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The basic instruments of public diplomacy are hardly new. The United States, for example, has conducted educational and cultural exchange programs for almost sixty years. Cultural diplomacy is usually an exercise in deferred gratification, since such exchange programs typically don’t offer immediate or obvious payoffs. Instead, programs such as the Fulbright educational exchanges represent a long-term strategic investment in establishing mutual trust and understanding. Similarly, the US information programs overseas have a long pedigree: the daily Washington File (formerly the Wireless File) began operation in the State Department in 1935 after an ambassador complained that the slow distribution of official information was “about as useful as a Roman ruin in a fast-changing world”.

The flow of information since has neither slowed nor stopped changing. In recent months, the biggest internal change, of course, has been integration. Public diplomacy programs, once administered by the US Information Agency, are now integrated into the Department of State under the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Moreover, public diplomacy officers serve in each of the Department’s regional and functional bureaus and in public affairs sections of the embassy.

Internet: <www.publicdiplomacy.org> (adapted.).

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Public diplomacy officers serve either in the Department’s regional and functional bureaus or in public affairs sections of the embassy.

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Pierre Englebert’s attempt to measure all of Africa using the yardstick of a single historical factor is highly problematic. In this regard, Englebert’s book suffers from four tendencies, the first two of which involve a dominant mode in current writing about Africa, and the third and fourth of which reflect the constraints of academic publishing, particularly in the United States of America. Current writing about Africa is characterised, firstly, by a remarkable tendency to generalise about the entire continent, which no author specialising in Asia, for example, would dare contemplate. This usually involves the extrapolation of a single empirical situation to the entire continent. In Englebert’s case, this clearly relates to his experience in the eastern Congo, which is made to serve as an example for all of sub-Saharan Africa. This tendency is associated, secondly, with an intensive search for a single factor that would explain the plight of Africa, a conceptual master key that can unlock the puzzle of the “African exception”. Englebert’s book is a typical example of this tendency to substitute historical explanations with a philosophy of history. He is not concerned with the identification of contingent factors which, through their myriad combinations and mutual (correlated) causal processes, have led to the emergence of the current complex situation on the African continent. Instead, he claims that the entire situation arose from a single historical moment — that of decolonisation — and evolved by necessity from this, and that this historical moment gave birth to a structure of post-coloniality, from which African states are fundamentally incapable of liberating themselves (while non-African post-colonies apparently are capable). Here, the argument becomes outright theological: The sovereignty accorded by outside actors represents the “original sin” of African statehood. As a consequence, and keeping in line with this theological mode of thinking, post-colonial Africa can be saved only by others.

T. Bierschenk. Book Review — Pierre Englebert (2009), Africa: unity, sovereignty, and sorrow. Internet: <http://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de> (adapted.).

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Englebert’s experience in the eastern Congo is paradigmatic for the elaboration of his thesis.