Chapter Eight The Hard Challenge of Soft Power and Public Diplomacy
I am partially guilty for having introduced the idea of the importance of India’s ‘soft power’ into the public discourse of our country. My rationale for applying Joseph Nye’s ideas to India (initially in a series of speeches at the dawn of the new millennium) lay in the excessive international focus on the country’s rising power in conventional terms: our consistent economic growth in the last two decades has prompted too many to speak of India as a future ‘world leader’ or even as ‘the next superpower’. The American publishers of my 2007 book, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, even added a gratuitous subtitle suggesting that my volume was about ‘the emerging 21st century power’. (The Indian subtitle was the more modest ‘Reflections on India in the 21st Century’.) India, assorted foreign commentators claimed with a breathlessness that began to grate a few years ago, is heading irresistibly for ‘great power’ status as a ‘world leader’ in the new century.
And yet I have a problem with that term. The notion of ‘world leadership’ is a curiously archaic one; the very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world’s most populous country by 2034, or even, in some recent estimates, 2026? Is it military strength (India’s is already the world’s fourth largest army) or nuclear capacity (India’s status having been made clear in 1998, and then formally recognized in the Indo-US nuclear deal)? Is it economic development? There, India has made extraordinary strides in recent years; it is already the world’s fourth largest economy in PPP terms and continues to climb, being poised almost certainly to overtake Japan for the third spot in 2012, though too many of our people still live destitute, amid despair and disrepair. Or could it be a combination of all these, allied to something altogether more difficult to define — its ‘soft power’?
Many of the conventional analyses of India’s stature in the world rely on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and among those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the twenty-first century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people. So it’s not economic growth, military strength or population numbers that I would underscore when I think of India’s potential leadership role in the world of the twenty-first century. Rather, if there is one attribute of independent India to which I think increasing attention should now be paid around the globe, it is the quality which India is already displaying in ample measure today — its ‘soft power’.
The notion of soft power is relatively new in international discourse. The term was coined by Harvard’s Joseph Nye to describe the extraordinary strengths of the United States that went well beyond American military dominance. Nye argued that ‘power is the ability to alter the behaviour of others to get what you want, and there are three ways to do that: coercion (sticks), payments (carrots) and attraction (soft power). If you are able to attract others, you can economise on the sticks and carrots.’ Traditionally, power in world politics was seen in terms of military power: the side with the larger army was likely to win. But even in the past, this wasn’t enough: after all, the United States lost the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, and the United States discovered in its first few years in Iraq the wisdom of Talleyrand’s adage that the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it. Enter soft power — both as an alternative to hard power and as a complement to it. To quote Nye again: ‘the soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority)’.
I would go slightly beyond this: a country’s soft power, to me, emerges from the world’s perceptions of what that country is all about. The associations and attitudes conjured up in the global imagination by the mere mention of a country’s name is often a more accurate gauge of its soft power than a dispassionate analysis of its foreign policies. In my view, hard power is exercised; soft power is evoked.
For Nye, the United States is the archetypal exponent of soft power. The fact is that the United States is the home of Boeing and Intel, Google and the iPod, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonald’s and Starbucks, Levi’s jeans and Coca-Cola — in short, of most of the major products that dominate daily life around our globe. The attractiveness of these assets, and of the American lifestyle of which they are emblematic, is that they permit the United States to persuade others to adopt the US agenda, rather than relying purely on the dissuasive or coercive ‘hard power’ of military force.
Of course, this can cut both ways. In a world of instant mass communications enabled by the Internet, countries are increasingly judged by a global public fed on an incessant diet of Internet news, televised images, videos taken on the cellphones of passers-by, email gossip. The steep decline in America’s image and standing under the Bush Administration after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power used by that government — Iraq invasion, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater’s killings of Iraqi civilians.
The outpouring of goodwill for Washington in the wake of 9/11 (think of Le Monde’s famous assertion, ‘we are all Americans now’) and its squandering by America’s over-reliance on hard power in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the related ‘global war on terror’, are instructive. The existing soft power assets of the United States clearly proved inadequate to compensate for the deficiencies of its hard power approach: fans of American culture were not prepared to overlook the excesses of Guantánamo. Using Microsoft Windows does not predispose you in favour of extraordinary rendition. The misuse of hard power can undermine your soft power around the world.
But this discussion today is not about the United States. In his book The Paradox of American Power Nye took the analysis of soft power beyond the United States; other nations, too, he suggested, could acquire it. In today’s information era, he wrote, three types of countries are likely to gain soft power and so succeed: ‘those whose dominant cultures and ideals are closer to prevailing global norms (which now emphasize liberalism, pluralism, autonomy); those with the most access to multiple channels of communication and thus more influence over how issues are framed; and those whose credibility is enhanced by their domestic and international performance’.
At first glance this seems to be a prescription for reaffirming the contemporary reality of US dominance, since it is clear that no country scores more highly on all three categories than the United States. But Nye himself admits this is not so: soft power has been pursued with success by other countries over the years. When France lost the war of 1870 to Prussia, one of its most important steps to rebuild the nation’s shattered morale and enhance its prestige was to create the Alliance Française to promote French language and literature throughout the world. French culture has remained a major selling point for French diplomacy ever since. The United Kingdom has the British Council, the Swiss have Pro Helvetia, and Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal have, respectively, institutes named for Goethe, Cervantes, Dante Alighieri and Camoes. In recent years, China has started establishing ‘Confucius Institutes’ to promote Chinese culture internationally, and the Beijing Olympics were a sustained exercise in the building up of soft power by an authoritarian state. The United States itself has used officially sponsored initiatives, from the Voice of America to the Fulbright scholarships, to promote its soft power around the world. But soft power does not rely merely on governmental action: arguably, for the United States, Hollywood and MTV have done more to promote the idea of America as a desirable and admirable society than any US governmental endeavour. Soft power, in other words, is created partly by governments and partly despite governments; partly by deliberate action, partly by accident.