soft power
On December 9, during a routine session of the European Parliament in Brussels, someone snuck into the building, probably through an inner parking garage, and quietly placed copies of the same thick paperback book into the private mailboxes of all 751 parliamentarians.
The book, Red Dalia, is a takedown of Dalia Grybauskaite, the president of Lithuania. The country sits on the fringes of the EU, squeezed between the former Soviet dictatorship of Belarus and the militarized Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. The books were printed in English.
The Russian government has always understood the interest of the three Finno-Ugric countries – Finland, Hungary and Estonia – in the Finno-Ugric peoples within the borders of the Russian Federation as “a pretext for putting pressure on Russia when the situation requires,” according to Alina Sergeyeva, a St. Petersburg commentator.
PD News takes a look at what China, the UK, India and the U.S. have been up to this week.
I moved to Germany for the first time as a language student in 2004. That November, the queen made her fourth state visit to the country. I hadn't even realized she was coming.
It was my landlady, Cäcilia, a conservative Catholic pensioner and widow in rural Pfalz in southwestern Germany, who excitedly pointed out that Elizabeth was in town on my return from work one Tuesday.
"Are you watching? Are you going to watch?" she cooed. Baffled, I asked what she was talking about, a question that seemed almost to offend. "Your queen's here. Here in Germany!"
China is using soft power through the form of foreign aid to help the world, despite criticism from the West that its approach lacks transparency.
There is no better proof of this than the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiatives, the latest strategies under Beijing's foreign aid policy.
This new article by three U.K. sports scholars evaluates and assesses how and why governments are leveraging sports mega-events, including the 2012 London Olympics; the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil; and the forthcoming 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, to bolster their nation-brand and foreign policy strategies.
Next month, well-heeled punters will flock to the Qatar Goodwood Festival for one of the highlights of the British horse racing calendar.
It wasn’t the kind of policy statement that would restore Britain to a central role in geopolitical crises. But the announcement that caught my attention in recent days was a smart deployment of soft power, of which the UK has plenty to offer. John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, claimed for Britain a pivotal role in the fight against cultural destruction, which he described as an affront to common human values.