The End of Power (28 page)

The same question posed of China offers similarly ambiguous results, with the biggest improvements in China's image reported in Nigeria (from 59 percent favorable in 2006 to 85 percent in 2009) compared with a drop in Turkey (from 40 percent in 2005 to 16 percent in 2009) and tepid results, in the 40–50 percent range, in many of the countries polled. Tellingly, in 2011, Pew reported that a majority or plurality of respondents in fifteen out of twenty-two nations said that China either will replace, or has replaced, the United States as the world's leading superpower. Opinions of
the EU have been mixed—its overall image declined in thirteen of twenty countries from 2010 to 2011—while views of Russia tend to be negative and opinions of Iran even more so, with a few salient exceptions (for instance, in 2009, 57 percent of Lebanese had a favorable opinion of Russia, and 74 percent of Pakistanis thought highly of Iran).
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All this suggests that soft power is, at the very least, a volatile concept, highly vulnerable to short-term twists in world affairs, in an environment where news travels more rapidly than ever. That has not stopped numerous countries from embracing the concept and looking into ways to increase their soft power. The scholar Joshua Kurlantzick traces China's shift to a soft power strategy to 1997, when the country couched its refusal to devaluate its currency as “standing up for Asia.” Since then, China has become the major provider of aid to many Southeast Asian countries, expanded aid and projects in Africa, accelerated distribution of its national television programs, and opened Confucius Institutes for language teaching and cultural programs around the world. In February 2012, China Central Television launched an effort to produce programming for the United States, opening a studio in Washington, DC, with more than sixty international staff.
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China is also becoming a destination for global artists and architects; and a sense of its growing importance is prompting parents around the world to consider enrolling their children in Mandarin classes. For China, soft power is an explicit strategy.
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In India, by contrast, soft power is less a policy priority and more a concern among analysts who hope that the country has already amassed a soft power advantage by virtue of being a democracy and having attracted generations of Western tourists, seekers, and now investors. “India has an extraordinary ability to tell stories that are more persuasive and attractive than those of its rivals,” argues Shashi Tharoor, the author and former UN high official turned Indian government minister and politician.
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The head of India's overseas culture programs cited the popularity of yoga as a component of soft power.
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Vague as all this can sound, one area in which India's soft power is generally accepted is Bollywood, the world's largest film exporting industry; it has won fans across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe for decades and is now breaking into the Western commercial mainstream.

If media penetration and popularity are among the more reliable indicators of soft power, as evidenced by both Hollywood and Bollywood, they also reveal a landscape where telenovelas from Mexico and Colombia, low-budget films from Nigeria, and reality shows from South Africa are
broadening the range of influences. In Russia and Eastern Europe, just as the end of the Cold War threw huge arsenals of surplus weapons onto the world market, the end of state television monopolies created a vast vacuum for cheap telenovelas from Latin America to fill, giving birth to addictions—and also markets. In Southeast Asia, a whole generation of fans knows South Korea not for its confrontation with the North nor for its time under dictatorship in the 1970s, but for its video games, pop music stars, and the
Winter Sonata
TV series. The Korean government capitalizes on this by sponsoring concerts and offering language and cooking classes at its cultural centers in the region. Once an opportunity to extend soft power comes into view, capitalizing on it is easy—and often very cheap.
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The latest Korean cultural beachhead is the United States, where the rapper Psy created a sensation with his “Gangnam Style” dances and songs. (Gangnam is a posh neighborhood in Seoul.) “K Pop,” another Korean superstar, also won over legions of fans: the
New York Times
reported that R&B singer Jay Park's songs and albums have hit No. 1 on the R&B/Soul charts on iTunes in the United States, Canada, and Denmark since 2010. Together with the global spread of consumer names such as Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, and LG, these cultural inroads are helping to strengthen South Korea's global brand: in the Anholt GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, which surveys twenty thousand people in twenty countries to put together a ranking of the top fifty country brands, South Korea has risen from thirty-third in 2008 to twenty-seventh in 2011.
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One of the best examples of smaller countries that have used coalitions of the willing, economic diplomacy (i.e., a lot of money), and soft power to advance their interests must surely be Qatar. It led the way in toppling Libya's Moammar Qaddafi by supplying rebels with money, training, and more than twenty thousand tons of weapons, and called early for the arming of rebels in Syria.
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It has attempted mediation in Yemen, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Palestine and—importantly—in Lebanon. Through an $85 billion investment fund, Qatar has bought into businesses from Volkswagen to the Paris St. Germain Football Club. And it is not only behind what is perhaps the most influential new news organization, the network Al Jazeera, but has been building up its reputation as a cultural center with top-rated museums of Islamic and Middle Eastern art as well as high-profile purchases of pieces by the likes of Warhol, Rothko, Cezanne, Koons, and Lichtenstein.
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But you don't have to be sitting on top of a small fortune in hydrocarbon resources to play with the big boys. A small group of countries that are not necessarily neighbors or bound by a common history can achieve results more quickly by simply choosing to work together than by going through cumbersome international organizations. And a more geographically ambitious foreign policy, one focused only on immediate neighbors, is within reach of a larger number of countries now; countries that lag in grasping this opportunity stand to lose their competitive edge.

None of these principles denies the value of a large military or a commanding resource base. But all of them flow logically from the decay of power, and they form the basis for a new kind of international politics.

When they set up the United Nations' system, the winners of World War II made sure to design it in ways that would protect their interests. The United States, Soviet Union, China, France, and Britain, for example, gave themselves permanent seats on the Security Council, the body that was to handle the most serious international crises. They also ensured that they would retain the power to veto any resolution. This arrangement was an innovation in international affairs and, in this case, it worked as its designers had hoped it would. The ability of the five permanent members (all of them nuclear powers) to block any action that threatened their interests gave them another useful tool to wield in the complex rivalry that resulted from the division of the world between the Western and Soviet spheres of influence. Of 269 uses of the veto between 1946 and 2012, more than 225 came before 1990.
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The Soviet Union was the most active veto wielder in the 1950s and 1960s, and the United States thereafter, mainly to stop resolutions condemning Israeli policy vis-à-vis Lebanon or the Palestinians. In the past decade, the Security Council veto has rarely been used; neither France nor Britain has employed it at all in over fifteen years. Since 2006, however, China and Russia have used their veto power to defend rogue nations such as Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and Syria from censure and sanctions.

But if the UN veto by traditional great powers is mostly dormant, other veto powers are flourishing. One arena in which the veto has proved extremely effective for individual nations is the European Union. In 1963, when the community had only six members and was dominated by the French-German alliance, Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain's application to
join. He renewed his opposition in 1967—even though all five of France's partners supported the British application. Only after de Gaulle died in 1969 did France soften its stance, resulting in the admission of Britain, Denmark, and Ireland in 1973. The French veto was an example of a major power—one of the two dominant players in the European Economic Community of the time—using the veto to stop others from usurping its national interest, not unlike the Security Council instrument.

As a result of the steady expansion of the EU and the principle of unanimity for key decisions, considerable power was given to one new nation after another, to the extent that some analysts have wondered why the existing members were so eager to admit new ones at all. Each wave of new members has gotten benefits, often financial, by threatening to hold up new initiatives. Fear of a British referendum on EEC participation in 1975 got France and Germany to agree to new financial terms of membership that were far more favorable to the UK. Later Greece, which joined in 1981, and Spain and Portugal, which joined in 1986, were able to get financial benefits from their fellow members in exchange for not blocking new treaties aimed to advance integration, such the Maastricht Treaty and the development of the common currency.

The EU now uses a system of “qualified majority voting” with a complicated formula that apportions votes to each country by population and requires 255 out of 345 votes for a measure to pass in the Council of Europe. This still creates safeguards for smaller states, preventing a small number of large countries from ramming any initiatives through. But key issues such as new common policies and further expansion of the union still require absolute unanimity, and each year finds small countries using this veto power to hold up various measures. For instance, Poland vetoed a key EU-Russia trade partnership in 2007, until Russia lifted a ban on imports of Polish meat. Lithuania vetoed the same deal until its EU partners agreed to endorse its position on a variety of disputes with Russia, including the issue of compensation for Lithuanians who were deported to Siberian labor camps. The Netherlands has blocked EU accession talks for Serbia over failure to hand over accused war criminals to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In these ways, small countries have used their veto power to gain concessions—sometimes on major issues, but sometimes on ones that might seem parochial—from larger EU states or from other nations seeking to deal with the EU as a whole.

By digging in their heels, small countries can hold up any number of international initiatives—and they are not hesitating to do so. The failure
of the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009 was blamed on many factors—the reluctance of the United States and China to make a deal, the intransigence of large industrial or developing countries—but in the end, what stopped the adoption of even a weak accord was the objection by a previously unimagined coalition: Venezuela, Bolivia, Sudan, and the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. The Sudanese representative likened rich-country proposals to the Holocaust, while the Venezuelan representative cut her hand on purpose to ask if it would take blood to be heard.
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Their acts were dismissed as farcical, but their nations' objections added to the mood of confusion and dissent of what already was a fractious meeting. In the end, the summit did not adopt the accord but, rather, “took note” of it—making a mockery of the efforts of the United States, EU, China, Brazil, India, and other big-country negotiators and sending a discouraging signal about global commitment to a common approach to climate change.

The EU succeeded in forging an agreement at the UN's Durban climate talks in December 2011—only to find its own climate-change policy thrown over three months later by a veto from Poland, which is heavily dependent on coal.
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Why do vetoes work so well for small nations today? One major and paradoxical reason is the proliferation of organizations intended for international cooperation on numerous issues. The more of these, the more opportunities for a country to potentially take a stand on a parochial, ideological, or even whimsical issue, often for short-term domestic political reasons rather than because of any defense of principle. But small-country vetoes also work because large countries no longer have the same range of carrots and sticks to force compliance. The decay of military and economic power makes small countries less vulnerable to strong sanctions from traditional patrons and trading partners. And the proliferation of news and communication channels allows small countries new ways to make their case directly to the global public, fomenting sympathy and support, rather than see it limited to closed-door negotiations.

“American ambassadors—an obsolete species?” The question was posed as early as 1984 by Elmer Plischke, a distinguished practitioner of that now-fading field, diplomatic history. Plischke pointed out the changes
that were eroding the primacy of ambassadors as representatives of their nation, including easier travel and communications technology, the rise of ways for governments to communicate directly with publics in other countries, and the diluting effect of the proliferation of nation-states, including so many very small ones, each with its own diplomatic corps deployed.
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All of these transformations, of course, have only accelerated in the ensuing three decades.