Public Diplomacy as a Form of Public Policy: The State in the Situation of Post-Truth and the Crisis of Democracy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of public diplomacy and its role in modern politics. Public diplomacy is analyzed as a form of public policy, which becomes relevant when the boundaries between the macropolitical (national) and the megapolitical (transnational) discourses are demolished. The emerging political meaning for public diplomacy is based among others upon the crisis of the democratic model, and one of the implications of the latter is the phenomenon of post-truth, accompanied with diverse and multidirectional information streams, resulting in different worldview frames of references with varying agendas. Public diplomacy as, on the one hand, a set of tools for public involvement, and on the other hand, a mechanism for the international dialogue comes to be a productive form not only for political relations with different countries, but also for reproducing state activity as an institution to deal with both civil society inside and other states and non-state actors outside the country. The explosive growth of communication tools, which under the present-day conditions are easily turned into transnational forms, encourage the steady development of public diplomacy as a specific field for global dialogue, one of the most important direction for strategic communications, in a sense, an independent sphere of public interaction. While undermining the monopoly of the state on the external relations and reducing its institutional stability, public diplomacy at the same time discovers some new lacunas for applying public policy, for new approaches to cohering interests of government and people, to generating public policy in general. Antiestablishment sentiment as well as reposting the populist agenda, which is a good example of the timely global political trend, at the same time, allow societies all over the world to reflect on the respective national practices, which might be also considered as an additional effect of the public diplomacy discourse.