British diplomat on soft and hard power
Jeremy Greenstock [at right], former UK ambassador to the UN and director of the Ditchley Foundation, offers this description of the roles of soft power and hard power. This essay was published in The New Statesman, a 94-year-old British magazine of current affairs.Greenstock's conclusion is a powerful argument for the value of soft power. He offers details and examples in the full article, which I recommend if you want to use this with students.
We must learn from our mistakes
"Does Britain really understand its true position in the new world order?...
"The fact is that the British people, if not always their poli tical leaders, have become more attuned to the European instinct for maximising soft-power approaches than to the American preference for hard action. This is not just the predilection of an over-mature nation for avoiding bullets and bombs because we are tired of them. It also contains an understanding that, in today's world, there are costs in making new enemies which we may not be able to afford, and that other peoples with a greater freedom of choice need to be persuaded, not pushed around. Even the worthy objective of promoting democracy in the world has to be pursued with interested rather than suspicious populations.
"Yet we and our EU partners have so far generated too low a capacity for hard-power responses when they are really needed. The US showed us up over Bosnia. The Iranians would call our bluff if we faced up to them on our own. Afghanistan may go sour on us anyway, but the inclination of some major European allies to avoid the hard fighting there could become a nail in Nato's coffin...
"Terrorism will remain in the headlines because it is lethal and mysterious and because it has probably not yet reached its peak. While the US is a significant ally in confronting it, we need to take account of an important difference in the threat facing the UK: we have a problem within our borders, not just beyond them.
"Ultimately, all terrorism must be countered at source. For the US, the prime requirement beyond effective frontier security is to persuade moderate Islam to assert its entirely acceptable values over violent extremism, an objective that most Islamic world governments will see as being of equal relevance to their own interests.
"In the case of the UK, and certain European allies, we also have to calculate and react to the effect of our history, our relationships and our policy choices on the domestic arena. A 'War on Terror' will not do. A proper defence becomes a matter of values, of respect for other systems, of diplomacy in establishing a global culture of the rule of law. As a nation with a surprisingly solid record of social change without civil strife since the industrial revolution began, we can, with wisdom and time, probably find some good answers. But they have to be assessed under our own criteria, with the necessary hard-headedness when it matters..."
Labels: concepts, globalization, policy, theory, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:17 AM
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