American Spaces
American Spaces is an umbrella program of the Bureau of International Information Programs, a bureau within the United States Department of State, to provide physical locations and applicable media with which to conduct public diplomacy. Created in the early 20th century for "countering disinformation and influencing international public opinion," these spaces, of various types and sizes, often feature unrestricted internet access as well as the rental of American books, periodicals, and DVDs.
Following World War II, these spaces proliferated in the form of libraries, Binational Centers, standalone American Centers, and America Houses all of which were brought under the "American Spaces" program in 2008. The threat of terrorism directed against these facilities resulted in the transfer of locations into either American Corners within local libraries or Information Resource Centers within US embassies. Each of these spaces exists to spread US soft power abroad.
Overview
The Office of American Spaces, subordinate to the Bureau of International Information Programs, oversees the operation of hundreds of U.S. public diplomacy locations worldwide. American Spaces was created in 2008 by Judith McHale, then the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, as an umbrella program for a host of preexisting public diplomacy initiatives. The American Spaces portfolio includes three groups of entities, some of which predate the 1953 establishment of the United States Information Agency with which some of these programs had been associated. Coupled with small literature desks in U.S. embassies called Information Resource Centers, these spaces, as tools of public diplomacy, started as large open libraries for mass consumption in the early 20th century but shifted in the 1970s-1980s into smaller public policy-oriented reference desks aimed to influence decision-makers and professionals abroad.The American Spaces provide physical space to support U.S. priorities through the conduct of the five main public diplomacy activities: the provision of news and information about the U.S., English-language instruction as well as EducationUSA advisement, cultural programming and events, and the continued recruitment of local nationals into U.S. exchange programs with ongoing alumni engagement. A study at American Spaces across East Asia and the Pacific published in 2016 by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions indicated that massive open online courses hosted in those American Spaces " increased open educational engagement with library users."
Paired with increased security concerns Post-9/11, the United States has returned to providing broader content for the mass audience as, some in the U.S. Government have concluded, American culture better carries the message of the nation than its spokespeople do. During fiscal year 2014, the Office of American Spaces operated a US$9 million budget while also directing $15 million in other funding for the renovation of existing spaces. During that year, the 715 American Spaces worldwide received 31.7 million visitors and, not counting bi-national centers, most of those visits were to the 37 standalone American Centers. As of 2017, the American Spaces program consisted of 659 American Centers, 111 Binational Centers, 443 American Corners, and 105 IRCs receiving more than 58.9 million visitors that year. Among public diplomacy programs, only the American Spaces and China's Confucius Institutes utilize a model of cost-sharing with local partners.
World Wars, libraries, and Binational Centers
Binational Centers
Binational Centers are privately founded English-language educational institutes, generally located in Latin America. The oldest of these, the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Norteamericano in Buenos Aires was founded October 17, 1927 by Cupertino del Campo, then the president of the Rotary Club of Buenos Aires. Further centers were established across Argentina including Córdoba, Mendoza, Rosario, Tucumán, Salta, and Santiago del Estero. As of 2016, there are more than a hundred of these centers in the Western Hemisphere which the U.S. Government considers "major hubs for English language learning and cross-cultural dialogue". Binational Centers were spread across many countries; in 1974 there were such centers in Freiberg, Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Saarbrücken, Tübingen.On March 11, 1990 an un-detonated bomb was discovered at the Binational Center at Chillán. On May 15, 1990 a Molotov cocktail was used against this same location. On May 24, 1990 an explosive damaged the Binational Center in Talca. The Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement attacked American Spaces twice, in the first attack on July 18, 1990, perhaps 600-800 grams of dynamite was detonated at the Binational Center in Cuzco, Peru wounding four Peruvian students. On August 8, 1990 they bombed the Binational Center in Trujillo, Peru. As of 2013, there were 112 operating centers across 19 countries. Although the Binational Centers program does not provide operational funding, it does pay academic specialists to teach English. The Binational Centers' provision of English-language lessons as a method of cultural diplomacy has been compared the Confucius Institutes' similar method with Mandarin. As of 2009, these centers became self-supporting based upon the tuition they collect. With the contraction of U.S. engagement, many locals are unaware these centers had any link to U.S. diplomacy.
Benjamin Franklin Library
The first American Center, the Benjamin Franklin Library in Mexico City, was the brain child of Carl H. Milam, then president of American Library Association, out of concern for the lack of both professional librarians and standardized book filing systems in Mexico. The price of books from private booksellers in Mexico remained out of reach for most and free lending libraries were rare. Milam's plan to build an American library in Mexico, modeled on the American Library in Paris, stalled for years until the 1936 signing of the Buenos Aires Convention, which encouraged Pan-American links between educational institutions. The Convention spurred the Department of State's creation of a general advisory committee within their Division of Cultural Relations. Milam joined the committee alongside James T. Shotwell of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an early ally of the ALA's Pan-American educational outreach plans, framing libraries in Mexico as a good-faith gesture. Also on the committee were Stephen P. Duggan, archivist and Carnegie alum Waldo Gifford Leland, and U.S. Commissioner of Education John Ward Studebaker.A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed the ALA to survey library holdings across Latin America with an eye to building a library in Mexico City. The plan involved a commitment from the Mexican government for the construction of the building, originally two separate libraries with the funding for books from private sources. As tensions rose in the lead up to World War II, the idea of creating U.S.-style libraries in Latin America aligned well with the U.S. Good Neighbor policy. Nelson Rockefeller, then leading Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, saw the ALA's library plan his foundation had funded as a way to show concrete U.S. support to Mexico as a library would serve as a platform for American information programs to retain access to Latin American raw materials markets. The OIAA took over the funding originally offered by the Mexican government. Rockefeller saw the library envisioned for Mexico City as the first of many to be built in Latin America to fill the gap left by the flagging Alliance française. A contract between OIAA and ALA was signed in August 1941, purchasing a residence at Paseo de la Reforma 34. The library opened in April 1942. At the opening ceremony, the President of Mexico, Manuel Ávila Camacho gave remarks welcoming the library as an "embassy of ideas" restraining the "present day imperialisms."
From the start the library proved very popular despite the fact that the library's initial collection of around 6,000 books were entirely in English. This success caused the OIAA to accelerate plans for further libraries in the region. The Biblioteca Americana de Nicaragua in Managua opened in October 1942 and the Biblioteca Artigas-Washington opened in Montevideo in 1943. The contract between the Department of State and the ALA for these three libraries was terminated at the end of 1946, handing sole control of the libraries to the U.S. Government. Three more branches of the Ben Franklin library were established in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla. In 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Guadalajara branch library was set on fire during a student demonstration.
Cold War America Houses and American Centers
American Centers are overseas U.S.-owned or -leased facilities that are apart from the local U.S. chancery or consulate and publicly accessible. The centers are manned by employees or the embassy or contracted staff supervised by U.S. diplomats. Following the end of World War II, American Centers were established in Allied-occupied areas of Germany, Austria, and Japan.America Houses
In Germany, the U.S. Occupation forces created the first of the postwar America Houses. The purpose of these Amerikahäuser was "to further the democratic reorientation of Germany, and to foster the assimilation of the German people into the society of peaceful nations..." with which the libraries would assist. With the official establishment of West Germany concurrent with the end of occupation in 1949, U.S. Forces had created 28 Amerikahäuser as well as 136 associated reading rooms and bookmobiles, usually co-located with U.S. military installations in Germany. Survey data in the late 1940s indicated that these centers reached urban professional men rather than the majority of the population which lived in smaller towns and rural areas.During the immediate postwar reconstruction of Germany, the Amerikahäuser as well as their British and French analogues served as important incubators of the German art scene as many art houses had been looted and reduced to rubble during the war. By 1974, there were Amerikahäuser in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hanover, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart under the United States Information Service as well as several in West Berlin. The Amerika Haus Berlin was a symbol of outreach to the German people, much as the British Council and Maison de France were doing in their sectors. During the social foment of the 1960s, several America Houses in Germany were attacked and disrupted by left-wing student protesters. A Government Accountability Office in the 1990s recommended closing some America Houses worldwide to cut costs and shifting the public diplomacy effort to extant Binational Centers. With the disestablishment of the United States Information Agency in 1999, the Amerikahäuser were tuned over to local German control from which since 2014 they receive a majority of their funding. One author suggests that, over time, these houses and the Binational Centers that replaced them became as much a conduit for Germany to influence the U.S. as they were ways for the U.S. to influence Germany.