Soft Power: A New Dimension of Power Dynamics

The civilisation has mostly equated power with strength. Power could be viewed as their ability to influence the behaviour of others to get the desired outcomes. This shaping the behaviour of others could be carried out by using different instruments. It could be done by economic engagement or by attraction or by coercion. Usually, nation-states are found using carrot and stick policy to retain or increase their authority.

It would be incorrect to believe that only the conventional instruments like military or economic might be useful to acquire power. There exists a possibility that at times using these instruments could even prove counterproductive. It is possible in certain cases to get the desired outcome without tangible threats or payoffs. This process of achieving results could also be referred as ‘the second face of power’. This allows a state to achieve the desired outcomes because other states respect its

A. Lele, Asian Space Race: Rhetoric or Reality?, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-0733-7_15, 219

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values, follow its model and aim to reach its level of prosperity and openness. This is what the soft power is all about. It involves attracting others to crave for the results that you desire.

Soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others. However, it involves much more than mere influencing others. It is more than just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is an important part of it. It involves the ability to attract, and this attraction could lead to acquiescence [2]. Soft power resources are the possessions that could create such attractions. Apart from state actors, the soft power could also be put into effect by non-state actors like major NGOs (nongovernmental organisations), MNCs (multinational corporations), various subnational entities and global institutions.

It is important to appreciate that there are various confines of the soft power. It does not allow you to take any active control of the other state or a group. It is not about ‘owning’ everything. The reasons for ‘attraction’ could vary from situation to situation and target to target. The eagerness of the recipient and his/her zeal to ‘comply’ plays an important role in this power dynamics.

There is an opinion that the concept of soft power is more theoretical in nature. It could also be argued that power is ultimately a power, and there is nothing hard or soft about it. A former New York Times columnist Leslie H. Gelb argues that there are no examples found in recent history where leaders of a country have changed their position on a major interest to them because they were persuaded to such an extent that they realised that the pursuing power had understood their interest better than they did. In reality such things just don’t happen.1

The soft power argument based on the ‘mechanism of attraction’ looks problem­atic for some. There is an opinion that the concept of attraction does not form a suitable foundation upon which to base a category of analysis [3]. It is also argued that to presume attraction as a natural force feasible or logical in the context of world politics may not be correct. Rather in the ‘context of world politics it makes far more sense to model attraction as a relationship that is constructed through representational force—a nonphysical but nevertheless coercive form of power that is exercised through language. Insofar as attraction is sociolinguistically constructed through representational force, soft power should not be understood in juxtaposition to hard power but as a continuation of it by different means’ [4].

Such critical reviews about Nye’s conceptualisation of soft power are neces­sary to take the debate further. It is important to note that Nye is not discussing about the attraction in isolation. His argument is that soft power is about the capacity to change what other countries want, and it could be connected with intangible power resources such as culture, ideology and institutions. He also argues that the soft power of a country has three primary sources: its culture, its political values and its foreign policies [5, 6]. Soft power also includes the capacity to shape

international organisations and agendas. It’s not always the state, but any major industrial house or even great philosophers or actors who wield influence on the polity and population of other states could also be recognised as sources of soft power.

For any nation-state, the various foreign policy initiatives are mostly undertaken to address various foreign policy challenges. These initiatives are mainly diplomatic and economic in nature. In certain situations, states are found using military diplomacy as an instrument of policy initiative. The concept of soft power when viewed under such settings demands a nuanced debate and discussion on one of the most important but often less discussed tenets of soft power that is the role of science and technology (S&T). Limited attempts [7] have been made either by Nye’s supporters or critics to contextualise the importance of science and technology as an element of soft power projection. In general, there is an absence of debate either for or against the relevance of S&T in wielding the soft power. The criticism to Nye’s postulation has emerged mainly from the community of social scientists who have different yardsticks to judge the effect of attraction. Nye’s hypothesis of attraction argues well when looked at the backdrop of S&T as a key instrument of soft power.