ECP Monitor
Russia’s ECP has a strong ideological dimension that emphasizes “sovereign democracy,” introduced by Vladislav Surkov in 2006 to characterize modern Russia, as well as traditional values of faith, family, and fatherland. Compared with the US and its espousal of universalist principles, Russia is a more reactive and opportunistic global power with its distinctly conservative and parochialistic approach. Similar to China, Russia subordinates civil liberties to national security and this has made the country subject to criticism of its political system. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s relationship with the EU and the US reached an all-time low since the end of the Cold War (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2022). Under Putin’s regime, Russia has become more authoritarian, with a crackdown on civil society and ever-expanding control of the media, especially since 2022.
“Public diplomacy” is primarily intended to support the goals of U.S. foreign policy, economic aims, and protect national interests and security by influencing the public abroad. In this, cultural and educational promotion plays a mostly subordinate role to geopolitics. The US ECP system reflects the privatized national understanding of culture, which is intended to be largely independent of the state. While such a system could create incoherence in other circumstances, the US has the luxury of falling back on its private sector sources of soft power. Indeed, even without a coherent ECP, the US dominates most of the world’s cultural, educational, and scientific fields.
Germany: references
(2023)
Germany: fact sheet
(2023)