Why 'soft power' isn't so soft: Representational force and the sociolinguistic construction of attraction in world politics

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 583-612

  Mattern, Janice Bially ^a  

^a LEHIGH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 22544451267     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298050330031601     Document Type: Review

References (112)

1. John Kerry, 'Nomination Acceptance Speech', Democratic National Convention, Boston MA, 29 July 2004 [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/ articles/A25678-2004Jul29.html];
2. and Alexander T. J. Lennon, ed., The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Using Soft Power to Undermine Terrorist Networks (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
3. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and William Owens, 'America's Information Edge,' Foreign Affairs 75, no. 2 (1996);
4. Francis Fukuyama, 'Us Must Balance Hard Power with Soft Power,' New Perspectives Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2004);
5. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., 'Leverage on Soft Power to Fight Terrorism,' The Straits Times 2004;
6. and Nye, 'When Hard Power Undermines Soft Power,' New Perspectives Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2004).
7. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
8. William Maley, 'Asylum-Seekers in Australia's International Relations', Australian Journal of International Affairs 57, no. 1 (2003);
9. and Rosaleen Smyth, 'Mapping US Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century', Australian Journal of International Affairs 55, no. 3 (2001).
10. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
11. Language is any sign svstem, whether those signs are verbal or written words, gestures, art, or other forms of expression. But since it is most accessible, I focus on verbal and written language.
12. And sometimes physically, although I do not address this here since then the attempt to wield soft power slides into the use of hard power, as traditionally defined.
13. In this way, a speaker uses representational force to secure her Self but it is the (in)security of her victim's Self that enables the speaker to formulate a representationally forceful threat.
14. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
15. Nye, Soft Power, x.
16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995);
17. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971);
18. and Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
19. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
20. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976);
21. Anne Sartori, 'The Might of the Pen: A Reputational Theory of Communication in Disputes', International Organization 56, no. 1 (2002);
22. and R. Price, 'Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines', International Organization 52, no. 3 (1998).
23. See also Richard Ned Lebow, 'Power, Persuasion and Justice', in this issue.
24. Nye, Soft Power, 111.
25. Nye and Owens, 'America's Information Edge,'.
26. Nye also advocates more passive approaches to cultivating soft power, for instance through entertainment and media. He offers no account of which - public diplomacy or passive cultural 'osmosis' - is more effective, when, and why.
27. R.S. Zaharna, 'Intercultural Communication and International Public Relations: An Integrated Literature Review and Critique,' Communication Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2000);
28. Alvin Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War, (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995);
29. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward and American Information Strategy, (Santa Monica: RAND, 1999);
30. Nye, 'When Hard Power Undermines Soft Power,';
31. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., 'The Challenge of Soft Power,' Time Magazine, Online Edition 1999,
32. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., 'Propaganda Isn't the Way: Soft Power', International Herald Tribune 10 January 2003.
33. Jacques Dufresne, 'Soft Opposition to Soft Domination,' Technology in Society 20, no. 3 (1998);
34. Nye, Soft Power, 90-7;
35. Erik Jones, 'New Dynamics of 'Old Europe',' French Politics 1 (2003).
36. Nye, Soft Power, x.
37. Ibid., 90, 99.
38. Schelling, Arms and Influence.
39. Nye apparently has a religious conviction about this point. See Michelle Bates Deakin, 'Wielding Our Power', UU World 28, no. 6 (2005).
40. There is an important point of objection to how I have rendered this point that I wish to acknowledge. This is the postmodern proposition that theory is everything - that theory always creates practice even if practitioners do not realise it. [For the development of this point in philosophy, see Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979);
41. in IR see Richard Ashley, 'Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematic', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 2 (1988).] I agree. However, it is clear that the theories that have underwritten the dominant practices of IR (e.g., realist theories of power politics) are so deeply engrained that for practitioners who abide them they are taken as truths not theories. This is also true for many IR scholars, who do not realize their own role in the perpetuation of status quo practices. What follows from this is that world politics, if it continues to follow the status quo, does not necessarily benefit in practical terms from further scholarly input. Scholars, on this view, thus have the job of reflecting upon practice rather than constituting it. This (mistaken) viewpoint would seem to have to change with soft power. Insofar as soft power is something that practitioners wish to pursue, even those scholars who view their role as predominantly reflective rather than constitutive can realise their constitutive or practical contribution. They can inform practitioners about how attraction works so they can more effectively 'cultivate and harvest' soft power.
42. Nye, 'The Challenge of Soft Power,'
43. Nye, Soft Power, 11.
44. Ibid., 111.
45. I refer at this point in my argument to the narrowly defined constructivist scholarship often associated with Alexander Wendt, Michael Barnett, and Martha Finnemore, to name a few. Conceptually this form of constructivism is 'thin' in the sense that its view of social construction does not go 'all the way down'.
46. Samuel Huntington, 'The Clash of Civilizations,' Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993);
47. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
48. and J. Mercer, 'Anarchy and Identity,' International Organization 49, no. 2 (1995).
49. In primordialism it is a natural similarity, in social identity theory it is in-group category similarity, and in constructivism it is the produced shared values, norms, and ideals.
50. Mercer, 'Anarchy and Identity,'
51. Emanuel Adler and Michael N. Barnett, eds, Security Communities, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39.
52. Though constructivism does unfortunately posit two different ontologies for attraction and identity formation.
53. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, 'International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,' International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998);
54. Neta C. Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
55. M. Lynch, 'The Dialogue of Civilisations and International Public Spheres,' Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000);
56. C. Cruz, 'Identity and Persuasion: How Nations Remember Their Pasts and Make Their Futures,' World Politics 52, no. 3 (2000);
57. and Thomas Risse, 'Let's Argue!: Communicative Action in World Politics,' International Organization 54, no. 1 (2000).
58. Jürgen Habermas, 'Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,' In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 43-115. (Cambridge: MIT, 1990).
59. Others have linked these practices to constructivist logic, thus emphasising the socially constructed version of Nye's approach to attraction. See Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Emergence of Noopolitik;
60. and Smyth, 'Mapping US Public Diplomacy'.
61. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998);
62. and Rodger A. Payne, 'Persuasion, Frames, and Norm Construction,' European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 1 (2001).
63. Crawford, Argument and Change;
64. and Risse, 'Let's Argue!'
65. Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). The various sub-actors in a collective actor become constituted by the larger cultural structures. Thus unlike the natural approach to attraction this cultural approach could theoretically offer a coherent account of where attraction 'sits' in a collective body. But, as I argue, this conceptual improvement is neutralised by the fact that this Habermasian logic of attraction is circular.
66. Risse, 'Let's Argue!'
67. For instance, one might argue that human rights activists around the globe have such a robust common lifeworld that the collective process of further refining and formulating the content of human rights can be accomplished without worrying about its dependence on prior attraction among the interlocutors. I am skeptical of even this example however since the common lifeworld that informs human rights activism (and so the attraction upon which it rests) is actually not all that 'common' globally.
68. For instance, Bourdieu argues that culture is a product of practice; Bukovansky argues that culture is a product of rules and discourse; and of course even though Habermas presupposes a culture (in the form of lifeworld), he poses argument as a way to envision the development of further culture. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992);
69. Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics;
70. and Jürgen Habermas, 'Discourse Ethics'.
71. In the Habermasian model, the role of communicative exchange in the production of culture is rooted in argument; in Bukovansky's model, communicative exchange is implied by the focus on discourse - a language-based matrix of meaning (Legitimacy and Power Politics, 22); in the Bourdieusian model, communicative exchange can be seen as the key process that makes habitus intelligible.
72. See Iver B. Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2002);
73. and Richard Biernacki, 'Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry', History and Theory 39, no. 3 (2000): 304.
74. Again any sign system amounts to language - whether those signs are verbal or written words, gestures, art, or other forms of expression.
75. Hayden White, The Content of the Form, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
76. In the case of Foucault, 'truth' is produce by 'grafting' it to relevant extant discourses. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
77. Which advocates of soft power believe is very possible.
78. Hayden White shows that thought is not socially intelligible unless communicated as narrative. Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,' In The Content of the Form. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), ch. 1.
79. See, for instance, Daniel Drezner, 'Bargaining, Enforcement, and Multilateral Sanctions: When Is Cooperation Counterproductive?,' International Organization 54, no. 1 (2000).
80. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, (New York: Routledge, 1997).
81. Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In this formulation I am positing that in order to participate in the construction of a culture/'reality' beings must already be actors: they must have some sociolinguistically constituted Self. However, they need not necessarily share any relevant aspects of their sociolinguistic constitution with their interlocutors. In this way I am not assuming the equivalent of a common lifeworld among interlocutors; merely that each participant has some Self-sources prior to entrance into the communicative exchange.
82. On ontological security, see Jef Huysmans, 'Security! What Do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier,' European Journal of International Relations 4, no. 2 (1998);
83. Jennifer Mitzen, "Ontological Security and World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma," ms. Ohio State University, 2005.
84. This is even more pronounced for collective actors, whose sociolinguistic matrices are yet more intricate.
85. Of course actors don't always choose the most rational strategy. There are also instances in which the most rational strategy is to not protect one's Self. For a discussion, see Janice Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 117-124.
86. Jeff Checkel, 'Social Construction and Integration,' Journal of European Public Policy 6, no. 4 (1999).
87. Leonard J. Schoppa, 'The Social Context in Coercive International Bargaining,' International Organization 53, no. 2 (1999).
88. On seduction and its preconditions, see Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation and the Drives, (New York: Ica Editions, 1993);
89. on manipulation, see Marcia Baron, 'Manipulativeness,' Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 77, no. 2 (2003).
90. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 3-4.
91. No author could narrate a 'reality' away completely on his own but he can deliver the 'final straw'.
92. Cruz, 'Identity and Persausion'.
93. Nye, Soft Power, 122.
94. Philip Jenkins, Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know About Terrorism, (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003);
95. Larry Beinhart, 'The 'War on Terror' Badly Needs a Total Rewrite,' Newsday, October 1 2004.
96. Nye, Soft Power, 112.
97. Collective actors (in this case the US, but also other actors in world politics who were already attracted to its policies) speak via key persons who, in a given context, are positioned so that they symbolise and embody the whole and can act on its behalf. Here this includes at least Bush, Condaleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair.
98. These were the months prior to the US preparations to invade Iraq. The dissent re-emerged after that period when the stakes for victim's subjectivity changed.
99. George Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001. This phraseology was then adopted by other members of the US administration. See, for instance, Rumsfeld's invocation of the phrase as reported by Ann Scott Tyson in 'Where the anti-terror doctrine leads', Christian Science Monitor, 7 February 2002.
100. I have illustrated representational force by reference to an example in which a materially powerful country coerced less powerful ones into accepting its 'truth'. However it is just as easily the case that a materially weaker or less powerful state might rely on representational force to cultivate its attractiveness and soft power over stronger states. For instance, as scholars of UK-US relations have often noted, that friendship is not about the British pandering to American power, or even some natural mutual confluence of attractions, but rather is, in significant part, the product of cunning, sharp British narratives of 'truth' that have significantly shaped American perspective and policy. In this way representational force is not a function of one's relative material prowess; it is a function of knowing how to trap the subjectivity of one's target audience. On the Anglo-American affinity, see Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1990).
101. This was before the old/new Europe debacle.
102. 'Jordan praises US stance', BBC News, 1 February 2002 [http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1796265.stm] (31 March 2005).
103. Nicolas Pelham, 'Jordan's Peaceful Image Shattered', BBC News, 19 November 2002 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2489777.stm] (31 March 2005).
104. It does nothing to the logic of soft power if the attraction is just as if rather than Real since in the end there is no difference in terms of the effects. Soft power is about getting others to do what you want them to do without having to rely on hard power. It is not cultivating the psychic experience of attraction. Moreover there is no way to know about the kind of psychic experience the actor is really having and so whether they ever really experience attraction. Language and action are all there are.
105. Pelham, 'Jordan's Image'; and Roger Hardy, 'Jordan Steps up Drive Against Militants', BBC News, 14 November 2002, [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/world/middle_east/2477393.stm] (31 March 2005).
106. and Roger Hardy, 'Jordan Steps up Drive Against Militants', BBC News, 14 November 2002, [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/ 2477393.stm] (31 March 2005).
107. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
108. Lynch, 'Dialogue of Civilizations,'.
109. Nye, Soft Power, 111.
110. Though listening in other low-stakes contexts is crucial so that one can learn where one's victim's Self is vulnerable.
111. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., 'The Decline of America's Soft Power: Why Washington Should Worry,' Foreign Affairs 83, no. 3 (2004).
112. It could last also if the victim comes to internalise their compliance as part of the 'realities' that constitute their subjectivity, though that process would require a some further theorisation.