American dreaming and cultural ethnocentrism: A critical discourse analysis of the mythic discourse in the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative

The War on Terror ushered in a third level of diplomacy grounded in values as a cumulation of everyday micromoments: mythic public diplomacy. Mythic public diplomacy uses values as a communicative outcome that is a process, not a product. Mythic public diplomacy seeks to engineer the values of target publics to align with the ideologies and interests of the country initiating diplomatic efforts. This dissertation examined the United States Department of State's Shared Values Initiative values advocacy campaign. Theoretical and methodological traditions of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and mythic rhetorical criticism were combined in an effort to provide practical applications in the planning and action processes of U.S. public diplomacy. This study places CDA within the framework of mythic rhetorical criticism in order to illustrate and better understand potential interpretations provided by culture. In 2002 the Shared Values Initiative, a values advocacy campaign developed by the United States Department of State under the direction of Charlotte Beers, attempted to correlate the United States with goals and values shared by Middle Eastern Muslim publics in order to restore U.S. credibility. The campaign removed two-way communication from public diplomacy and rhetorically framed dialogue to control perceptions, to remove areas of potential conflict, and to supplant cultural expectation and lived experience with magical thinking and idealized visions of Muslim identity. Throughout the campaign, hegemonic and dichotomous language created an official identification of Muslims as "Other" than American. The separation of Muslim Americans from Americans implies a difference that supersedes citizenship, dividing Muslims from Americans as literally as one would separate an egg yolk from the white. Both are part of the egg, but it is easy to differentiate between the two. The Shared Values campaign acts as an anti-movement, ensconcing Muslim experience within American privileged interpretations of reality.