“Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all possessed a great deal of soft power in the eyes of their acolytes, but that did not make it good. It is not necessarily better to twist minds than to twist arms… Soft power is not a form of idealism or liberalism. It is simply a form of power, one way of getting desired outcomes.”
– The Future of Power (Public Affairs, 2011), by Joseph S. Nye Jr., Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration.
During the American war in Vietnam, young Americans traveling through Western Europe often sewed a Canadian flag badge onto their backpacks in order to prevent anti-American reactions to their presence. This concealment of their American identity reflected their own rejection of American foreign policy as well as the anti-American attitudes of Europeans. The quote above by Joseph Nye — whose books about soft power were in themselves instruments of American soft power — implies that America’s “evil” enemies used soft power with great skill, but apparently, he could not think of a single American or European leader who concealed injustices with a self-justifying soft power narrative.
Nye defined soft power as the ability of a nation-state to achieve its aims “through attraction rather than coercion or payments … [through] the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.” This can include anything from the exports of fashion and music to educational initiatives, to nation-building efforts such as the Marshall Plan and Germany’s efforts to reintegrate with Europe post-World War II.[1]
“Soft power” is normally defined along these lines; as one political entity’s use of cultural, economic or diplomatic influence to persuade, entice or otherwise motivate another polity towards certain actions.[2] It’s a complex notion within political science that was developed partly as a means of distinguishing modern structures of political influence that ostensibly rely less on violent coercion than previous ones, but the concept also arguably developed as a marketing tool for framing Western political influence as enlightened, reasoned and mutually beneficial to all parties involved. The very notion of soft power is thus, in a way, an expression of the institution it describes.
The US did, at one time, successfully use soft power to put a positive spin on its global hegemony, but after the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and RFK, and during the wartime administrations of Johnson and Nixon, the positive shine was lost. Young Americans traveling in Europe soon preferred to be mis-identified as Canadians. In the 1980s and during the unipolar moment of the 1990s, the US regained some of its soft power appeal.
It would be difficult to explain young Americans’ attempts to disguise their nationality to contemporary youth on both sides of the Atlantic. This change is an indication of how the independence of America’s Western allies disappeared as these nations fell into conformity with policies set in Washington. This change is also an indication of how anti-war and anti-establishment consciousness has vanished among young Americans, Canadians, and Europeans. Furthermore, carefree travel became more difficult in the 1980s and beyond, and American culture became more isolationist at that time. The “hippy trail” that stretched from London to Bangkok became a memory of a faded cultural consciousness.
Soft power in the modern sense is arguably intertwined with the emergence of modern communications technologies and the development of the propaganda apparatuses of mass society, but the development does not seem to have been linear or simple. Institutions of influence that were structured around earlier technological tool sets were often disrupted by subsequent technological developments. The newspaper and the printing press enabled certain modalities of political influence that were challenged by telegraphy, and similar processes repeated with the advent of radio and the refinement and popularization of photography.
The American war in Vietnam is an example from such a liminal period, where the emergence of new modalities of mass communications technologies created structural imbalances for the stable reproduction of cultural and political hegemony, enabling uncomfortable facts, images, and narratives to be exposed, which provided space for potent political organization and counter-cultural formations, such as what characterized the global protest cycle of the late 1960s.
During 1960s and 1970s, and even up to the first decade of the 21st century to some extent, Western European nations, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand sometimes exerted political independence and resistance to American foreign policy, often enough to be seen as practicing soft power in counterbalance to aggressive US hegemony. The overall effect could be likened to a good cop-bad cop routine. Both cops have the same objective, and their mixed approach is more effective at reaching it. Examples include Australia’s leadership in supporting the independence of East Timor, and New Zealand’s criticism of the US overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected president in 1973 — among more significant examples described further on.
Paradoxically, this heterodoxy made the West more appealing to dissidents in both the East and West because it created an impression worldwide that there was a resistance forming against all forms of militarism and domination in both superpowers. Artists and dissidents adopted a “both sides are wrong” attitude, which ended up as more of a benefit to the West. One could argue that the presence of reasoned, democratic dissent in the heart of the imperial machinery afforded US soft power an enduring credibility, especially when communicated indirectly through other Western proxies. The counterculture, genuine as it was, thereby also functioned as a potent tool of propaganda towards both reinforcing key social imaginaries of the West, such as the myth of democracy, as well as in terms of providing the impression that US institutional behavior was to some extent being carried forth by earnest human agents in pursuit of liberal and humanitarian ideals.
Leaders such as Olof Palme in Sweden and Pierre Trudeau in Canada were significant irritants to American presidents. In 1972, Palme condemned the bombing of North Vietnamese cities,[3] and in 1976, Trudeau was the first Western leader to visit Cuba and establish friendly relations. [4,5], New Zealand opposed nuclear testing in the Pacific and declared itself a non-nuclear state that would not allow the presence of any nuclear armed vessel in its waters. It had a bitter dispute with France over nuclear testing and the state-sanctioned bombing that killed a crew member of the Rainbow Warrior when it was moored in Auckland.[6]Australian leader Gough Whitlam recognized the government of North Vietnam in 1973, and he threatened to shut down the American Pine Gap surveillance station which housed operations that were beyond Australia’s control. He also wanted to introduce a policy of economic nationalism that would reduce the control of foreign corporations over Australian resources. He was soon ousted from power in a legislative coup—dismissed by the Governor General who was, overtly, the British monarch’s representative in Australia, and, covertly, the CIA’s man in Canberra.[7]
Arguably, this period illustrates something akin to a “sweet spot” of the US or Western soft power maximum, which also coincides with the US pinnacle of economic, political, and cultural dominance, paradoxically paired with a relative political independence of other Western polities, which often directed significant criticism against unchecked US influence. The situation is akin to how ostensible power-sharing in representative democracies to some extent will function towards establishing a perception of governmental legitimacy among the citizens — whether or not the policy outcomes actually reflect their interests.[8]
One could list many more examples of dissent among the higher echelons of the Western power structure from the Vietnam War up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. At that time, France, Germany, Canada, and Russia formed a bloc of resistance by refusing to support the invasion, and the most significant global popular protests in the history of the world were mounted in an attempt to avert the war, widely held to be in violation of international law, in spite of being marketed as a “humanitarian intervention”. This was in retrospect the last gasp of decades-long pushback against the US, but at the time, this resistance was considered a major obstacle to expansion of the US empire, and was seen by US officials as a betrayal as they spoke of a “new Europe” (e.g. Poland and other states) — a Europe that understood the importance of going along with US objectives — versus an “old Europe” that was falling behind and falling out of American favor. Many Americans boycotted the consumption of “French fries” in protest, while several food vendors renamed them “freedom fries.”[9]
This also coincided with the initial phases of a project to develop a new generation of political leaders in NATO states and other allied nations, a project that succeeded in turning Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand into little more than Euro-Atlantic vassals that exercised almost nothing of the independence that was common before 2003. There is a long list of young leaders who were educated and financed through various non-government organizations, such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the US Congress’ National Endowment for Democracy, not to mention the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Program. By 2020, the heads of state in the above-mentioned nations were no longer elder statesmen and stateswomen who had risen to the top after decades of experience in government and diplomacy. The average age of heads of state had dropped to the mid-forties as this crop of young leaders were given a shortcut to power that would have been impossible in previous times. New Zealand’s Jacinda Arden was merely thirty-seven when elected in 2017. France’s Emmanuel Macron became president at age thirty-nine in the same year. Canada’s Maclean’s magazine, as early as 2002, touted Justin Trudeau on its cover as a future leader when he was just thirty years old, thirteen years before his eventual election.[10]
This particular generation of upstart leaders has been criticized vehemently for their narcissistic over-estimation of their talents and their tendency to adopt authoritarian measures while identifying as the liberal, empathetic, and tolerant “good guys.” Seemingly oblivious to the powers that financed their political careers, in error they assume that their rapid rise to high office must have been the result of personal virtues.[11]
This broad reshaping of the governing strata of Western societies, more immediately in line with the objectives of corporate interests, and at the price of limiting regional and national independence, coincides with the entrenchment of neoliberal ideology during the last decades of the 20th century. From the beginning of the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF became a dominant force in pushing through major structural reform programs throughout almost all economies of the Third World, programs which tended towards the liberalization of markets. Liberalization would here refer to the abolishment of price controls and trade barriers, privatization, promotion of foreign investments and currency reforms. These reform programs were in turn predicated upon neoliberal ideological objectives, by which we refer to an ideology which not only promotes radical privatization and globalization, but also that promotes the establishment of major transnational institutions and NGOs which operate towards these goals.[12] The progressive political cohesion of Western polities and the lack of a meaningful internal pushback against imperialism, especially since the beginning of the 1990s, should be considered in relation to the increasing entrenchment and adoption of neoliberal ideology and discourse, which served to empower transnational capital at the expense of national and regional independence.
The ensuing drift into an unwavering alignment with American objectives has, however, led to the loss of any heterodoxy and soft power advantages, such as they existed, for US-allied nations. The power of these smaller partners once had a moderating influence on US militarism, and these successes actually advanced US interests in complex ways that hard power could not. For example, Mikhail Gorbachev’s first visit to a Western nation was to Canada when he was the Soviet Union’s agriculture minister in the early 1980s. What he observed about Canada’s management of its agricultural resources was reported to be a major influence on perestroika.[13] Gorbachev could not have made such a visit to the United States at that time. The Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan had frozen relations, and President Reagan had made things worse by calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world” in a speech at the height of the Cold War. Gorbachev’s visit to Canada was one example of outreach to an adversary nation, which often had to be done through the United States’ somewhat neutral or independent allies.
This was indeed the imperial utility of soft-power nations. They provided a kind of moderating conscience that served as cover for the excesses of naked imperialism, softening their impact and providing an image of a reasoned internal opposition, yet which for this reason paradoxically helped promote and entrench the imperialist projects of domination in the long run.
Canadian media reports (see note 13 above) about Gorbachev’s visit likely exaggerated the visit’s influence on his thinking, however. Gorbachev was raised on a collective farm where he observed his father overseeing one of the successes of Soviet agriculture. After their rough start in the 1930s and during wartime, the collective farms in the 1950s were now producing surpluses and fueling national development. Serfdom was over, and agricultural workers were now state employees provided with housing, education, and health care. Furthermore, Gorbachev’s biography showed that if one of the former serfs were talented and ambitious, he or she could go to a top university in Moscow and one day be appointed General Secretary of the Politburo. When Gorbachev visited Canada in 1983, he had a strong belief in the achievements of the Soviet system. During his visit, he was eager to improve relations, and he was inspired by some of what he saw in Canada. He knew the Soviet system needed reform, but it is probably a gross distortion to describe his Canadian trip as something that made the scales fall from his eyes. Even so, the Canadian media reports were themselves instruments of a soft power project to create a narrative of Gorbachev as almost a Western asset determined to put an end to what he saw as the fatally flawed Soviet system.
The Canadian report also describes how Gorbachev had frank talks with the Soviet ambassador to Canada when they were far from the prying eyes of Moscow. The ambassador had, apparently, been banished to his post in Canada because he had unacceptable views about some Soviet policies. In Ottawa, these two critics of their own system are reported to have vented their frustrations and discussed the urgent need for reform. The ambassador knew Gorbachev was already in the Politburo and might be a man who could change the country. Perspective on this meeting could be gained by imagining that in the present day, an American senator meets the American ambassador for Kazakhstan and they have a private and frank discussion about the agricultural and pharmaceutical lobbies’ catastrophic influence on the health of Americans and on the economic and military strength of the country. Alternatively, imagine a similar discussion in the 1980s between two American officials regarding the looming revelations about the Iran-Contra crimes or the stock market crash of 1987 — then imagine this being spun in the media as the harbinger of collapse of the United States.
One could look at the allies’ soft power benefits optimistically, or one could view them more cynically as a front for US hard power objectives. One could say hard power and soft power differ like rape and seduction. The victim of the former at least knows she didn’t consent, but if the one who was seduced has regrets, she has to live with the psychological repercussions of having consented. Those who are taken in by soft power later have to rationalize their “buyer’s remorse” in one way or another, if the outcome did not live up to promises. They admit their remorse, or they adopt what cognitive scientists call “choice-supportive bias” — the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were and to double down on one’s commitment, ignoring any evidence that they were bad choices.
This phenomenon was perhaps most striking among Eastern Europeans in the early 1990s when it became clear that few of them had given much thought to what it would be like to suddenly have to compete for economic survival while losing the social safety net of guaranteed housing, jobs, education, pensions and health care.[14] Young people in East Berlin focused on just wanting to go to a rock concert (discussed further below). Like California hippies before them, they weren’t thinking about the “grim meat-hook realities” of living in a capitalist system.[15]
Another aspect of this era of soft power is the manipulation of United Nations missions. In 1960, the Soviet Union complained that the UN mission in Congo was being used to remove the first elected leader of the newly independent nation, Patrice Lumumba.[16] In the 1955-1965 period, Sukarno made the same accusation about interference in Indonesia.[17] In 1993-1994, the French and Rwandan governments complained that UN forces, led by a Canadian general, were violating the Arusha Accords and favoring US-backed Tutsi forces based in Uganda. Historical research done afterward confirms these accusations.[18, 19]
Whichever way one looks at soft power — as a benefit or as a front for hard power — one must face the fact that it now has been largely squandered or abandoned in the recent era of unbridled NATO expansion, demonization of Russia, and forced subservience to US goals. The “third world” is for the most part not a non-aligned party anymore, but increasingly cognizant of Western efforts towards hegemony. If one could imagine a UN peacekeeping mission for Ukraine at some time in the future, it could not be led by an “impartial” Canadian general. That deception worked in Rwanda in 1994, but it wouldn’t work in 2024.
In 1986, a year after Gorbachev came to power, there were signs of the soft power decline, even though it would have its greatest victory in 1991. Olof Palme, the recalcitrant Swedish prime minister who marched against the Vietnam War with North Vietnam’s Moscow Ambassador Nguyễn Thọ Chân, was assassinated in 1986, and many years later, in 2023, Sweden finally gave up the remaining vestiges of neutrality and joined NATO under terms that bear strong resemblance to what Japan accepted in 1945 as a surrendering nation.[20]
In September 2023, every member of Canada’s parliament, from every political party, gave rousing applause to a visiting Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. Dishonoring every Canadian soldier who fought in WWII, these parliamentarians cheered in historical ignorance of the fact that this guest had participated in the Jewish holocaust and in war crimes against Canada’s WWII ally. This honored guest was only one of thousands of Ukrainian enemy combatants who had, for reasons never explained to the public, been given refuge in Canada after the war. The visit was conducted to score a propaganda win against Russia during Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Canada. In the days that followed, even the pliant Canadian media were forced to admit the event was scandalous, yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put the blame on the Speaker of the House and could only say that he urged Canadians not to let Vladimir Putin exploit the unfortunate occurrence, even though it was too late to repair the damage.[21] The event spoke for itself, without any assistance needed from Putin. It was the nadir of attempts by the West to use soft power, exposed here as a rotting mask on the rise of long-dormant fascism in the Euro-Atlantic political-economic formation.
Thus, the soft power advantage for the West — limited, hard to control, and hypocritical as it often was — no longer exists. US allies have turned themselves into obedient vassals and client states, utterly lacking the imagination and courage to propose alternatives or broker peace negotiations for the war in Europe. They signed the Minsk Accords, then admitted later that they were just a way to buy time for Ukraine. For Palestine, they offer no substantial opposition to an obvious mass atrocity and genocide. Thirty years ago, after the wars in Yugoslavia and Central Africa, the Western guardians of humanitarian values promised us that such crimes against humanity would never be allowed to happen again.
The non-American Western nations’ former perceived role as honest brokers of peace is now being filled by countries like Turkey, Hungary, and China, yet their efforts are considered unacceptable by the Western nations that see themselves as, by definition, the guardians of international virtue. Many in the Global South never thought “the West is the best,” but the rejection of that notion is pretty much unanimous now as nations of the Global South line up to join the BRICS group of nations.
This is not 1987 when thousands of East Berliners heard David Bowie singing on the opposite side of the wall and believed there was something in the culture beyond the wall to aspire to. Those who govern the “golden billion” inside the Western “garden” (a term used by European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell) still delude themselves that the world looks up to them.[22] The Global South — the majority of the world population that is outside that “garden” in the “jungle” — is tired of the condescension and no longer sees anything to emulate. They have seen what thirty years of the unipolar world order have achieved, and they are not impressed. The alliance nations of the “garden” have revealed themselves as the Fourth Reich, and they are utterly distrusted by their adversaries and their victims.
This points to a dilemma that was well understood by wiser cold warriors of the past. George Kennan — diplomat, historian, and originator of the US containment strategy — was a committed anti-communist whose views were formed during the period when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union. In his 1947 essay, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” he demonized the Soviet Union in typical American fashion, but he also showed that he was aware that the United States had to be perceived as standing for something that would make it worth emulating. He wrote:
[it is] a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.[23]
The term “problems of its internal life” was a vague reference to the legacy of slavery and genocide of native Americans, as well as economic inequality and all forms of social injustice. The cold warriors of the presidential administrations between Truman and Nixon were aware that capitalism had to be proved capable of solving the problems that Marx and Lenin said were intrinsic to capitalism. Kennan’s flaw was perhaps in thinking that Marx and Lenin were wrong. He thought that a kinder, gentler version of capitalism could exist. Once the communist superpower rival was gone, however, capitalists showed no interest in fixing “the problems of internal life” in the nations they dominated.
About this essay by Kennan, Arnaud Bertrand wrote recently:
But what Kennan understood very well is that you can’t make the case for hegemony for hegemony’s sake. It needs to make sense domestically… And what this [contemporary] “war, war, war and pro-war censorship” move by the US demonstrates is that this is very much NOT the case. Funding wars abroad is immensely unpopular domestically and so is censorship. What the world at large wants to see are prospects for peace. A “responsible world power” is one that can bring about sustainable peace, not fund endless wars without any positive vision for bringing an end to them or for what comes afterwards. The only somewhat discernible vision here is “we want to win these wars decisively, as losing them would mark an end to our hegemony,” which, frankly, at this stage, is more of a selling point for 90% of the planet than something that would make them side with America… for the very reason that it’s become obvious to most that the US is not a “responsible world power” anymore but instead one that has descended into a nihilistic vision where nothing else matters but the maintenance of its own domination at any cost, including, paradoxically, the loss of its own responsibility and “spiritual vitality.”[24]
From Bowie in Berlin to Bono in Kiev
”The Soviets’ closed system and lack of popular culture impeded the ability of the Soviet Union to compete with the U.S. in terms of soft power.”
– Patryk Babiracki, Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943-1957 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
Patryk Babiracki’s notion about the power of popular culture is worth exploring because it is a recurrent theme in explanations of why the Warsaw Bloc countries turned away from Soviet domination and why the Soviet Union collapsed two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Political scientists and historians don’t place much emphasis on popular culture as the cause of these changes, but there is a powerful myth in popular culture itself that it has a profound influence on the world and was the prime reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The popular myth is often taken up by political commentators because it is a convenient way of ignoring the covert, government-financed operations of hard and soft power that were the main instruments used to weaken the Soviet Union from outside while it was dealing with its significant internal problems. It is more pleasant and self-delusional to think that poetry and song, coming from below the power structures of both sides of the cold war, had the power to change the world toward its natural and rightful order.
This analysis will also tend to obscure the immense power inherent in the Western-aligned global media apparatus whose dominance was arguably even greater around forty years ago, before corporate consolidation both killed off internal diversity and created a strong demand for a more radically alternative media. This is arguably the same pattern we’ve attempted to identify in relation to the political dynamics of soft power in relation to political conformism and a de facto ideological consolidation. There’s a sense in which the impact of US-centric Western culture and media was at its peak where there was a genuine internal diversity in terms of output and information channels, but also since there truly was nothing equivalent on offer anywhere else. Nobody else had the capacity to project their narratives, ideals, and identity across the globe in a similar manner. Jerry Mander made the following observations during the early 1990s:
Right now, about sixty percent of the world population has access to television. In many places where television has recently arrived—remote villages in Africa, South America, Indonesia, northern Canada; places where there are not even roads—satellite communications have made it possible for people to ingest the dominant external society. In grass houses, on the frozen tundra, on tiny tropical islands, in the jungles of Brazil and Africa, people are sitting in their traditional homes of logs or mud or grass, and they are watching Dallas and The Edge of Night and Bonanza.[25]
Yet it may still be true that the Soviet leadership just failed to understand the benefit of allowing a controlled artistic opposition to flourish. In the early years of the cold war, US officials who were organizing their soft power assets wondered what to do with anti-establishment voices in the arts.[26] Religious conservatives in the United States wanted no funding to go toward the avant-garde who flaunted tradition and religion and criticized the powerful. These voices lost out to East Coast elites in government who believed the promotion of the avant-garde was the best way to show the government in Moscow that the American system could tolerate criticism of all kinds, or almost all kinds. Government-funded programs, both overt and covert, could nurture a compatible left that criticized the excesses of capitalism but was essentially opposed to communism and all forms of tyrannical government. Such artists were easy to find. There were very few who openly endorsed communism, defended Mao and Castro, or supported Soviet plans to assist socialist revolutions in the de-colonizing nations of Africa and Asia.
Control of the compatible left also became control of anti-war organizing among the baby-boomer youth in the 1960s. Much has been written describing (and speculating about) the activities of government agencies in spreading recreational drug use in order to weaken political organizing and draw mainstream support away from marginal groups.[27] The Manson murders of 1969 were the culmination of this effort. Tom O’Neill’s work provided evidence that Manson’s cult had connections to covert programs designed to discredit “the hippies” and put an end to the possibility that that counter-culture movement would gain traction in mainstream politics.[28]
Meanwhile, no artists, especially in popular music, were singing the praises of socialism. One can find plenty of examples of songs with lyrics against war, greed, corruption and the excesses of capitalism, and dire warnings about an apocalyptic technocratic future, but no one had anything positive to say about Mao putting an end to the century of humiliation, or Castro throwing the Yankee Imperialists out of Cuba. While socialist nations got busy building things, the artists of the West had nothing constructive to say. They preferred to be “beautiful losers,” a term Leonard Cohen chose for the title of his novel published in 1966. Thematically, the music was mostly doom and gloom, and pessimistic about the possibility of any political ideology offering a way forward for humanity. Young people living between the Berlin Wall and Vladivostok were inspired by the fact that these voices were not suppressed in the West.
Soft power is difficult to wield because it evolves organically in facets of society that are mostly outside of government control. One asset (i.e. rock music) aimed at a target nation may attract rebels but strengthen conservatives, leading to no overall net effect. Soft power is not a normative term. It is descriptive and nebulous. One can recognize when it exists, but there is no formula for its construction. The attempt to recapture it is as doomed as an attempt to repeat any of life’s magical moments in artistic performance, sport, or romantic love.
As an example of this soft power in popular music, and the narratives that have developed about it, we conclude with a short discussion of the influence of David Bowie, his music, and his concert at the Berlin Wall in 1987.
David Bowie’s global appeal in the 1970s and 1980s culminated in a magic moment in soft power politics, one which Britain’s “Cool Britannia” official marketing campaigns have been exploiting ever since. Keep in mind, however, that for most of Bowie’s career before 1980, polite society viewed him as a drug-addled freak and a bad influence on the young. Then they realized that Soviet and Eastern Bloc governments hated the Western music flowing into the black market, so it could be useful to promote the freaks as symbols of rebellion and freedom. The thinking seemed to be: They’ve been so good at undermining social cohesion here, so why not let them loose there? This trend continued until it seemed like popular musicians had all been recruited into the diplomatic corps, some willingly and others not.
Perhaps because now nations of the West have no great ideas to recruit others to their cause, they turned to artists, hoping they would reproduce the magic moments of days gone by. This is why Bono’s trip to Kiev in 2022 seems like such a pathetic attempt to revive what was a novel magic moment in 1987.[29] It was reminiscent of the time-warped character in Groundhog Day when he tried in vain, by repeating the same day hundreds of times, to recapture a romantic moment he achieved “just for one day” (to cite the phrase from Bowie’s Heroes). Bono killed the U2 brand, and he has been despised and ridiculed ever since he formed a friendship with G.W. Bush in an apparently pragmatic attempt to advance his humanitarian causes. His only consolation is that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hit a lower low when he went to Kiev two years later and played Neil Young’s Rocking in the Free World, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the song was an ironic condemnation of US militarism as a waste of money needed by the poor at home.[30]
At the closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Britain had a few moments to promote the London Olympics, which were to be held four years later, and it chose to highlight its pop music culture of the late 20th century. It was a notable contrast with the closing ceremony that had just celebrated thousands of years of Chinese history. Jimmy Page performed the Led Zeppelin tune Whole Lotta Love, with Leona Lewis belting out the famously raunchy lyrics to a global audience that was probably expecting more “wholesome” entertainment. This was the first glimpse of the weirdness and satanic allusions that would come in the Olympic ceremonies held in London in 2012 and Paris in 2024.
In 2012, the British team entered the opening ceremony in London while David Bowie’s Heroes was played in the stadium. The opening and closing ceremonies in 2012 heavily featured popular musicians, actors, cinema, and fiction because doing so was perhaps the best alternative for the nation of Shakespeare. Otherwise, a celebration of its long history (following the Chinese example from 2008) would have only reminded the world of centuries of British imperialism. In the London ceremony there was a conspicuous absence of pride in deeper traditions, and the tradition that was presented, the monarchy, was muddled by Queen Elizabeth being escorted by a fictional character, James Bond, played by the actor Daniel Craig. The production was supposed to be lighthearted, but it also suggested that Britain was ashamed of its past and instead eager to distract the global audience with this confusing display blending reality and fantasy.
Heroes was used in 2012 because by this time it had a mythic status as the British song that brought down the Berlin Wall. Bowie sang the song, recorded in 1977 in West Berlin, at a 1987 concert near the Berlin Wall, which drew a massive crowd on its eastern side. The concert was part of a propaganda drive promoted by West German and American radio stations that broadcast into East Germany. West German organizers admitted that the plan was to provoke and exact revenge on East German authorities by causing massive crowds to gather at the wall on the east side.[31] By the final day of the concerts, East German authorities did crack down, after which West German authorities denounced the reaction that they had boasted about wanting to provoke. Aside from the overtones of East-West tension, one could ask how much this was simply a matter of one municipal jurisdiction planning a disruptive event without any respect for, or coordination with, an adjacent municipal jurisdiction. Imagine, for example, that Kansas City, Kansas, put on a big outdoor concert without consulting with the adjacent Kansas City, Missouri, about the disruptions their event would cause.
There are numerous articles on the internet about the Berlin concert that deliver the official narrative about the events of the time (See Appendix 1 for a list of examples and citations). The performers let themselves be used for this official purpose. In the historical record, it is one of the early examples of rock artists merging their goals, consciously or unconsciously, with official propaganda drives.
From Google’s top selections of articles about this performance, one can learn the standard narrative about this soft power win for the West, as well as a particularly distorted interpretation of the song’s lyrics. Even though the German government officially thanked Bowie at the time of his death for his role in bringing down the Berlin Wall, most media reports today grudgingly admit that the concert had little to do with the wall coming down, as seen in an article in Vox:
The Berlin Wall was chiefly brought down by historical forces that flowed in from the east, not from the west. It was Gorbachev’s reforms of the Soviet system, the decisions of a few Soviet-bloc states to edge away from Moscow’s control, disarray among the East German leadership, and the actions of East Germans on the ground that ultimately shaped history. Bowie’s performance, like Reagan’s speech a year later, did not determine Berlin’s fate. Still, it played some role in at least hardening those forces of history. And it is easy to see why many in Berlin might cherish such a version of their own history in which hope and optimism triumph — like the lovers in Bowie’s Heroes finally finding a way around the wall.[32]
The last sentence in the above passage shows the curious interpretation of the song that has developed over time. In interviews, David Bowie described how the song was inspired by something he saw from the window of his recording studio in Berlin, which was near the Wall (from 6:34 in this video). Several times he saw a couple, both of them from West Berlin, sitting on a bench near a guard tower by the Wall during lunch hour. He thought it was an odd place for a couple to go, but there was no danger in approaching the west side of the Wall. One could easily think of mundane explanations. It was probably just the farthest place they could walk to from whatever place in West Berlin they wanted a break from. In other words, it could have been a song about two lovers escaping from the oppressive drudgery of life under capitalism. The narrator of the song says:
I, I will be King
And you, you will be Queen
Though nothing will drive them away
We can beat them just for one day
We can be heroes just for one day
And you, you can be mean
And I, I’ll drink all the time
Cause we’re lovers and that is a fact
Yes we’re lovers and that is that…
Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, forever and ever
Oh, we can be heroes just for one day
Everyone is free to make their own interpretations, but it seems obvious to us that the song could be about two working class lovers living under capitalist drudgery. The wall might be symbolic of their frustration with both sides of the absurd East-West confrontation, but it is not really possible to read an anti-communist message into it. They are two powerless people dreaming about having power over others, being free to be mean to others, and free to drink all the time, which is the only dream capitalist propaganda offers to the meek. The narrator declares that nothing will keep them together, so the message is despairing and hopeless, and the thought of being heroes just for one day suggests a plan to go out in a nihilistic blaze of glory. How did this ever come to be seen as an inspiring challenge to the East German government? And later, how was it ever considered to be an inspiration for British athletes at the London Olympics?
Having spent a lot of time in Berlin, David Bowie obviously did believe strongly that the people of Berlin should be reunited, but in his comments about Berlin and the 1987 concert, he never explicitly condemned communism or the East German government. He deliberately evaded stating support for one side or the other, preferring to let his songs speak for themselves, and his songs were mostly about life in the West. If one wanted to look for clues about his politics, one could consider the lyrics of other songs from the 1970s besides Heroes, songs such as Aladdin Sane (anti-war, anti-imperialist), Panic in Detroit (an ode to the radical revolutionaries of the 1960s), Cracked Actor (the depravity of Hollywood) Drive in Saturday (post-apocalyptic America), Young Americans (the shallowness of the American Dream), Fashion (human herd mentality). In the 1980s, there was China Girl (warnings about Western capitalism knocking on China’s door) and Let’s Dance (which Bowie interpreted in the official music video as a condemnation of settler colonialism). From 1997, there is I’m Afraid of Americans (the title speaks for itself). The Western propaganda system found these songs to be of no use, but it managed to twist Heroes (which actually belongs thematically with the songs above) into something that it was not.
Conclusion
“Soft power” is an elusive concept. It’s an attempt to approach a nested interrelationship between culture, political processes, ideological state apparatuses and the identities and experiences of regular human beings. Because of this complexity, it’s difficult if not impossible, to provide any comprehensive models for how soft power as a distinct and definite process must operate. One could also say that it blends in with neutrality — another nebulous concept from international relations, which, like soft power, provides a space for creative and adaptive solutions to political conflicts. Part of the problem lies in our (Western) language and conceptual apparatus for describing and analyzing social phenomena, where we tend to think in terms of definite and separable institutions that exert characteristic effects upon society.
In terms of soft power, it would probably be more appropriate to consider the phenomenon in terms of a fluid process. Soft power seems to function somewhat like water progressing through a landscape, which, depending on situation and circumstances, can take on many shapes and appear in different forms that each have unique impact — yet are in line with certain common characteristics — on the surrounding environment.
Even so, it seems that we can identify certain common preconditions for the development of soft power as a social process. From the above analysis, there’s an argument that a soft power useful from the point of view of overarching imperial (or civilizational) objectives presupposes the persuasive support of an adequately empowered (technologically, mediatically, politically) and confident intellectual class at the helm of the culture, that, while critical, discordant and nuanced, also overall tends to support the imperial bottom line.
Soft power as such then emerges as a much more complex phenomenon than just the simple effects of agitation propaganda or the impact on people’s identity and worldview as described by Ellul’s integration propaganda or Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses. Soft power in its most developed form rather rests on the voluntary and reasoned acquiescence and reproduction of imperial ideology and objectives by a sufficiently empowered intellectual class as a driver of a conspicuous and impactful culture, a class which is perched upon an equilibrium of sufficient freedom of speech, thought and agency so that it has ample room to spread its wings — but is sufficiently loyal so as to not fully become a threat to the power structure.
This reasoning recalls the Marxist understanding of the role and function of the middle class within the capitalist power structure. When the middle class is properly harnessed to support the system, it makes up a “toiling intelligentsia” whose self-interest lies precisely in maintaining an uneasy balance between the ruling elites and the proletariat, which then serves to cushion the excesses of the former and thereby also preventing the more radical forms of dissent from manifesting within the proletariat. [33]
It seems that soft power on a global scale operates in an equivalent manner. At its peak some five decades ago, it was subtle enough to entice even luminaries and intellectual rebels like Sartre and Feyerabend to wholeheartedly, if indirectly, support the general framework of the imperial power structure. The immense intellectual alibi that this arrangement provided enabled Western imperialism to score a lasting cultural victory that even now seems almost immutable.
However, in our current situation, truly disruptive or ground-breaking scientific and cultural developments seem to have ground to a halt, while free-thinkers or mavericks in any field are hounded off stage if they exhibit even an inkling of unorthodoxy. They are replaced, of course, by mediocrity and more obedient personalities of moderate capabilities and limited creativity. Into the breach come new organizations outside the West such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, “New Silk Road”), and the Ancient Civilizations Forum. All of these have pledged to be based on soft power, cooperation, and respect for cultural differences and national sovereignty.[34] This stands in contrast to the established policy of NATO and the EU that have attempted to spread “Western values” through force and coercion. Nicolai N. Petro points out that they “… have taken unprecedented steps to restrict the ability of member states to act independently, insisting on the enforcement of an overarching values consensus in the interests of collective security.”[35] For about two thirds of the global population, the power and appeal of Western civilization has dissipated, and they now prefer to turn toward these alternative groupings. The manner in which the emerging multi-polar framework will use soft power to approach the dynamics of geopolitics, diplomacy and persuasion remains to be seen.
Perhaps this approach will reflect lessons learned from the characteristics of the decline of Western soft power, and more carefully take into account the complex processes behind the stagnation that follows in the wake of elite overproduction and the loss of credibility that an obviously manufactured and unreflected political unanimity engenders.
And maybe the next iteration of empire will consider the intricate balance necessary to preserve the persuasive impact of a talented intellectual class that is just independent and empowered enough to provide a genuine and creative support for the power structure that instrumentalizes it.
Inglês! Remember what you said. Civilization belongs to whites. But what civilization, and until when?
-Revolutionary martyr Jose Dolores in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Queimada.
(Acknowledgement: Michael Riches declined to be credited as an author, but we wish to acknowledge his valuable work as an editor and contributor of ideas to drafts of this article.)
Appendix 1 Media Articles about the 1987 Concert in West Berlin
- Blake Stilwell, “This is how David Bowie helped bring down the Berlin Wall,”We Are the Mighty, October 22, 2020. https://www.wearethemighty.com/music/david-bowie-berlin-wall/
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to keep East Berliners (and all East Germans) inside East Germany. It certainly wasn’t needed to keep Western citizens out. It quickly became a symbol of the Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe, the barrier between East and West that kept one side subject to the oppression of forced Communism and the other a burgeoning society of freedom and self-governance. It was in Berlin where Bowie recorded his 1977 album, Heroes*, [with the titular] song about two lovers, one from East Berlin and one from the West … Bowie could walk outside his door and see the tyranny and death that came with living in the heart of the Cold War. The song’s lyrics were so descriptive of the city’s plight, it became one of Berlin’s anthems.*
About “We Are the Mighty”: “‘We Are the Mighty’ is a [US] veteran-led digital publisher and Emmy Award-winning media agency. We are the military community’s premier media and entertainment brand connecting 133 million-strong [sic*] American service members, their families, and those who support them.” https://recurrent.io/our-brands/. *This figure must be an error. It would be one third of the US population.
- Jefferson Chase, “Cold War Kids,”DW (Deutsche Welle), July 4, 2007.https://www.dw.com/en/87-concert-was-a-genesis-of-east-german-rebellion/a-2663850
Peter Schwenkow, the promoter and producer of the concert, says that at least a quarter of the speakers were indeed pointed at the eastern part of the city—as an act of revenge.
“On the afternoon before the Genesis concert, I visited a friend of mine in East Berlin,” Lanz recalled. “When it was time for me to leave, he said with teary eyes how much he wished he could go with me. All he wanted to do was go hear a concert. I still get goosebumps when I think of that.”
In the wake of the concert, the GDR realized it had made a mistake. “It was the nervous reaction of a one-party state that was in over its head,” said Rainer Börner, an East Berlin music producer and cultural secretary for the GDR’s main youth organization. “Some of us realized we had to increase what we were offering.”
- Max Fisher, “David Bowie at the Berlin Wall: the incredible story of a concert and its role in history,”Vox, January 12, 2016.This source was cited in the text above. See note 32. https://www.vox.com/2016/1/11/10749546/david-bowie-berlin-wall-heroes
References
[1] Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Public Affairs, 2004).
[2] See e.g. “Soft power,” Cambridge Dictionary 2024, Cambridge University Press. SOFT POWER | English meaning – Cambridge Dictionary
[3] Jan Stocklassa, The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin (Amazon Crossing, 2018).
[4] Peter Edwards, “5 things about the last time a Trudeau visited Cuba,” Toronto Star, November 15, 2016. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/5-things-about-the-last-time-a-trudeau-visited-cuba/article_6eaef871-1cbc-54c0-b235-0924287ccc13.html
[5] Tonda MacCharles, “Justin Trudeau’s visit to Cuba decidedly different than father’s,” Toronto Star, November 16, 2016. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/justin-trudeau-s-visit-to-cuba-decidedly-different-than-father-s/article_d6124e47-e464-5dee-8016-fb9abd3d28d7.html
[6] The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act 1987. https://www.disarmsecure.org/nuclear-free-aotearoa-nz-resources/history-of-nz-legislation
[7] “Whitlam’s fate sealed by plan to shut down Pine Gap,” Australian Citizens’ Party, December 5, 2023. https://citizensparty.org.au/whitlams-fate-sealed-plan-shut-down-pine-gap
[8] See e.g. Ernest Germain, “Marxism and Democracy,” Fourth International 10, no. 4 (April 1949): pp.104-109.https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi49_04
[9] Pascal Lottaz (interviewer), “Elites are Killing Europe for this Reason: Journalist Patrik Baab,” Neutrality Studies, July 14, 2024. https://youtu.be/4pdFI3iUlIY?si=YqZumTPe4Wb7zKft
[10] Johathan Gatehouse, “‘When I run’: Justin Trudeau considers politics,” Macleans, December 23, 2002. https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/when-i-run-justin-trudeau-considers-politics-from-the-archives/
[11] François Asselineau, « Pourquoi cet étalage de blancs-becs en Occident ? » (Why this Surplus of Young Upstarts in the West?) Union Populaire Républicaine. https://youtu.be/XsnO6Bti_ks?si=l7Ivl–pD48C7CCc
[12] Andy Storey, “The World Bank, Neo-Liberalism, and Power: Discourse Analysis and Implications for Campaigners.” Development in Practice 10, no. 3 and 4 (July 2010): 361–70. doi:10.1080/09614520050116514.
[13] Jamie Bradburn, “In 1983, Gorbachev took a stroll in small-town Ontario that helped shape the future of the Soviet Union,” The Ontario Educational Communications Authority (TVO), September 3, 2022. https://www.tvo.org/article/in-1983-gorbachev-took-a-stroll-in-small-town-ontario-that-helped-shape-the-future-of-the-soviet
[14] Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Publishers, 1997).
[15] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (Random House, 1971), 178. The phrase “grim meat-hook realities” comes from a passage of this book about the end of the 1960s in the United States: “We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously.”
[16] Jihan El-Tahri (director), Cuba: An African Odyssey, Part 1 (Temps Noir, 2007) DVD, 00:26:34~. In this film, Vladimir Shubin, former Director of the Africa Department of the Soviet Politburo said, “The UN troops were supposed to protect the independence of Congo, but they wouldn’t allow the Congolese troops which were loyal to Lumumba to operate. The mission of the United Nations troops was misused to topple the government of Lumumba or to at least not protect Lumumba.”
[17] Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles(Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Strategic Information and Research Development Center, 2015).
[18] Charles Onana, Rwanda, la vérité sur l’opération Turquoise : Quand les archives parlent (Rwanda and the Truth about Opération Tourquoise: When the Archives Speak) (L’artilleur, 2019).
[19] Richard Sanders, “R2P [Responsibility to Protect]: Typecasting Canada as Hero in Theatres of War,” Press for Conversion, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/35334199/R2P_Responsibility_to_Protect_Typecasting_Canada_as_Hero_in_Theatres_of_War
[20] Dennis Riches (translator), “Interview: Slobodan Despot: ‘The West is too sure of the universality of its values.’” Dialogue Franco-Russe, April 15, 2024.
[21] “Putin calls Canadian parliament’s applause for Nazi veteran ‘disgusting,’” Reuters, October 6, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-calls-canadian-parliaments-applause-nazi-veteran-disgusting-2023-10-05/
[22] Joseph Massad, “Josep Borrell’s European ‘garden’ is built on the plunder of the ‘jungle,’” Middle East Eye, October 19, 2022. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/eu-josep-borrell-europe-garden-built-on-plunder-jungle
[23] George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, 1947. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=3629
[24] Arnaud Bertrand on X (Twitter), April 21, 2024. https://twitter.com/rnaudbertrand/status/1781901966773477701?s=51&t=aMj1zHpMN3ra4p2uJNfftw
[25] Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (Sierra Club Books, 1992).
[26] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 1999, 2013).
[27] John L. Potash, Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists (Trine Day, 2015).
[28] Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties (Hachette Book Group, 2019).
[29] Caitlin O’Kane, “U2’s Bono and The Edge hold surprise concert in subway station in Kyiv,” CBS News, May 9, 2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bono-ukraine-u2-surprise-concert-kyiv-train-station/
[30] Lianne Kolirin, “Blinken plays ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ in Kyiv bar,” CNN, May 15, 2024. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/15/europe/blinken-rockin-free-world-scli-intl/index.html
[31] Jefferson Chase, “Cold War Kids,” DW (Deutsche Welle), July 4, 2007. https://www.dw.com/en/87-concert-was-a-genesis-of-east-german-rebellion/a-2663850
[32] Max Fisher, “David Bowie at the Berlin Wall: the incredible story of a concert and its role in history,” Vox, January 12, 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/1/11/10749546/david-bowie-berlin-wall-heroes
[33] Bela Kun, “Marx and the Middle Classes.” Pravda, May 4, 1918.
[34] Naoíse Mac Sweeney, The West: A New History of an Old Idea (Penguin Random House, 2023), 328.
[35] Nicolai N. Petro, “Neutrality, Security, and Civilizational Realism: A Conundrum with Lessons for Russia and Ukraine,” Neutrality Studies (Substack of Pascal Lottaz), November 1, 2024. https://pascallottaz.substack.com/p/neutrality-security-and-civilizational
(Featured Image: “BRICS leaders meet at the G20 Summit, 15 Nov 2015” by GovernmentZA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.)
