Supreme clichés – Joseph Nye and soft power

• Joseph Nye is one of the most cited and misunderstood theorists in international relations.

• His concept of “soft power”, coined in 1990, has become a universal slogan brandished by authoritarian governments, communications firms and diplomats who betray its meaning with each use.

• Return to text.

What everyone is saying

The expression is everywhere. Communicators use it to designate cultural influence, press officers to praise artistic tours, governments to justify their investments in international media. China talks about its soft power when it inaugurates a Confucius Institute. Qatar invokes it to justify its billions invested in world sport. Russia dresses it up with television channels and film festivals. In France, he is summoned to defend the French-speaking world or film exports.

The dominant summary can be summed up in a few words: soft power is power through culture, image and influence. Hollywood versus tanks. Jeans against propaganda. A gentle and pacifist alternative to military hard power. A weapon that even the most modest states can afford as long as they invest sufficiently in their international communication. And above all, a universal tool, available to everyone – democracies and authoritarian regimes alike.

This reading is wrong on almost every point. It confuses resources and behaviors, the tool and its instructions, the window and the store. Worse, it turns the concept against itself: Nye had precisely constructed his theory to describe what authoritarian regimes cannot do.

What Nye Really Wrote

A rigorous definition, systematically ignored

Nye forges the concept in Bound to Lead (1990) and deepens it in Soft Power (2004) then The Future of Power (2011). Its definition is precise:

“Soft power is the ability to affect others through the co-optive means of agenda setting, persuasion, and positive attraction, in order to achieve preferred outcomes. HAS”¹

The central distinction is clear: “Hard power is pushing; soft power is shooting. HAS”² It is therefore not a question of image or communication. It is a form of power that acts on the preferences and agendas of other actors – not through force or money, but through attraction and persuasion.

Nye distinguishes three “faces” of power. The first is direct constraint. The second is the ability to set the agenda, to define what we talk about and what we don’t talk about. The third – the deepest – is the ability to shape the initial preferences of others, to make them spontaneously want what you want. It is at this third level that soft power operates, and it is this level that most commentators completely ignore.

Three sources, not one

Against culturalist reduction, Nye is explicit:

“A country’s soft power rests on three basic resources: its culture (where it is attractive to others), its political values ​​(when it respects them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when others perceive them as legitimate and with moral authority). HAS”³

Culture is therefore only a third of the equation – and even then, only where it is attractive. Political values ​​and the credibility of foreign policies count just as much. He immediately adds: “ The conditions in parentheses are the key to determining whether potential soft power resources translate into attraction behavior. »⁴ A state that exports popular films but wages illegitimate wars destroys its own soft power.

The formula is concise: “ With soft power, what the target thinks is particularly important, and targets matter as much as agents. Attraction and persuasion are social constructs. Soft power is a dance that requires partners. »⁵

As for McDonald’s and Hollywood, Nye cites them precisely to illustrate what soft power is. not : « Of course, eating at McDonald’s or wearing a Michael Jackson t-shirt is not automatically an indicator of soft power. Militias can commit atrocities or fight Americans while wearing Nikes and drinking Coca-Cola. »⁶ Possession of a cultural resource does not automatically produce attraction. It depends on the context and the ability to convert this resource into favorable behavior. Nye illustrates through the absurd: “ Having a larger tank army can produce victory if the battle takes place in a desert, but not in a swamp. Likewise, a beautiful smile can be a resource of soft power, but if I smile at your mother’s funeral, it may destroy my soft power rather than create it. »⁷

A complement to hard power, not its opposite

The most widespread misinterpretation consists of opposing soft power and hard power as two exclusive strategies. Nye has continued to deny it. It is precisely to correct this error that in 2004 he created the concept of smart power : « I developed the term smart power in 2004 to counter the erroneous perception that soft power alone can produce effective foreign policy. I defined smart power as the ability to combine hard and soft power resources into effective strategies.. »⁸

The demonstration goes through an edifying example. When Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, understood in 2006 that the war against terrorism was also being played out in newsrooms, he concluded that the United States must communicate better. Nye comments: “ Unfortunately, Rumsfeld forgot the first rule of advertising: if you have a bad product, even the best advertising won’t sell it. »⁹ Soft power is not marketing. This is not a technique to better sell a policy. It is the product itself – the reality of what a country is and does.

In his 2013 article, he is even more direct: “ In the century we live in, any state-led power enterprise will need to combine both hard and soft power resources to establish smart power strategies. »¹⁰ Power in international affairs is like ‘a game of 3D chess’¹¹ : the military chessboard, the economic chessboard, and the transnational chessboard require different and complementary tools. You can’t win on just one board.

Nye also formulates the issue in narrative terms: in a world of information, “ politics can ultimately be boiled down to those whose history wins. »¹² Narratives become the currency of soft power. However, a credible narrative cannot be fabricated from scratch: it must correspond to a reality.

The paradox of authoritarian regimes

This is undoubtedly Nye’s most decisive lesson – and the most ignored by those who claim to apply it. Soft power only works if it is based on real credibility. But this credibility cannot be manufactured by governments: it emerges of civil society Nye puts it unequivocally: “ Although governments control politics, culture and values ​​are embedded in civil societies. Soft power may seem less risky than economic or military power, but it is often difficult to use, easy to lose, and costly to restore. »¹³

And above all: “ Soft power depends on credibility, and when governments are seen as manipulative and information is seen as propaganda, credibility is destroyed. »¹⁴ The formula is scathing: “ The best propaganda is not propaganda. »

China’s demonstration is at the heart of The Future of Power. Beijing invested billions in the 2008 Olympics, the Shanghai Expo, the Confucius Institutes, and international media.

“China’s efforts have been hampered by its domestic political censorship. For all the effort to make Xinhua and CCTV competitors to CNN and the BBC, there is no international audience for flimsy propaganda. HAS”¹⁵

Nye quotes director Zhang Yimou, when asked about the absence of contemporary films in his filmography: his films on current China would be neutralized by the censors.

The paradox is structural, and not just cyclical. Even if the authoritarian model can generate a form of attraction in certain countries which admire Chinese growth, ” The authoritarian growth model produces soft power in authoritarian countries, but does not produce attraction in democratic countries. What attracts in Caracas may repel in Paris. »¹⁶ Attraction is always relative to the target.

Nye draws the logical conclusion: “ An authoritarian system has difficulty generating soft power because much of soft power is generated by civil society, not governments. American soft power comes from Hollywood and Harvard and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many, many others. »¹⁷ This is the exact opposite of what China, Russia or Qatar practice, which invest massively in government instruments – media, cultural institutes, sporting events – believing that money can buy attraction.

The example of Norway is illuminating in reverse: with 5 million inhabitants, it has developed a strategy of smart power credible by relying on peace and development aid policies perceived as legitimate – not on communication expenditure.¹⁸ Size matters nothing. What matters is the coherence between proclaimed values ​​and actions.

What the author says says a lot

The paradox is striking: the concept forged to describe the power of attraction of liberal democracies is today massively exploited by regimes which violate all its conditions. China, Qatar, Russia spend billions on “soft power” – and are surprised that it doesn’t work. Nye nevertheless provided them with the answer in 2011: we don’t decree attraction. We deserve it.

There is more: to reduce soft power to international communication is not only to betray Nye, it is to reproduce exactly the error that Rumsfeld had made and that Nye had scathingly criticized. If the policy is bad, the best advertising won’t sell it. Soft power is not a veneer. It is the substance itself.

In a world where narratives circulate at the speed of the Internet and where every contradiction between proclaimed values ​​and real actions is immediately visible, soft power has become more demanding than ever – and the regimes that believe they can buy it, more vulnerable than ever.

Notes

¹ Joseph S. Nye Jr., . The Future of PowerPublicAffairs, 2011, p. 21. ↩

² Ibid.p. 21. ↩

³ Ibid.p. 84. ↩

⁴ Ibid.p. 84. ↩

⁵ Ibid.p. 84. ↩

⁶ Ibid.p. 22. ↩

⁷ Ibid.p. 22. ↩

⁸ Ibid.p. 23. ↩

⁹ Ibid.p. 28. ↩

¹⁰ Joseph S. Nye, “The Balance of Power in the 21st^e century Géoéconomien° 65, 2013/2, Éditions Choiseul, p. 20. ↩

¹¹ Joseph S. Nye Jr., « The Future of Power », Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesvol. 64, No. 3, Spring 2011, p. 50. ↩

¹² The Future of Powerop. cit., p. 113

¹³ Ibid.p. 83. ↩

¹⁴ Ibid.p. 83. ↩

¹⁵ Ibid.p. 107. ↩

¹⁶ Ibid.p. 98. ↩

¹⁷ Joseph S. Nye Jr., « The Future of Power », Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesop. cit., p. 49

¹⁸ The Future of Powerop. cit., p. 24