The British Council and British cultural diplomacy 1934-1959: a new form of diplomacy?

ABSTRACT

There are grounds for considering the creation of the British Council in the interwar period as a manifestation of post-World War One internationalism and the search for a ‘new diplomacy’. Yet, as an arms-length body established by the Foreign Office (FO), it was expected to support not supplant traditional diplomats. If the creation of a body dedicated to cultural relations did indeed represent a new departure for British diplomacy, to what new destinations did it hope to carry that diplomacy? Focusing on the first decades of the Council’s existence, this article shows that the British Council’s growing commitment to cultural internationalism did not prevent it from continuing to function as a vector for British cultural propaganda. It also argues that the transition to Commonwealth did not diminish a commitment to the Empire, and shows the importance of recognising the tensions at work within the model of cultural internationalism adopted by the Council given that development would represent an increasingly significant proportion of its work from the 1960s onwards.

KEYWORDS:

• internationalism
• cultural diplomacy
• British Council
• empire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Richard Seymour, “Commentary,” British Council Monthly Review 1, 3, August 1947, 66. The National Archives (TNA), BW 119/2.

2. Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 126.

3. Book-length studies covering different aspects of the history of the British Council include Corse, A Battle for Neutral Europe; Morris, Culture and Propaganda; van Kessel, Foreign Cultural Policy; Ritter Imperial Encore. Other article length studies include Byrne, Hampton, Torrent and Simony in this issue.

4. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 7.

5. https://www.britishcouncil.fr/ (translated from the French); https://www.britishcouncil.org/ (consulted 16/10/2021). The first definition previously appeared in the English language version of the British Council’s website, which has recently been updated with the second text.

6. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism, 3.

7. Tallents’s pamphlet was recently re-edited in Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain. As was common at the time, Tallents uses England as shorthand for the UK throughout his essay, citing Princes Street Edinburgh and St. Andrews as examples of the ‘fame of England’; while dedicating his work to his ‘fellow citizens of the United Kingdom’.

8. Tallents, The Projection of England, 5, 9.

9. Tallents, The Projection of England, 10, 31.

10. Nye, “Soft Power,” 153; Reynolds, Britannia Overruled, 2.

11. Woodrow Wilson speech delivered at Mount Vernon, 4 July 1918, Washington, 1918, 5.

12. Sharp, “The New Diplomacy and the New Europe,” 7; Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, 1096.

13. Tallents, The Projection of England, 9.

14. Sharp, ‘Some Relevant Historians’, 363.

15. Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 86, 107–110.

16. Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 125–126.

17. The British Council’s 1940 Royal Charter stated its mission as: “promoting a wider knowledge of [the United Kingdom] and the English language abroad and developing closer cultural relations between [the UK] and other countries” https://www.britishcouncil.org/about-us/history; Diane Eastment, The Policies and Position of the British Council, 14.

18. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas, 22–23.

19. Ibid., 15.

20. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism, 142. Frank Richard Cowell, “Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946. A Personal Record”. Originally published in the Journal of World History, Vol. 10, N° 1, “International Intellectual Cooperation,” 1966. Reprinted in The Forum of Reflexion, “What UNESCO for the Future?” November 2004, XII-XV. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000145580_eng See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée.

21. Jeanpierre, “La politique culturelle française aux États-Unis”; Okret-Manville, La politique de promotion culturelle britannique en France.

22. Haigh, Cultural Diplomacy in Europe, 41; Richard Seymour, “Developments in the UK during the Second World War, leading to the practice of collective cultural co-operation,” 1965. TNA, BW 82/19. Richard Seymour (1903-?) joined the British Council in 1940 and was soon appointed Deputy Secretary-General. Having served as one of the secretaries of the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education during the war, he later represented the UK on the cultural committees of the Brussels Treaty Organization and the Council of Europe, while holding various senior positions at the Council.

23. See Rietzler, “Before the Cultural Cold Wars”.

24. Such is the assumption underlying the schema put forward by a former Council officer: ‘Cultural propaganda is at one end of a scale that passes through cultural diplomacy to cultural relations at the other end; the progression is from the use of culture as a force to advance national ends, through the association of culture with current diplomatic aims, to an open collaborative relationship’. Mitchell, International Cultural Relations, 28.

25. Donaldson, The British Council; White, The British Council.

26. Frank Richard Cowell (1897–1978) served at the Foreign Office and the British Council and was deeply involved in the setting up of UNESCO. He also published a number of scholarly works, mainly in the field of philosophy.

27. Cowell to F. Ashton-Gwatkin at FO, 7 November 1941. TNA, BW 2/85. Cowell refers to his experience as a Rockefeller Research Fellow in other countries and six months at working as Deputy Secretary-General of the British Council since the beginning of the war but does not specify his position at that time.

28. White, The British Council, 7.

29. Quoted by Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 143–144. The argument remained in force during World War Two, White to Cowell, n.d. TNA, BW 2/85.

30. Rex Leeper, “British Culture Abroad,” Contemporary Review, 148, 1935, 203.

31. Ibid., 202.

32. As stated by C. A. F. Dundas, British Council Representative in the Middle East in ‘Notes by Mr. Dundas on the Council’s Policy in the Near East’, 16 June 1941. TNA, BW 2/85.

33. Hand-written notes added to ‘Notes by Mr. Dundas on the Council’s Policy in the Near East’, TNA, BW 2/85.

34. Like Leeper, Woodward had been recruited to produce academic handbooks to inform British policy at the end of World War One, though from within the Historical Section of the Directorate of Military Intelligence rather than PID. See Otte, ‘The Light of History’.

35. C. E. M. Joad, “The Liberal Tradition,” Britain To-day 62, October 1941; Ernest Barker, “The Progress of British Democracy,” Britain To-day 64, October 1941 and “The English People,” Britain To-day 87, July 1943; Gilbert Murray, “Shopkeepers or Humanists?,” Britain To-day 79, November 1942; E. L. Woodward, “Is there an English tradition?,” Britain To-day 102, October 1944; C. K. Allen, “British Democracy,” Britain To-day 104, December 1944. A similar position was adopted in post-war editorials such as ‘And After’, Britain To-day 168, April 1950 and “A Great Nation,” Britain To-day 199, November 1952.

36. C. E. M. Joad, “The Liberal Tradition,” Britain To-day 62, October 1941, 8.

37. E. L. Woodward, “Is there an English tradition?,” Britain To-day 102, October 1944, 10.

38. Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” 699.

39. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 57.

40. Editorial, “At the Crossroads,” Britain To-day 99, July 1944, 3–4.

41. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 81.

42. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism, 145–146.

43. Editorial, “Your Country and Mine,” Britain To-day 119, March 1946, 2–3.

44. Richard Seymour, “Commentary,” British Council Monthly Review 1, 3, August 1947, 65–66. TNA, BW 119/2.

45. Editorial, “The Tennis Players,” Britain To-day 185, September 1951, 4–5.

46. Editorial, “And After,” Britain To-day 168, April 1950, 8.

47. Ibid., 10.

48. Saïd, Culture and Imperialism, 51.

49. Richard Seymour, “The British Council and the Commonwealth,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 105, No. 5010, August 1957, 781–782.

50. Laurence Brander, “On the Nature of Cultural Propaganda” (speech given to Council staff, 15 Feb. 1951), British Council Monthly Review, March 1951. TNA, BW 119/5.

51. ”A competition. The forty best books,” Britain To-day 185, September 1951, 34; ‘The forty best books’,

Britain To-day 189, January 1952, 36–37.

52. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 62–63.

53. Editorial, ‘In Defence of Culture’, Britain To-day 84, April 1943, 3. Scott-James also quotes Arnold at length in ‘Cultural or Otherwise’, Britain To-day 138, October 1947, and ‘Cultural Relations’, Britain To-day 223, November 1954. Scott-James had edited a volume of Arnold’s poetry for the Everyman series in 1908.

54. Editorial, “The Spirit of UNESCO,” Britain To-day 131, March 1947, 7–8.

55. Cowell, Culture in Private and Public Life, 228.

56. Ibid., 229.

57. Cowell expressed even greater disdain for the contemporary mass culture of those who lived in the ‘massed communities of many modern large towns and suburbs. […] Lives spent in such a dull conventional routine are so incomplete that the need for cultural values to add meaning and value to existence is now acute for millions of human beings’. Ibid., 4, 11.

58. Huxley’s detractors, according to Cowell, were “committed to the doctrinaire views of a very different tradition”. Frank Richard Cowell, “Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946. A Personal Record”. Originally published in the Journal of World History, Vol. 10, N° 1, “International Intellectual Cooperation,” 1966. Reprinted in The Forum of Reflexion, “What UNESCO for the Future?” November 2004, XXVIII. See Maurel, Histoire de l’UNESCO, 32.

59. F. R. Cowell, “Publicity for Great Britain,” November 1941, 7–8. TNA, BW 2/85.

60. Gorman, The Emergence of International Society, 4; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 13.

61. See Eastment, The Policies and Position of the British Council, 126–160.

62. Sir Malcolm Robertson M.P. in debate on colonial development, Parliamentary Debates, November 26, 1942. https://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1942/nov/26/colonial-development

63. Robertson to Casey, Minister resident in the Middle East, Cairo, 19 November 1942. TNA, BW 2/85.

64. Editorial, “The Commonwealth Pattern,” Britain To-day 110, June 1945, 4.

65. Morefield, Covenants without Swords. Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire, 2.

66. Editorial, “Collective Security,” Britain To-day 113, September 1945, 2.

67. Editorial “Imperialism,” Britain To-day 124, August 1946, 4.

68. Hyam, “Bureaucracy and ‘trusteeship’ in Colonial Empire,” 265.

69. Butler, “The ambiguities of British colonial development policy,” 129; White, The British Council, 85–88; Eastment, The Policies and Position of the British Council, 282–285.

70. Sir Charles Jeffries of the CO to Select Committee on Estimates, 1947, quoted by Seymour, ‘Commonwealth’, 1957, 783.

71. Seymour, “Commonwealth,” 1957, 784.