Young Azeri musicians performed at a White House ceremony

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes represented the Department of State, which will partner with public and private cultural organizations to launch the initiative.

State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announced the department's four initial GCI partnerships September 25. Working with ECA, the National Endowment for the Arts will initiate a series of international literary exchanges. By sponsoring translations and publications, the program will afford Americans and readers in other nations access to the best of each other's literature.

A partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue President Bush's We the People initiative, which welcomes kindergarten through grade 12 teachers from throughout the world to weeklong Landmarks Summer Institutes. Participants visit historic sites and together with American participants explore U.S. democratic principles.

A major international film and filmmaker exchange sponsored by the American Film Institute Partnership will bring together American and foreign filmmakers to share their motion pictures with each other's audiences, at AFI-Fest in Los Angeles and at other American and international film festivals.

A new cooperative initiative with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will allow overseas institutions to tap into U.S. expertise in arts management and performing arts training. This partnership will place special emphasis on inclusiveness and will promote programs that feature the work of disabled artists.

The first lady recalled that cultural diplomacy paid mutual dividends during the Cold War, when the Soviet and American peoples' shared love of jazz proved valuable in reducing tensions between the two nations.

Today, "art has the same power to reduce tensions and to strengthen alliances," she said. By "enjoying each other's literature, music, films and visual arts," Americans can deepen their friendships with other peoples and strengthen ties with their countries.

Appropriations for cultural diplomacy programs have more than tripled since 2001, according to a State Department announcement of the initiative.

Hughes said civilized peoples of all nations and faiths treasure their artistic, cultural and historic heritages. She said that these common values were not shared by violent extremists like those who bombed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, in February, or those who ordered the demolition of the 1,800-year-old and 1,500-year-old Buddha statues of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001.

Hughes praised cultural exchanges as embodying the spirit of partnership and respect that is at the heart of public diplomacy. "The arts -- visual and performing -- express the full range of human experience and remind us that despite differences of language and race, politics and policy, our human experience is a shared one. The arts resonate in the hearts and souls of people everywhere."

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