A Review of Ludovic Tournès’s Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde.

Ludovic Tournès. Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde: Les États entre promotion nationale et propagande. Paris: Armand Colin (Collection U), 2025. 240 pp. €30. ISBN 978-2-200-64185-6.

I. A Long History of an Ungentle Art

In the spring of 2025, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed American embassies worldwide to “tell the story the way America would tell it,” recasting what had long been called cultural diplomacy as an overt instrument of psychological warfare. The directive was only the sharpest expression of a broader dismantling: the Fulbright Program curtailed, Voice of America gutted, the United States Agency for Global Media restructured. To anyone raised on the comforting vocabulary of “soft power,” the moment feels novel. To Ludovic Tournès, it is the latest swing of a pendulum that has been moving since the 1850s.

Tournès’s Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde, published by Armand Colin in the autumn of 2025, is the first sustained attempt in any language to write a genuinely global history of states’ use of culture as a foreign-policy instrument. Its subtitle — Les États entre promotion nationale et propagande — supplies the book’s central tension. Cultural diplomacy, on Tournès’s account, is never innocent, never quite “soft,” and never far from the propaganda it claims to leave behind. The book arrives at a moment when the field it surveys is being violently rearranged: American withdrawal, Russian isolation, the rise of East Asian cultural industries, and the proliferation of new actors from Gulf monarchies to the European Union. This review reads the volume both as a synthesis of three decades of new diplomatic history and as a provocation aimed at the soft-power vocabulary that has dominated policy discourse since Joseph Nye’s 1990 coinage.

The argument is best understood comparatively. Against Nye, Tournès insists that “soft power” is a prescriptive policy concept masquerading as an analytical one. Against the dominant Anglophone literature on cultural diplomacy — particularly the work of Jessica Gienow-Hecht and the Berghahn “Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy” series — Tournès refuses to confine the story to the Twentieth Century’s superpower rivalry. Against his own earlier Américanisation. Une histoire mondiale (Fayard, 2020), which traced a single vector of cultural projection, this new book widens the lens to encompass all states’ cultural projection as a structured, long-duration historical phenomenon. The result is a compact, argumentative synthesis that deserves readers well beyond the Francophone academy.

II. The Author and His Quarry

Ludovic Tournès is professor of international and global history at the Université de Genève, an ancien élève of the École Normale Supérieure, and — unusually for a historian of diplomacy — also a published poet. Born in 1969, he came to cultural diplomacy through a strikingly oblique itinerary. His first major monograph, New Orleans sur Seine: histoire du jazz en France (Fayard, 1999), traced the reception and political instrumentalization of jazz in twentieth-century France, treating music as a vector of American cultural presence without reducing it to a tool of state. A long sequence of articles and edited volumes followed on American philanthropic foundations — the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in restructuring French social science in the 1930s, the Ford Foundation’s cultural diplomacy of the 1950s, the broader architecture of philanthropic Americanization in the twentieth century.

This itinerary culminated in 2020 with Américanisation. Une histoire mondiale (XVIIIe–XXIe siècle), published by Fayard and awarded the Grand prix des Rendez-vous de l’histoire. That book — over 450 pages — argued that “Americanization” was not a natural diffusion of attractive goods but a deliberate, state-coordinated, and contested project reaching back to the eighteenth century. It was, in retrospect, the immediate intellectual preparation for the present volume. Where Américanisation examined one projection vector (the American one) over the long haul, Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde widens the lens to all vectors, while tightening the chronological focus to the period — roughly 1850 to the present — in which the modern nation-state and its cultural apparatus took shape.

The 2025 book is therefore best understood as both a synthesis of Tournès’s career and a pivot. The earlier musicological and philanthropic interests remain visible — jazz and Voice of America broadcasts appear at key Cold War junctures, and the Ford Foundation receives sustained treatment — but they are now embedded in a much larger architecture that takes in the Alliance française, the British Council, the Soviet university system, the Confucius Institutes, Japan’s Cool Japan strategy, and South Korea’s KOCIS-KOFICE apparatus. The book’s compact format (240 pages in Armand Colin’s didactic “Collection U” series, aimed at students from the baccalauréat through the third year of university) means that this widening of scope comes at the cost of depth in any single case. The trade-off, as we shall see, is deliberate.

III. The Argument: A Repertoire, Not a Soft Power

The book’s conceptual architecture rests on a single phrase: “répertoire d’actions.” Cultural diplomacy, Tournès argues, is not a thing but a set of practices — language teaching, artistic touring, scientific exchange, sports diplomacy, broadcasting, film export, literary promotion — assembled at different moments by different actors and only subsequently coordinated (more or less tightly) by the state. This definition lets him integrate private associations (the Alliance française, the Dante Alighieri Society, the Japan Foundation), paragovernmental agencies (the British Council, the Instituts Cervantès), religious actors (the Jesuits), educational institutions (the Confucius Institutes), and the artists, intellectuals, athletes, and scientists who serve as unwilling or willing vectors.

The phrase “diplomatie culturelle” itself, Tournès notes, was coined in 1936 by the Hungarian academic János Hankiss and only diffused into diplomatic practice after 1945. Its slow institutionalization is itself an historical fact requiring explanation. Tournès traces that explanation to the parallel emergence of nation-states and national cultures: cultural diplomacy becomes conceivable only when a state possesses a discrete “national culture” to promote. Hence the book’s nineteenth-century starting point — not because cultural exchange did not exist before 1850 (it manifestly did), but because only in the nineteenth century did states begin to conceive of culture as a coherent instrument of foreign policy.

The book’s sharpest conceptual move is its critique of Joseph Nye’s “soft power.” In a long conversation with Florian Louis published in Le Grand Continent in April 2026, Tournès lays out the case in four steps. First, soft power is a “concept of a policy practitioner” that is prescriptive rather than analytical; it tells states what they ought to do, not what cultural diplomacy has actually been. Second, it is analytically redundant: the concepts of “cultural diplomacy,” “public diplomacy,” and “hegemony” already do the work, and Tournès suspects Nye coined “soft power” precisely to avoid the Marxist and Gramscian resonances of “hegemony.” Third, soft power implies a “magic” by which attractive ideas diffuse themselves, whereas the historical record shows that even the most apparently attractive cultural goods — Hollywood cinema, for instance — required aggressive studio strategies and systematic state support to internationalize. Fourth, the term has been so over-extended in common usage that it now obscures rather than illuminates.

“The concept of soft power should in my view be left to political practitioners. It designates what one would like to see come about, and not what is or has been.” — Ludovic Tournès, Le Grand Continent, April 2026

The subtitle’s tension — “promotion nationale” versus “propagande” — is not a moral dichotomy but a historical gradient. Democratic propaganda, Tournès insists, differs in form from totalitarian propaganda, but both exist, and both have historically used the same channels (radio in particular). The boundary between the Alliance française teaching French in 1890 and the Committee on Public Information exporting Hollywood in 1917 is, on his reading, far more porous than the actors themselves cared to admit. Crucially, Tournès also distinguishes cultural diplomacy from public diplomacy (a distinction often elided in Anglophone usage): the former concerns cultural productions proper — language, literature, music, theatre, sport — while the latter concerns information and news in the service of foreign policy. The two overlap (broadcasting does both), but they are not identical.

IV. The Chapter-by-Chapter Architecture

The book is organized in five chapters that follow a clean periodization. The first chapter is theoretical and historiographical: it surveys the existing literature, offers the “répertoire d’actions” definition, distinguishes cultural from public diplomacy, and lays out a typology of actors (states, paragovernmental agencies, private associations, religious organizations, individuals). It is here that Tournès positions himself against the soft-power framework and against the Anglophone tendency to absorb cultural diplomacy into public diplomacy.

Chapter II covers what Tournès calls “proto-cultural diplomacy” from 1850 to 1914 — the period in which the repertoire of actions is elaborated but not yet coordinated. Three sub-themes structure the discussion: linguistic diplomacy (the Alliance française founded in 1883 under the presidency of Paul Cambon, the Italian Società Dante Alighieri founded in 1889, the German support for schools abroad formalized with a dedicated budget at the Auswärtiges Amt in 1878 — by 1913, 511 schools serving 60,000 pupils); university and scientific diplomacy (the early Rockefeller-funded exchanges, the Pasteur Institute’s foreign branches); and intellectual and artistic diplomacy (concert tours, theatre tours, the early universal exhibitions). The point is that these actions existed in isolation, undertaken by different actors with different motives, before any state thought to assemble them into a policy.

Chapter III (1914–1945) traces the institutionalization of cultural diplomacy under the pressure of total war. The First World War crystallizes the field: within weeks of August 1914, each belligerent creates dedicated agencies for the cultural struggle. The American Committee on Public Information (1917) is emblematic — at once a propaganda organ explaining American war aims to domestic and foreign audiences and a vehicle for the accelerated export of Hollywood film. The interwar period sees professionalization and the rise of totalitarian cultural ambitions: Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (March 1933) seeks not merely to legitimate the regime but to overturn the liberal international cultural order and impose a new one under Nazi domination. The chapter closes with the Second World War, where the boundary between cultural diplomacy and propaganda effectively disappears.

Chapter IV (1947–1989) is the Cold War chapter and the longest. Tournès resists the temptation to reduce the period to a bipolar contest. Yes, the superpowers’ cultural diplomacies confront each other — Voice of America jazz broadcasts versus Bolshoi tours, Fulbright exchanges versus Soviet university training — but the chapter’s analytical interest lies elsewhere. Defeated powers (Germany, Japan) use cultural diplomacy to re-enter the concert of nations: Japan joins UNESCO in 1951 and founds the Japan Foundation to develop Japanese studies abroad. Declining imperial powers (France, the United Kingdom) use it to compensate for geopolitical retreat: France clings to its “magistère mondial,” with 53,000 pupils in Alliance française classes by 1953, even as the linguistic battle against English is visibly being lost. And “emerging” cultural diplomacies appear — a category Tournès uses capaciously, encompassing Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, but also Switzerland, a developed country that had not previously cultivated a cultural diplomacy.

Chapter V addresses the recomposition of cultural diplomacy in the twenty-first century. Its central concept is “désoccidentalisation”: a structural erosion of American cultural diplomacy (deepened by the Trump administration’s sabotage of Fulbright and Voice of America), a decline of Russian cultural reach (compounded by post-2022 ruptures with European universities), and the corresponding rise of Japan’s Cool Japan strategy (formalized as “pop culture diplomacy” by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2006), South Korea’s hallyu (orchestrated by KOCIS and KOFICE), and China’s Confucius Institutes — over 500 worldwide, though recruitment difficulties and espionage suspicions complicate the picture. Tournès also examines new non-state actors: Gulf petro-monarchies, the European Union, and the ambiguous case of billionaires such as Elon Musk whose private cultural interventions sit in a grey zone with state power.

V. Sources, Method, Geographic Scope

Methodologically, Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde is a work of synthesis rather than archival discovery. Its scaffolding is the substantial body of monographic literature produced over the last thirty years by the “new diplomatic history” — a historiographical current that has displaced the older state-centric and treaty-focused diplomatic history in favour of an approach that takes seriously cultural circulation, private actors, transnational networks, and reception. Tournès draws eclectically on this literature, integrating case studies produced by specialists of individual countries and weaving them into a single argument. The result is bibliographic breadth without primary-research depth — a trade-off inherent to the “Collection U” format, which is explicitly didactic and aimed at students from the baccalauréat to the third year of university.

The book’s geographic ambition is its strongest methodological claim. The Franco-British-American triangle that has dominated the existing literature is here displaced by a genuinely global cast. France (the Alliance française, the Institut français, AEFE) and the United Kingdom (the British Council, the BBC’s pedagogical broadcasting, the Commonwealth cultural infrastructure) receive sustained treatment, as does the United States (the Committee on Public Information, Hollywood, Fulbright, Voice of America). But the book also engages seriously with Germany (the imperial school network, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry), Italy (the Dante Alighieri Society through fascism and into republican Italy), the Soviet Union (the massive university exchange programme that trained hundreds of thousands of African and Asian students), Japan (UNESCO accession, the Japan Foundation, Cool Japan), South Korea (the KOCIS-KOFICE apparatus and the hallyu strategy), China (the Confucius Institutes and their contested reception), Turkey, Brazil, Senegalese pan-Africanism, Switzerland, and the Gulf monarchies. The European Union appears as a novel non-state actor.

The cover image — the Russian Cultural Centre on the quai Branly in Paris, recently opened and known to most Parisians by its distinctive silhouette but rarely visited — is an emblematic choice. It captures the book’s central paradox: cultural diplomacy is everywhere visible, but its actual reception is hard to measure, and its intended audience (diasporas, in the first instance, then broader foreign publics) often differs from what its practitioners publicly claim. Tournès concedes that “evaluating the impact, success, result of cultural diplomacy, is the hardest thing to do,” but insists that the very fact that states have practiced it for a century and a half, with ever-growing investment, is itself evidence that they take it to be effective.

VI. Historiographical Positioning

The book sits at the intersection of several historiographical currents. The most immediate is the “new diplomatic history” that has reshaped the study of international relations since the 1990s. Work by scholars such as Jessica Gienow-Hecht (whose Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, published by Berghahn in 2010, has been a touchstone for Anglophone scholarship) has insisted on treating cultural diplomacy as a serious object of historical inquiry rather than as a footnote to political-diplomatic history. Tournès draws on this literature extensively but refuses one of its key premises: the tendency to dissolve cultural diplomacy into public diplomacy and to treat the two as analytically equivalent. His insistence on the distinction — cultural diplomacy concerns cultural productions proper; public diplomacy concerns information and news — is a deliberate reassertion of the older Francophone tradition (Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Robert Frank) against the Anglophone synthesis.

A second positioning concerns Joseph Nye’s soft-power framework. Nye introduced the term in Bound to Lead (1990) and developed it in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004). Over three decades, “soft power” has migrated from academic political science into policy discourse, journalism, and even corporate strategy, accumulating along the way a remarkable imprecision. Tournès’s critique — that the concept is prescriptive rather than analytical, that it obscures the role of coercion, that it implies a magical diffusion of attractive ideas — is not wholly original (it echoes earlier critiques by historians and international-relations scholars), but it is the most sustained and historically grounded critique now available in French. Crucially, Tournès does not simply reject the concept; he argues that “hegemony,” used in a non-doctrinaire Gramscian sense, does the analytical work that “soft power” only appears to do.

A third positioning is internal to Tournès’s own oeuvre. Américanisation. Une histoire mondiale (2020) argued that Americanization was a coordinated project of cultural projection reaching back to the eighteenth century. The new book widens the lens: Americanization becomes one vector among many, no longer the master category of global cultural history. The shift is significant. Where the 2020 volume ran the risk of reproducing, even while criticizing, the American-centric frame, the 2025 book genuinely de-centers the story. The proliferation of cultural diplomacies — from a small Western club in 1900 to nearly two hundred state actors today — becomes the book’s organizing historical claim. The nineteenth century, Tournès observes, may have been the century of nationalisms, but the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been even more so, with the number of independent states growing from around forty in 1900 to nearly two hundred today, each one cultivating, or aspiring to cultivate, its own cultural diplomacy.

Finally, the book engages — sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly — with the broader contemporary literature on cultural policy, soft power, and cultural industries. The Anglophone literature on Voice of America, the USIA, and the Fulbright Program (Lipschitz, Cummings, Arndt) is treated respectfully but critically; the French literature on rayonnement and action culturelle extérieure (René Girault, Robert Frank, Anne Dulphy, Gilles Kepel on cultural Islam) provides much of the empirical scaffolding for the French case. Tournès’s refusal to treat the State as an anachronism in an age of NGOs, foundations, and billionaire cultural entrepreneurs is itself a polemical position, pushed back against the dominant transnationalist current of the last two decades.

VII. Critical Assessment: Strengths, Limits, Provocations

The book’s strengths are substantial. The first is its genuinely global scope. Few works in any language attempt to encompass French, British, American, German, Italian, Soviet, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Brazilian, Senegalese, Swiss, and Gulf cultural diplomacy within a single argumentative frame, and fewer still succeed in doing so without losing analytical coherence. Tournès’s “répertoire d’actions” concept is the key: by treating cultural diplomacy as a set of practices that can be assembled in different configurations by different states at different moments, he is able to compare across cases that older, state-bounded literatures could not. The result is a book that genuinely earns the adjective “mondiale” in its title.

The second strength is conceptual clarity. The distinctions between cultural and public diplomacy, between cultural diplomacy and propaganda, and between the search for hegemony and hegemony actually acquired are consistently and usefully drawn. The book’s sharpest passages — the critique of soft power, the analysis of how defeated powers use cultural diplomacy to re-enter the international system, the discussion of how declining imperial powers use it to compensate for geopolitical retreat — are conceptual rather than empirical. They will be quoted.

The third strength is the book’s most quietly subversive: its treatment of Soviet university exchanges. Tournès notes that the Soviet Union hosted hundreds of thousands of African and Asian scholarship students during the Cold War — many more than the tens of thousands hosted under American exchange programmes — taking on the entirety of their tuition for three or four years. He observes, in passing, that this helps explain why Russia’s image in Africa and Asia remains less negative than Western observers assume, and why so many African and Asian states did not condemn the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The point is not original to Tournès, but it is made here with unusual clarity, and it is the kind of long-arc historical insight that justifies the genre of synthesis.

The limits are correspondingly clear. At 240 pages, the book can only gesture at depth in any single case. Specialists of French cultural diplomacy will find the Alliance française and Institut français treatment familiar; specialists of Japanese Cool Japan will find nothing they did not already know from the work of Koichi Iwabuchi and others. The 1850 floor is acknowledged as arbitrary — Tournès admits in the Grand Continent interview that earlier forms of cultural diplomacy “probably” existed but that he did not want to “venture onto terrain I did not know sufficiently.” The twenty-first-century chapter’s treatment of digital platforms and of billionaire diplomacy (the Musk case is mentioned but not developed) feels preliminary, and one wishes for more on South-South cultural flows beyond the Brazilian and Senegalese cases.

More substantially, the book’s relationship to the question of reception and effects is uneasy. Tournès concedes that “evaluating the impact, success, result of cultural diplomacy is the hardest thing to do,” and offers language-learning statistics and exchange-programme numbers as proxies. But the conceptual apparatus for moving beyond proxies — for assessing how cultural diplomacy is actually received, contested, reappropriated, or ignored by its target publics — is not developed. This is partly a limit of the synthesis format, but it is also a limit of the field, and a more explicit acknowledgment of it would have strengthened the book. The most provocative moments — the equation of soft power with prescriptive politics, the insistence that the national frame is reinforced rather than dissolved by globalization, the refusal to treat the State as an anachronism — are stated more than argued. They will, however, stimulate useful disagreement.

VIII. Conclusion: Why This Book, Why Now

Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde arrives at a moment when its subject is being violently rearranged. American cultural diplomacy is being dismantled in real time. Russian cultural infrastructure is being shuttered across Europe in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. East Asian cultural industries — from K-pop to Japanese manga to Chinese video games — are visibly displacing Western soft power in markets that Western states long took for granted. New non-state actors, from Gulf monarchies to the European Union to billionaires operating in the grey zone between private and public, are entering the field. To read Tournès’s long-arc history in 2025–26 is to be reminded that none of this is unprecedented: cultural diplomacy has always been weaponized, the boundary between promotion and propaganda has always been porous, and renouncing cultural diplomacy — as the United States is currently doing — is itself a political choice with political consequences.

The political resonances of the book have not been lost on its early reviewers. Chloé Maurel, writing in Le Monde diplomatique in December 2025, singled out the “désoccidentalisation” thesis as the book’s most striking claim. Boris Faure, in lesfrancais.press the same month, used the book to frame the troubled reform of the Agence pour l’enseignement français à l’étranger (AEFE), arguing that France’s universalist discourse now collides uncomfortably with the contraction of its cultural network. Florian Louis’s April 2026 conversation with Tournès in Le Grand Continent drew out the book’s implications for the Trump-era sabotage of American instruments. These readings confirm what the book itself only implies: that a historical synthesis of cultural diplomacy, written at this moment, is inevitably also a political intervention.

For the general educated reader, the book is best approached as an invitation rather than a closed argument. It offers a map of a vast field, a vocabulary for thinking about it, and a set of provocations that will repay engagement even from readers who ultimately disagree. For historians of international relations and cultural policy professionals, it will be an indispensable reference. For students in the Francophone academy at which the “Collection U” format is explicitly aimed, it is an exemplary introduction to the genre of argumentative synthesis. One hopes for an English translation: the book’s de-centering of the American case and its sustained critique of soft power deserve an Anglophone readership that the original French will not fully reach. At a moment when the international cultural order is being remade, Tournès has provided the indispensable historical compass.

References

Faure, Boris. Une « Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde ». lesfrancais.press, 4 Dec. 2025, lesfrancais.press/une-histoire-de-la-diplomatie-culturelle-dans-le-monde.

Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E., and Mark C. Donfried, editors. Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy. Berghahn Books, 2010.

Louis, Florian. « La diplomatie culturelle est-elle une forme de propagande ? » : une conversation avec le chercheur Ludovic Tournès. Le Grand Continent, 3 Apr. 2026, legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2026/04/03/diplomatie-culturelle-propagande-tournes.

Maurel, Chloé. “Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde. Les États entre promotion nationale et propagande.” Le Monde diplomatique, Dec. 2025, p. 24, monde-diplomatique.fr/2025/12/MAUREL/69079.

Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. PublicAffairs, 2004.

Tournès, Ludovic. New Orleans sur Seine: histoire du jazz en France. Fayard, 1999.

Tournès, Ludovic. Américanisation. Une histoire mondiale (XVIIIe–XXIe siècle). Fayard, 2020.

Tournès, Ludovic. Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde: Les États entre promotion nationale et propagande. Armand Colin (Collection U), 2025.

Tournès, Ludovic. Publications. Département d’histoire générale, Université de Genève, unige.ch/lettres/istge/enseignants-chercheurs/tournes-old/publications.

Tournès, Ludovic. Ludovic Tournès. Cairn.info, shs.cairn.info/publications-de-ludovic-tournes–5840.

Dunod / Armand Colin. Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle dans le monde. Dunod, 2025, dunod.com/histoire-geographie-et-sciences-politiques/histoire-diplomatie-culturelle-dans-monde-etats-entre.

[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of GLM, Zhipu, tools (July 30, 2026). The featured image has been generated in ChatGPT, OpenAI (July 30, 2026).]

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