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Soft power is rare in world politics: Ruling out fear- and appetite-based compliance

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Abstract

Soft power has become a catchall phrase that suffers from analytical ambiguity. Extant literature on soft power often conflates it with other kinds of power. In this article, I suggest examining soft power from the power recipient’s perspective, emphasizing the latter’s agency. I introduce three ideal-type explanations for power recipients’ compliance with power wielders’ desires: fear, appetite, and spirit. Fear- or appetite-based compliance is in line with coercion or inducement, respectively, in Joseph Nye’s soft power formulation. As such, soft power arguments require ruling out compliance based on fear and/ or appetite. Soft power is rare in world politics, and it often builds on the material preponderance of the main custodians of the standard of civilization, that is, the central actors in the (regional) international society in question, leading to soft power’s correlation with hard power.

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Notes

  1. Here, legitimacy refers to ‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’ (Suchman 1995, pp. 573–574).

  2. In discussions of behavioral (soft) power in international relations, the behavior in question is that of states, which are treated as as-if persons who believe, feel, think, calculate, decide and act (see also Mitzen 2006; Wendt 2004). However, in empirical studies that use a soft power framework, the unit of analysis is often ordinary individuals without a clear connection between different units of analysis. In other words, how changes at the individual level translate to the state-level is often missing (c.f. Çuhadar and Paffenholz 2019). In Nye’s soft power framework, when foreign policy elites are the ones attracted or persuaded, they can shape their state’s foreign policy behavior directly, while if ordinary citizens are the stakeholders involved, the idea is indirect influence through the mediation of public opinion (Nye 2011, pp. 94–99). This framework is how public diplomacy studies connect interventions at the individual level to the host country foreign policies (see, e.g., Martinez Machain 2021).

  3. This case study is explored for illustrative purposes only, and as such, empirical details, or rigorous analysis of contending explanations are not of primary concern.

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This work was supported by the Ewha Womans University under Grant 1-2023-1175-001-1.

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    Kadir Jun Ayhan

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Ayhan, K.J. Soft power is rare in world politics: Ruling out fear- and appetite-based compliance. Place Brand Public Dipl 19, 476–486 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-023-00304-7

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