‘Museums are the new United Nations.’ So says Jack Loman, the director of the Museum of London. He is one of many professionals, and increasingly policymakers, calling on cultural institutions to act as instruments of foreign policy.
Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is enthusiastic about this mission and is currently floating it as a new strategy. A recently appointed programme manager has been working on the viability of the idea for the DCMS, undeterred, it seems, by the hostility towards Labour’s foreign policy and the criticism of its cultural policy enacted to date.
Many think government foreign policy can only benefit from this approach. Sir Christopher Frayling, head of the Arts Council, explained why in a speech outlining and endorsing this programme some while ago. Cultural organisations ‘are able to win a certain trust precisely by being seen as at a distance from government’, he said. In other words, arts organisations can do the bidding of the Foreign Office and meddle abroad without looking like the British government; something Frayling bizarrely believes is positive.
Frayling suggested that targeted cultural policy, imposed by British arts organisations, can win the hearts and minds of foreign peoples better and more subtly than political leaders such as the globetrotting Tony Blair. This sounds like a case for the Arts Council to go into places where British forces have intervened; as they would put it to ‘deliver democracy’. And anyone who doesn’t support this development will be convinced by cultural professionals instead of soldiers.
Frayling warned in his speech that arts organisations will have to be careful to avoid coming across as top-down and imperialist: ‘The risk is that a cultural foreign policy both sounds and may act as cultural imperialism, at which the UK, like many other countries, has proved extraordinarily adept over the years.’
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