20 Years of Constructing Public Diplomacy in Post-Communist Romania: The Neglected Internal Dimension of Country Promotion

• In Event: Political/Government Public Relations

Abstract

While most research on how countries promote their images abroad focuses on communication campaigns aimed at foreign audiences (external dimension), this paper proposes a constructivist approach for investigating the echoes and debates stirred by these initiatives within the countries and among internal audiences (internal dimension). It uses a case study from Romania, a post-communist country where this topic of country promotion was subject to recurrent internal debates among various social actors and, in time, was gradually turned into a public issue. Focusing on the institutional construction of country promotion within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a key actor in promoting Romania abroad, this paper aims to illustrate how a constructivist approach can be operationalized in order to investigate the internal dimension of country promotion.
This paper draws a 20-year historical reconstitution of evolutions in Romania’s diplomacy after 1989 within MAE, aiming to trace the main practices of country promotion, integrate them into a typology, identify the typification of these habitualized practices and how they have been defined and thus, revealing the entire process of institutionalizing these practices as public diplomacy within MAE. At the same time, the main initiatives and campaigns of MAE to promote Romania abroad after 1989 are analyzed, with a focus on the definitions about Romania that these campaigns projected and on the way they were publicly legitimized by MAE’s representatives. Although the perspective of MAE is privileged, it is always considered within the interactions with other institutional and social actors, so that the actions of MAE are placed in the socio-political context of the period.
Ultimately, this paper argues that there is a need for critical thinking about the complex phenomenon of country promotion to complement the dominant functionalist paradigm in the current literature. The constructivist perspective is but one of the approaches that can be followed and it brings forward the neglected aspect of internal dimension of country promotion: the historicity, typification and habitualization of country promotion practices in a country, within the network of constant interactions and negotiations of several social actors who end up by influencing the way governments conceive and institutionalize country promotion. Thus, this dynamic and social centered view of country promotion can advance the thinking about country promotion in literature in terms of exploring theories outside public relations, public diplomacy and nation branding, and consequently of employing new research designs and methodologies when investigating this topic.

Author

• Elena Alina Dolea, University of Bucharest