Shared identity is unsustainable without incorporating culture and sports under the European umbrella, and football might prove to be one of the highest hurdles to jump on the road to Europeanization.

Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI) and a renowned China expert, will testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs today on the subject of the various "Confucius Institutes" being put in place all over the United States. These institutes... represent a significant threat to U.S. national security and an attempt to enhance China's "soft power" globally.

BRICS, grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has set a distinctive example of great powers rising with "soft power," said Boris Martynov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Latin America Institute.

And all of this may in the end be an attribute of America's vaunted soft power - our foreign policy is not made in a hermetically sealed environment by wise-men-for-life but rather rises from the give and take of our democratic process, which at the end of the day is open to all.

Many Indian analysts accept their country is unlikely to make good the economic and developmental gulf that separates the two regional rivals, but say that India's "soft power" and "cultural influence" is an advantage.

There used to be a saying about the Chinese: “They work while we sleep.” In the field of public diplomacy, it is absolutely spot on...Thankfully, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is determined to expose the Chinese public diplomacy offensive. Hearings on “Public Diplomacy with China” will be held by the Foreign Affairs Committee at 2:30 pm Wednesday.

It is a message designed to entertain and to engage a particular audience: those without much knowledge of history and not particularly interested in current events but who can be easily reached by new media and easily counted in audience surveys.