Celebrity Diplomacy

Andrew F. Cooper,Louise Frechette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317262701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Time magazine named Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates their "Persons of the Year." The United Nations tapped Angelina Jolie as a goodwill ambassador. Bob Geldof organized the Live8 concert to push the G8 leaders' summit on AIDS and debt relief. What has come to be called "celebrity diplomacy" attracts wide media attention, significant money, and top official access around the world. But is this phenomenon just the latest fad? Are celebrities dabbling in an arena that is out of their depth, or are they bringing justified notice to important problems that might otherwise languish on the crowded international diplomatic scene? This book is the first to examine celebrity diplomacy as a serious global project with important implications, both positive and negative. Intended for readers who might not normally read about celebrities, it will also attract audiences often turned off by international affairs. Celebrities bring optimism and "buzz" to issues that seem deep and gloomy. Even if their lofty goals remain elusive, when celebrities speak, other actors in the global system listen.

Celebrity Diplomacy: Who Does It, How, and Why?

Celebrities have had a long association with the modern world of diplomacy. Benjamin Franklin—often considered the first American celebrity—assiduously worked the French Court of Louis XVI.¹ The quixotic reputation of Lawrence of Arabia remains indelibly connected to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. And a stunning range of prominent actors, writers, poets, and entertainers—including Shirley Temple Black, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz—represented their countries as ambassadors.

Yet, if not completely new, the enmeshment of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century celebrities in diplomacy is quite different in nature, scope, and intensity. The selection of Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates as Time magazine’s 2005 persons of the year serves as just the most visible measure of how new types of celebrities performing an expanded range of activities are being recognized on the international stage.

Such a phenomenon cries out for some conceptual clarification as well as extended analytical treatment. Teasing out the motivations and modes of operation of this emergent cohort of diplomats is important, but so is the task of finding out exactly who these new celebrity diplomats are. Bono and the Gateses cover two very distinctive streams of activity that merit close attention. They do not, however, exhaust the list of celebrities who have ventured into the diplomatic world.

The personalities featured in this book perform their roles in global affairs through fundamentally different means than state officials and diplomats. The wave of celebrity entertainers and entrepreneurs is largely a public phenomenon, defined by an activism on the world stage that is cast as the stylistic opposite from the insulated and secretive world of mainstream diplomacy. An element of spectacle informs the activity. The mode of operation is decidedly populist in style. Few, if any, among these celebrities have any formal training, either academic or practical, in the workings of diplomacy. Their initiation is done without any extensive apprenticeship. The message they put out is cast in colloquial and sometimes markedly undiplomatic language. The site of diplomatic activity—if showcasing familiar diplomatic techniques such as communication and signaling—is decidedly unconventional. Instead of resident embassies and communiqués, their platforms of choice include interviews in a wide cross-section of new as well as old media and mass performances via staged events.

DO CELEBRITY DIPLOMATS DO DIPLOMACY?

If setting some parameters about who the celebrity diplomats are is important, an even more basic question must be teased out: Is what these entertainers and entrepreneurs do on the global stage actually diplomacy? Few of their activities mesh easily with the mode of behavior associated with traditional diplomatic culture. The biggest gap has to do with the criterion of representation, where there is no basis for seeing any of the celebrity diplomats as members of a formalized guild of diplomats.² Celebrities, unlike official diplomats, cannot easily claim that they speak for a constituency, whether defined as a cause or a people.

One way of getting around this issue of legitimacy is by taking a giant postmodern leap and simply adopting the view that everybody has the potential to be an authentic diplomat.³ If diplomacy is wedded to everyday activity along a wide continuum and a robust and open-ended version of individual agency, the normative claims of traditional state-centric diplomacy are eroded.

If that is too big a stretch, a less diffuse argument can be made that some celebrities deserve to be included as diplomats on their own merit. For all their personal awkwardness—whether because of amateur enthusiasm or big egos—celebrity diplomats in clustered form do ft into some of the generic components of diplomatic culture. They combine the assertive individualism characteristic of the West with an appreciation of universal or cosmopolitan values. They abhor the use of violence. They engage in continuous dialogue, although not in a restrictive fashion, with multilateral forums such as the United Nations (UN) and the Group of Eight (G8). They are eager to balance what can be considered “megaphone diplomacy” with face-to-face engagement with official actors up to the level of chief executive, whether presidents or prime ministers.

The activities of celebrities on the global stage highlight as well the adaptive quality of diplomacy. Their enhanced role demonstrates the interplay between the domestic and the global in a very obvious fashion. Diplomacy has become porous not only in terms of formal structures but in terms of the fusion of informal elite dynamics. As celebrities push for recognition and support by becoming plugged into transnational policy making, the political elite use celebrities to boost their own credibility. This interplay is consolidated by the combination of publicity and symbolic and material resources that celebrities can generate.

The enhanced role taken on by celebrities reveals the cracks in the rigidities of the modern Westphalian state-centric system. Celebrity diplomacy emphasizes global reach in terms of problem solving, pushing for activity when and where it is needed. The Latin root of ambassador, ambactiare (meaning to go on a mission) has effectively become the mantra of diplomacy used by celebrities. All push hard against the constraints of the fixed way of doing things. All blend enthusiasm with outrage. All privilege a transnational trajectory over national sensibilities.

The current wave of celebrities squarely targets the arenas of global governance, global equity, and global regulatory issues. Efforts to end global poverty, to cancel debt, to expand programs of official development assistance, and to focus on HIV/AIDS and other pandemic health issues, all of which are heavily concentrated on Africa, would be on the top of most current lists of celebrity activism. The diplomatic project of Bono is at the core of this book, because of its blend of both representative and unique qualities. In the same manner as Nelson Mandela or Pope John Paul II, Bono’s role transcends the boundaries of easy categorization. As the lead singer of U2 and cofounder of DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), Bono not only stands out as the archetypal celebrity diplomat but also bridges the gap between the Hollywood and corporate categories. In light of his pivotal role and reach in activities, it does not seem an exaggeration to talk about the possibility of the Bonoization of diplomacy.

Because of his imprint as a moral entrepreneur, Bono escapes most of the criticism for opportunism and superficial fluff heaped on other celebrities who have taken on a diplomatic profile. And this Teflon effect is well merited. A breathtaking gulf exists between Bono’s serious and sustained enterprise and many other copycat celebrities who say that they “want to save the world.” Bono comes closest to reproducing the operational brand of good international citizenship found in state and societal expressions of initiative-oriented diplomacy. But as we will see, Bono does not escape all criticism: a ripple of negativity has emerged, due in large part to the perception that his means have become distorted in the pursuit of his goals.

Getting the attention of elite decision makers is as salient as playing to a mass audience for Bob Geldof, who often is twinned with Bono in the hierarchy of celebrity diplomats. Geldof has embraced the role of maverick, cajoling and embarrassing state officials to do more in the priority areas he has targeted. What he does well is mobilize and shame. If Geldof has continued to stir things up, in the persona of “Saint Bob” or “Mr. Africa,” he has also become part of the establishment. In this duality Geldof highlights an important contradiction in the mode of operations of celebrities. At least in posture, Geldof can be termed an extreme antidiplomat—impervious to the pull of socialization. But he has embraced and been embraced by the state elite. Geldof’s extended process of estrangement has been not with the apex of power, but rather with sections of civil society in the global justice movement.⁴

Notwithstanding the projection of these two bigger-than-life personalities (and their ability to work as the smooth and rough edges in parallel forms of engagement), it would be misleading to elevate them to a position that completely disconnects them from other celebrities entering the world of diplomacy. In tune with the argument that the new aristocracy of stardom comes from a variety of sources, including “royal stars,” “true” Hollywood stars, as well as musical stars, the candidate net for celebrity diplomats must be widened.⁵ No discussion of this activity can leave out the legacy of the charismatic Diana, Princess of Wales, and the campaign to ban antipersonnel land mines, an initiative that also linked celebrity diplomacy and a hybrid form of state/ nonstate diplomacy. Nor should the wealth of glamorous enthusiasts located in the world of Hollywood, whether pioneers such as Audrey Hepburn or the current wave with Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, or George Clooney, be ignored. The mutual attraction of Hollywood and the UN is especially intriguing and deserves its own chapter before the analysis moves onto a detailed examination of the activities of Bono and Geldof.

SETTING SOME BOUNDARIES

Nuancing the nature of celebrity participation also helps set the boundaries about their relevance and performance as diplomats. A distinction needs to be made between the celebrities this book profiles as “celebrity diplomats” and those celebrities who have taken up political careers or causes exclusively at the domestic level. For the purposes of this study, the boundaries still remain tightly drawn in a number of important respects. One basic point of distinction is between official and unofficial roles. Once a celebrity runs for elected office, a line is crossed even if the same celebrity’s diplomatic profile is expanded. Illustrations of this split abound in the United States from President Ronald Reagan to Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler turned governor of Minnesota, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the “Terminator” who morphed into the governor of California.⁶ But this phenomenon is global. Just one recent illustration is the experience of George Weah in Liberia. Weah, through his fame as the 1995 FIFA world player of the year and his leadership of the Liberian World Cup football/soccer team, had become a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) goodwill ambassador with a high profile, especially among youth. Leveraging this opportunity, Weah used his sporting fame to mount a strong run at the presidency of Liberia in 2005.

The entertainers and entrepreneurs who have become ascendant diplomatic actors must be distinguished as well from the state officials and professional diplomats accorded celebrity status. This group deserves scrutiny in its own right. With greater space to operate, access to media, and in some cases, at least, an enhanced taste for self-promotion, some statesmen in this cluster both intersect and rival for attention of the type celebrity diplomats possess, as discussed in this book. It is true of extremely high-profile retired diplomats such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Holbrooke.⁷ After all, Kissinger (under the moniker of Dr. K) tightened the connection between diplomacy and popular celebrity status. But it is also the case with the current superstar trio of ex-leaders, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, and, of course, the hyperactive Bill Clinton. All have, in one way or the o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Celebrity Diplomacy: Who Does It, How, and Why?
• 2 Star Power and the United Nations: From Audrey Hepburn to Angelina Jolie
• 3 The Bonoization of Diplomacy?
• 4 Bob Geldof: The Antidiplomat
• 5 Davos: Mixing Glamorous Buzz with Material Bite
• 6 (Uneasily) Moving Celebrity Diplomacy beyond the Anglo-Sphere
• Conclusion: The Contentious Future of Celebrity Diplomacy
• Notes
• Acronyms
• Index