Abstract
Abstract Overseas broadcasting has been an integral part of the BBC’s remit since the creation of its Empire Service in 1932. Throughout its history, the BBC has consistently argued that its services for overseas listeners should not be classified as a form of British propaganda, but instead understood as a fundamentally benevolent undertaking, providing objective, impartial, and trustworthy news and information to hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide. In the post-imperial era, the World Service increasingly depicted itself as not just a ‘global public service broadcaster’, but also as a kind of humanitarian endeavour, an ‘Oxfam of the Mind’ which made a significant contribution to Britain’s wider efforts in the field of overseas development. This article critically evaluates this vision of the BBC World Service as a post-imperial ‘gift to the world’. It outlines how, in the early 1990s, the World Service created the first BBC-branded overseas development NGO, the Marshall Plan of the Mind (MPM), which used both UK government and external philanthropic funding to help promote British commercial and diplomatic interests in post-communist Eastern Europe. MPM is then contextualized in relation to the World Service’s longer (and largely overlooked) history of overseas development work and its relationship with the NGO sector, both before and after the end of the Cold War. By exploring how and why the World Service inserted itself into the NGO sphere, this work contributes to ongoing historical debates regarding the BBC’s relationship with the state and the role(s) that global development NGOs have played in shaping Britain’s post-imperial ‘place in the world’.
Highlights
Reagan unsurprisingly celebrated the recent fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, as well as the role that the capitalist democracies of the West were already playing in providing economic support and political guidance to the region as it began its transition to democratic capitalism
Tusa emphatically made the case that the World Service had a prominent and uniquely valuable role to play in ensuring that the ‘benefits of democratic capitalism’ proposed by Reagan did ‘flow’ into Eastern Europe.[3]
At the same time that Marshall Plan of the Mind (MPM) was operating in Eastern Europe, the World Service’s Somali language service was directly collaborating with Oxfam, with the latter providing funding and information to help produce the BBC’s Baafinta series, which used the power of radio to help reunite Somali families divided by civil war.[79]
Summary
On 17 October 1991, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) hosted a symposium at their London headquarters, entitled ‘Eastern Europe: New Challenges to Business’.1 The round-table brought together an illustrious panel of speakers to discuss how Western nations and corporations might support the region as the Cold War drew to a close. This article evaluates the historical significance of the BBC Marshall Plan of the Mind (MPM) organization, which was created soon after Tusa’s RSA speech It outlines the nature of MPM’s work in postCommunist Eastern Europe during the 1990s, showing how despite the World Service’s celebrated commitment to impartiality, MPM transmitted undeniably pro-capitalist and pro-British narratives to its considerable audiences in the region. MPM is contextualized in relation to the World Service’s earlier overseas development work, and situated as a direct precursor to the contemporary BBC-branded overseas development NGO, BBC Media Action In his speech to the RSA, John Tusa highlighted three main reasons why, in his opinion, the BBC World Service ought to play a leading role within Western efforts to help rebuild Eastern Europe and the (soon to be former)[8] Soviet Union after the fall of Communism. Downing Street estimated its daily audience in October 1997 at around 3 million, while in his memoir, John Tusa remarked that the soap ‘became very popular, sometimes attracting the biggest audience of the day’.55
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