Images of Nations and International Public Relations

Michael Kunczik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136689017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

This volume addresses the importance of images of nations in international relations. One fundamental assumption is that the behavior of states is not the same as that of individuals. States are social systems whose behavior as a rule directly corresponds neither to the motives of their respective leaders nor to those of their populations. However, it is also self-evident that international activities always depend on personal relationships. The studies presented relate to more or less deliberate attempts to induce change in images. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter, findings made in public relations, advertising research, prejudice research and other fields are also taken into account. Very often it is impossible to distinguish between the image of the nation-state and the images of big enterprises such as Krupp, Ford, or Coca Cola. For this reason, the country of origin effect is also discussed.

1 Introduction to the Problems of International Image Cultivation

DOI: 10.4324/9780203811917-1

Preliminary Remarks

The first time one visits a new country, regardless of how thorough his or her preparation, it is always different from the way he or she imagined it would be. Not all Scots are tightfisted and frugal, and they do not all run around in kilts and play bagpipes. Not all the Swiss are bankers, nor do they spend their time yodeling from the mountains. And the Viennese have other things to do besides dancing waltzes. At the same time, one discovers that the inhabitants of the host country often have the most peculiar, largely inaccurate, perceptions of one’s own country. The question is, what kind of information has created such images, and can they be changed?

Images of certain nations, however right or wrong they might be, seem to form, fundamentally, through a very complex communication process involving varied information sources. The process starts with one’s experiences in very early life; in school; in children’s books, fairytales and other leisure literature; the theater and so on, and may include accounts by relatives, acquaintances, and friends. But radio and TV transmissions of international programs, newspapers and magazines, cultural exchange programs, sports, books, news services, and so on are probably the strongest image shapers. The various communication sources are responsible for the image or images of another nation in all strata of a population. Education and travel – that is the degree of personal experience of foreign cultures – are also of extraordinary importance to image building.

Practically anything can contribute to our forming an image of another nation: the fact that a bottle of Italian wine tastes of cork; that the highways in Russia are awful; that the consular official has bad breath; that yet another product made in Germany doesn’t work; that the opposing national team plays more unfairly than our own ever would or, rather, than we perceive it ever would, which is the more likely of the two, for in observing a very physical game, like soccer, the supporters of each team, as a rule, see two completely different games, with one’s own players the heroes and the opposing players the villains. Third parties may be affected altogether differently again by the match. During the Grenoble winter Olympics in 1968, the West German ice hockey team brawled with the United States team. According to the German public relations (PR) practitioner, Rainer Fabian (1970), this earned the Germans considerable empathy from the French, who are not enthusiastic fans of the United States.

As to what public relations could do to remove prejudices between peoples, Fabian (1970) responded: “They present one’s own nation to the other as being as likeable as possible. They exchange ambassadors and arrange state visits, they put on art shows and transport warm blankets to the locality of a disaster, they print brochures and invite students to a language course, they do all they can and they hope that at the next soccer international there is no brawling between the players of the two teams. Then all the work was for nothing. Public relations between nations is the most difficult variety of public relations work” (p. 29). von Studnitz (1950) put it this way: “In the old days one could win over an empire by marrying, today you can win over peoples by a leading article” (p. 299).

However, one cannot wholly agree with such assortions with respect to the imputed fluctuation of nation-images from the point of view of research. Thus, social psychologists M. Sherif and C. W. Sherif (1956) observed that “once established in a group, stereotypes tend to persist” (p. 653). Similarly, Deutsch and Merritt (1965) in their analysis of research findings on the effects of events on national and international images, came to the conclusion that “human thinking and imagining” is very resistant to “sudden environmental pressure”: “Almost nothing in the world seems to be able to shift the images of 40 percent of the population even within one or two decades” (p. 183).

With respect to the entire field of image building, it can be said that there has not been enough research on the historical dimension. So called “classical” literature also transports images. Thus, objections were raised in the United States against using Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” in school lessons on the grounds that the character of Shylock would prejudice youngsters against Jews. Similar objections were raised against Pinocchio as allegedly featuring “Italians and ‘assassins’ in close association” (G. W. Allport, 1954/58, p. 196). Many prejudices about nations are carried forward through the generations, so that historical events of long ago remain decisive in a nation’s image.

This is so with the Germans’ perception of Russia, for example, shaped decisively in the 16th century by reports about the despotic czar, Ivan IV (“the Terrible”, 1533 – 1584). Since then, Germans’ predominant image of Russians has been that they are cruel, naive, and servile. The misdeeds and horrors perpetrated by Ivan have not been perceived as those of a pathological individual, but as a trait in the Russian or, more precisely, the Muscovite national character. Thus, in 1706, Christian Stieff characterized the Russians as a people born to be slaves: “Their nature is so corrupted that they will do nothing voluntarily; only the harshest and most cruel beatings can make them do anything at all”. Just before World War I, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II expressed to the Austrian foreign minister, Count Leopold Berchtold, the opinion that “Slavs were not born to rule, but to serve; this had to be brought home to them”. Conversely, an old Russian adage says, “The Germans have invented the devil.”

Even Czar Peter the Great (1689 – 1725), the “master craftsman on the czarist throne”, who tried to reform Russia and open it to Europe, was not able to change decisively the Germans’ notions of Russia, although his efforts were very positively assessed in Germany. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz (1646 – 1716), for example, saw Russia as a kind of clean slate under Peter the Great. It had a chance, he observed, to avoid many mistakes made elsewhere and to adopt the best from both Europe and China. As late as the 19th century the Berliner Albert Lortzing wrote his very popular opera, “Zar und Zimmermann” (“Czar and Carpenter”), in which Peter’s deeds are positively depicted. Peter the Great himself, in fact, already pursued image cultivation for Russia. His diplomats were instructed no longer to use the terms Muscovites or Muscovia, because they were associated with Ivan the Terrible; instead they were to use Russians and Russia. In other words, a positive image of a “changed” Russia was to be built up. Russia urgently needed at the time to make specialists from Europe want to go there to work.

Someone who became famous for image cultivation by deception was Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, who wanted to show his empress, Catherine II, how successfully he was colonizing New Russia, the Ukrainian steppes, although he was, in fact, overreaching himself. In 1787, accompanied by a splendid retinue and the ambassadors of foreign powers, the empress traveled via Smolensk to Kiev and then down the River Dnepr on a lavishly appointed fleet of galleys. The journey proceeded through a world of villages with garlands, triumphal arches, and make-believe buildings – the fantasy world of the Potemkian villages. An entire sham world of people busy at their work, of trade, and of change had been staged all along the Dnepr. The supposedly flourishing villages on the banks and beyond were wooden backdrops. The cheering crowds were comprised of serfs breathlessly hurrying ahead of the royal route to play their jubilation role over and over again.

Fidel Castro used much the same ruse to make his guerrilla force appear bigger than it was. Some authors (e.g., Ratliff, 1987) suggest that Castro got his job through The New York Times that is, through the help of Times correspondent and editorial writer Herbert Matthews, who had visited Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Ché Guevara, and others in the Sierra Maestra on February 17, 1957. The famous article “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout” appeared on the front page of the paper on February 24, 1957, with the subhead “Castro Is Still Alive and Still Fighting in the Mountains.” The Times article was of central importance to Castro’s further career and made Castro an international figure. The overestimate of the size of Castro’s forces was the result of Castro’s enormous skill in handling journalists and his extreme adroitness in manipulation. Castro only had about fifteen men with him: “And while the interview was going on … Raul would march in a group of ten men, and then they would be marched off stage, they would change hats, and be marched on stage again. Castro was so successful that Matthews’s three lengthy articles were laced full of references to Castro, with about three hundred troops, [and to] our other camp where the rest of our troops are” (Wallach, 1987, p. 149 – 150).

In his famous book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann (1922) wrote: “Man … is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach” (p. 181). The mass media are, in fact, continuously offering images of nations. Take this random selection of cover story topics in Time magazine: Super Japan; Panama’s Noriega, with the cover headline “The Drug Thugs: Panama’s Noriega Proves They’re a Law Unto Themselves”; Colombia, “Can Colombia Break Free From the Drug Lords?”. But the image of the United States is also drawn, and not only positively: “Drugs in the United States: Kids Who Sell Crack.” The image of the United States abroad was also the subject of a Time cover story: “A Candid Look at How The Rest of the World Views America Today” (March 27, 1989). These reports in Time, without a doubt, affect the images of the respective countries. After publishing a cover story “Gun Crazy” (August 2, 1993), reporting on violence in the United States, a German reader wrote: “I have never visited the United States, and after reading your report will not. I hope that our youth in Europe will be spared the terrible gun habit.” (This letter to the editor was published in Time on August 23, 1994; the cover story was titled “America the Violent: Crime Is Spreading and Patience Is Running out.”)

In the weekly German news magazine, Der Spiegel, the Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Haiti, Lebanon, and Panama were described as states that have been bought by the worldwide drug cartel so that they could run their drug business undisturbed. Cutlip (1994) gave an account of unethical public relations connected with the image of the Bahamas: In 1955 public relations firm Hill & Knowlton acquired the Bahamas tourist account. During the 1960s, there were rumors of a close connection between the gambling house and gangsters. In 1965, Allan W. Witwer, a former reporter then in charge of Hill & Knowlton’s Bahamas account quit his job and started to write a book, The Ugly Bahamas, in which he made use of his confidential information. Witwer could not find a publisher. Cutlip (1994) wrote: “Then with an obvious motive, he took the chapters to Hill and Knowlton and not so subtly suggested that Sir Stafford Sands, Minister of Bahamian Tourism, might be interested to know about his proposed book. According to Fortune, Bill Durbin, H & K’s vice president for foreign accounts, read the book and hurried down to Nassau” (p. 451). According to Cutlip, Durbin convinced Sands that the publication of the book would damage the Bahama’s image. H & K arranged for the manuscript to be bought by a dummy publisher.

Mexico, too, has an image associated with drug corruption. The drug dealers are said to have an ideal situation in Mexico: They do not sit in the President’s palace, but they control political decisions without anyone beein able to prove it. This negative image of Mexico became even more pronounced after the assassination of José Francisco Ruiz Massieu in 1994, General Secretary of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, because the brother of the victim was Mexico’s deputy attorney general in charge of the war against narcotraffickers. Mexico is now regarded by many people as a narco-democracy. The image of Mexico has been further damaged by the 1994 peasant revolt in Chiapas.

This bad image caused Enrique Krauze, a Mexican journalist, to write an article about the image of Mexico, “Violence: Legend and Reality” (1994). Krauze argued: “In 1994 Mexico seems destined to confirm all the old stereotypes, after all, it is the land of Pancho Villa, where men with handlebar mustaches and wide-brimmed sombreros whip out pistols at the slightest provocation, making it a perennial theater of human sacrifice” (p. 39). Krauze maintained that Mexican history is the stuff of legend, but some of the legends are far from true. He characterized Mexico as a peaceful country that from 1930 to 1994, was “a haven of stability in a region that oscillated between anarchy and dictatorship”. But “at least for the moment, the legend of a barbarous, violent, unstable Mexico has become a reality”. Whether Krauze was correct or not, Mexico no longer has the image Marie Robinson Wright described in Picturesque Mexico (1897): “Mexico, land of mystery and romance; land of mingled tradition and history; land of vast forests and fruitful valleys; of snow-capped mountains and inexhaustible mines; land of sapphire skies and unrivalled climate; land of tropic luxuriance and noble patriotic hearts; of thee would I sing; thy praises would I carry to the farthest end of the broad green earth” (p. 15). Mexico’s bad image may have been the reason for an elaborate campaign: In pursuit of congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico spent more than $25 million between 1989 and 1993 for public relations and lobbying (Manheim, 1994, p. 34).

There can be no doubt that the mass media influence the way a country’s people form their images of the people and governments of other countries, because it is the mass media that disseminate the greater part of the information about foreign countries, but, in the context addressed here, I must note that into the 1970s, the thesis was widespread in communication science that mass media had no effects at all. This empirically untenable claim has never been valid with respect to the forming of images of other nations.

Hollywood, the dream factory, disseminated images of nations from the outset. Thus, according to Richards (1973) in the 1920s and 1930s, a completely stylized and mythic England was created, “where nothing ever changed, where everyone knew his place and where civilized dramas of life and love could be played out. This became even more important with the outbreak of the Second World War. For the projection of this image as an ideal world reinforced the British in their struggle to preserve it and convinced the Americans that it might be worth fighting for, too” (p. 107). This presumed effect cannot be sustained by quantitative data, however.

Woll (1980) traced the evolution of the portrayal of Latin American men, women, and locales as shown on the American screen from the birth of the motion picture until the 1980s, and concluded that the Latin has remained a rapacious bandit or an object of ridicule: “Americans … receive a dominant picture of Latin society populated by murderous banditos and submissive, but sensual, pleasant women” (p. 2). Films influenced and continue to influence fashion, language, and foreign images. In a study sponsored by the American Commission for Freedom of the Press and News Exchange, “Peoples Speaking to Peoples”, L. White and R. D. Leigh (1948) pointed out that among the many examples of false perceptions of America that surfaced during World War II, the most incredible were not found among the jungle inhabitants of Borneo, but among West Europeans, who had seen dozens of Hollywood films.

The influence of novels, films, and youth literature in forming images of foreign nations and countries should not be underestimated. One of the most important British writers of youth literature to spread the vision of the British empire was George Alfred Henty (Huttenback, 1970). Henty’s writings dealt with events in the history of British imperialism. His heroes were gentlemen and adventurers. They were of modest and brave character. In his books the beneficial aspects of British imperialism were emphasized. Not much store was put in intellectual abilities. In With Clive in India, one reads, “What do the natives care for our learning? It is pluck and fighting power that have made us their masters”. Sheer imperial racism probably emerges most clearly in The Tiger of Mysore. The Rajah of Tripataly tells his sons, “We in India have courage; but it is becau...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction to the Problems of International Image Cultivation
• 2 Problems of International Image Cultivation
• 3 Mediation of Foreign Policy
• 4 Observations on Image Changes
• 5 Short Historical Outline of Image Cultivation by Governments
• 6 Selected Cases of International Public Relations
• 7 International Image Cultivation During Cold War Times
• 8 Image Policy During Wartimes: Theoretical Considerations and the Gulf War
• 9 Consequences for Image Polishing
• References
• Index