Narrating Hegemony: The Constitution of US Cultural and Informational Diplomacy, 1936-53.

This paper brings together the insights of IR constructivism and the study of cultural and informational diplomacy. It argues that the transformation of American foreign policy from a posture of ad hoc internationalism in the 1930s to embedded hegemony in the 1940s can be understood as a transition enabled by a discursive and ideational shift. Furthermore, I argue that cultural and informational diplomacy were key sites within US foreign policy at which this ideational shift was undertaken and contested. I then proceed to chart the evolution of US policies of cultural diplomacy, overseen by the State Department's Division of Cultural Relations and its programs of international information, focusing on the Voice of America radio station. In the course of my survey of the development of these diplomatic programs I take a particular interest in the discursive representation of America as a hegemonic power, and reflect on how Washington's role within the international order was constituted by the figurative practices of narrative, framing, presupposition and propositions about 'self' and 'other.' Surveying these discursive practices within the context of US cultural and informational diplomacy highlights how the claiming of America's authority and historical incumbency to pursue an extensive global role in the post-war period was a self-constitutive practice with important implications for how US foreign relations during the 1930s and 1940s. I note in this context that there was a particularly strong propensity among US cultural and informational officials to situate Washington's approach to cultural and informational diplomacy as a reflection of long-standing domestic political creeds within the US. This discursive tendency in turn led policy-makers to view foreign policy as a basis to vindicate America's domestic political and spiritual creed on a global scale. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]