Year in, year out, all over the world, but particularly in countries where the British government has foreign policy objectives, cultural events are devised, laid on and paid for by a body which is funded directly by the foreign office. Hundreds of thousands of Antony Gormley clay figurines are now touring China; Siberia recently enjoyed a showcase of new British cinema; in January, Aziz Ibrahim, once of the Stone Roses, played a series of gigs in Libya. It's hard to tell whether such events arrive like damp squibs or welcome blasts of British culture: you won't read much about them in the press, since arts critics rarely venture much beyond these shores. And anyway, the target audience is not you, citizens of Britain, but populations far removed.
The body behind these far-flung activities is the British Council, which promotes the English language, education, science, law, human rights and the arts, mainly through its 220 offices in 110 countries. The council's grant from the government for 2003-04 was ?164m (rising to a ?479m turnover, thanks to the services it sells such as English language courses), of which its arts provision was just ?19.2m.
Nevertheless, it is through its arts programme that the British Council achieves greatest visibility. Every year, up to 2,000 events are presented in over 100 countries. Its French and German equivalents - the Institut Fran?ais and the Goethe-Institut - receive far higher arts budgets but attract less worldwide attention. The British Council is arguably our most important, if least accountable, cultural agency. Its priorities are quite distinct from, say, the Arts Council or the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta, set up in 1998). The British Council is a major commissioning body, devising its own ideas for projects rather than simply facilitating them, and promoting British artists to foreign audiences. By contrast, Arts Council England is a baggily inclusive outfit (funded to the tune of ?335m in 2003-04, rising to ?410m in 2004-05) which acts as a domestic support structure, operating through regional offices and providing funds for everything from established institutions such as the Royal Opera House (?3.1m this year) to individuals receiving just a few hundred pounds. In contrast to the Arts Council's generalism, Nesta focuses specifically on innovative ideas.
Over the past decade, the British Council has successfully dispelled the image of a fusty imperial network by promoting the latest in contemporary dance, architecture, music, design, theatre and literature. But what is the aim of such high-minded diplomacy?
Unlike the constant barrage of criticism fired at the Arts Council, there is little public sniping about British Council projects, although there have been complaints about the lack of transparency in the selection of artists, who tend to be pets of the art establishment. The council's arts team is low-profile, self-selecting, professional and generally respected. They are arts missionaries, who stress their independence from government influence (in contrast, the closest American equivalent, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, simply carries out state department policy). The British Council talks animatedly about creating "constructive dialogue" with other nations and of the benefits of building long-term bridges. Representatives on the ground know what local populations want to see. Thus China, with its burgeoning home ownership, recently got "Hometime," a radical interior design show. Helena Kennedy, the council's chair since 1998, speaks of the strengths of "cultural diplomacy," as opposed to the conventional kind. Behind the sensitive language, the mission is ultimately to popularise our language, our humour and our peculiar ideas of beauty; to sell British films, products, books and education to the world.
The British Council may be separate from the foreign office, but its arts programme is nothing if not pragmatic. In 2003, there was a drive in Islamic countries. This year the focus is on Africa, and the council is running a large-scale mentoring project of African writers in English - inevitably entailing Commonwealth countries, even Commonwealth refuseniks like Zimbabwe. There's something in this of the traditional urge to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and perhaps also a repayment of the debts of empire. But the mentor-writers are mostly struck by what the poet Graham Mort describes as the "hunger for contact and cultural self-expression" which they encounter.
The British Council is clearly guided by international news priorities. In the 2004 arts programme you will find both the first film festival in the Palestinian territories and - in the name of even-handedness - a British film festival in Israel, while the young, Turner-prize shortlisted artist Catherine Yass is shooting a film from a helicopter along the border of Israel and the Gaza strip. In April, cellist Matthew Barley will lead 1,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriot performers in a concert (the largest ever staged in Cyprus) one week before Cyprus joins the EU. Then there is "Politically Uncorrect," a four-month roadshow around South Africa to celebrate ten years of democracy, consisting of comedy, poetry slams and message songs, as well as a special programme devised by the team of At Home with the Kumars.
This year the British Council is also responsible for major sculpture exhibitions in Iran and in Athens, during the build-up to the Olympic Games. Cultural sensitivities are attended to in both cases. At Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art, the survey of 20th-century British sculpture has been an important event for both the museum and the British Council. The council's visual arts department could not have afforded to stage the show on its ?2.2m annual budget, but the foreign office viewed it as part of a strategic goal, and helped out. The council only returned to Iran in 2001 after a 22-year absence and in 2003 staged The Winter's Tale, for which actresses donned headscarves and long clothes. In this year's highly successful sculpture show, there were no portrayals of the naked figure, nor of disabled people, which the curators discovered were also offensive to Muslim sensibilities.
In Athens, a huge Henry Moore exhibition will open the city's new sculpture museum and park in June, by invitation of the Greek Olympic committee for culture. This is a surprisingly grand gesture by Greece to the country with which it is in bitter dispute over the return of the Elgin marbles. It reflects the esteem in which the British Council is held in Athens, although the council itself is tactfully playing down the significance of this. It's a case of a little bit of risk-taking plus diplomatic sensitivity - a distinctively British combination. Each British Council event is a little experiment in cultural relations. Last year, the Volcano theatre group staged a play featuring a male on male kiss. It caused a sensation in Georgia, where performances were cancelled, but not in supposedly more conservative Azerbaijan or Armenia.
Every exhibition or production is accompanied by an education programme, which is where the arts dovetail with other areas of British Council activity. The council has a big education budget, and with good reason. The additional 50,000 overseas students recruited to Britain since 1999, with the help of the council, are worth an estimated ?500m a year to British universities (this increase in student numbers met the 2004-05 target set by Tony Blair two years early). And the British Council deals in cultural imports as well as exports, putting ?500,000 a year into Visiting Arts, the national agency for promoting international arts within Britain (the foreign office, the various British Arts Councils and the department for culture also contribute). Like the British Council, Visiting Arts declares that it is "particularly specialised and active in relation to east and central Europe and the former Soviet Union, east and southeast Asia, south Asia, Africa and Islamic countries." This year African artists are being brought to Britain in order to foster positive images of the continent. Another scheme will recruit students from ten African countries to take up placements in museums around Britain.
Set up 70 years ago at a time of imperial decline and international instability, the British Council has gradually reinvented itself to become a curiously successful model of contemporary cultural patronage. It was launched as the "British Committee for Relations with Other Countries," and initially worked through British embassies and high commissions. (It also started a collection which now comprises 9,000 works of art.) The second world war, the cold war and other interruptions governed where and how it was able to operate over the following decades, and it was long portrayed as comically fuddy-duddy and ineffectual in novels like Graham Greene's The Third Man, Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons and Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange. Last year, John Le Carr? mocked it in Absolute Friends, which depicted a shambolic theatre group travelling through eastern Europe - precisely the image of amateurism that the current regime is trying to escape. Until the 1990s, a typical visual arts programme was more likely to include polite, scholarly exhibitions of 18th-century watercolours than demonstrations of cutting-edge British art. But such stereotypes no longer apply. The vast Constable exhibition in Paris in 2002, part-curated by Lucian Freud, was accused of being old-fashioned, but was nevertheless a tremendous critical success, achieving visiting figures of 250,000.
Five years ago, there was a dramatic change of geopolitical emphasis at the council, away from western Europe and towards the former eastern bloc and further afield. A huge programme of reorganisation included the bitterly contested dispersal of the contents of libraries in Paris, Athens and Amsterdam. These and some other libraries have since been reincarnated as "knowledge and learning centres," in which internet access is favoured over the printed word (though the centres have started ordering books again). Ten of a proposed 50 are now up and running, including a brand new centre, plus library, in Delhi.
Nevertheless, the British Council's highest-profile event is still a western European one: curating the British Pavilion at the Venice biennale. Last year, in a show co-designed by the supremely modish architect David Adjaye, the British Council fielded Chris Ofili, for which he recently won a South Bank Show award for exhibition of the year. On alternative years the pavilion and the council participate in the architecture biennale in Venice, and the British section this year is to be curated by Peter Cook, a leading architect in the highly experimental 1960s Archigram design collective.
The performing side of the British Council also seems to attract artists otherwise allergic to institutions, who respond to the autonomy offered by its projects. The defiantly anti-establishment theatre director Declan Donnellan spoke gratefully at the launch of the 2004 arts programme of the opportunities his Cheek by Jowl theatre company had been given to work in Russia. Donnellan's latest project with the British Council is a production of Othello, which has just premiered in Lille and will tour Italy, Portugal, Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Russia, Ireland, China, Australia and the US. It will even touch down in London.
Where echoes of empire remain, they have been largely reinterpreted into a contemporary idiom. The conceptual artist Roderick Buchanan, the British entry for the 11th Indian triennale later this year, is making a film about the Royal Highland Fusiliers (whose cap badge is an elephant) and the Madras Regiment, who have maintained links ever since they fought in the 18th century. But it is in the nature of the British Council's international involvements that it is inevitably drawn into some diplomatic entanglements. Its Istanbul office recently had to move after the bombing of the British high commission, and the British Council representative in Pakistan is currently working from home for security reasons. The council has to function on its good name abroad, and in an attempt to draw a line between culture and politics, organisers distinguish making contact with the people of a country and its regime. But it is an uneasy distinction, and the language used betrays the yearning for influence. Helena Kennedy, announcing that she would be standing down as chair of the council (Neil Kinnock replaces her in September), spoke approvingly of the benefits of "soft power." Andrea Rose, head of visual arts adds: "You can do the arts when you can't always do the politics," which actually implies the converse of what Rose intends: that the arts can do a political job. She maintains that "British values - the fact that we're a free society - can be seen as much in our arts as in other things." This may not be missionary zeal, but it's a message nevertheless. Declan Donnellan believes, "In performing abroad we see ourselves in other people's eyes... we remember that we are a liberal democracy."
In the mid-1990s, the British Council underwent stringent funding cutbacks, with the arts group hit harder than most. But since then it has regrouped, met its efficiency targets and pressed on with appropriately "dynamic and modern" work. It is not necessarily thanked for what it achieves. Last year further cuts were made by moving the arts group out of its spacious Portland Place premises into smaller offices in Spring Gardens, opposite the department for culture. There's certainly no shame in reinventing a semi-imperial structure in a contemporary style. But what's remarkable is how much the arts wing of the British Council produces on so little - operating as a creative patron of the arts, and creating some international goodwill along the way.
