11 juin 2022
François Doppler-Speranza, « Culture, Information, and the Military Challenge to U.S. Public Diplomacy in NATO France », HAL-SHS : histoire, ID : 10670/1.lhjqks
The U.S. military has long been suspicious of the intentions of civilian agencies, particularly in the area of information. As early as the 1910s, civilian and military actors sought to exercise control over the projection of an official U.S. image abroad. At that time, the United States was experiencing significant technical advances, but was greatly affected by espionage conducted within its own borders. The military demanded to exercise a right of control, especially over the dissemination of information in the press. The press held a great deal of power in wartime, since it could disseminate strategic information to the enemy. Its power of nuisance was indisputable: any misinterpretation of information could lead to a consequent lengthening of the war or even defeat. Rather than serving to encourage subversive behavior, as the first twentieth century in Europe had shown, the press cooperated with the U.S. government and contributed to the organization of a public diplomacy that came of age around the Second World War. However, the various channels of expression of U.S. culture on and around military bases abroad bore the stigma of suspicion about the dissemination of information. In France, a joint civilian-military “taskforce,” placed under the auspices of the State department and orchestrated by the U.S. Information Services (USIS) branch office in Paris, established – but also challenged – the federal control over the projection of culture and information. This presentation aims to revisit the debate over the conception and development of U.S. public diplomacy in France in light of the presence of sedentary U.S. military contingents scattered throughout the country during the NATO era. In the early Cold War years, Paris was a hub for U.S. agencies and international organizations, working – sometimes informally – alongside the host nation's military and civilian representatives. On the one hand, the U.S. military was forced to accept a certain amount of civilian control over its information activities. On the other hand, civilian organizations could not afford to bypass the military institution to influence public opinion around the bases established in small towns of provincial France. The quarrel between civilian and military power gave rise to a “parabellicist” strategy: it consisted of mobilizing culture and information in peacetime to provide a narrative on perpetual warfare in order to keep U.S. and French public opinions on war footing. Through an in-depth analysis of U.S. and NATO archives, as well as French military archives and press, this presentation aims to analyze the power struggles between military and civilian agencies over the conduct of a U.S. public diplomacy specifically designed to promote the U.S. armed forces in France. As archival evidence shows, their publicity was organized not only through existing U.S. diplomatic channels and international organizations, but also through unofficial, voluntary initiatives that encouraged cultural and social change supervised by ambassadors in combat boots.