Last Wednesday I attended a half-day conference in StockholmAt Rival. on public diplomacy, nation branding, and Sweden’s image abroad. Speakers included Olle Wästberg, head of the Swedish InstituteHe was previously Consul General for Sweden in New York, where I once met him at a party at Anna L.’s loft., Leif Pagrotsky, Sweden’s minister for education, research and culture, Mark Leonard, the mind behind Tony Blair’s successful Cool Brittania rebranding campaign, and Simon Anholt, the authority most often on tap when countries decide to talk brandingIt is Anholt who was behind the recent survey that picked Sweden as the country with the world’s most powerful brand (albeit from a limited menu of 11 countries). He also said he “sort of doubts it” Sweden will top the next survey, which comes out quarterly, as it will include 25 countries, including strong competitiors Canada, New Zealand, Switzerand and Australia..

If you speak Swedish, then you can read Bloggforumer Jonas Morian’s account. He zooms in on the most surprising part of the event: Pagrotsky ripped into Svenskt Näringsliv, a pro-business interest group, for willingly sabotaging Sweden’s image abroad in order to score political points at home against the ruling Social Democrats. The example he proffered is an interview he gave the FT extolling Sweden as a desirable place to invest, only to have a Svenskt Näringsliv member write a letter to the editor contradicting the minister.

This was not the only debate of this kind that erupted during the past week. June 6 saw the publication of a letter in a Latvian daily on the occassion of Sweden’s national day, apologising for the Swedish government’s support of a recent trade union blockade of a Latvian construction firm operating in Sweden. The letter was signed by 50 Swedes of a liberal persuasion. This prompted Hans Karlsson, the Swedish minister for employment, to demand an apology for the apology from those in the oppostion parties who had signed it.

All this raises a great many interesting questions in the context of public diplomacy and nation branding. Suddenly we’re no longer just discussing what Sweden’s image abroad is, but also about who owns this image, whose responsibility it is to maintain it, and whether there is a patriotic duty for Swedish citizens to present a unified face before foreigners when it comes to this image.

But first, what precisely is public diplomacy? Leonard defined it as “to understand, inform, influence and build relationships with civil society abroad in order to create a positive environment for the fulfillment of (Swedish) political and economic objectives.” This might sound like propaganda tout court, but in fact it is meant to convey a more honest, cooperative approach to making other people like you, in the same way that Robert Scoble blogging for Microsoft is meant to make us like the company, especially because he sometimes concedes a point or takes up your cause with Bill. It’s all rather just a clever implementation of Joseph Nye’s notion of soft power, and it works for me.

The other thing to take home from Leonard’s speech is that these days, governments only have marginal control over a country’s image abroad; Embassies have relatively little impact on a foreign public’s perceptions. Instead, it is foreign correspondents covering local US news who inform most Europeans about the goings-on there. It’s Swedish tourists just being themselves in Greece who shape perceptions of Sweden there. It’s foreign students in Italy deciding that the country is a political basket case. All this is rather obvious, really.

The decentralized way in which a country’s image is contructed in the minds of foreigners constrains those who would deign to tweak it. If the branding exercise begins to strain credibility, then it becomes propaganda, which in these days eventually means a PR backlash.

Anholt argued in his talk that nation branding at its core is about articulating a common identity — and this begins with the stories citizens tell each other about who they are. It’s a bit marketingese, but I can buy into that. In which case, if Swedes agree on what these common stories are, then the task of branding Sweden abroad is made much easier.

But what if Swedes do not agree on which stories are common to all? Or what if they believe that some of these stories are nothing to be proud of? What if Pagrotsky’s story to the FT is not the consensus view held by Swedes, but one of several competing narratives about what Sweden really is?

I think the situation is somewhat analogous to what’s been happening in the US. It used to be the case that Americans left partisan bickering at home when travelling abroad. Overseas, Americans would rally around the flag and support their president, regardless of whether he was Republican or Democrat, because flag and president were symbols of the country that transcended partisanship — they formed part of the narrative that all Americans could agree on.

This pact has frayed before, notably during the Vietnam war, and it has frayed again post-9/11, as exemplified by the Dixie Chicks in the runup to the second Iraq war: They told Europeans they were ashamed President Bush was from Texas because they felt “the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”

If one is a patriot, when is it alright to break rank and criticize government policy abroad? Never? In that case, the Dixie Chicks were wrong, as was Svenskt Näringsliv and the 50 Swedish liberals. (Not to mention Alexander Solzhenitsyn.)

A more workable answer is that, if you are a patriotI keep on adding “if you are a patriot” as a qualifier, as I myself am not a patriot of any stripe., it is alright to take the partisan battle abroad if you feel your government is attempting to recast its ideological underpinnings as your country’s national brand.

To American liberals I’ve talked to, Bush’s endorsement of neo-con foreign policy prescriptions after 9/11 seemed to amount to that. When their domestic opposition to the war in Iraq led to their patriotism being questioned, these suspicions were bolstered.

In Sweden, the stakes are not nearly as high, but we have a similar situation: In the case of the letter to the FT, the author seems to feel that the image of Sweden being promoted abroad — as a business-friendly place to invest — is belied by actual government policy. In the case of the apology to the Latvians, the authors seem to be saying that the ruling Social Democrat’s regulatory approach to the labor market — “ordning och reda” — used to prevent Latvians from competing in Sweden, is not in fact a core Swedish value, but rather a Social Democratic ideology whose effect abroad is harming the image the Baltic states have of Sweden as the example to emulate. The letter of apology to the Latvians, then, becomes an attempt to redress the balance of the impressions that form the image of Sweden in the minds of Latvians.

If it is the government that owns the Swedish brand, then these letters certainly are unpatriotic attempts at interfering with affairs of state, and Pagrotsky and Karlsson are right. But if the brand is owned by the people, then a government policy with effects abroad that strays too far from common values should be expected to lead to letters like these.