Austrian foreign minister meets Serbian finance minister and Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.By the very end of the twentieth century, in the late 1980s, Joseph Nye coined the term ’soft power’. Little did we know that he had hit an ontological political jackpot. Oculus tauri. Nye wrote that ’the dictionary tells us that power means an ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what they otherwise would not’, giving the very definition of power as it is, an almost proverbial potestas per se. Traditionally, power was seen as brute force, an almost strictly military instance. ’Today, however, the definition of power is losing its emphasis on military force and conquest that marked earlier eras’, he wrote. ’Soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade’.
No matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, today’s Europe (and much of the rest of the world) is a willing slave to the Right-Wing’s soft power. This power is so strong that it has persuaded us that the Right Wing is not even Right-Wing. Until it becomes ’extreme’, such as the case of Viktor Orbán. Soft power is the Right-Wing’s bread and butter. And it works.
For starters, this can easily be seen in the sludge-ridden discourse about the New Left, from Syriza, via Podemos, to Jeremy Corbyn. Whenever the Left Wing succeeds (or even worse, whenever it simply pops up as a political choice), we are bombarded with a relatively ridiculous discourse about the ’extreme left’, even though nothing but anarchism nowadays could legitimately be considered as an ’extreme left’ option. And the world is in ’schock’ that a leftist is now leading a labour party in the United Kingdom, however utterly bizzare that might be. O, tempora, o, mores. Why?
