In a course
I am teaching on the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, one
student gave an excellent presentation on the relationship between today’s
Russia and the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.
One of the
journal articles she examined was entitled “Beyond Spheres of Influence: The
Myth of the State and Russia’s Seductive Power in Kyrgyzstan,” by Stefanie
Ortmann, a professor in the Department of International Relations at the
University of Sussex in England.
Ortmann questions
the analytical value of “spheres of influence” for understanding power and the
state in the post-Soviet region, instead drawing on the concept of “seductive
power” through an extended discussion of Russian influence in the central Asian
state of Kyrgyzstan, a country often described as a Russian client state.
For today’s
Russian Federation, the 14 other former republics of the old Soviet Union are
considered the “near abroad.” They are both foreign, yet not entirely foreign.
For Moscow,
she writes, “this is power at a distance, ‘seductive power’ that works to
produce particular political subjectivities and is effective precisely because
it draws on mutually constitutive understandings of state and space.”
Shared Russian
and Kyrgyz conceptions of state and space, as well as material factors, such as
enduring networks at both elite and societal level, reproduce Russian power in
Kyrgyzstan, even though the latter has been a sovereign entity since 1991.
In other
words, there is no simple and inexorable link between sovereign power and
exclusive control over bounded territory. Seductive influence may transcend
this supposedly watertight connection.
For
Russians, Kyrgyzstan is not a foreign state in the sense that, say, Pakistan
is. And for the Kyrgyz, the same holds true – despite the greater distance,
Moscow is subjectively closer than Islmabad.
I would
submit that this same type of relationship exists between Canada and the United
States – and it is an even closer one.
“Soft” power is a concept that is simultaneously seductive
and slippery: It captures something that most of us intuitively recognize — the
capacity to influence others without twisting arms, threatening, or compelling.
The currency of soft power is culture, political values, and foreign policies.
As Harvard University political scientist Joseph Nye wrote
in his 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, “A country
may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries –
admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity
and openness – want to follow it.”
If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of
others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes, he argued.
“This soft power – getting others to want the outcomes that
you want – co-opts people rather than coerces them.”
Soft power extends beyond the operations of government, to
the activities of the private sector and to society and culture at large.
What was the content of America’s soft power? Nye put it
into three categories: cultural, ideological, and institutional. In these
areas, the world would want to be like the United States. And that pull, in
turn, would help the nation shape the world.
American
soft power permeates Canada, through television, movies, songs, books and
magazines, fashion, food, educational institutions, newscasts, and products of
every shape and size. Its influence is so overwhelming it often escapes our
notice.
Most
Canadians live within a day’s drive of the U.S. border, and there are an almost
infinite number of personal interactions, given a common language in most
cases.
Tens of
thousands of snowbirds spend winter months in Florida and Arizona. Countless
numbers of Canadian students attend colleges and universities south of the
border and we often accept those degrees as having more value than Canadian
ones.
Canadian
actors, singers, and authors frequently move to cities such as New York, Los
Angeles or Nashville to further their careers.
Canada and
the U.S. are similar in ethnicities and religions, as well. For all these
reasons, we do not really consider he United States to be a “foreign” country, the
way we view every other nation – even our former colonial master Britain.
As for the
Americans, they view Canada as their “near abroad,” a kindred state with whom
they retain cordial and peaceful relations. It too is not really a “foreign”
nation.
Both sides,
despite occasional flaps, prefer to keep it that way.
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