Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia's Influence Abroad.

• Author: Brown, John H.
• Position: Book review

Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia's Influence Abroad by James Sherr, London: Royal Institute for International Affairs/Chatham House, 2013, ISBN9781 86203 266 8, Paperback, 137 pp., $23.36 (Amazon)

Soft power is "the ability to get what you want through attraction." So wrote the coiner of the term, Harvard professor Joseph Nye, Jr., in his Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004). Conceived by Nye in 1990, the term is now used by a multitude of nations throughout the world.

But soft power, while today part of the global foreign affairs vocabulary, doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. This, as I see it, is the main point of the book by James Sherr, Associate Fellow and former Head of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. His study focuses on three characteristics of Russian soft power or, as he sometimes calls it, soft coercion: its history; its strong links to the state; and its role in legitimizing the regime at home.

Dealing first with history, Sherr underscores that Russian thinking about the importance of influence in hard diplomacy did not begin with Nye's speculations about soft power, which "skews the equation in favour of liberal democracies" by their emphasis that such power is "a staple of daily democratic policies."

Russia, Sherr writes, "has inherited a culture of influence deriving from the Soviet and Tsarist past. It bears the imprint of doctrines, disciplines and habits acquired over a considerable period of time in relations with subjects, clients and independent states." He does a masterly job in dealing with this process, covering "The Imperial inheritance"; "The Leninist crucible"; "The Stalinist codicil"; and "The Gorbachevian moment."

Second, noting that after the collapse of communism "Russia's liberals lost ground from the moment they acquired it," Sherr stresses that President Vladimir Putin considers soft power a central ("vertical") government function. It is an instrument for "the revival of a great state." (Putin, reflecting his state-first perspective, believed that the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a "Western 'special operation' and a triumph of Western soft power, which to Putin is a form of state power.")

This Russian symbiosis of state and soft power is not Nye's "staple of democratic policies" noted above. Indeed, Nye underscores (in a passage not quoted by Sherr) that "Governments can control and change foreign policies. They can spend money on public diplomacy...