Soft Power: From Multidisciplinary Measurement to Complexity Study
by Jean-François Simard and Pierre C. Pahlavi
INTRODUCTION
Soft Power, the ability to indirectly influence others' behavior without resorting to force, is now omnipresent in academic debates and widely invoked in foreign policy discussions . During the past century, economic globalization and growing interdependence seem to have increased the importance of soft power resources as "the everyday currency of world politics." As exemplified by international events since 2001, it is becoming more and more difficult today to pursue security by relying exclusively on brute force or classic military deterrence. Other sources of power, now referred to as soft power, are apparently gaining or regaining popularity among researchers, strategists and policy makers.
However, despite the growing interest in soft power and its policy applications, an important issue remains unanswered: that of its measurement or evaluation. Most of the literature focuses on quantification of economic and military activities, but little attention is paid to the measurement of Soft Power and soft power policies such as public diplomacy (PD) and other branches of Strategic Communications (SC). The problem tackled herein addresses the urgency of the many deficiencies currently affecting the evaluation of soft power policies. In spite of these important shortcomings, our central argument is that it is not only vital to improve ways to characterize and measure Soft Power but that it is also possible. It can be done through a multidisciplinary approach; using indirect means. Despite that Soft Power is inherently difficult to measure, a trail or footprint is left behind, cause and effects, or national objectives can be partially inferred. This argument will be presented in two parts. The first part will summarize the current classical concepts of influence and limitations by Joseph Nye, and others. In the second part, we will propose a multidisciplinary approach founded partly on Complexity sciences, but more importantly, emerging modeling and measurement methods including R&D programs in other universities, and centers of excellence will be presented.
1. CLASSICAL INFLUENCE
Though it could seem paradoxical given today’s marriage of some of realism’s heirs to hard materialism , thinkers in the realist tradition have long debated the nature of the links between political power and ideological influence. In antiquity, Thucydides did not doubt that the relations between nations were shaped and governed by ideational factors rather than solely by bare statedness. Echoing the Chinese thinker Sun Tzu, Machiavelli also developed the idea that permanent conquest of a nation must necessarily be achieved with the “support of one’s fellow-citizens”; conquest must include the seduction of the conquered masses along with the exercise of military and economic power. The Florentine thinker considered that though influence gained in this way might be difficult to acquire, it was more rewarding and of longer duration than that acquired through simple economic or military strength, especially in the cases of political entities in which the populace play an important role. In the tradition of Polybus, Plutarch and Tacitus, the Prussian Clausewitz also made his contribution to the body of theoretical work about what we call the “small war” or the “war of opinion” without which, according to him, there is no “grand strategy” worthy of the name. In fact, history endlessly illustrates and confirms the notion that the longest lasting political victories are those that combine physical conquest with manufacturing the consent of the conquered people.
In his seminal work, Struggle for Power and Peace, Hans Morgenthau explained that “a subtle diplomacy aiming not at the conquest of territory or at the control of economic life, but at the conquest and control of the minds of men” is one of the most powerful “instruments for changing the power relation between nations.” Equally convincing, the French political thinker, Raymond Aron considered that ‘genuine realism’ must acknowledge the place of ideologies in the diplomatic and strategic construct, since ignoring them can only produce a restricted and impoverished theory.
Though soft power enjoyed a golden age as one of the most important weapons in the ideological clash between Moscow and Washington, research on the subject has quite paradoxically been sidelined by emphasis on other issues. Unfortunately, the military and nuclear confrontation between the two blocs consumed the bulk of attention and impeded the development of more complete theoretical considerations of the diplomacy of mass persuasion. In the sixties and seventies, most scholarly attention shifted towards hard power issues associated with tangible and easily measurable resources such as military and economic strength.
At the centre of the interdependence school of thought, the work of Joseph S. Nye constitutes an important contribution by presenting culture and information as sources of soft power. Coined in Nye's prescient 1990 study, Bound to Lead, the term “soft power” - the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion - is now widely invoked in foreign policy debates. Nye's merit has been to draw attention once again to the strategic dimension of culture and information, allowing for a better understanding of the advantages that they can represent for diplomacy. This being the case, he returned to the theoretical debate a traditional and crucial notion buried by many decades of blind materialism and a fixation on military and economic power. Nye's most recent book, Soft Power, re-introduces the idea and argues for its relevance in forming post-September 11 foreign policy. Though it may suggest in a seductive way that information and culture now constitute unavoidable auxiliaries of modern policy, Nye’s theory remains incomplete. More importantly, Nye offers no tools to measure Soft Power.
Military and economic influences are easier to measure: strategic atlases are used to visualize spheres of influence, and economic metrics are well documented. The best examples of this are the thematic maps of Gérard Chaliand. Although spheres of influence are coarsely represented, they still do not offer metrics or tools to quantify or parametrize soft power effects. New public diplomacy programs developed over the past few years tried to increase countries’ cultural and information influence overseas . Here again, governments are still unable to determine to what extent their PD initiatives are able to influence foreign audiences or contribute to the achievement of their foreign policy goals. There is a strong temptation to rely upon the growing number of multinational opinion surveys in order to deduce an estimate of a country's soft power. Surveys such as the Pew Research Center or the Program on International Policy Attitude have stronger logistical and financial means than many governments. Although tracking attitudes and trends allow for an understanding of national sentiment and support, conventional surveys say little if anything about the specific effect of public diplomacy programs on foreign opinions. Some public policies such as the program of issuing visas and the outcome of controlling legal entry of immigrants and non-immigrants are relatively easy to appraise. As acknowledged by many specialists, such relationships are more problematic when applied to most of other goals. Their outcomes depend, generally, on external factors and contingent elements that are beyond the control and are thus impossible to include in operations.
But though there are problems and difficulties to overcome, the enterprise is not futile. Efforts are currently being made to develop evaluation techniques that are for the most part inspired by those used in the private sphere for gauging the success of persuasive actions and public relations campaigns. The work done in the field of strategic public relations is the most promising that we are likely to see in the next few years. However it appears that classical concepts and conventional methods exemplified thus far offer incomplete tools to measure Soft Power. Concepts of influence as perceived by political scientists such as Joseph Nye offer a good starting point but provide a limited framework for the systematic measurement of a nation’s influence. In spite of the fact that their analysis are useful, a holistic approach is needed to characterize the true complexity of influence.
2. COMPLEX INFLUENCE
The main argument of this paper is that classical concepts of soft power, and science disciplines taken individually are not adapted to the measure influence. The following reasonable hypothesis is proposed: national influence and Soft Power are governed by the rules of complexity. Therefore, in spite of the intrinsic limits to the measurement of human activities, nations can be treated as complex networks, subject to modeling and measurement.
Recent progresses in chaos science and complexity have changed our understanding of nature.Complexity sciences have shown that organic and multivariable systems cannot be studied solely with deterministic methods. Complex systems exhibit different properties as a function of scale, they are subject to instability, show adaptability and memory, hysteresis, emergence of collective properties, and non-linearity to name a few. An approach based on “Human or cognitive networks” as complex systems could offer an alternative view of Soft Power modeling.
In the 40s and 50s, Heinz Von Foerster, the Father of Second Order Cybernetics, was interested in modeling the Human as a physical system. His research totaling over 100 papers covered a broad range of topics spanning self-organization, group dynamics, human cognition, etc. Giants such as John Von Neuman, Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener have all collaborated with Foerster. In his recent work “The Web of Life”, Fritjof Capra describes how the majority of complex properties of society exhibit non-linearity, embedded characteristics, retroactive loops, self-organization, etc.
Modeling political organizations as networks may be interpreted as an “atomist” view of political science, but a holistic approach taking advantage of multiple disciplines ranging from information sciences, simulation, forensic methodologies, the science of Geomatics, etc. may contribute to a more complete view of influence. Robert W. Cox, a classical sociologist treated labor and production through the prism of human relations: “a complex social force at the origin of power and the new world order.”
Simulations of complex systems have also shown the fundamental role that information and complexity plays in economics. Jing Chen and other economists have indeed established the relationship between development and information content that a society generates. The more sophisticated a society is, the more information and complexity (or entropy) it generates in the form of products and knowledge. The work that the Santa Fe Institute is doing in that regard is exemplary.
Attempts at quantifying influence are not new. Ole R. Holsti had formulated plans in the 60s to correlate verbal communication with the physical behavior of politicians, and put forward qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to establish correlations. George Mason University from Virginia has many research programs on quantitative social sciences including graduate programs offered by the “Center for Social Complexity.” Northwestern University in Illinois recently created a collaborative group “Complexity in Action Network” with multiple partners from industry, governments, etc. The fact of the matter is, a new paradigm is occurring in all sciences and this change is global across many universities and research centers across the world. Research conducted by Dr Yaneer Bar Yam, President of the New England Complex Systems Institute, offers a conceptual framework to study the complexity of human networks. His project uses a physical approach to study human groups and interactions.
A similar approach to social sciences is the one recently exposed by Phillip Ball from Oxford University. Referring to the original ideas of Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan, and Ludwig Boltzmann’s work in thermodynamics and statistical physics, Phillip Ball discusses society as a statistical phenomenon. Measuring society from the bottom up as a statistical ensemble with phase transitions, group averages certainly provides new insight. Statistics is not the answer to the physics of sets, but does provide a way out of Newtonian determinism. Economic markets have been shown to have fractal properties and the example of market corrections, recessions are catastrophic events that a part of regulating process of the economy. Of great interest, P. Ball discusses meta-stable states within the context military conflicts and WWII.
Computer-based agent-based modeling examples are shown to explain collective modes of behavior. P. Ball refers to a computer-based model - Sugarscape, a “SimCity” agent-based computer model for social systems, being developed by Brookings Institution, the Santa Fe Institute, and the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC, is used to develop policy recommendations on population growth, economic development, migration, etc. John Casti also discusses the great potential of “would be” systems: agent-based simulations of virtual populations and cities. Such models could perhaps be extended to study geographical influences, effects of technological change, and organizational systems, etc.
Along the same line, Mathews et al concludes that even if complexity provides a new understanding and ideas about the nature of social sciences, there is no unified model nor proven analysis methods. Caution is therefore required to avoid simple analogies and false metaphors between social and pure sciences. At the origin of this problem is the lack of a unified theory of human groups. To do this properly, multiple disciplines integrating geography, mapping, forensics methodology, complexity, and information sciences should contribute to a more unified framework to Soft Power measurement.
CONCLUSION
Our current period of globalization and growing national inter-dependencies necessitates that more attention be paid towards the notion of influence and Soft Power however elusive they may appear to be. Since the measure of a nation’s physical capacities can be quantified, current methods principally covers the coercive forms of power i.e. military and economic. Aspects of Soft Power are nevertheless measurable indirectly, through proxies, but the task remains ambitious. The Father of Soft Power, Joseph Nye, and his contemporaries have largely ignored the question of measurement and few processes or solutions are offered to measure cultural and diplomatic influence.
In spite of these difficulties and limitations, it is concluded that a multidisciplinary approach based on the sciences of complexity can provide a more complete approach to the measurement of Soft Power. Current cultural and moral influence measures are for the most part in the form of economic products, the number of literature publications and cultural events, etc. Military and economic influences are much easier to measure: strategic atlases are used to visualize spheres of influence, and economic metrics are well documented. These opportunities should not be regarded as limitations but as points of departure for the evaluation of more intangible forms of influence.
In conclusion, an approach integrating all effects a posteriori as in a forensics-type research with multiple disciplines contributing to the development of a unified framework is proposed. Agent-based simulation, modeling of human networks are emerging tools from the social sciences can also be applied to field of influence. Centers of excellence such as the Santa Fe Institute, collaborative projects between national institutes and industry can tackle such a task. Cyberspace and the Internet are potential laboratories for the study of human groups and their interactions. A unified model based on human group and a “physics of societies” approach provides a new prism through which scientists, researchers may shed light on the measurement of Soft Power and influence.
