Soft power: Who does it help?

Soft power is one of those popular catchphrases. Nations export culture, ideology, and people to create soft power. This may be because the nation has a competitive edge. It could have a superior education system; it could have a rich culture; it could have a superior political system. It could possess military might — since hard power often translates into soft power.

One common assumption is that the “exported” people retain cultural ties and residual loyalties to the land of origin, which reinforces the competitive edge of the “exporter”. Soft power is assumed to create a feedback loop to reinforce hard power, so to speak.

For example, India has soft power in Southeast Asia and the Far East for historical reasons accrued over millennia. Buddhist missionaries won hearts and minds. Naval conquests established Indophile cultures in Indonesia and Cambodia. Right now, South Korean movies, music, games and dress codes are entrancing millennials everywhere. 

But history indicates assumptions that soft power always benefits the “exporting nation” are plain wrong.

The UK has a vast amount of soft power, accumulated while the sun never set on the Empire. The EU’s business language is English (though the UK is no longer a member). Pop music everywhere has English lyrics. Of course, some of that soft power flows from the fact that the world’s largest economy was a British colony, and English is America’s official language. But George Washington and his band of rebellious brothers were British immigrants — one example of soft power exports rebounding.

In the modern era, Germany, Italy and Japan exported vast amounts of soft power, along with large numbers of people in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Italian immigrants turned crime into an art form in the US, and took over Argentina. German immigrants colonised large chunks of the US. Japanese immigrants flooded Hawaii and the US West Coast.
 

Soft power exports from Japan, Italy and Germany spiked in the 1930s. Japan started dreaming of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” created by annexing chunks of mainland Asia. Germany’s Third Reich started fantasising about a Greater Germany (Gross Deutschland) and the enslavement and extermination of inferior races.

Germany’s “exports” rose as scientists, businessmen and intellectuals fled, as books written by Jews, and businesses owned by Jews were burnt, and Jews, Gypsies, Catholics, the disabled, etc., were herded into extermination camps. Citizens also left Japan in search of greater political stability (political assassination and military coups were a national pastime in 1930s Japan). The Italians left as Il Duce Mussolini tried to grab chunks of Africa, and babbled about a New Roman Empire through the “Right of Blood“ (Italy won two football World Cups by inducting Argentinian footballers, so this doctrine wasn’t utterly useless).

The soft power exported by Japan, Italy and Germany actually translated into hard power. Only, that hard power contributed materially to the “exporters” losing World War II.

Emigre scientists and engineers (including Italians like Enrico Fermi, non-Jewish Germans, and many Jews who barely avoided concentration camp) invented nuclear weapons, and gathered information about Axis war-efforts.

General Dwight David Eisenhower, who oversaw the Allied invasion of Europe was born into a German immigrant family. Admiral Chester Nimitz who commanded the US Pacific Fleet was also of German descent. The US Army’s 442nd Infantry Regiment, which won more gallantry awards than any other US formation, was entirely composed of volunteers of Japanese descent. Godfather Lucky Luciano, and his Mafioso famiglia paved the way for Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. The hit squads immortalised in Tarantino’s Inglourous Basterds consisted of German Jews.

The advocates of Gross Deutschland and the Greater East Asia thing mostly ended up dead, after killing millions of their own countrymen (along with lots of others). Both Germany and Japan were forced to accept alien overlords and new constitutions. Germany was cut in two. 

Soft power is certainly power. But it isn’t always beneficial to the exporter. It can rebound horribly on the exporter, if the soft power is being exported for the wrong reasons.