Diplomacy on the Map. What Recruitment Practices Tell Us about the French Audiovisual Dilpomacy

This article focuses on French cultural diplomacy by analyzing one of its specialties: audiovisual diplomacy. It studies how its agents (the “audiovisual attachés”) are recruited, showing that the French audiovisual diplomacy’s main orientations are mostly decided during this crucial administrative step. There is a sharp contrast between these strong recruiting mechanisms and the autonomy the attachés feel abroad. In fact, as soon as the attachés’ personal qualities are matched with the regions where they are posted abroad, three groups are made visible, each with their own agenda: “Cooperation veterans” are sent to sub-Saharan and northern Africa or to the Middle-East, “young scouts” to Asia and eastern Europe, and “culture hostesses” to North America and western Europe (where they specialize in film festivals and non-profit broadcasting). Three heterogeneous stakes (cooperation, culture and business) are then combined within a unique audiovisual diplomacy. This is highly original and explains why such a diplomatic specialty has survived despite not having an equivalent in other countries’ diplomacies. As it is eventually suggested in our concluding remarks, focusing on recruitment as we did would probably help greatly to account for policies of various institutions that rely on agents deployed across the world.