Good news story about Public Diplomacy in the NYT (made possible by Smith-Mundt)

Briefly, on the heels of the Palestinian Seven story, the New York Times has a feel-good story on international exchange, specifically the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), Giving Young French Muslims a Close Look at the U.S.:

For Karim Zéribi, the highlight was shaking the hand of Barack Obama. For Ali Zahi, it was meeting his childhood hero, the basketball star Magic Johnson. And Mohamed Hamidi was surprised to find a mosque in Washington that was bigger than the one in his parents’ village in Algeria.

Mr. Hamidi is a well-known blogger, Mr. Zahi is a mayoral aide in this Paris suburb, and Mr. Zéribi runs an employment agency. All are French, Muslim and under 42. All grew up and work in suburbs that became emblematic of the frustration among second- and third-generation immigrant youths that led to three weeks of riots in France in 2005.

And all three joined the small but growing ranks of influential Muslims in Europe invited to the United States on 21-day trips organized by the State Department as part of its International Visitor Leadership Program.

IVLP is a great program with a tangible-enough track record to warrant broad support and expansion.  Unbeknownst to many, the IVLP is a result of the Smith-Mundt Act, otherwise known as Public Law 402: the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948.  Programs like IVLP, along with information activities through the Voice of America, were the purpose and intent of Smith-Mundt (the Act was about counter-propaganda and not anti-propaganda as many have labeled it today).  As a Republican Congressman said sixty years ago, “The important thing is to bring the foreigners in here and work them over.”  To wit Senator Alexander Smith, co-sponsor of Smith-Mundt, replied that the purpose of “sending our boys over there” as part of two-way cultural diplomacy was to “working over” the foreigners in their home environment. 

For the academic in you, you may be interested in the following paper and presentation by Giles Scott-Smith, a friend at the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands.  The paper, with its appropriately long title, is about Margaret Thatcher and IVP (no “L” back then): ‘Her Rather Ambitious Washington Program’: Margaret Thatcher’s International Visitor Program Visit to the United States in 1967. 

The presentation is over two years old and isn’t really intended as a stand-alone, but I’ll put it up anyway: Mapping the Undefinable: Exchange Programs as an Object of Political Analysis. 

Giles has the only analytical work I’ve seen on IV(L)P-FLP (Foreign Leader Program, the antecedent for IVP), although I’m sure something else is out there.  More work should be done on this as well as on military exchange and education programs.  If you know of other studies, please let me know. 

Enough for now, deadlines loom.

H/T to Chris on the NYT story.  The quotes are from Frank Ninkovich’s superb The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950.