West European cultural policies as a political instrument: British Council case

This study aims to unveil the fact that instrumentality of culture for the sake of political and commercial objectives has not been a question limited to only the official cultural policies of post-war era but was already inherent in the historical emergence of culture as a concept; to determine that the aforementioned cultural policies did not appear from void but emerged as results and expressions of a certain historical process, and that they do not consist of only the nominal policies led by governments but also other public policies influencing the cultural life of the society should be considered as implicit cultural policies; finally to specify that the British Council is an organization which uses culture as an instrument for such an objective as to promote the British interest and prestige, in other words to enhance the political and commercial influence of the United Kingdom in the world. Although culture has too many definitions, these can be classified in three configurations as 1) human intellectual development, 2) national geist, and 3) a general body of arts. The first chapter clarifies how those configurations had developed through such phenomena as race, nation and class. The meaning of culture as human intellectual development, which was a key concept in the French Enlightenment, is a configuration that has operated on racism and colonialism tracks. Likewise, the national geist meaning of culture, a product of the German Counter-Enlightenment, has been an integral part of the international antagonism processes. Meaning of culture as the general body of arts, which reflects an Anglo-Saxon approach, has been expressed in the tensions between social classes for distinction and distance. The second chapter of the study analyzes the form of the French, German and British cultural policies gained at the post-war era. The final chapter, on the other hand, consists of a description of British Council's raison d'etre, foundation process, bureaucratic position, and the reactions it gave to such historical processes as decolonization and the Cold War, and an analysis of the organization's operational characteristics and the type of instrumentality it employs.