fulbright-Hays Act, these programs support U.S. foreign policy objectives by assisting in the development of friendly relations with other countries. These programs promote ties between private citizens and organizations in the United States and abroad by presenting U.S. history, society, art, and culture in all of its diversity to overseas audiences.

In the last decade, the State Department’s support for cultural exchange has declined drastically, especially with the absorption of activities of the former United States Information Agency (USIA) and the elimination of the USIA’s Arts America Program.  State Department cultural exchange programs are funded at only $2 million, and staffing has declined by well over 50 percent since the end of the Cold War.
 
CULTURAL EXCHANGE: ADDITIONAL TALKING POINTS
Secretary Condoleezza Rice stated in her opening testimony before Congress that cultural exchange programs are a priority for her as Secretary of State.

• “We also must realize that America and all free nations are facing a generational struggle against a new and deadly ideology of hatred that we cannot ignore.  We need to do much more to confront hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth.  We will increase our exchanges with the rest of the world.  And Americans should make a serious effort to understand other cultures and learn foreign languages.  Our interaction with the rest of the world must be a conversation, not a monologue.  And America must remain open to visitors and workers and students from around the world, without compromising our security standards.  If our public diplomacy efforts are to succeed, we cannot close ourselves off from the world.  And if I am confirmed, public diplomacy will be a top priority for me and for the professionals I lead.”  (emphasis added)

In January 2005, the Public Diplomacy Council called for increasing cultural exchange programs among its recommendations for improving U.S. public diplomacy.

• “increase program budgets for public diplomacy, including international broadcasting and exchange programs, four-fold over five years.”

George Kennan, perhaps the most influential American diplomat of the post-World War II era and former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, delivered a speech on cultural exchange in 1953, and his words are as true today as they were 50 years ago.

• “In such a country as ours, faced with these facts of geography and of modern technology, the impact of foreign cultural values is needed just as rain is by the desert.  And needed…for our sakes alone, for our development as individuals and as a nation, lest we fall into complacency, sterility and emotional decay; lest we lose our sense of the meaning and wonder of life itself…Let us by all means have the maximum cultural exchange, even if America had before it no problem whatsoever of outside opinion; even if we had no need of any sort for people, and all that was concerned was our own development here at home.”

President Bush’s FY06 budget proposes an increase in the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs/Professional and Cultural Exchange Programs.

• “Exchanges promote a better appreciation of the United States abroad and provide a greater receptivity for U.S. policies among foreign publics….Rarely has the need for a sustained effort to ensure foreign understanding of our country and society been so clearly evident, or as directly related to our long-term national security as now.”
• “…the Office of Management and Budget evaluated exchanges in all regions of the world….Global exchanges were rated effective with a score of 97 percent….OMB’s reviews noted that exchanges addressed a strategic goal of U.S. foreign policy: the need to increase mutual understanding between Americans and citizens of other countries.”