Heine
As President Obama's recent European tour showed, public diplomacy is where the action is in international affairs today - leaders and public officials reach out directly to citizens, so that the latter influence governments. This was also evident during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's tour of Asia, where she was all over the place - from TV morning shows to primary schools and NGOs of various kinds. In Europe, Obama was dubbed as "the most popular man in the world". Not everybody fits that bill, and you need some star power to pull in a crowd and hold it.
Celebrities can certainly do that, and, in this media-driven age, the latest trend within public diplomacy is "celebrity diplomacy", a concept coined by my CIGI colleague Andrew Cooper in a recently published book with that title, which, quite fittingly, has a picture of Bono with President George W. Bush on the cover.
From Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to Richard Gere, Mia Farrow and George Clooney, celebrities championing their pet international causes are all over the place these days. At Davos, Sharon Stone makes as much of a splash as Bill Gates, and many find this discomfiting.
Cynical view
The cynical view is that celebrities do this to keep themselves in the news and sell more records or movie tickets. It is always difficult to judge motives. But it could be argued just as well that taking up controversial causes is bound to alienate some, thus cutting into your fan base.
It is easier to judge results, and here the evidence is quite positive. Celebrities often do make a difference. Government spending on humanitarian programmes abroad is not always popular, and being able to count on the public support generated by celebrity endorsements helps politicians.
Perhaps the single biggest accomplishment of President George W. Bush was his considerable increase in US aid to Africa to fight AIDS - up to US$15 billion, something triggered in part by Bono - the lead singer of U-2 - who worked on it tirelessly. Bono even managed to turn around the late Senator Jesse Helms' views on international cooperation to Africa, no mean feat, given the enormous clout the latter wielded for many years as chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
As we approach the 15th anniversary of that historic concert by Harry Belafonte on April 19-20, 1959 in Carnegie Hall, a performance that made for the first live album ever recorded that became a major hit, and one of the great musical performances of the century, we should recognise the role played later on by Belafonte in the early days of "celebrity diplomacy", when the very concept had not yet been coined.
The 'King of Calypso', and the man who brought Jamaican folk music to the whole world (is there anybody who does not know "Daylight come and me wanna go home"?) Belafonte started many decades ago what Bono and Madonna are doing today.
Fame
Harry Belafonte - File
Matilda was, of course, the song with which Belafonte shot to fame in 1953, and his calypso was the first album to sell over a million records. His fame reached even far-away Chile, and I still remember my parents and their friends dancing to Belafonte's music in our home's living room, to a rhythm ("she take my money and run to Venezuela") that was all the rage throughout Latin America. He was the first black performer to win a Tony award (in 1954), and the first black man to win an Emmy (in 1959). The Banana Boat Song was another great hit, as was Mama Look a Boo Boo, and he sang at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. He was one the great stars of 1950s America.
He also performed in many films, including Carmen Jones, Island in the Sun, and The World, the Flesh and the Devil - often pushing the envelope in the fraught interracial relations climate of the '50s and '60s - and did so as recently as 2006 in Bobby, the Emilio Estevez movie about Bob Kennedy's assassination.
Belafonte, who could have easily settled into the life of easy comfort of top singers and actors, was inspired instead by his role model, Paul Robeson. He threw himself into the struggle for civil rights, backing the cause being championed by Martin Luther King Jr, and refusing to perform in the South from 1954 to 1961, given racial discrimination there. A close confidante of King, he was one of the organisers of the 1963 March on Washington DC, on which he also spoke.
In the 1970s and '80s he focused on Africa, taking up the anti-apartheid cause with great zest, honouring African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo and being involved in putting together the Grammy-winning We are the World to raise funds for the continent, as well as singing in the Live Aid concert in 1985. In 1987, he became a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. He worked later on Rwanda, and has also taken up humanitarian causes in Kenya, particularly with children.
In an interesting role reversal, he even engaged in musical diplomacy, convincing Fidel Castro that hip hop was a significant art form, thus clearing the way for its expansion in Cuba.
"Pushing the envelope" is what Harry Belafonte has done all his life, and one does not have to agree with everything he has said. He may have been among the first celebrity diplomats, but he certainly does not speak in diplomatese. That is not the point. Half a century after that extraordinary concert at Carnegie Hall, which broke new ground in what show business is all about, we should recognise the man who, after making Jamaican folk music known all over the world, took on another big task, at a time few fellow artists cared to do so, helping to make that world a better place.
Jorge Heine holds the Chair in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.