INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL POLICY https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2020.1765164 Silk road diplomacy: Geopolitics and histories of connectivity Tim Winter University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia, 6009, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The Silk Road has become one of the key geocultural and geostrategic concepts of the twenty-first century. Identified by two routes – maritime and overland, the Silk Road stretches across the Indian Ocean and Eurasian landmass; regions that will be of paramount importance in an increasingly multi-polar world. Through Belt and Road, China proclaims to be ‘reviving’ the Silk Road for the twenty-first century; ambitions that are creating forms of diplomacy across multiple sectors and countries. To contextualise such developments, this paper examines the Silk Road’s historical formation as an arena of diplomacy and international cooperation. It argues that this stylised, romanticised depiction of premodern globalisation came to be associated with peace and harmony, cosmopolitanism and inter-cultural dialogue after World War II. Within this, however, Silk Road diplomacy has served as a vehicle for nationalist and geopolitical ambitions. The paper argues such entanglements underpin China's Belt and Road Initiative today. Received 9 January 2020 Accepted 2 May 2020 KEYWORDS Belt and Road, Silk Road, Cultural Diplomacy, Heritage Diplomacy, Geopolitics Introduction China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is fuelling a common misconception about Eurasian history; the idea that the continent was connected via two single threads of commerce, one by land, the other by sea. The Silk Road has become one of the most romanticised and mythologised geocultural imaginaries of modern times, a narrative of pre-modern globalisation that evokes all the mysteries and fantasies of an exotic Orient, images of great civilisations and religions that stretch across expanses of time and land, and of rich, colourful cultures shaped by the environmental conditions of mountains, deserts and vast open plains. A narrative based around two principal routes not only signals a particular scale of commerce and connectivity, but also draws on a highly selective reading of Eurasian history as one of harmonious relations and the peaceful movement of ideas and people, technologies and goods. Today China proclaims to be ‘reviving’ the Silk Road for the twenty-first century, and in drawing on such themes for BRI cooperation a vast platform of cultural and heritage diplomacy has emerged. Beijing’s leaders declare the ‘Silk Road spirit’ is being revived via a series of relationships built on ‘trust’, ‘harmony’, ‘openness’ and ‘dialogue’ (Winter 2019). At the first Belt and Road Forum in 2017, Xi Jinping (2017) also stated that the Silk Road was the ‘great heritage of human civilization’, a legacy of ‘peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit’. Analyses of Belt and Road have primarily pivoted around infrastructure, trade and geopolitics. By implication, the Silk Road is frequently passed over as little more than a gesture to romantic pasts of trade and exchange, where the camel trails of previous centuries are replaced by transcontinental rail lines and special economic zones. Sailing ships carrying porcelain become the container ships and oil CONTACT Tim Winter Australia, Australia 6009 tim.winter@uwa.edu.au © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western 2 T. WINTER tankers of the twenty-first century. The Silk Road is thus presented as merely a palette of richly evocative imagery through which the old is paralleled with the new to make strategies of connectivity meaningful for audiences around the world. Across academia and think-tanks, it has become commonplace for it to be summarised in a sentence or two, as authors move on to the ‘substantive’ themes of BRI. This paper seeks to complicate this picture, revealing how the Silk Road operates as a strategic narrative for foreign policy. More broadly though it aims to show how the Silk Road – as an historiographical invention of the late nineteenth century – emerged in the twentieth as a platform for diplomacy and international cooperation. In pursuing this line of analysis, the paper argues that the Silk Road now operates as a space of competing agendas, enabling both nationalist and international agendas. It suggests that states mobilise discourses of Silk Road cooperation and dialogue – as promoted by organisations such as UNESCO – to advance their own diplomatic and expansionist agendas. Current events, including the accelerated development of a Health Silk Road in response to Covid-19, exemplify this. Here then we also learn how the Silk Road narrative has been shaped by the geographies of diplomacy and international cooperation in the Cold War and postCold War eras. Finally, by citing examples from Japan, the paper also argues for a more critical reading of how pan-Asianist motifs sit alongside ideas of East-West exchange within Asian discourses of the Silk Road. This, it is suggested, is critical to understanding China’s deployment of the Silk Road in the twenty-first century. Connected pasts The German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen first coined the term Seidenstraße (Silk Route) in 1877 as part of an account of his time spent in northwest China surveying routes for a possible transcontinental train line that would carry coal to a rapidly industrialising Germany (Chin 2013; Waugh 2007). A geographer in the broadest sense, Richthofen was interested in the trade routes between Han dynasty China (206BCE-220CE) and the Roman Empire, with evidence drawn from the Taklamakan Desert region, in what is today northwest China. In effect, Richthofen’s account captured a tiny fragment of a much larger history of regional trade and exchange. In the run up to World War I other scholars and explorers added further detail by gathering manuscripts, artefacts and artworks from across Central Asia. A remote outpost in the geographies of European empire, the region provided researchers from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and Sweden unique insights into some of the multivalent, multi-directional flows and networks of a pre-modern world system stretching across the Eurasian landmass. Crucially here, such scholarship also spoke to debates in Europe and Japan about civilisation, and the term’s historical, philosophical and geographical conceptualisation. In Asia, pan-Asianist writers and other critics of European colonialism stressed regional solidarity and by the 1920s such groups were holding conferences in China, India and Japan. Ideas about contact zones among ‘Asian civilisations’, as Sen (2016, loc. 293) notes, served as the foundations for building ideas of cultural and political regionalisms. These would later resurface in Silk Road narratives. With the advent of World War I, expeditions to Central Asia would drop off dramatically, and the conflict together with the ideological shifts towards history created by revolutions in Russia and the creation of the Soviet Union, would close the door on what has come to be known as the golden age of Silk Road research. In the 1930s, however, the concept began to enter the popular imagination in the West, particularly in Europe (Waugh 2010, 13–14). The new communication technologies of radio and silent film, together with newspapers, autobiographies and magazines such as National Geographic brought stories of grand adventure to ever greater audiences in Europe and North America (see Winter 2019). Sven Hedin’s trip to Xinjiang in the early 1930s and his subsequent book The Silk Road was widely read across Europe, and added to the allure of the region (Hedin 1938). Around this time Marco Polo was also becoming a figure of popular culture, in large part through a Hollywood film industry fascinated by both grand adventure and the Orient. Indeed, Marco Polo became the quintessential journeyman of the Silk INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL POLICY 3 Road, and as authors of the 1930s inflated the significance of their own exploits through reference to The Travels, Polo stretched the Silk Road story in the popular imagination through to the thirteenth century and down through the Levant. A brief but golden moment of twentieth century transcontinental adventure – during which motor vehicle expeditions sponsored by André Citroën, Buick, or Esso crossed Asia – romantically depicted trips as ‘retracing’ the steps of the thirteenth century traveller and his ‘route along the Silk Road’. Of note here then is how ideas of exchange, dialogue, openness, and cross-border trade as a source of cultural and economic enrichment became pivotal to the Silk Road story once it began to take hold in the public imagination as an enigmatic, alluring account of Eurasian history. Within this, male adventure has been a recurring theme, one that has taken on regional inflections. In the Middle East and North Africa, histories of trade, exchange and cosmopolitanism are celebrated through the fourteenth century travels of Ibn Battuta, rather than Marco Polo. In China and India, Silk Road imaginaries revolve around Buddhism, one that is conveyed through Faxian or Xuanzang, who set off on their pilgrimages in the fifth and seventh centuries respectively. The romance of this fabled history has primarily centred around the landmass of Eurasia, and the idea of camel caravans crossing desert and mountain. In Europe, the common conception of the Silk Road is of it ending in the Mediterranean. In Asia, Xi’an and Nara compete to be the Eastern terminus, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Viewing it purely as a corridor between East and West, however, ignores the histories of intraregional and north-south connection that have also become part of the narrative, particularly within Asia. Such accounts point to connections and flows through Siberia, some of which stretch southwards down through India and Iran. But as the idea of maritime routes, indeed a Maritime Silk Road, continues to gain traction, one of the core tenets of Silk Road history – that the advent of sea trade caused its decline – is being upended. This ongoing revision of the Silk Road story expands the geographies of connectivity across the Indian Ocean and up through the East and South China Seas, and brings in new themes such as the spread of Islam by sea (Kwa Chong-Guan 2013). The modern history of the Silk Road, or indeed Silk Roads, then has been one of expansion and proliferation, in its geographies and timeframes, and the themes that authors, filmmakers, museums, the tourism industry and so forth fold into the story. As a single road has become multiple routes, the Silk Road has come a very long way since Richthofen first used the term to describe trade between Han dynasty China and the Roman Empire nearly a century and a half ago (Liu 2010; Millward 2013; Parzinger 2008). Its international popularity today stems in part from the inherent ambiguities of the term, its evocative representation of other cultures and exotic pasts, and, crucially, its geographic and conceptual elasticity. Although undoubtedly instructive in pointing to a world of pre-modern global trade and exchange, it continues to procure simplicity, contrived coherence and a singular overarching narrative to a multitude of events, whether they be connected or disconnected by time and space. In a grand narrative of dialogue, openness, and the enrichment – economic and cultural – that comes from trading across borders and across cultures, the Silk Road constructs a highly stylised, romanticised and neoliberal vision of Eurasian history, ignoring and erasing the more difficult histories of war, famine, plague, imperial ambition and such like. The Silk Road is thus a quintessentially modern geocultural concept; one that constructs history through a distinct series of metaphors, notably around dialogue and connection. As we will learn, these metaphors have come to be infused with ideas of peace, harmony, cosmopolitanism, and the sense that a better world emerges from the interaction and exchange of cultures. It is these qualities that render it amenable to contemporary forms of diplomacy, which now stretch across media, heritage, the arts, museums, and multilateral politics. In such worlds, the Silk Road enables efforts to create dialogue, peace and openness to be grounded in a deeper past; giving substance to a worldview that has been threatened by the nationalism and conflict of modern times. To understand how this has come about we need to return to the 1950s.