First published in The Guardian, July 27, 2006
In the barren, brutal knockabouts of British parliamentary politics, to be called ‘soft’ on anything is clearly one of the worst imprecations in the schoolyard. John Reid has finally proven his hard credentials in the debate about ‘soft’ sentencing (practised by ‘soft’ judges) by promising tough sentences for even minor crimes. Another opportunity no doubt, for Blair to taunt Cameron on a willingness to “talk tough” about the issue, but “act soft” when voting.
So far, so yah-boo. But it’s by no means clear that the charge of ‘being soft’ in public life is always going to be read negatively whatever the prosecuting authority. Certainly the light sentencing of Zenadine Zidane, given three days community service for head butting an opponent in the World Cup Final, will answer the emotional groundswell the player received – not only from football pundits, but from all those who believe in the French dream of multiculturalism, right up to Chirac.
Last week Cameron commanded headlines again for championing his ‘soft’ offensive – asking us to “show love” to hoodies rather than fear and opprobrium. The waves of understanding that bathed a delinquent football celebrity cast an interesting light on Cameron’s much derided speech. Might ‘soft’ mean not moral weakness in the face of abuse, but a certain willingness to engage with the causes of the crime, and the long term fate of the criminal? ‘Soft-focus conservatism’ may be the critique on the lips of commentators – but the polls show that it’s having an effect on potential voters.
Yet ‘soft’ might not always mean fuzzy, warm and yielding. For over a decade, the political analyst Joseph Nye has been proposing ‘soft power’ as an alternative US foreign policy – in his words, “the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will”. With Condi Rice explicitly invoking ‘soft power’ in the US’s new approach to Iran, and – as Timothy Garton Ash noted in these pages recently – shaping a much more diplomacy-orientated American foreign policy in general, it seems ‘attraction and persuasion’ have been added (or restored) to the political tool kit of the West.
There is an interesting ambivalence around the appearance of ‘softness’ as a positive element in both national and international politics. Just as Nye’s ‘soft power’ is easy to perceive as mere entryism for the longer term goal of US global imperialism, so Cameron’s ‘soft values’ could be seen as a calculated pitch for the female vote as well as the growing green constituency.
Yet given that the issue which has most damaged Blair’s leadership has been his use of ‘hard power’ in Iraq, might soft power be a concept worth developing and championing? Similarly, the politics that Cameron represents - and which Gordon Brown recently derided as a 'namby-pamby emphasis on chocolate oranges' - is trying (however cynically) to resonate with a form of 'soft power' that existed long before the advent of policy wonks: that is, the power of the feminine itself. Could the empathy, relatedness and horizontal responsiveness that so marks a 'female' approach to the world - call it 'soft', if you like - be a new and distinct input into political change and reform?
This goes beyond the traditional feminist case against patriarchy, and into positive examples of current female leadership, particularly beyond the West. When Lu Hsiu-lien, Vice President of Taiwan, published her book on Soft Power in May this year she began by saying “the concept is not difficult to understand; yet very few leaders to date have put this concept into practice”. Might this be because ‘soft’ – beyond its deployment by spin-meisters - is a complex, feminine quality? And because politics is still dominated by men?
Says Hsiu-lien: “Soft power consists of five key elements: human rights, democracy, peace, love, and technological progress, which are intimately intertwined. It contrasts sharply with exploitative materialism and aggressive militarism. Hard power, with its heartless and mechanical nature, ignores humane values and misleads nations toward the over-centralization of state power and even military hegemony. It is aggressive and destructive. Soft power, in contrast, makes use of mercy and wisdom to fight against corruption, poverty and injustice. It is constructive and generous.”
Her achievements for Taiwan to date have been prodigious - from founding the New Feminism Movement (women now constitute 23% of the Taiwan parliament) to co-founding the Democratic Pacific Union – which will focus on new mechanisms for co-operation and dialogue around America.
A Buddhist herself, Hsiu-lien is not afraid to use words like love, peace and beauty as legitimate goals for society: “At the heart of each of Taiwan’s success stories”, she writes, “lies the human spirit”. She knows – and a growing body of scholarship on wellbeing backs her up - that tools like psychological, emotional and spiritual intelligence build cohesive and integrated societies.
Such ‘soft’ knowledges are also crucial to the advanced diplomatic and conflict-resolution skills that are required in our fissile and globalised world; and for this reason, as Scilla Elworthy’s recent Demos report notes, tackling terrorism is women’s work[i]. Is it the severe lack of women in both Hezbollah and the current Israeli government that allows such regular outbreaks of devastating violence to occur? In the West, three decades of research into public policy shows that the leading presence of women makes for “broader social legislation, benefiting everyone”, says Marie C Wilson of the White House Project.
The prospect of a ‘feminised’ soft power counters an image of women as a passive and indecisive audience, merely reacting to the combative postures of male politicians and leaders. A new narrative around the power of women is certainly needed. Today’s third wave of feminism, which should be building on previous achievements, is faltering in the face of retro movements (like raunch culture) which equate freedom with liberation from self-respect.
For women who want to use their growing agency to transform their societies, the advent of soft power is a real opportunity. If persuasion, attraction and understanding are the new arts of power, then the future is more profoundly female than we could ever have imagined.
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