Britain's Persuaders

Soft Power in a Hard World

Helen Ramscar, Michael Clarke

• Editore: I.B. Tauris
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755634286
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: National Security

'Soft power' is an oft-used term and commands an instinctive understanding among journalists and casual observers, who mostly interpret it as 'diplomatic' or somehow 'persuasive'. 'Hard power' is seen, by contrast, as something more tangible and usually military. But this is a superficial appreciation of a more subtle concept - and one key to Britain's future on the international stage. Britain's Persuaders is a deep exploration of this phenomenon, using new research into the instruments of soft power evident in British society and most relevant to the 2020s. Some, like the British Council or the BBC World Service, are explicitly intended to generate soft power in accordance with governmental intentions; but rather more, like the entertainment industries, sport, professional regulatory bodies, hospitality industries or education sectors have more penetrating soft power effects even as they pursue their own independent or commercial rationales. This book conducts an up-to-date 'audit' of all Britain's principal sources of soft power. Situating its analysis within the current understanding of the 'smart power' of nation states – that desire to employ the full spectrum of policy instruments and national characteristics to achieve policy outcomes, specifically in the context of 'Brexit Britain' where soft power status is certain to loom larger during the 2020s.

1

Introduction

At 15 billion miles away, the most distant human object from earth is the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which was launched in 1977. In its long life it has flown past Jupiter and Saturn, and it crossed the boundary into interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 1 is expected to last until 2025 when, after almost fifty years, its power source will finally disappear. It then hurtles further away from our solar system, perhaps to be intercepted by aliens from another world. If and when that happens, it will carry a message of peace to them from the United Nations – in English. Astonishing in one sense, but not in another. In 1977 the UN secretary general who recorded the message was an Austrian. But as Andrew Roberts puts it, during the twentieth century, English had become ‘the primary language of stock exchanges, business, air-traffic control and economic development . . . it overhauled German as the language of science and French as the language of diplomacy’.¹ It was natural in 1977 that English should be the language in which to greet any curious space alien. And it was a symptom, a deep symptom for deep space, of political power here on earth. It was an expression of soft power so profound that it seemed entirely natural and sensible at the time.² If similar missions occur before 2077, which seems almost certain, will this world still reach out to our alien friends in English?

Why should sending messages in English, instead of French, German or Mandarin, tell us anything about the nature of political power and the ways in which it is expressed in our more immediate and tangible world? In this study we want to dig deeper into the symbolism of Voyager 1’s recorded message. We want to consider how soft power seems to work across the board – and in particular, how it works for Britain as the country confronts the immediate decade ahead.^*

We do this because the early 2020s are a very appropriate moment to examine the question of Britain’s ‘soft power’ in the world. The very concept of ‘power’ and the way in which it operates in the globalized environment is evidently changing. ‘Power’ was never a simple concept, but in the 2020s we see it manifested in some mysterious and apparently contradictory ways. The big states certainly try to exert their political power through some very traditional, assertive and militarized modes, even as the general exercise of international power, in most other respects, inclines towards more subtle expressions of attraction and persuasion. The exercise, both of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power, is constantly in evidence, though most governments would prefer to dwell on their own efficient uses of soft power as ways of achieving cooperative and desirable ends. This seems natural in such a complex world where all countries are part of a globalized society, and in these circumstances the unsubtle use of ‘hard power’, ‘raw power’, ‘naked power’ or whatever suggests something either brutal or simply inefficient.

The notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power carry strong intuitive meanings for most people who use the terms, and obvious examples can be cited easily enough to demonstrate them both in action. If Britain deploys aircraft or warships to the Eastern Mediterranean to defend its military base in Cyprus, it is exercising hard power. If it hosts an international conference to discuss the future of foreign military bases throughout the region, it is exercising soft power. In a deeper analysis, of course, these terms have to be unpacked a good deal further and set in their political context. Understanding more carefully some of the ways in which the exercise of international power is rapidly evolving is an important, and urgent, analytical question.

A new examination of soft power is also particularly appropriate to Britain’s own situation in the 2020s. The next decade will be internationally challenging for all the European states, no less for ‘Brexit Britain’ that seeks to chart a new course outside the European Union and pursue a more independent economic and political role in world politics. What are traditionally regarded as a state’s ‘hard power’ resources – military capabilities, economic instruments or those levers of government like policing and regulation that can be used to pressure foreign states or actors – will be more difficult to exercise for all European and middle-range powers. Their military and economic capabilities are all in relative decline in comparison to the big countries like the United States and China and the rising powers of Asia (and also of Russia, at least in military terms). As they pursue their international objectives, European middle-rank powers will naturally lean more heavily on their soft power resources, in which they still have significant relative strength.

This will be particularly true for Britain, where the ‘global Britain’ orientation created in response to Brexit relies heavily on employing the full spectrum of the country’s resources: social, cultural, historical and political, as well as its more hard-edged strengths in economic size, military expertise, intelligence, diplomatic weight and so on. As Boris Johnson put it in 2016 to the Conservative Conference when he was foreign secretary, Britain’s hard power, he said,

is dwarfed by a phenomenon that the pessimists never predicted when we unbundled the British Empire. And that is . . . our irresistible . . . soft power – the vast and subtle and pervasive extension of British influence around the world that goes with having the language that was invented and perfected in this country and now has more speakers than any other language on earth.³

Such comments played to one of the political undercurrents behind the urge to leave the European Union, namely some sense of innate British exceptionalism – an assumption that British society and culture were somehow generically different from those of its European Union partners, and that after almost fifty years inside the EU it had become apparent that British society simply did not share the same political and social make-up that propelled its continental neighbours towards close common European goals.⁴ Brexit Britain would promote its distinctive social and political culture, its business acumen and its free-trading history, as international strengths – sources of power – in themselves. Among other things, therefore, the Brexit decision represented a confident bet on Britain’s ability to use its soft power assets to full advantage.

Subsequent arguments around the Brexit decision also highlighted the historic diversity of British society – diverse in the different kingdoms that now constitute the United Kingdom and diverse in the regions within and between them. We will return to this in the final chapter, but here we merely note that soft power does not flow primarily from a government but from the wider society. And British society is inherently and historically diverse, geographically and socially. That can be a source either of soft power strength or of weakness, and we offer examples in Part Two of both.

In short, many analysts seem to regard soft power as a subject of great intrinsic interest and also of growing contemporary relevance to the external relations of all the mid-ranking countries. This study is an attempt to dig below the surface of traditional soft power thinking, looking at the soft power cards that Britain has to play in its hand and trying to evaluate their worth as the international competition in soft power resources becomes ever more fierce. But to understand such a vague concept properly, soft power has to be situated within an understanding of international power more generally. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ power are very shorthand terms for resources and relationships that are far more complicated and are always changing. The card game of international power has to be understood more clearly. So too does the nature of the cards themselves and what they are each worth.

In addition to the British institutions that are normally regarded as self-evidently useful cards in Britain’s soft power hand, for instance, there are many other institutions and organizations that play roles that are at least as important, even if they may not know it themselves.

Some publicly funded British institutions, like the BBC World Service or the British Council, are explicitly intended to generate soft power in accordance with governmental intentions. But more institutions, like the rest of the BBC, the wider entertainment industries, sport, professional regulatory bodies, hospitality industries or education sectors, have more penetrating soft power effects even as they pursue their own independent or commercial rationales. Around one-third of the world’s population have regular access to watch the highly internationalized English Premier League, which is far and away the most powerful football league in the world. Formula 1 racing could hardly be more international, but it was created and initially owned by British sports entrepreneurs, and six of its ten teams are based in Britain.⁵ London’s Metropolitan Police is regarded as one of the leading international models of urban policing. British expertise is consistently influential in regulating world shipping, air transport or global transit security, and British specialists in finance or in professions such as law, engineering, architecture, publishing or communications are very well represented among global management bodies. Not least, the British Royal Family remains unique and in terms of commercial asset value was measured in 2017 as the third biggest brand in the world.⁶ For a country that represents 0.8 per cent of the global population, these are all significant potential strengths, and most of them are not controlled, or even much influenced, by the British government.

A certain amount of attention has been paid in the past to the soft power potential of Britain’s ‘explicit’ persuaders, like the BBC or the Commonwealth, but very little attention has been paid to the far greater number of ‘implicit’ persuaders, many of whom may not be fully aware of their own international attraction and whose influence has never been surveyed comprehensively within a single framework. Freddie Laker, for example, was a lifelong airline entrepreneur who launched the budget airline ‘Skytrain’ in 1977. It went bust in 1982, partly because all the big airlines imitated it, but it changed the face of the global airline industry. Or Jim Davis, who had a massive impact on harmonizing different interests in world shipping; or Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who served twenty-three years in the Army, became a leading international expert on chemical warfare and was training doctors in Aleppo even as barrel bombs were being dropped by Syrian aircraft. Or Trevor Nunn, a noted Shakespearean director who nevertheless launched some of the world’s most successful popular musicals, including Cats and Les Misérables. In the case of internationally famous English football star Marcus Rashford, whose own campaigning drove a British policy U-turn on child food poverty, his personal domestic success had its own international impact.⁷ Britain’s persuaders can be seen in many different guises across all social spheres.

Compared with the wealth of scholarship devoted to understanding the concept of ‘power’ itself and the different ways it tends to work in the international system, there have been relatively few studies on soft power since the concept was popularized less than thirty years ago, still fewer on British soft power. In recent years, and under the political pressures of the last decade, however, there has been a growth in the interest around soft power, not so much for its own sake but rather as a component to understanding better what seemed to be happening in world politics as power was visibly shifting – to new international actors and new ways of conducting international politics.⁸ A few studies have looked more specifically at British soft power resources and tried to analyse some of the ways they are handled.⁹ And there have been some notable reports that have tried, over the years, to list and compare Britain’s soft power resources as a means to have them recognized and more consciously supported by government.¹⁰ Not least, there are the ‘international rankings’ that the media so enjoy, which score different countries according to their apparent soft power acumen and influence.¹¹

This book is intended to draw from, and build on, all of these studies. It offers a different framework to analyse British soft power as a contribution to the creation of a net assessment approach to the nation’s soft power assets. A net assessment of soft power would work in roughly the same way as military net assessments. In the soft power sphere it would involve a deeper dive into the evidence to try to establish the net lead or net loss of international influence British institutions have in relation to close competitors and their natural peer countries. Too many institutions are judged and measured by their outputs – how many visits, programmes, exhibitions, exchange arrangements and so on – as opposed to their impact – who notices and what difference does it make? Difficult as it is to measure ‘impact’, evidence-based assessments, alongside qualitative judgements, should be set against similar impact assessments that competitors are seen to create. The British government does not undertake such an exercise – certainly not for those institutions outside its own control – though it moved a little in this direction in 2019 when it set out its intention to conduct ‘a fundamental’ Integrated Review of all external policy.¹²

In this study, we are not in a position to produce a net assessment, which would require much more information about public and elite opinion and also about social trends within other societies, as well as more information than normally exists in the public domain about our own. So we make no attempt to offer a proper net assessment here. But we do believe that it can be done. And we structure Part Two of this study around some different behavioural categories for soft power assessment that are not normally considered and which we believe can capture a greater range of the relevant interactions that could be part of the approach. If it were to be done, a net assessment would doubtless be a big analytical undertaking; and it would require more precise specification than we have attempted in this short book. At least this might be a start. And we hope it will galvanize interest in wider thinking about British soft power.

Britain’s prominence in this respect was generally established during the twentieth century when the cul...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Authors
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations and terms
• 1 Introduction
• Part One Thinking about power
• Part Two Britain’s persuaders
• Part Three Soft power in practice
• Appendix 1: Twinned cities
• Appendix 2: Statistics
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright