Soft Power and Diplomacy by Bridey Heing

Author:Bridey Heing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Soft Power Doesn’t Make Great Powers

Nevertheless, many remain fixated on soft power. Just this week, a U.K.-based consultancy firm called Portland, in cooperation with the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, published a report ranking the world’s top 30 countries by soft power. The ranking is based on the composite score of soft power elements: culture, digital footprint, government, engagement, education and business/ enterprise. The first thing that stands out is that European countries dominate the list, and these countries outrank others that are geopolitical heavyweights. Ireland outranks Russia, and Greece is above China. In fact, Russia, China and Turkey are all in the bottom six of this top-30 ranking. That two small European countries are considered more powerful than three much larger countries— countries that are major geopolitical centers of gravity—should automatically raise questions about the credibility of soft power.

A second observation is that most of the countries at the top of the soft power ranking —France, the U.K., the US and Germany —are also among the world leaders in hard power. The US has regularly demonstrated that through hard power measures such as sanctions or military activity, it can coerce other countries to change their behavior. Germany is the economic powerhouse of the European Union and has threatened economic measures against smaller EU countries, especially Greece, to coerce them into supporting EU regulations. France’s cultural influence—a component of soft power—does have global reach, but the foundation for this cultural influence was colonization, a product of hard power.

Soft power reads well on paper, but its dependence on persuasion makes it largely inconsequential in the world of geopolitics, whereas hard power dictates reality and the course of events.

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