Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990 in his book Bound to Lead. His purpose in doing so was to rebut the conventional wisdom of the time, which was that given that the Soviet Union was passing the US military power while Japan was overtaking America economically, the United States was doomed to decline as the Spanish and British empires before it had. “Declinists,” whose views were exemplified by Paul Kennedy’s 1978 bestseller, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, only believed this because they focused exclusively on American hard power and on the aggregate of the nation’s tangible resources. This focus, Nye contended, had led the US foreign-policy establishment to underestimate America’s vast resources of soft power, which he defined as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through coercion or payments.” For Nye, these were every bit as vital.
But subsequently, in a 2017 essay, “Soft Power: The Origins and Political Progress of a Concept,” Nye admitted that his ideas seemed to have struck a greater chord with European political leaders than with American ones—an understatement if ever there was one. For the European Union had made soft power, or, more accurately, normative power, the basis not just of its international diplomacy, but of its self-conception as a great power. It is not that EU member states dissolved their military establishments. Rather, Europe’s global purpose was no longer empire, as it had been for half a millennium, but the instauration, within the boundaries of the bloc, of the “perpetual peace” based on universally applicable cosmopolitan law that Immanuel Kant had dreamed of, and, outside those borders, of the globalization of that peace through norm-setting and the elevation of international law above that of national law—above all where human rights were concerned. Repudiating its bloody past, and striving to make its own success at constructing what Jürgen Habermas dubbed a “postnational constellation” serve as the catalyst for leading the world into what Churchill, speaking of the promise of the United Nations, called the “sunny uplands,” both by example—the norms it set for itself—and by exerting its influence, its “soft power,” to further those norms internationally.
Unlike the pessimistic assumptions on which the centrality of hard power are based, assumptions summed up in the celebrated Roman adage, “If you want peace, prepare for war,” this worldview depended for its coherence on a progress narrative—on the idea, to borrow Martin Luther King’s formulation, that the arc of moral history might be long but it bends toward justice. There was no small amount of complacency and self-flattery in such an assumption, for often European diplomats seemed to be saying in effect, “If we can put an end to millennia of war on our continent, why can’t you on other continents do the same?” But it would be a mistake to view the European elevation of soft power as merely a cynical exercise. For there was genuine idealism as well.