True Cultural Diplomacy Is Subversive
March 4, 2021
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Andrei Tarnea
Culture is intrinsic to identity, in both its individual and collective expressions. Culture is indelibly imprinted in all our products and activities. For millennia, culture traveled. Tradesmen and caravans, ships and refugees, migrants and warriors transferred, shared, and shaped the cultures we live today. Culture escapes controls, borders, and legal barriers and it circulates with the constant human flow of a roaming species. It speaks, translates, and mediates.
Diplomacy is inseparable from culture. Goods, practices, and ideas including cultural traditions and habits were used as tools of diplomacy. But, ever stubbornly, culture is not just what governments chose it to be.