The "soft power" of Ukrainian art within the coordinates of the modern world

It was an honour to open the conference, organised by the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. The conference was dedicated to thinking about soft power, cultural diplomacy and Ukraine. I chose to ask the question if such a thing as soft power through culture exists any longer. Is not power just power?

Kateryna Lysovenko “Ukraine Unmuted Exhibition” (catalogue) 2022

Thank you for this invitation to join you this morning. I stay in touch with Olexandr and many other Ukrainian colleagues on a regular basis and my admiration for your work increases day by day, hour by hour.

I have been invited by Olexandr to address the theme of soft power/hard power this morning in a few sentences.

It used to seem like such a straightforward distinction to make. Hard power referred to bombs and tanks and to border guards and passports. For Max Weber the legitimate use of state violence to impose its will, either in relation to internal conflict or war with another state or non-state player, was a relatively stable definition of hard power. And despite its crudity, it can serve as a rough-and-ready description of hard power. I think all you Ukrainians recognise hard power as a lived reality better than I possibly could from my office in Plovdiv.

Soft power, on the other hand, is a persuasive approach to internal and international state relations typically involving the use of economic or cultural influence. It’s worth pointing out that this definition of soft power usually only refers to international state relations. But, as serious adults, can we really draw the line here? Are states not attempting to apply soft power to their internal relations with citizens as much as to external ones?

So that’s how things have been: Weber’s definition of hard power and its soft-power-dialectic. But in times of fascism these distinctions, these two discrete fields of activity, become one. And it probably becomes one for both fascist nations and non-fascist nations. It’s no longer a question of soft power and hard power. It’s simply a question of ‘all power’. As Brecht once wrote:

Today anyone who wants to fight lies and ignorance and to write the truth has to overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth, even though it is disguised everywhere; the skill to make it fit for use as a weapon; the judgement to select those in whose hands it will become effective; the cunning to spread it amongst them. These difficulties are great for those who write under Fascism, but they also exist for those who were driven out or have fled, indeed, even for those who write in the lands of the bourgeois freedom.

Some months ago a St. Petersburg court sentenced a 19-year-old woman to three years in a penal colony after she was accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army, including by gluing a quotation on a statue of a Ukrainian poet. Darya Kozyreva was arrested after she glued a verse by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko onto his monument in St Petersburg. Clearly the border between soft and hard power no longer exists in this example.

We live in a new age of rage. Putin’s rage. Russia’s rage. But there is also Trump’s rage, and indeed the rage of the Right around the world. It is a rage at remembering.

Read the full article, in English and in Ukrainian, at #ClickbaitCitizen.