Trade ambassadors

The 2016 edition of the Latin American Cultural Festival was launched last Friday. Organized by MAPEAL, the Macau association for promoting trans-Pacific exchange between Asia and Latin America, the festival brings to the city a series of events that will appeal to many different senses: food, movies, talks and books. MAPEAL’s vocation lies in fostering commercial partnerships through iterating dialogue and the promotion of cultural and artistic expressions. In a world in which businesses continue to be mediated by laws, language, and ways of acting which are culturally-rooted, this is rather welcomed, for the landscape is still rife with misunderstandings. Under the pressures of economic competition, MAPEAL’s agenda is somewhat counter-current and yet entirely apposite to sustainable interaction in a diplomatic vein. The origins of modern diplomacy lie in the development of thriving economies: the Italian city-states. Think Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who descended from a family of traders. His empirical knowledge of Cathay and proficiency in Chinese drew him into service at the Khan court. France perfected modern diplomacy under Louis XIV. The French King was a pioneer in acknowledging the political value of “culture” by exporting arts and intellectual knowledge as a strategy to increase France’s international influence. To be sure, a man who came to be known as the Sun King had a propensity for conceitedness, to say the least, yet he was a man of vision. Today, France’s worldwide reputation owes much to the maturation of its cultural diplomacy. The persistence of French as one of the main diplomatic languages – although French-speaking countries have a lower demographic representation than English, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish-speaking countries – reflects its history as the global diplomatic language for over a century. It is a position that was only acquired through long-term investment and hard work. Although diplomats are being increasingly trained more as technocrats – losing some of the patrician aura of old-school foreign affairs representatives – language acquisition and above-average historical, geopolitical, and cultural knowledge are still vital competencies in trade and politics. And because the strengthening of economic ties seems to go hand-in-hand with intercultural understanding, people and groups acting as ambassadors of culture for trade are crucial to the task. Diplomacy is, after all, the art of not making war. Something at which Macau has set the example for centuries. In encouraging cultural exchange and diversity, MAPEAL sticks to one of the roles the city performs best.