At the end of the Olympic Games she also found success in the diplomatic realm when she was elected to be a member of the Athletes’ Commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – an achievement that the Slovak Olympic Committee President František Chmelár said was equal to winning “four or five gold medals”.

The Lithuanian Parliament, Seimas, held the solemn opening ceremony of the Lithuania-Armenia forum, where MPs, political, scientific, cultural, representatives as well as sport figures, actors, journalists and representatives of the Armenian community participated, Armenian MFA informs Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Furthermore, political movements such as the youth group Nashi have harassed Estonia’s diplomats and vandalized its websites, while “soft-power” organizations like Russkiy Mir (Russian World) actively work to promote cultural and linguistic ties to the homeland.

As a culmination of Georgia’s post 2008 reconsideration of its relations with the people of the North Caucasus, last week Georgian parliament adopted its State Strategy, targeting Circassians, Chechens, Ossetians, Ingush, Adyghes, Kabardins and other people in the North Caucasus.

But much has changed since the “soft power” strategy of covertly educating North Koreans began in earnest two decades ago. North Koreans are no longer completely in the dark. We can’t quantify the amount of information that has leaked into the country, because we can’t conduct public opinion surveys in North Korea.

In the Lisbon Summit (2010), NATO decided to use Soft Power (the term which belongs to Joseph Samuel Nye – Harvard University Professor) for stabilisation of the Western Balkan Countries in the new millenium because it is not only cheaper and effective, but also this strategy brings long-range stability to the region and provides prosperity and more democratic rights to these nations.

Given the financial fiasco in the EU in the past two years, EU partisans now seem to be significantly overrating the appeal of membership to prospective candidate nations. Yet that message does not appear to have penetrated the thinking of either Western political leaders or pundits in the policy community.The EU is still the great brass ring of European politics, but it is now a tarnished brass ring.