EU Public Diplomacy: A Coherent Message?

Public diplomacy is typically defined as how a nation's government and/or society projects itself to external audiences in ways that improve these foreign publics' perception of that nation. In the long run, successful public diplomacy should result in augmented soft power and favorable policies towards the nation that engages in it. An entity like the EU necessarily encompasses multiple levels of public diplomacy - subnational, national, transnational, and supranational. Do the various aspects of the EU's multi-leveled public diplomacy form a coherent overall message, or do they work against each other? This question is important both practically and theoretically. Practically, the EU is struggling to make its presence known on the international stage as one of the most important players in world politics. It is undeniably the greatest example of voluntary international cooperation among states in modern times, and a major normative power with significant influence in the areas of humanitarian aid, climate change, multilateralism, human rights, and development, among other things. Yet, it is not yet fully on the radar for many. In a 2005 Gallup poll, for example, only 38% of those surveyed in North America had heard of the EU. This paper argues that EU public diplomacy, taken as a whole, sends conflicting messages because national-level public diplomacy rarely includes the EU in its messages to foreign publics. This limits and dilutes the visibility of the EU. On a theoretical level, EU public diplomacy provides a strong example of norm diffusion and identity creation. In the context of an evolving actor that is in many ways still very new, I suggest that the European experience shows that external image and internal identity are mutually constitutive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]