by Nicholas J Cull
The British Council was founded as an organ of international propaganda. During the late 1920s an influential group of civil servants became convinced that ‘British’ values of parliamentary democracy could be subsumed by the rising tide of fascism. Their response was the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries, which became the British Council. Particular Council initiatives included the teaching of English, but political messages always came along with the language tuition.
Geographical priorities included the Middle East and Latin America where the dictator powers were working hard to win friends. Significantly the Foreign Office forbade Council operations in the United States, for fear of antagonising the American’s whose sensitivity towards propaganda had been sharpened by similar British activities in the First World War. Only the attack on Pearl Harbour made America safe for British Council activity.
Of course English lessons and Shakespeare lectures could not halt the march of World War Two, but during the war itself the British Council played an important role in the neutral world, building respect for British culture and sympathy for the British cause.
This and similar efforts over the BBC external services facilitated the astonishing transformation of Britain from its pre-war image of perfidious imperialist manipulator into an new incarnation as truth teller and fount of fair play. At the war’s end the Council moved into enemy territory and helped with the process of promoting liberal democracy, and – through all import educational exchanges – direct experience of British life.
During the Cold War the British Council maintained its propaganda value and developed an important double function. It provided a point of contact with western ideas in the non-aligned world and, when thaws permitted, the Eastern Bloc. More than this, the British Council provided a view of the West distinct from that presented by the United States and its equivalent operation: the United States Information Agency; building a sense of the diversity of western culture.
There can be little doubt that the British Council facilitated the post-war emergence of English as an international language, or that its activities have aided the wider objectives of British foreign policy. The Council helped to ensure a cultural place for Britain in the modern world beyond that justified by its economic or political power: it has been a central organ of what the American scholar Joseph Nye Jr. has called ‘soft power.’ This said, however the Council has seldom attracted adequate resources or respect from policy makers, beside the occasional nod towards the Council being ‘good for trade’.
Despite neglect, the British Council lives on: hale and hearty with a seventieth birthday at hand. Like the BBC World Service it remains one of the great bargains on the Treasury’s list. One shudders to imagine a world without the British Council in which the British state turned its back on thinking people around the world and the projection of Britain were left to commercial channels: profitable audiences would see the usual mix of heritage drama and royal scandal while the unprofitable corners of the world would be utterly abandoned and prey to the loudest local opinion on exactly what British values might be.
Nicholas Cull is Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester and author of Selling War: the British Propaganda Campaign against American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II, Oxford University Press, 1995 and co-editor (with David Culbert and David Welch) of the Encyclopaedia of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion, ABC-Clio, 2003
