Snow (review)

Recent events—leading Europe through the showdown over Iraq and successfully staging the Olympics—have provided Greece with an exceptional opportunity to increase its power and influence. In this article I present suggestions for enhancing Greece's relative position in the international system, particularly within the Western alliance and the European Union, over the next decade.¹ To accomplish this, Greece must shun traditional Realist-based hard-power approaches and, instead, promote soft-power strategies. Ideally, countries want to have enormous material resources at their disposal. Few countries, however, are ever in such a position. For the less well-endowed states, the only two options are to cultivate nonmaterial power bases or to accept a low placement in world politics. Realizing Greece's limitations, in this article I offer suggestions for the former: developing Greece's soft power.

The Soft Side of Power

Scholarly discussions of international relations highlight the centrality of power. Indeed, power is central to every prominent school of thought in the field, and few students of politics would quibble with the thesis that it is vital to the protection and promotion of national interests.

Traditionally, power has been viewed as emanating largely from tangible capabilities.² During the Cold War era, this was frequently expressed using Mao Tse-Tung's famous dictum, "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun." While this might be a bit too simplistic to capture the complexities of world politics, when it comes to safeguarding countries' most vital interests—state survival and self-defense—world leaders have discovered that relative advantages in military armaments and economic fortunes are important elements of national power.

Still, in recent decades most students of international relations have come to understand that there is far more to power than mere material resources. In fact, a whole new school of thought has emerged in the past fifteen years, premised on the notion that ideational components of power are just as important—if not more important—than material capabilities.³ I have grounded this paper in this growing perspective, that power is best understood as involving material and ideational elements: hard and soft power.⁴

Joseph S. Nye Jr. has been instrumental in flushing out differences between the two types of power:

Hard power is the ability to get others to do what they otherwise would not do through threats or rewards. Whether by economic carrots or military sticks, the ability to coax or coerce has long been the central element of power. . . .

Soft power, on the other hand, is the ability to get desired outcomes because others want what you want. It is the ability to achieve goals through attraction rather than coercion. It works by convincing others to follow or getting them to agree to norms and institutions that produce the desired behavior.⁵

Power through attraction has different bases from power through coercion. The ability to coerce effectively relies greatly on the material capabilities to punish or reward plus the will to carry through declared actions. The ability to attract other governments to accept one's platform or agenda, however, rests on the appeal of one's values, flavored with legitimacy. Nye conceptualizes these differences as resting along a spectrum ranging from command power to co-optive power (see table 1).