It is now used frequently, and often incorrectly, by political leaders, editorial writers, and academics around the world. So what is soft power? Soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade. Whereas hard power—the ability to coerce—grows out of a country's military or economic might, soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies.
Hard power remains crucial in a world of states trying to guard their independence and of non-state groups willing to turn to violence. It forms the core of the Bush administration's new national security strategy.
Similarly, foreign policies strongly affect soft power. Jimmy Carter's human rights policies are a case in point, as were government efforts to promote democracy in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. In Argentina, American hu- man rights policies that were rejected by the military government of the S produced considerable soft power for the United States two decades later, when the Peronists who were earlier imprisoned subsequently came to power.
Policies can have long-term as well as short-term effects that vary as the context changes. The popularity of the United States in Argentina in the early S reflected Carter's policies of the s, and it led the Argentine government to support American policies in the UN and in the Balkans.
Government policies can reinforce or squander a country's soft power. Domestic or foreign policies that appear to be hypocritical, arrogant, indifferent to the opinion of others, or based on a narrow approach to national interests can undermine soft power. For exam- ple, in the steep decline in the attractiveness of the United States as measured by polls taken after the Iraq War in , people with un- favorable views for the most part said they were reacting to the Bush administration and its policies rather than the United States gener- ally.
So far, they distinguish American people and culture from American policies. The publics in most nations continued to admire the United States for its technology, music, movies, and television. But large majorities in most countries said they disliked the growing influence of America in their country. As we will see in the next chapter, three decades ago, many people around the world objected to America's war in Vietnam, and the standing of the United States reflected the unpopularity of that policy.
When the policy changed and the mem- ories of the war receded, the United States recovered much of its lost soft power. Whether the same thing will happen in the aftermath of the Iraq War will depend on the success of policies in Iraq, develop- ments in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and many other factors.
The values a government champions in its behavior at home for example, democracy , in international institutions working with others , and in foreign policy promoting peace and human rights strongly affect the preferences of others.
Governments can attract or repel others by the influence of their example. But soft power does not belong to the government in the same degree that hard power does. Some hard-power assets such as armed forces are strictly gov- ernmental; others are inherently national, such as oil and mineral re- serves, and many can be transferred to collective control, such as the civilian air fleet that can be mobilized in an emergency.
In the Vietnam era, for example, American popular culture often worked at cross- purposes to official government policy. Today, Hollywood movies that show scantily clad women with libertine attitudes or fundamen- talist Christian groups that castigate Islam as an evil religion are both properly outside the control of government in a liberal soci- ety, but they undercut government efforts to improve relations with Islamic nations.
In their view, imitation or attraction are simply that, not power. As we have seen, some imitation or attraction does not produce much power over policy outcomes, and neither does imitation always produce de- sirable outcomes. For example, in the Is, Japan was widely ad- mired for its innovative industrial processes, but imitation by companies in other countries came back to haunt the Japanese when it reduced their market power.
Similarly, armies frequently imitate and therefore nullify the successful tactics of their opponents and make it more difficult for them to achieve the outcomes they want. Such observations are correct, but they miss the point that exerting attraction on others often does allow you to get what you want.
The skeptics who want to define power only as deliberate acts of com- mand and control are ignoring the second, or "structural," face of power-the ability to get the outcomes you want without having to force people to change their behavior through threats or payments.
At the same time, it is important to specify the conditions under which attraction is more likely to lead to desired outcomes, and un- der which it will not. All power depends on context-who relates to whom under what circumstances-but soft power depends more than hard power upon the existence of willing interpreters and re- ceivers.
Moreover, attraction often has a diffuse effect, creating gen- eral influence rather than producing an easily observable specific action. Just as money can be invested, politicians speak of storing up political capital to be drawn on in future circumstances. Of course, such goodwill may not ultimately be honored, and diffuse reciproc- ity is less tangible than an immediate exchange. Nonetheless, the in- direct effects of attraction and a diffuse influence can make a significant difference in obtaining favorable outcomes in bargaining situations.
Otherwise leaders would insist only on immediate payoffs and specific reciprocity, and we know that is not always the way they behave. Social psychologists have developed a substantial body of empirical research exploring the relationship between attractiveness and power.
A dictator cannot be totally indifferent to the views of the people in his coun- try, but he can often ignore whether another country is popular or not when he calculates whether it is in his interests to be helpful. In democracies where public opinion and parliaments matter, political leaders have less leeway to adopt tactics and strike deals than in au- tocracies. Thus it was impossible for the Turkish government to permit the transport of American troops across the country in because American policies had greatly reduced our popularity in public opinion and in the parliament.
In contrast, it was far easier for the United States to obtain the use of bases in authoritarian Uzbekistan for operations in Mghanistan. Finally, though soft power sometimes has direct effects on spe- cific goals-witness the inability of the United States to obtain the votes of Chile or Mexico in the UN Security Council in after our policies reduced our popularity-it is more likely to have an im- pact on the general goals that a country seeks. If one considers various American national interests, for example, soft power may be less rele- vant than hard power in preventing attack, policing borders, and pro- tecting allies.
But soft power is particularly relevant to the realization of "milieu goals. It is easier to attract people to democracy than to coerce them to be democratic. The fact that the impact of attraction on achieving preferred outcomes varies by con- text and type of goals does not make it irrelevant, any more than the fact that bombs and bayonets do not help when we seek to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, slow global warming, or create democracy.
Other skeptics object to using the term "soft power" in interna- tional politics because governments are not in full control of the at- traction. But the fact that civil society is the origin of much soft power does not disprove its existence. In a liberal society, government cannot and should not control the culture. Indeed, the absence of policies of control can it- self be a source of attraction.
The Czech film director Milos Forman recounts that when the Communist government let in the American film Twelve Angry Men because of its harsh portrait of American in- stitutions, Czech intellectuals responded by thinking, "If that coun- try can make this kind of thing, films about itself, oh, that country must have a pride and must have an inner strength, and must be strong enough and must be free. That is all the more reason for governments to make sure that their own actions and policies reinforce rather than undercut their soft power.
And this is particularly true since private sources of soft power are likely to be- come increasingly important in the global information age. Of course, one must be careful not to read too much into opinion polls. They are an essential but imperfect measure of soft-power resources because an- swers vary depending on the way that questions are formulated, and unless the same questions are asked consistently over some period, they represent snapshots rather than a continuous picture.
Opinions can change, and such volatility cannot be captured by anyone poll. Moreover, political leaders must often make unpopular decisions be- cause they are the right thing to do, and hope that their popularity may be repaired if the decision is subsequently proved correct.
Pop- ularity is not an end in itself in foreign policy. Nonetheless, polls are a good first approximation of both how attractive a country appears and the costs that are incurred by unpopular policies, particularly when they show consistency across polls and over time. And as we shall see in the next chapter, that attractiveness can have an effect on our ability to obtain the outcomes we want in the world. With the advent of the nuclear age, the United States and the Soviet Union possessed not only in- dustrial might but nuclear arsenals and intercontinental missiles.
The age of the superpowers had begun. Subsequently, the leading role of the United States in the information revolution near the end of the century allowed it to create a revolution in military affairs.
The ability to use information technology to create precision weapons, real-time intelligence, broad surveillance of regional bat- tlefields, and improved command and control allowed the United States to surge ahead as the world's only military superpower. But the progress of science and technology had contradictory ef- fects on military power over the past century. Paradoxically, nuclear weapons were acceptable for deterrence, but they proved so awesome and destructive that they became muscle- bound-too costly to use in war except, theoretically, in the most ex- treme circumstances.
A second important change was the way that modern communi- cations technology fomented the rise and spread of nationalism, which made it more difficult for empires to rule over socially awak- ened populations. In the nineteenth century, Britain ruled a quarter of the globe with a tiny fraction of the world's population. As nation- alism grew, colonial rule became too expensive and the British em- pire collapsed.
Formal empires with direct rule over subject populations such as Europe exercised during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are simply too costly in the twenty-first century.
In addition to nuclear and communications technology, social changes inside the large democracies also raised the costs of using military power. Postindustrial democracies are focused on welfare rather than glory, and they dislike high casualties. This does not mean that they will not use force, even when casualties are ex- pected-witness Britain, France, and the United States in the Gulf War, and Britain and the United States in the Iraq War.
But the absence of a prevailing warrior ethic in modern democracies means that the use of force requires an elaborate moral justification to ensure popular support, unless actual survival is at stake. For ad- vanced democracies, war remains possible, but it is much less ac- ceptable than it was a century, or even a half century, ago. Nonetheless, the success of the European countries in creating an island of peace on the continent that had been ravaged by three Franco-German wars in less than a century may predispose them toward more peaceful solutions to conflict.
However, in a global economy even the United States must con- sider how the use of force might jeopardize its economic objectives. Mter its victory in World War II the United States helped to re- structure Japan's economy, but it is hard to imagine that the United States today could effectively threaten force to open Japanese mar- kets or change the value of the yen.
Nor can one easily imagine the United States using force to resolve disputes with Canada or Eu- rope. Unlike earlier periods, islands of peace where the use of force is no longer an option in relations among states have come to char- acterize relations among most modern liberal democracies, and not just in Europe.
The existence of such islands of peace is evidence of the increasing importance of soft power where there are shared val- ues about what constitutes acceptable behavior among similar dem- ocratic states. In their relations with each other, all advanced democracies are from Venus. Even nondemocratic countries that feel fewer popular moral constraints on the use of force have to consider its effects on their economic objectives.
War risks deterring investors who control flows of capital in a globalized economy. As two RAND analysts argue, "In the information age, 'cooperative' advantages will become increasingly important. Moreover, societies that improve their abilities to cooperate with friends and allies may also gain competitive advantages against rivals.
On the contrary, the information revolu- tion has yet to transform most of the world, and many states are unconstrained by democratic societal forces. Civil wars are rife in many parts of the world where collapsed empires left failed states and power vacuums. Even more important is the way in which the democratization of technology is leading to the privatization of war. Technology is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, technologi- cal and social changes are making war more costly for modern democracies.
But at the same time, technology is putting new means of destruction into the hands of extremist groups and individuals. It is a long-standing method of conflict frequently defined as deliberate attack on non- combatants with the objective of spreading fear and intimidation.
Already a century ago, the novelistJoseph Conrad had drawn an in- delible portrait of the terrorist mind, and terrorism was a familiar phenomenon in the twentieth century. It occurred on every continent except Antarctica and affected nearly every country. September Il, , was a dramatic escalation of an age-old phenomenon. Yet two developments have made terrorism more lethal and more difficult to manage in the twenty-first century. One set of trends grows out of progress in science and technol- ogy.
First, there is the complex, highly technological nature of mod- ern civilization's basic systems. But some though not all systems become more vulner- able and fragile as they become more complex and efficient. Where bombs and timers were once heavy and expensive, plastic ex- plosives and digital timers are light and cheap.
The costs of hijack- ing an airplane are sometimes little more than the price of a ticket. In addition, the success of the information revolution is provid- ing inexpensive means of communication and organization that al- low groups once restricted to local and national police jurisdictions to become global in scope. Thirty years ago, instantaneous global communication was sufficiently expensive that it was restricted to large entities with big budgets like governments, multinational cor- porations, or the Roman Catholic church.
Today the Internet makes global communication virtually free for anyone with access to a mo- dem. Terrorists also depend on getting their messages out quickly to a broad audience through mass media and the Inter- net-witness the widespread dissemination of bin Laden's television interviews and videotapes after September I I. Terrorism depends crucially on soft power for its ultimate victory.
It depends on its abil- ity to attract support from the crowd at least as much as its ability to destroy the enemy's will to fight. The second set of trends reflects changes in the motivation and organization of terrorist groups. Terrorists in the mid-twentieth century tended to have relatively well-defined political objectives, which were often ill served by mass destruction. They were said to want many people watching rather than many people killed. Such terrorists were often supported and covertly controlled by govern- ments such as Libya or Syria.
Toward the end of the century, radical groups grew on the fringes of several religions. There they were trained in a wide range of techniques, and many were recruited to organizations with an extreme view of the religious obligation of ji- had. As the historian WaIter Laquer has observed, "Traditional ter- rorists, whether left-wing, right-wing, or nationalist-separatists, were not greatly drawn to these opportunities for greater destruc- tion Terrorism has become more brutal and indiscriminate since then.
Fortunately, unlike communism and fascism, Islamist ideology has failed to attract a wide following outside the Islamic community, but that community provides a large pool of over a billion people from which to recruit. Organization has also changed. For example, AI Qaeda's network of thousands of peo- ple in loosely affiliated cells in some 60 countries gives it a scale well beyond anything seen before.
But even small networks can be more difficult to penetrate than the hierarchical quasi-military organiza- tions of the past. Both trends, technological and ideological, have created a new set of conditions that have increased both the lethality of terrorism and the difficulty of managing terrorism today. Because of Septem- ber I I and the unprecedented scale of AI Qaeda, the current focus is properly on terrorism associated with Islamic extremists.
But it would be a mistake to limit our attention or responses to Islamic ter- rorists, for that would be to ignore the wider effects of the democra- tization of technology and the broader set of challenges that must be met. Technological progress is putting into the hands of deviant groups and individuals destructive capabilities that were once lim- ited primarily to governments and armies.
Every large group of peo- ple has some members who deviate from the norm, and some who are bent on destruction. It is worth remembering that the worst ter- rorist act in the United States before September I I was the one committed by Timothy McVeigh, a purely home grown antigovern- ment fanatic.
Even if the current wave of Islamic terrorism turns out to be genera- tional or cyclical, like terrorist waves in the past, the world will still have to confront the long-term secular dangers arising out of the de- mocratization of technology. Lethality has been increasing. In the S, the Palestinian at- tack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics or the killings by the Red Brigades that galvanized world attention cost dozens of lives.
In the s, Sikh extremists bombed an Air India flight and killed over people. September II, , cost several thousand lives- and all of this escalation occurred without the use of weapons of mass destruction. If one extrapolates this lethality trend and imag- ines a deviant group in some society gaining access to biological or nuclear materials within the coming decade, it is possible to imagine terrorists being able to destroy millions of lives.
In the twentieth century, a pathological individual like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot required the apparatus of a totalitarian government to kill large numbers of people. Unfortunately, it is now all too easy to envisage extremist groups and individuals killing millions without the instruments of governments. This is truly the "privatization of war," and it represents a dramatic change in world politics.
More- over, this next step in the escalation of terrorism could have pro- found effects on the nature of our urban civilization. What will happen to the willingness of people to locate in cities, to our ability to sustain cultural institutions, if instead of destroying two office buildings, a future attack destroys the lower half of Manhattan, the City area of London, or the Left Bank of Paris?
The new terrorism is not like the S terrorism of the IRA, the ETA the military wing of the Basque separatist movement , or Italy's Red Brigades, nor is the vulnerability limited to anyone soci- ety.
A "business as usual" attitude toward curbing terrorism is not enough. Force still plays a role in world politics, but its nature has changed in the twenty-first century. As we will see in chapter 3, many terrorists groups also have soft as well as hard power. The United States was correct in altering its national security strategy to focus on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction after September II, But the means the Bush administration chose focused too heavily on hard power and did not take enough account of soft power.
And that is a mistake, because it is through soft power that terrorists gain general support as well as new recruits. A country that courts popularity may be loath to ex- ercise its hard power when it should, but a country that throws its weight around without regard to the effects on its soft power may find others placing obstacles in the way of its hard power.
No coun- try likes to feel manipulated, even by soft power. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, hard power can create myths of invincibility or inevitability that attract others. Kennedy went ahead with nuclear testing despite negative polls because he worried about global perceptions of Soviet gains in the arms race.
Kennedy "was willing to sacrifice some of America's 'soft' prestige in return for gains in the harder currency of military prestige. As one designer put it, American symbols "are still the strongest security blanket.
But not always. Moreover, as we saw earlier, hard power can some- times have an attractive or soft side. As Osama bin Laden put it in one of his videos, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they wil11ike the strong horse. The Iraq War provides an interesting example of the inter- play of the two forms of power. Some of the motives for war were based on the deterrent effect of hard power. Dona1d Rumsfe1d is re- ported to have entered office believing that the United States "was seen around the world as a paper tiger, a weak giant that couldn't take a punch" and determined to reverse that reputation.
Moreover, states like Syria and Iran might be deterred in their future support of terrorists. These were all hard power reasons to go to war. But another set of motives related to soft power. The neoconservatives believed that American power could be used to export democracy to Iraq and transform the politics of the Middle East. If successful, the war would become self-legitimizing. As William Kristo1 and Lawrence Kap1an put it, "What is wrong with dominance in the service of sound principles and high idea1s?
Even when a military balance of power is impossible as at present, with America the only super- power , other countries can still band together to deprive the U. France, Russia, and China chafed at American military unipolarity and urged a more multipolar world. In Charles Krauthammer's view, Iraq "provided France an opportunity to create the first coherent challenge to that dominance.
Soft balancing was not limited to the UN arena. Outside the UN, diplomacy and peace movements helped transform the global debate from the sins of Saddam to the threat of American empire.
That made it difficult for allied countries to provide bases and sup- port and thus cut into American hard power.
As noted earlier, the Turkish parliament's refusal to allow transport of ground troops and Saudi Arabia's reluctance to allow American use of air bases that had been available in are cases in point.
Since the global projection of American military force in the fu- ture will require access and overflight rights from other countries, such soft balancing can have real effects on hard power. When sup- port for America becomes a serious vote loser, even friendly leaders are less likely to accede to our requests.
In addition, bypassing the UN raised the economic costs to the United States after the war, leading the columnist Fareed Zakaria to observe, "The imperial style of foreign policy is backfiring. At the end of the Iraq war the administration spurned any kind of genuine partnership with the world.
It pounded away at the United Nations. In most ma- jor peacekeeping missions, the UN covers most of the expenses for countries that contribute troops. Bush covered 80 percent of the costs, and during the Clinton interventions abroad, the United States shouldered only 15 percent of the reconstruction and peacekeeping costS.
For some, thwarting the UN was a gain. Some urged the creation of an alliance of democracies to replace the UN. But such responses ignore the fact that the key divisions were among the democracies, and the United States can influence but not alone determine international views of the legitimacy of the UN. Moreover, soft balancing that puts pres- sure on parliaments in democracies can be conducted outside the framework of the UN.
The Internet has allowed protests to be quickly mobilized by free-wheeling amorphous groups, rather than hierarchical organizations. In the Vietnam era, planning a protest required weeks and months of pamphlets, posters, and phone calls, and it took four years before the size of the protest rallies, 25, at first, reached half a million in In contrast, , people turned out in the United States and 1.
Such post hoc legitimization may help to re- store American soft power that was lost on the way in, but it also shows that legitimacy matters. And in the difficult cases of Iran and North Korea, it is worth noting that President Bush appealed to the views of the "international community" that some of his advisors dismissed as "illusory. Morality can be a power reality. The initial effect of the Iraq War on opinion in the Islamic world was quite negative.
An Egyptian parliamentarian ob- served, "You can't imagine how the military strikes on Baghdad and other cities are provoking people every night. People who would otherwise turn up their noses at them are now flocking to their banner. It is still too soon to tell whether the hard-power gains from the war in Iraq will in the long run exceed the soft-power losses, or how permanent the latter will turn out to be, but the war provided a fascinating case study of the interaction of the two types of power.
Looking to the future, much will depend on the effectiveness of American policies in creating a better Iraq and moving the Middle East peace process forward. In addition, much will depend on whether the intelligence failures and political exaggeration of intelli- gence evidence will have a permanent damaging effect on the credi- bility of the American government when it approaches other countries for help on cases like Iran and North Korea, as well as in the war on terrorism.
As the British weekly The Economist observed, "The spies erred and the politicians exaggerated The war, we think, was justified. But in making the case for it, Mr Bush and Mr Blair did not play straight with their people. But the skep- tics miss the point that cooperation is a matter of degree, and that degree is affected by attraction or repulsion.
Already in , well before the Iraq War, reactions against heavy-handed American policies on the Korean peninsula had led to a dramatic drop over the past three years in the percentage of the Korean pop- ulation favoring an American alliance, from 89 to only 56 percent.
Whether in the Middle East or in East Asia, hard and soft power are inextricably intertwined in today's world. At the same time, much of the world does not consist of advanced democracies, and that limits the global transformation of power.
For example, most African and the Middle Eastern countries have preindustrial agricultural economies, weak institutions, and authoritarian rulers.
Some large countries such as China, India, and Brazil are industrializing and may suffer some of the disruptions that analogous parts of the West encountered at similar stages of their development early in the twentieth century,57 In such a diverse world, all three sources of power-military, economic, and soft-remain relevant, al- though in different degrees in different relationships.
However, if the current economic and social trends of the information revolution continue, soft power will become more important in the mix. The information revolution and globalization of the economy are transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these two forces have enhanced American power. But with time, technology will spread to other countries and peoples, and America's relative preeminence will diminish.
Today Americans represent one twentieth of the global population total, but nearly half of the world's Internet users. Even more important, the information revolution is creating virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders.
Transnational corporations and nongovernmental actors terrorists included will play larger roles. Many of these organizations will have soft power of their own as they attract citizens into coalitions that cut across national boundaries. Politics then becomes in part a competition for attractiveness, legitimacy, and credibility. The abil- ity to share information-and to be believed-becomes an impor- tant source of attraction and power.
This political game in a global information age suggests that the relative importance of soft power will increase. These conditions suggest op- portunities for the United States, but also for Europe and others, as we shall see in chapter 3. The soft power that is becoming more important in the infor- mation age is in part a social and economic by-product rather than solely a result of official government action.
Nonprofit institutions with soft power of their own can complicate and obstruct govern- ment efforts, and commercial purveyors of popular culture can hin- der as well as help the government achieve its objectives. But the larger long-term trends can help the United States if it learns to use them well. To the extent that official policies at home and abroad are consistent with democracy, human rights, openness, and respect for the opinions of others, America will benefit from the trends of this global information age.
But there is a danger that the United States may obscure the deeper message of its values through arrogance. As we shall see in the next chapter, American culture high and low still helps produce soft power in the information age, but government actions also matter, not only through programs like the Voice of America and Fulbright scholarships, but, even more important, when policies avoid arrogance and stand for values that others ad- mire.
The larger trends of the information age are in America's fa- vor, but only if we learn to stop stepping on our best message. Smart power means learning better how to combine our hard and soft power.
Not only is America the world's largest economy, but nearly half of the top global companies are American, five times as many as next-ranked Japan.
Consider the following: 1f The United States attracts nearly six times the inflow of foreign immigrants as second-ranked Germany. According to the United Na- tions Development Program's quality-of-life index which takes into account not only income but also education, health care, and life ex- pectancy , Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, and Belgium rank ahead of the United States as the best countries in which to live.
Britain and Germany rank ahead as havens for asylum seekers. France and Spain attract more tourists than the United States though the U. When it comes to "unattractive indicators," the United States ranks near the bottom of the list of rich countries in the level of development assistance it gives, but at the top in the percentage of its population that is incarcerated.
For that to happen, the ob- jective measure of potential soft power has to be attractive in the eyes of specific audiences, and that attraction must influence policy outcomes. In this chapter we shall look at several examples of how such attraction has affected important policy outcomes. In the run-up to the Iraq War, polls showed that the United States lost an average of 30 points of support in most European countries.
Levels of support were even lower in Islamic countries. Mter the war, majorities of the people held unfavorable images of the United States in nearly two-thirds of 19 countries surveyed. Most of those who held negative views said they blamed the policies of the Bush administration rather than America in general. Reactions to policies are more volatile than underlying reactions to culture and values.
The image or at- tractiveness of a country is composed of foreigners' attitudes on a variety of levels and types, of which reactions to American policy constitute only one. Figure 2. At the same time, majorities in 34 of those 43 countries said they disliked the growing influence of America in their country.!! The Iraq War was not the first time that a controversial security policy reduced the attractiveness of the American image in other countries.
There have been four prior periods when U. Median measures of 43 countries surveyed seventies; and during the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Germany in the early eighties. Although there was a decline in the overall popular- ity of the United States from to by about 23 points in Britain, 32 in Germany, 19 in Italy, 7 in France , majorities in all but France continued to express positive opinions of the United States throughout the major operations of the war and right up to the Paris Peace Talks of I Feb.
In a Newsweek poll, pluralities of around 40 percent of the people polled in France, Britain, Germany, and Japan disapproved of American policies. At the same time, majorities in all those countries approved of the American people,14 President Reagan was able to get Euro- pean agreement for deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces, but there was considerable European resistance to his policy efforts to isolate the Soviet Union economically.
Nonetheless, there has also been anti-Americanism in the sense of a deeper rejection of American society, values, and culture. It has long been a minor but persistent strand in the image, and it goes back to the earliest days of the republic, when Europeans turned America into a symbol in their own internal culture wars. Already in the eighteenth century, some Europeans were absurdly arguing that the excessive humidity in the New World led to degenerate forms of life. For many on the European Left, America was a symbol of capitalist exploita- tion of the working class, while those on the right saw it as degener- ate because of its racial impurity.
In , a former viceroy of India complained to Conservative MPs that Hollywood had helped to shatter "the white man's prestige in the East," and Belgium banned Africans in its colony the Congo from attending American films. Upper class anti-Americanism may be surrogate snobbery.
European elites have always grumbled about America's lack of sophistication, but polls show that America's pop culture resonates widely with the majority of the people across the continent. Another source of anti-Americanism is structural. The United States is the big kid on the block and the disproportion in power en- genders a mixture of admiration, envy, and resentment.
Similarly, in the mids majorities across Western Europe told pollsters they preferred an equal distribution of power between the United States and the USSR rather than U. Policies can soften or sharpen hard structural edges, and they can affect the ratio of love to hate in complex love-hate relation- ships.
The United States was even more preeminent than now at the end of World War II, when it represented more than a third of the world economy and was the only country with nuclear weapons, but it pursued policies that were acclaimed by allied countries. Similarly, American leadership was welcome to many even when the end of the Cold War meant there was no longer any country that could balance American power. For example, the Yugoslav intellectual Milovan Djilas argued in that if the power of the U.
The best Japan can aspire to is 'vice president. Neoliberal Institutionalism particularly looks at this solution: it argues that international institutions promote cooperation and limit the effects of anarchy. Indeed, Neoliberals accept the existence of anarchy within the international system, but that does not prevent cooperation.
Keohane presents three advantages of international institutions under anarchy: they lower coordination costs, they raise the cost of cheating, and they diffuse information. Furthermore, Neoliberals believe that states are more concerned with absolute gains rather than relative gains. States conceive of their gains not in comparison with other states but looking towards the total gains, which enhances cooperation between them.
Therefore, international relations may be a positive-sum interaction, where each side benefits from cooperation. Eventually, Keohane and Nye , p.
They found three conditions of complex interdependence: an increasing number of channels of contact between societies, the fact that governments reluctantly use military force, and that security is no longer the main issue in international relations.
Joseph Nye differentiates between two types of power. He argues that soft power is as important as hard power, and even more so in international politics. Indeed, soft power enables a change of behaviour in others, without competition or conflict, by using persuasion and attraction. He also points out the importance of style: as soft power is a matter of seduction, behaviours such as arrogance might be counterproductive and entail repulsion rather than attraction.
In opposing hard power, soft power emphasizes not the ever-possibility of war, but the possibility of cooperation; not military power, but the power of ideas. More precisely, soft power is relevant to the three solutions that Liberals propose to solve the problem of war.
The first is that democracies will not go to war against other democracies. In a democracy, the people have a say in the country and can impose peaceful goals. Democracies are therefore more inclined to use soft power rather than hard power. Furthermore, Nye asserts that even in case of difficulties, a democratic state will not lose its soft power. Thus, when a policy is criticised, it may produce some soft power as the people from other countries may see that as a proof of authenticity and as a sign of freedom of speech.
The second solution to the problem of war for believers of Liberalism is economic interdependence. The fact that it constrains states to cooperate with others appears more to be coercion rather than attraction, and this solution would be therefore closer to hard power than soft power.
Thus, a free trade economy will produce soft power, as it will attract others to its model. A successful Liberal economy may create a desire in other countries to adopt this model. International institutions are the third solution posed by Liberals to the problem of war.
In promoting cooperation through common rules and norms, they foster peaceful relations. This is a core assumption of Neoliberalism, which sees institutions as a means to tone down the effects of anarchy. Furthermore, Nye , p. For instance, the United States uses institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to promote its values of liberalism and democracy. Thus, soft power, as presented by Joseph Nye, adopts a lot of Liberal theory, and particularly of Neoliberal Institutionalism.
Joseph Nye uses the theory to study the particular case of the United States. He aims to prove that the country is not in decline and that isolationism must be avoided. Indeed, in a globalized and interdependent world, the United States has to cooperate and it also needs the cooperation of other countries. Because an increasing number of issues are global, a multilateral approach in international relations is required.
Therefore, it is soft power that will be helpful in this situation, rather than hard power. Indeed, issues such as global warming, outer space and cyberspace are more likely to be solved with soft power, whereas military force would be inefficient or insufficient. Nye justifies the use of multilateralism in U. Likewise, Nye agrees with Neoliberalism that absolute gains are more important for states than relative gains. Even with soft power, a positive-sum interaction can be implemented.
Soft power can therefore benefit each side. It contradicts the Realist assumption that states only seek security. For Nye and other Liberal thinkers, states sometimes seek prosperity. Thus, Nye succeeds in putting together the assertion of the pre-eminence of the United States with the Liberal theory of a multilateral international system.
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