Power

"He wrote his book on radical views of power in the 1970s, following a tradition of people writing that power was the ability to get others to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do. It gave the image of twisting arms, using coercion to get people to do things. This was a famous definition of power, developed by the Yale political scientist Robert Dahl in the 1960s. Dahl basically set a trend of how people thought about power. Lukes said wait a minute, if I can set the agenda so that your items don’t even arise for us to discuss, then I don’t have to twist your arm. What’s more, he went on to say, if I can establish your preferences then I don’t have to coerce you to get you to do what I want. What Lukes did was to say there are three faces of power: coercion and payments (or sticks and carrots); setting the agenda so that your issues don’t come up; and thirdly, if you want what I want then I don’t have to spend anything on carrots and sticks because I have been able to affect your preferences. That’s one of the great dangers, and Lukes does talk about it. Is there a situation in which this becomes a form of brainwashing, and how do we know? For example, if you have a Muslim woman in a full-face veil, it may be because she’s been trained by her culture to believe she should wear a full-face veil. Is that her free will or not? If you take an opinion poll and ask “are you wearing this because you want to?”, she’ll say “yes”. So her preference is to wear it. But then you ask her where the preference came from. That’s why Lukes’s work is so interesting, because he digs below the surface of these issues. In my book The Future of Power I talk about hard and soft power. Hard power is the ability to use carrots and sticks, coercion and payments; soft power is using attraction and persuasion to do things. I often quote Eisenhower, who certainly knew about giving commands. He said: “To give a command is relatively easy. To get people to do what you want because they want to do it for you is much more difficult.” I think that’s what we have to realise about leadership in general in an information age – it’s less hierarchical and commanding, and more like the centre of a circle where you have to use attraction and persuasion, creating networks to bring people together. That’s true not only at the level of domestic politics but also in international politics. Given the diffusion of power in global politics, leadership is going to involve soft power as well as hard power, getting people to develop networks and institutions to deal with problems. The combination of hard and soft power is what I call “smart power”. Yes. You use hard power to defeat the enemy but soft power to win the hearts of the civilian population. That means that killing a lot of civilians is a disastrous strategy. Not only ethically bad but counterproductive in terms of the goals of counterinsurgency. I have a chapter in my book on military power which goes into this in some detail. Absolutely. In fact, in 2008 I published a book [ The Powers to Lead ] in which I said that hard, soft and smart power were not just categories of international relations but of human relations."