Why `Soft Power' Isn't So Soft: Representational Force and the Sociolinguistic Construction of Attraction in World Politics

Abstract

Soft power—the ability to achieve desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion—has become an important part of scholarly thinking and policy practice with respect to world politics. And yet attraction, the core component of soft power, has been largely neglected in scholarly research. Research has been undertaken, policy suggestions offered, and ethical conclusions about soft power drawn all on the basis of implicit and often unacknowledged assumptions about attraction. As I argue here, this is problematic because neither of the most prominent assumptions— attraction as natural and attraction as constructed through persuasive argument—are feasible or logical in the context of world politics. In fact, as I argue, in the context of world politics it makes far more sense to model attraction as a relationship that is constructed through representational force—a nonphysical but nevertheless coercive form of power that is exercised through language. Insofar as attraction is sociolinguistically constructed through representational force, soft power should be not be understood in juxtaposition to hard power but as a continuation of it by different means. This analytic insight in turn demands some practical and normative reformulations about soft power. ————————————————————————