From: Mai'a Cross and Jan Melissen, "EU leaders should change tone when talking to rest of the world," euobserver.com:
Not everything is bleak
Not everything is bleak. Europe can still pull itself together. With its highly-active populations, assertive regions, diverse member states, activist town halls, and attractive cities, Europe remains a mosaic of collective projection capacity without equal in the world.
Future public diplomacy should build on Europe’s evident strengths at the sub-national level, closer to civil society. European policy-makers must also wake up to the fact that maintaining the traditional separation of domestic and external communication spheres is completely out of touch with the reality of vast information flows that simply ignore borders.
Recurring criticism of EU foreign policy chief Lady Ashton has compounded difficulties for Europe’s diplomatic service to fight Europe’s negative image in the world. It is time to start trusting EU diplomats to develop new public diplomacy traditions that are also in the interests of states.
The EU External Action Service could be instrumental in moving away from the EU’s greatest shortcoming in public diplomacy: its tendency towards talking at others. Beyond such one-way ‘infopolitik’, internal image and external image are of course related.
When others start talking about Europe in a more positive light, Europeans themselves may even start believing that there is some truth to what they say.
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