Is culture soft power?

     This section, named “International cultural rights and diplomacy”, will be dedicated to the understanding of international organizations such as UNESCO, what different countries' institutes do for the spread and maintenance of their culture around the world, and explanations about different topics related to cultural rights on an international level.

    This first post focuses on whether or not culture can be understood as soft power.  So, first of all, what do we mean when talking about soft power? Usually defined as the opposite of hard power, which involves physical, military and economic features; this concept was coined by Joseph Nye, American political scientist known for co-founding the international relations theory of neoliberalism. Soft power concept was introduced in  Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990) and in an article published the same year. There, soft power was used to portrait America’s leading superpower, since it was defined as a piece of a more generalized strategy of the country. The concept is more precisely defined in Soft Power: the Means to Success in World Politics (2004), where he highlights the three main sources of soft power in a country:


  • Its culture and its attractiveness to others.
  • It political values.
  • Its foreign policies.

  

This concept was widely adopted in different contexts, specially in emerging powers such as South Korea or China. There, the main elements of the country’s culture, which are usually very distinctive of the country and very popular abroad at the same time, were understood as elements of the soft power strategy.

Thus, he highlights that the most efficient way in which a country can enhance its power capabilities is combining the possibilities of both hard and soft power, a concept he names ‘smart power’. The country is considered to be the main beneficiary, so it makes soft power dependent on its ability to move a wide range of tools to expand this power to an international scene. The country is here seen as homogeneous, a quality that is simply not true in most cases. Last but not least, Nye argues that when a country adopts soft power tools, its attractiveness towards the foreign people or countries increases, which in turn, improves its own power.

Just to make it easier to understand, the British Council defines soft power as “the advantage that comes to an international actor through being associated with admirable values and culture”.  It doesn’t necessarily imply altruism, thus the internal logic of the concept is unilateral.

If you are curious about which countries lead the ranking of soft power, here we show them from 2015 to 2019:


                            Top 5  ranking of leading countries in soft power from 2015 to 2019.



    Which elements are used to create this ranking? It is extracted from a poll which subjects were Culture, Education, Engagement, Digital, Enterprise, and Government. The Culture section includes both ‘high’ culture as performing arts to ‘pop’ culture as films, and it also refers to the annual weight of international tourism, music industry exports and international sports events.
    Despite the decline of the US positions, this country still has lots of soft power assets, especially those that are not linked to the government. In 2019 (we have no more recent reports), the US dominated in Culture, Digital and Education segments. Regarding Culture, the reasons are obvious: internationally acclaimed singers and actors, Hollywood blockbusters, Disney products, Netflix,...
    So, just to answer this post’s title: culture is a highly important part of soft power and we should deeply think about the influences we get and why we get them.





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