Turkey's cultural diplomacy activities in the Balkans: A model for strategic public diplomacy

When a country's culture has universal values and its policies serve the values and interests shared by others, thanks to its attractiveness, it increases the possibility of achieving the desired outcomes. Cultural policies are defined as the policies that state institutions, ministries, local governments, non-governmental organizations, foundations, associations and universities pursue in the cultural field for the protection and development of cultural goods and assets in a country. Cultural diplomacy is the promotion of a culture and its products to a target audience. Cultural diplomacy aims to influence and/or improve international economic, political and social relations by promoting the cultural resources, products and achievements of an actor and facilitating cultural communication. Because of the vital role that culture plays in international relations, cultural diplomacy is being debated more than ever. This is thanks to the unifying properties and human values of culture. Based on these points, this study examines the creation and coordination of Turkey's cultural diplomacy activities, the process of delivering messages and evaluation of the outcomes with the focus on how to increase the efficiency of public diplomacy institutions. This study aims to show that the hard power (political, military and economic power) is not the only decisive factor in international relations, as a result of the developments in the field of communication in the globalizing world, the image and perceptions of the countries in the public opinion of the other communities can provide more advantages than the political, military and economic power. In this regard, this study examines Turkey's policies, within the framework of cultural diplomacy, with the feedback, opinion and suggestions received from the relevant institutions, and discusses and puts forward a model proposal. In this study, Turkey's cultural diplomacy activities within Balkans were chosen as an example and policies that Turkey needs to apply in this field have been proposed. In this context, in the first part of the study, definitions of diplomacy and public diplomacy have been made, historical development of these concepts, their place in the new world order, the concept of soft power and its usage areas, image management of countries, strategic communication management and public diplomacy models have been examined. In the second part of the study, the concept of cultural diplomacy which is a complement of public diplomacy was discussed. In this part, the concepts, tools and applications of culture and cultural diplomacy were defined and the development of cultural diplomacy in the world and cultural models of diplomacy were examined. In the third part of the study, the Balkans' place in international politics and Turkish institutions' cultural diplomacy activities in the Balkans were discussed. In the first section of the fourth part, interviews conducted with representatives of Turkey's cultural diplomacy institutions have been analyzed and interpreted. This study concludes that Turkey's public diplomacy activities should be managed by an independent public diplomacy agency. In this regard, in the second section of this part, a model proposal for Turkish public diplomacy is presented and advantages and disadvantages of implementation of this model were discussed in the conclusion part. Keywords: Culture, Public Diplomacy, Cultural Diplomacy, Soft Power, Image, National Interest, Propaganda.