{"id":2241,"date":"2017-11-10T10:51:11","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T18:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=2241"},"modified":"2017-11-10T10:51:11","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T18:51:11","slug":"soft-power-and-the-arts-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2017\/11\/soft-power-and-the-arts-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Soft power and the arts (1\/3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"who<\/a>This week saw the release of two major studies in the UK on culture and soft power: Soft Power Today<\/a> from the British Council and the University of Edinburgh, and The Art of Soft Power<\/a> from King’s College London. There’s a lot of depth to each of the reports, and I’ll write about each of them in subsequent posts. I’m relatively new to this aspect of cultural policy, so consider this introduction my own attempt to get a few things sorted out, and some preliminary questions.<\/p>\n

I began with Joseph Nye’s seminal article<\/a> from 1990. That was a time when the future path of global economics and power was uncertain, and Nye can be excused for not seeing all that would happen in the decades to come. Japan is given prominence as an economic power, China is treated as an underdeveloped backwater, South Korea (which turned out to be tremendously effective in the soft power arena) does not get mentioned at all. But his key points have had staying power: pure military might is less important than it once was for accomplishing national strategic goals, transnational corporations continued to have growing influence on patterns of trade and politics, and technology and the new information economy would make natural resource endowments of decreasing importance.<\/p>\n

What is<\/em> soft power? In a twitter conversation<\/a> with the British Council, they put it succinctly (I think they were still limited to 140 characters): “We define it as a country\u2019s ability to make friends & influence people not through military might, but through its most attractive assets”. So, for example, Andrew Rose found that all other things equal, a country’s ranking in terms of international opinion on whether it is “a mainly positive or negative influence on the world” had a significant effect on that country’s exports<\/a> – just as we as individuals prefer to buy from companies of which we hold a good opinion, so do importers.<\/p>\n

So where do the arts and culture come in? How a country is perceived can certainly be effected by its popular culture (see, again, South Korea), and over a long period this has been a great source of influence for the US (as Nye notes in his 1990 essay). Whether its “high” culture has much impact is hard to discern – in a piece this week<\/a> in The Guardian<\/em>, Tristram Hunt thinks the Louvre Abu Dhabi marks a great advance in French soft power, at the expense of the British – but we will maybe better know when the noise from press fawning over the building has died down a bit. In Cultural Trends<\/em>, Stuart MacDonald wonders about the effect of the Brexit vote<\/a> on Britain’s soft power, and I think this is the more promising avenue to take.<\/p>\n

What I mean is: soft power is about perceptions of what a country is like, its culture<\/em> in the widest sense of the word. In a recent piece<\/a> revisiting soft power, Joseph Nye, visiting China, reminds them that it is their civic life, rather than their government, or any official cultural policies, that will have most influence. The US has been popular culturally despite<\/em> its governments, though with the election of a president who is the worst practitioner of soft power that could be imagined (his grasp of hard power is similarly incompetent, come to that) we will see if that changes.<\/p>\n

I have two worries, and they are related. First, what if every country believes it has soft power, because who could fail to like the people that we<\/em> are? Canadians (I am one) are particularly attracted to this idea. Denmark<\/a> is proud of its soft power rankings: “Denmark has climbed up two places from last year’s index to the 9th<\/sup>\u00a0place in 2014\/15 owing to, among other things, popular Danish TV series such as Borgen, The Killing, The Bridge and The Heirs and Copenhagen\u2019s global brand as a bicycle-friendly city.” Gruesome murders and bike paths, what’s not to like? So in any study of soft power it’s important I think to look for bias in how soft power, and “likability”, are defined.<\/p>\n

Second, as Nye makes very clear, soft power is … power. It’s the ability to get other countries to do what you want them to. It’s doing it not by military or economic threat, but by getting them to want what you want. Nye uses the example of raising children, how it’s made easier when you instill in them preferences that match your own, which is a metaphor that makes me very uneasy.<\/p>\n

So … I’ll look forward to reading these new research reports, be back soon.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week saw the release of two major studies in the UK on culture and soft power: Soft Power Today from the British Council and the University of Edinburgh, and The Art of Soft Power from King’s College London. There’s a lot of depth to each of the reports, and I’ll write about each of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-issues","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/BTS1.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3dIW5-A9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2250,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2017\/11\/soft-power-and-the-arts-23\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":0},"title":"Soft power and the arts (2\/3)","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"November 15, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The British Council and the University of Edinburgh have teamed up to prepare an empirical analysis of the actual effects of soft power (my introduction on soft power and the arts is here). 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The idea is to take measures of different assets of a country that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Recall","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/2015-Mercedes-Benz-E400-4MATIC-coupe-134-626x382.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/2015-Mercedes-Benz-E400-4MATIC-coupe-134-626x382.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/2015-Mercedes-Benz-E400-4MATIC-coupe-134-626x382.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2263,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2017\/11\/soft-power-and-the-arts-3-3\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":1},"title":"Soft power and the arts (3\/3)","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"November 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Soft power is the ability for a country to have international influence through means other than the threat of military action or aggressive economic policy (i.e. hard power). 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This morning's papers presented very different answers to the question. The New York Times reports on President Biden's idea that we ought to ensure there are good and interesting careers and stable incomes for people who do not want to, or find it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/image-2.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/image-2.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3653,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2024\/12\/art-politics-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":5},"title":"Art, Politics, Trump","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"December 5, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"A favourite old book of mine from my childhood is Kenneth Clark\u2019s\u00a0Civilisation, which goes along with his television series. 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