The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power

Naren Chitty, Lilian Ji, Gary D Rawnsley, Craig Hayden, Naren Chitty, Li Ji, Gary D. Rawnsley, Craig Hayden, Naren Chitty, Li Ji, Gary D. Rawnsley, Craig Hayden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317369363
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power is the first volume to offer a comprehensive and detailed picture of soft power and associated forms of public diplomacy. The terms soft power and public diplomacy have enormous currency in media and policy discourse, yet despite all the attention the terms remain conceptually ambiguous for analysts of international influence. The consequence is that the terms have survived as powerful, yet criticized, frames for influence.

Divided into two main parts, Part I outlines theoretical problems, methodological questions, the cultural imperative and the technological turn within the study of soft power and Part II focuses on bringing the theory into practice through detailed discussion of key case studies from across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

This innovative handbook provides a definitive resource for students and scholars seeking to familiarize themselves with cutting-edge debates and future research on soft power and will be of interest to those studying and researching in areas such as international relations, public diplomacy and international communication.

PART I

Theoretical perspectives

SECTION I

Theoretical considerations

1

SOFT POWER, CIVIC VIRTUE AND WORLD POLITICS¹ (SECTION OVERVIEW)

Naren Chitty

Machiavelli emphasizes the antagonistic element in man’s natural endowment. Men are prone to violence and combat; they are antisocial by nature. However, necessity (chiefly the demands of survival) impels men to associate with each other, to constitute themselves into a series of rival groups. Within these groups, which evolve into complex and interdependent societies, men learn to cooperate, to restrain their demands, to solve by speech and law issues that have formally been solved by brute strength, and the sword. In a word, they become civilized – that is, accustomed to living with their fellow men in a civitas. They are taught the meaning of justice and to distinguish between their particular good and the common good.

(Germino 1972, pp. 40–1)

Introduction

This chapter is an overview for the theory section of this book and also prepares the theoretical ground for the volume. The first of four substantive parts discusses power (soft and hard) in the context of world politics. The second unfolds an academic genealogy for soft power, relating soft power to positivist and post-positivist moments in IR and selected post-positivist interests such as cooperation, civil society and civic virtue.² A weak global republican confederacy is posited, to give shape to the contemporary world governance framework in relation to which cooperation and conflict take place. Civic virtues, for governing elites, influentials in civil society and ordinary citizens, provide the interactional framework for the confederacy.³ The third section examines moral constructions of soft power. Whether soft power and public diplomacy overlap in part or are interchangeable is also addressed⁴. The contingent relevance of high and low politics to soft power is discussed and definitions of public diplomacy and subsets of cultural and civil diplomacy are provided. The role of civic virtue in soft power aspirations is dealt with. Fourth, soft power’s passive and active forms are broken analytically into traditional and contemporary categories and three categories of multiplier mechanisms – mobility, media and cultural industrial. Following on from the humanist tradition of a republican political organization, qualitative values for soft power are proposed. This is followed by a conclusion.

Power in world politics

Power in the collocation ‘soft power’ suggests use of a political lens. Born in the junction of biosphere and infosphere, the powerful, though somewhat unruly, meme evolves in the latter (Gleick 2011). Nye (2011, p. 14) points out that power can be defined as resources or behavioral outcomes. He further describes each of three faces of power, faces that allow both hard and soft methods (2011, p. 91). The hard methods are the use of coercion or inducement: to change a subject’s strategies (first face); to curtail a subject’s agenda (second face); to shape a subject’s first preferences (third face). The soft methods are the use of attraction or persuasion to change a subject’s preferences in the first face (inducing behavioural change); or attraction or institutions to convince a subject of the legitimacy of one’s agenda in the second face (framing and agenda-setting); and to shape a subject’s first preferences through priming in the third face (Nye 2011, pp. 42, 91).

There are “complex structures of culture, social relations and power that affect and constrain” people that Nye (2011, p. 14) includes in power’s second and third faces. Wendt (1996, pp. 57–8) notes that it is rhetorical practice that is employed as third face power to manipulate “shared meanings and significations”. For Foucault power, including disciplinary power, “forms a dispersed capillary woven into the entire social order” (Barker 2004, p. 103). Lukes (2005), who added the third face of power to the first (Dahl 1961) and second (Bachrach and Baratz 1963), relates Nye’s soft power to his third face but faults both Nye’s strategic agent-centrism and Foucault’s subject-centered structuralism for failure to address empowerment. If Lukes found these two approaches wanting in this respect, one might discern in the constructivist approach to world politics the inhabiting of structure by agency (Chitty 2005). From within sociolinguistics Fairclough (1989, p. 46) described power in discourse as “powerful participants controlling and constraining the contributions of non-powerful participants” through manipulating content, social relations and subject positions. There is little wiggle room for agency in the Foucauldian capillaries where power is omnipresent in discourse (Foucault 1998, p. 63). Nye’s position is that soft power is a kind of power, this omnipresent power. A syllogistic treatment will lead to consideration of soft power as being everywhere in discourses. Where soft power is at play there should be greater potential for agency. Where discourses are inherently attractive due to virtuosity in crafting of content or inherent virtue of content or communication style, I would say such rhetoric of human interaction will exercise soft power.

While power is central to Nye’s conceptualization of soft power, soft should not here signify modulated power, or refer to a grade of intensity as in a spectrum ranging from very soft, through soft, medium intensity, to hard and very hard power. Rather it is power that is qualitatively different in that it is on the co-optive (soft) side of a spectrum that has command or coercive (hard) power behavior on the other side (Nye 2011, p. 21). Nye (2011, p. 10) distinguishes between power defined as (1) resources and (2) behavioural outcomes, emphasizing the importance of the latter, dependent as they are not just on the former but also on contexts and strategies. He also makes a distinction between passive and active soft power, direct and indirect use of soft power, “the passive approach to soft power” being described briefly in terms of the attraction of an actor’s exemplary values (Nye 2011, p. 94). Soft power can be non-instrumental or passive but may be used instrumentally (Chitty 2015a). A second feature is its elasticity; it is not reduced as a resource by use.⁵ Soft power can also be generated by cultural industries, but consumption of cultural products thus generated does not deplete soft power either. Dissemination of political propaganda does erode it. Finally, soft power can be bidirectional.⁶

Context for soft power in world politics

Human interaction brings into play differentials in economically, cognitively or militarily generated value balances that give the participant or participants, in the context under consideration, an ascendancy over the others. In human interaction action or non-action leads to reactions in succession, so where power is action or non-action leading to a complex actor’s interests being served, power is the sustainability of the complex actor’s interests being served in continuous longitudinal and horizontal action-reaction chain networks through a complex social system over a defined period. If “[f]‌or Machiavelli the cosmos is not an ordered whole, but rather a field of unpredictable forces into which a masterful intelligence can inject some degree of order and purpose”, post-bellum intelligence in the twentieth century has attempted to create order around the “anthropocentric humanist” notion of human security (Germino 1972, pp. 16, 21). The growth of soft law in the international sphere and normativization of correct uses of violence, force and dark deeds and the influence of public opinion on policy communities has led to, arguably, a containment of the use of force and violence. The quarantining of the use of hard power has made space for soft power, reification and growth of soft law and the normativization of practices of good governance. Indeed, Wolin (1960, pp. 223–4) believes that Machiavelli even in his time believed that his political science “made brutality and cruelty unnecessary” and prescribed an “economy of violence”; Germino (1972, pp. 27, 54) went further in suggesting that Machiavelli’s “new way” looked towards a politics that was in the “framework of anthropocentric humanism”. While there can be no violence in soft power, violence, as in theatres of war, can beget world orders invested with power relations based on war outcomes but that are hospitable to soft power. That said, before its defraction to hard and soft power, power was a compound of these two elements – and continues to be so in many ways.

The focus here will be on soft power in a contemporary construction of world order that includes “a condition of rule” or “no anarchy”⁷ (Onuf 2014), global civil society (Onuf 2004, Kaldor 2003) with its moral economy (Calabrese 2005) – that I have characterized as a weak global confederacy, republican in nature.⁸ Confederacies are more autonomous than federations. World confederacy does not here refer to the United Nations (UN) as an institution standing apart; it refers to evolving institutions of world governance, actors and cultures that include both rule-making and ruling elites as well as the ruled and recusants. The global polity, tighter here and looser there, is based on internationally accepted rules and states and non-state actors adhering to the consensual rule-making and rule framework – as well as outlaws and recusants and polities that have not been accredited by the system. Outlaw behavior (crime) is seen as offensive but normal, in domestic society, by Durkheim (1895 [1950]). May not such behavior be seen as offensive but normal in international society as well? As soft law grows and hardens over time and international society becomes more rule-oriented and shows some homonomy in at least discrete theaters of international activity, the anarchy problematique perchance will become less consequential. Conversely, international institutions may weaken at times and be engulfed by a wider heteronomy.⁹ There is also the possibility that Machiavelli was right in believing “that man can acquire a second nature through civil society” (Germino 1972, p. 53).

The global confederacy, extant around a plethora of states and international institutions, is weak because sovereignty is not shared between an organizational centre and members. “At global and regional levels, institutions that have states as members – commonly known as international regimes – link public offices in administering the global system of needs” (Onuf 2004). The polity is republican in values for two reasons. First, its members have espoused humanist republican values, to varying degrees, through the European historical tradition – on republican, liberal or socialist models. Second, the institutions themselves incorporate humanist norms and mixed government (Pettit 1997). Democracy in general assemblies and republicanism in managing councils is facilitated by multilateralism and major interest norms of international regimes (Finlayson and Zacher 1983 pp. 296–304). Mixed government forms are vertical within the UN and horizontal when incorporating its members and family of agencies. Policy vectors are directed, at least professedly, at the public good rather than the interest of rulers – increasingly seeking cooperation with the private interests of the corporate world. The preferment of civic virtue is evident in the evangelism of good governance and the “deference value” of rectitude, the latter comprised of “the moral values – virtue, goodness, righteousness, and so on” (Lasswell and Kaplan 1950, p. 56). Onuf (2013, p. 509) makes a distinction between Pocock’s (1975) Aristotelian Atlantic republicanism that “directs attention to human agency, action and the effects of time” and his own Grotian–Pufendorfian “Continental republicanism [that] offers general conclusions about spatial relations, the satisfaction of needs and the conditions favoring order and stability”. He sees a distinct theoretical divide between republicanism and liberalism. In practice republics such as that of the United States (US) are crucibles of competition between liberal and conservative thought; the confederacy is a republic that is a crucible of competition between republics and republic-like monarchies with the monarchic, aristocratic, democratic mix favored by Machiavelli (Germino 1972, p. 37), hosting variously conservative, liberal, socialist, communist and even theocratic tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical perspectives
• Part II Case studies
• Conclusion
• Index