CULTURAL DIPLOMACY AND PEACE

Abstract

For more than a century, the cultural diplomacy has been an integral part of the contemporary diplomatic practices, indispensable module for recognition, approximation and cooperation of near and distant cultures. The unobtrusively attractive power of culture and cultural diplomacy is called “soft power” in the foreign political relations. The soft power allows to create lasting relationships of trust, affection, friendship and partnership in a wider political and social context. Culture, cultural policies and cultural diplomacy of the 21st century acquire the status of a strategic political determinant, both in internal political aspect and within the frames of foreign policies. Culture is a component of building relations of trust and approximation, but also a ground for misunderstandings and conflicts that may occur between different cultures and religions. The cultural diplomacy can be an еxtremely useful instrument for prevention of conflicts and crises, especially where the political and economic conflicts are followed by religious and cultural confrontations and crises. The role in the rehabilitation and the return to normal life in the regions of wars and armed conflicts is indisputable. Peace as the highest and most valuable benefit of civilization has never been lasting and for ever-gaining global reality. For certain regions and districts the absence of peace has become their most deficient factor for decades. If the cultural diplomacy has the power to prevent and rehabilitate the serious disturbances of peace and peaceful international coexistence of peoples, states and religions, it certainly can be one of the most important components and instruments in building аssumptions for lasting and sustainable peace on the contemporary international scene. The global peace, the minimization of the numerous open regional war hotspots, the whole world economic and social development in conditions of necessary consensus of the opposed interests, must in itself contain components of culture and cultural diplomacy. The culture informs, creates, connects, converges, and in conditions of irreconcilable social exclusivities and xenophobia can be an irreplaceable tool in the processes of social cohesion. Numerous educational forms, musical, fine arts, literary contents, TV and radio, films, theatres and ballet, archeology and cultural heritage, language as an indispensable instrument for understanding, up to the newest forms of digital cultural action through the largest global medium, internet, are inevitable and vitally important factor for solution of post-conflict and post-crisis situations This study, by referring to specific examples on building assumptions for lasting and sustainable peace, takes into consideration numerous activities of cultural diplomacies of states, international organizations, non-governmental and civil societies.