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What does the Modern Jazz Quartet have to do with diplomacy?
In 1960, the cool jazz musicians became cool jazz ambassadors in a U.S. State Department-sponsored trip to Germany. The idea behind sending the MJQ, as aficionados called them, was that diplomacy can be conducted in many ways, from high-level official meetings to concerts.
The MJQ was one of many groups sent abroad by the State Department in an exercise of cultural diplomacy. As scholar Nicholas J. Cull writes, those efforts for more than a century have exported U.S. culture and brought many foreigners to the U.S. over the decades.
“Government-funded cultural diplomacy is an old practice,” writes Cull, an expert on public diplomacy who teaches at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Cull chronicles a history of those programs that begins in 1889, when “President Benjamin Harrison’s government hosted a delegation of leaders from Latin America on a 5,000-mile rail tour around the American heartland as a curtain raiser for the first Pan-American conference. The visitors met a variety of American icons, from wordsmith Mark Twain to gunsmiths Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson.”
Over more recent decades, the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has brought “foreign leaders to the U.S. for visits, funds much of the Fulbright international student, scholar and teacher exchange program and works to get American culture to places all across the globe,” writes Cull.
But President Donald Trump has proposed cutting almost the entire budget that pays for those programs. Cull quotes James Mattis, who told Congress in 2013, when still a general heading Central Command, that cultural diplomacy plays a crucial role in keeping the peace: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully,” he said, “then I need to buy more ammunition, ultimately.”
PS: Listen to the MJQ video embedded in the story. You’ll catch a little cool for yourself.
Also in this week’s politics news:
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