Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World

by Jason C. Parker

Overview

The Cold War superpowers endeavored mightily to "win hearts and minds" abroad through what came to be called public diplomacy. While many target audiences were on the conflict's original front-lines in Europe, the vast majority resided in areas in the throes of decolonization and experienced the Cold War as public diplomacy- as a media war for their allegiance rather than as violence. In these areas, superpower public diplomacy encountered volatile issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization-which intersected with the dynamics of the Cold War and with anti-imperialist currents. The challenge to US public diplomacy was acute. Jim Crow and Washington's European-imperial alliances were inseparable from the image of the United States and put American outreach unavoidably on the defensive. Newly independent voices in the non-European world responded to this media war by launching public-diplomacy campaigns of their own. In addition to validating the strategic importance of public diplomacy, they articulated a different vision of the postwar world. Rejecting the superpowers' Cold War, they forged the "Third World project" around nonalignment, post-imperial economic development, and anti-colonial racial solidarity. In doing so, Jason C. Parker argues, the United States inadvertently helped to nurture the "Third World" as a transnational imagined community on the postwar global landscape. Tracing US public diplomacy during the early years of the Cold War, Hearts, Minds, Voices narrates how US foreign policy engaged with and impacted the Global South and international history more broadly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190251864
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Jason C. Parker is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction : In the Beginning Was the Word Chapter 1: Absent at the Creation: The Truman Administration's Public Diplomacy Outside Europe Chapter 2: Hearts and Minds on New Frontlines: The Public Diplomacy of the Korean War in Asia Chapter 3: Pawns, Proxies, and Pressing the Case for the "Free World": The USIA and Ike's New Look Chapter 4: A "New Babel of Voices": Cacophony and Community in the Decolonizing World Chapter 5: "Mucha Alianza, Poco Progreso": The Alliance for Progress and the Development of the "Third World" Chapter 6: True Colors: Nonalignment, Race, and the Proliferation of Public Diplomacy in the Formation of the "Third World" Conclusion: Murrow's Wager Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

"Parker's book, focused on the years between 1947 and 1962, shows how the clumsy insistence of U.S. and Soviet public diplomacy to fit all issues into a Cold War rubric created space for entrepreneurial Third World nations such as Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt or Jawaharlal Nehru's India to shape their nascent movement....Among the many works on the genesis of the nonaligned movement, Parker's book is the definitive account of the role American public diplomacy played in it."—Greg Barnhisel, Journal of American History

"A bravura performance. Jason C. Parker compellingly guides the reader to a nuanced understanding of 'the history of American public diplomacy outside Europe during the first decade and a half of the Cold War and its inadvertent role in fostering the entity of the Third World.' He examines the simultaneous drawing of two new global maps: of the Third World, or Global South as it is now known, as it was coming to grips with the decolonization of centuries-old European empires in Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean nation-states; and of the Cold War rivalry of the American and Soviet empires....Hearts, Minds, Voices is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of public diplomacy."-Joseph M. Siracusa, American Historical Review

"Hearts, Minds, Voices, an enlightening and thought-provoking history of the gap between objectives and outcomes that bedeviled US public diplomacy in the Third World, is a sobering reminder of the uncertainties surrounding the use of soft power. It is also an impressive contribution to the literature on the troubled US encounter with decolonization."—Frank Ninkovich, author of The Global Republic: America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power

"With insight, skill, and terrific use of archival sources, Jason Parker documents the attempt of the postwar United States to influence the nations of the Global South through the extensive use of what is now known as public diplomacy, but which some at the time called more bluntly propaganda. Parker perceptively suggests that the unintended consequence of this campaign was to shape not only external perceptions of what became known as the Third World but also internal perceptions. A major contribution."—Nicholas John Cull, author of The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001

"Jason Parker illuminates the ways in which the United States sought to win the 'hearts and minds' of those in the Third World in the early Cold War. His work reshapes our conception of the Cold War, demonstrating the central role that public diplomacy played in American strategy. Hearts, Minds, Voices highlights the transnational reach of public diplomacy and reframes significant turning points in American foreign policy."—Sarah B. Snyder, author of Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War

"In this imaginatively conceived, deeply informed, and meticulously researched study, Jason Parker masterfully shows how the 'Third World' created itself amid a global contest of ideas. Rejecting the binary logic of the early Cold War, and often appropriating media techniques pioneered in the West, the nations of the Global South discovered one another and joined together in an increasingly self-aware community of international actors. Parker's novel approach is to focus on US public diplomacy and to argue that Washington's groping efforts to engage non-European societies unwittingly helped to catalyze the Third World's self-creation. In so doing, the author deeply enriches our understanding of postwar global history."—Salim Yaqub, author of Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s

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