Nnitin Desai: Soft power

India must pay more attention to mechanisms of cultural exchange and media impact to have a greater say in the global arena.

The god who rules over foreign policy must be like Ardhanarishwara, a god who is half man and half woman. The exercise of power by a country, or for that matter by anybody, has to have this dual capacity of hard power and soft power, each reinforcing the other.

Power is the ability to make others do what you want them to do. It can come from coercion or from how incentives are structured in international relations. But it can also come from an ability to influence the way people define their goals and identify the options available to them for meeting these goals. Harvard's Kennedy School dean Joseph Nye, who first presented the concept in the early nineties, defines it as "co-opting people rather than coercing them".

We understand how hard power is exercised. That is why countries aim at military capacities that allow them to prevail over others or to deter them. But we do not understand the ingredients of soft power as well. And that is why soft power is often the accidental outcome of cultural evolution, that subtle process by which ideas and concepts that have survival value drive out others that are less useful.

Soft power is not about popularity. The United States has influenced the way people think about their international options not just through its military might but also through the enormous reach of its culture and its influence in shaping values and life styles. And it has done that even in places like Iran and China where it is far from popular.

Soft power is not entirely determined by the strength of military might and market power. The Scandinavian countries, for instance, exercise soft power far beyond what their hard power capacities would suggest by using an institution like the UN as an influence multiplier.

Soft power works mainly through the mechanisms of cultural exchange and media impact. But it also works through the presence and influence a country exercises in multilateral processes and global gatherings like the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum, to take two very different examples.

In the early stages of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union put in a huge effort in winning over hearts and minds. But the Soviet effort was organised as propaganda and its impact was soon restricted to the already converted. The US effort on the other hand was much more diverse. There was a propaganda component in the USIS and all that. But there was also a much less organised cultural contact through academic exchanges, a relatively free press and media and of course Hollywood.

There is a good test of this difference in the soft power of the two belligerents in the Cold War. The impact of the Soviet Union on values and lifestyle aspirations in the USA was minimal, despite the US being a more open society. But the reverse impact of the USA on hearts and minds in the Soviet Union was deep and widespread. In the end the US won the Cold War because along with military containment it deployed a formidable arsenal of soft power.

India, like every other country in the world, is at the receiving end of the hard and soft power of the United States. But, as we have seen in the WTO negotiations and in the latest World Economic Forum, it has the soft power to be able to influence the terms of the global debate. In its own bailiwick it has the capacity to exercise an ideological and cultural influence on its neighbours.

Bollywood films, TV programmes seen across the border, the free press, the frequent contacts between artistes, academics, businessmen and professionals project values of freedom of belief and expression, of social mobility, of women's advancement and, more recently of economic progress. Much of this traffic in ideas and values is one way, from India to its neighbours. And this is so even though, as a country, we are far from popular in our neighbourhood. This is soft power, coopting the neighbours into looking at their life chances in the way in which we look at them. This power, subtle and undirected, does more to shape our relations with these neighbours than the formidable military superiority that we wield.

The projection of soft power is more than the conventional exercise of external publicity. It is also more than propaganda, however subtly it is organised. It works along many tracks, but, of these, three seem most important.

The first is the news and opinion media. CNN and BBC and new entrants like al-Jazeera are instruments of soft power. So are the newspapers Herald Tribune and Le Monde which have an international reach. TV news channels are crucial as the early visual impressions that they imprint shape at least the initial presumptions in people's minds. But the press, though slower in its impact, does matter because it can present analysis, opinion, contrasting views and second thoughts. We have seen this, most recently, in the way opinion on the US involvement in Iraq has evolved. We have virtually no independent presence in the globalised media and this is something that must be corrected.

The second track is the mass entertainment media. Here India has a great asset in the popularity of Bollywood films not just in our immediate neighbourhood but much further afield. Nothing much needs to be done except a greater recognition in official circles of the huge asset that this is in the exercise of power.

The third track is the people to people contact, mainly among the educated and economic elites. This has been pursued with some direction in the Track II diplomacy with Pakistan. It was a crucial part of the US success in the Cold War game. It must become a more systematic part of our dealings with other countries, not just one neighbour.

A world where the direct exercise of military power will become difficult and where the influence of transnational elites will increase will be a world shaped by the impact of soft power. That is why our strategic planners must pay more attention to the other half of the Ardhanarishwara of power.