The omni-talented entertainer Barry Humphries died over the weekend. On Monday, his native Australia announced a new and enhanced defence posture. One way of engaging with the world as a middle power is fading. Another has just started.
In the middle of the last century, Humphries, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes brought their lively minds from Down Under to Up Over. Around the same time, Australia invested in film-makers and (with no small pay-off) sports coaches. Its wine penetrated foreign markets. Its coffee culture would become the world’s best, or at least fussiest. Throw in some favours from providence — sunshine, coastlines — and the projection of national charm was awesome.
It was also, in the end, beside the point. Nuclear submarines, fortification of the north shore: these are the priorities now. Such are the exigencies of sharing a region with China.
Australians can at least go through this adjustment with South Koreans. The coolest country of the past decade or two sells musical, cinematic and gastronomic wares to western as well as to Asian consumers. Again, the national charm offensive is something to behold. Again, it is only of so much use against China (and its errant ward, North Korea). So defence spending is going up. The idea of acquiring nuclear weapons is not too sensational for politicians in Seoul to air.
We are living through, if not the end of soft power as a useful concept, then a brutal exposure of its limits. Countries that had mastered the art of cultural attraction are now having to load up on lethal kit. That doesn’t mean the softer stuff was a mistake. Australia loses nothing from overperforming in Olympic medal tables. South Korea loses nothing from its presence on foreign screens. At the margins, and in indirect ways, these things might even generate geopolitical clout. But gone is any pretence that soft assets can replace, or even rival, hard ones.
And these are hardly two countries that were stuck in pacifist dreamland. (Since 1989, Australia has taken less of a peace dividend than America.) It is the EU, and some of its constituent states, that will find the declining usefulness of soft power much harder to take. Here is an institution founded to transcend might-is-right. The liberal reforms that Brussels asked applicant countries to make, and their willingness to make them, remains the best case study of soft power in the world. There was a vein of European thought that held military force to be a kind of oldthink: an American atavism. It was under Nato protection that such hokum set in.
Joseph Nye, the conceptual father of soft power, enriched the sterile study of international relations. But his idea was always vulnerable on one point. It is hard to separate admiration for a country (soft power) from awe at its wealth and arms (hard power). My childhood liking for the US was rooted in its seemingly vast houses, its high-tech win in the Gulf war, its number one-ness. It was the land of the free and the home of the double-door fridge. A poorer, weaker country, even if its values were the same, would not have been so beguiling. In fact, if those values were attractive, it was because they seemed to lead to material strength.
Unless I am unique in my cynicism, this is how cultural attraction works. It is a byproduct of more orthodox national assets, not an adequate compensation for their absence. (The confusion, I think, is that people conflate economic wealth with soft power. Nye distinguished the two. The first, as used in sanctions or market access, is still a kind of coercion.)
Sure enough, for every example of soft power, hard power is close at hand. Yes, the EU accession states of 2004 longed to reclaim their European identity. But they also wanted to join a rich, less Russia-threatened club.
By astronomical margins, would-be migrants would rather move to the US than to China. That hasn’t stopped the one losing relative influence to the other over recent decades. Ultimately, if a country grows from 5 per cent of world output to 18 per cent, as China has since 1980, there is a limit to what the soft power of others can do to counteract it. That kind of economic weight buys too much military hardware. It spawns too many bilateral dependants in trade and investment. It demands an answer in material power.
Ask Australia, forced by geographic circumstance to shift the stress from the soft to the hard side of its national strategy. A country that had to fight for relevance in the past now has rather too much for its own comfort.