Usages of soft power

During the conference The Last Three Feet: New Media, New Approaches and New Challenges for American Public Diplomacy, one of the panelists talked about how while in Iraq, he started giving Facebook a different use than his predecessors. The American Embassy had been writing its posts in English, and so their public mostly consisted of Americans. Being a body that's supposed to interact with the country that it's in, they started posting in Arabic, and about topics that Iraqis might care more about. Another panelist also talked about how they started using Twitter in Bahrain to present news stories from a different perspective, a more "objective" one.

Is this a move into what Ronfeldt and Arquilla call Noopolitik? It might be. In the case of the Bahrain example, they seem to have taken the approach of "whose story wins". However, many of these efforts still go on within a context of war. Thus, soft power is only a complement to hard power, and may be even a way to strengthen it. There's also the matter of how it's being exercised. During the conference, one of the attendants asked if they ever worried about pushing hegemonic perspectives. At first, there was silence, for some reason, nobody wanted to answer. Then, the only person who stepped up to the plate completely shut down theories of hegemony, saying that he wasn't worried at all about it. Being diplomats, particularly American diplomats, I do think that such concerns should be on the table. A lot of times there seems to be an uncontested assumption that the American way is the best way, and that's not necessarily true.

Back to the subject of soft power, I would also like to point out some more recent efforts by a politician from another country, Silvio Berlusconi. Just yesterday, he used his Facebook account to refute rumors about his resignation as prime minister. He's got more than 2,000 likes and more than 3,000 comments. Of course, in a country with a population of around 60 million people, these numbers are very small. But we have to take into consideration that his expressions will probably make their way from person to person and to the media.

Actually, the way Berlusconi has stayed in power for so long is the subject of an entire book. I recently went to a conference where Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini talked a bit about this. A lot of it has to do with the exercise of soft power. He explained how, in Italy, he has been very successful at pleasing the Italian public, while outside his country he's not perceived so favorably. He know Italians, and has been able to successfully sell himself. As shown in the documentary Videocracy, a lot of it has to do with his power over media. He owns a substantial part of television, so he controls a lot of the information that the great majority of Italians get. Is this also a form of noopolitics? I think it's got some of it, but it's certainly far from the type of networked structure that Ronfeldt and Arquilla talked about, where civil society and governments cooperate for global interests.