title: The Strategic Employment of Culture as a Resource of Soft Power. Analysis of the EU’s Creative Europe Sub-Programme Culture as a resource for internal soft power
Creators: name: Rozanova, Ekaterina
Publisher: name: Goldsmiths, University of London
Year: 2021

description: In the study of international relations power has always been a central focus of theory, analysis, and debate. In the last thirty years, the concept of soft power has become prominent in these debates. This dissertation looks at the role of culture in the attainment of soft power and in particular it develops on Joseph Nye’s insight that culture can be instrumentalised as a resource for soft power. While Nye’s work has generated much constructivist scholarship on soft power, there has been little structured theorisation as to the nature of cultural soft power resources themselves. By adopting a power-as-resource perspective, this dissertation asserts that cultural resources can be built and deployed like any other material resources and, to illustrate this, establishes a theoretical framework to assess the key characteristics of strategic instrumentalization of culture as a resource thereby making an original contribution to the theoretical understanding of soft power. The dissertation then applies this theoretical lens to a case study to show how the framework provides a tool to evaluate empirical examples. The case study analyses the European Union’s Creative Europe Sub-Programme Culture (CESPC), which at the same time allows the dissertation to provide new insight into the EU’s instrumentalization of culture. To arrive at the theoretical framework, the dissertation builds on existing literature and adopts an understanding that the concept of soft power can be understood through the realist power-as-resource perspective and that soft power has an internal dimension in addition to the foreign policy dimension. It establishes four elements that need to beconsidered in the strategic employment of culture, specifically these are: cultural assets, communications mechanisms, narratives, and audiences. These elements include the ability of the agent to generate activity around culture and heritage, the ability to build arm’s length networks through the creative and cultural sector, the ability to engage in mass communication strategies, and the ability to produce coherent narratives and build strategic audience groups in the cultural sphere. Exploring the internal deployment of soft power and using the previously developed theoretical framework, the dissertation examines how the European Union has instrumentalized culture in the case of the CESPC and evaluates to what extent this programme has the capacity to serve as a soft power resource. It does so by assessing the degree to which the EU’s employment of culture through the CESPC satisfies the four elements identified in the theoretical framework. The dissertation’s findings demonstrate that while the EU meets certain criteria within the theoretical framework and therefore evidently systematically instrumentalizes culture for power related purposes, it fails to meet other dimensions within the framework and hence fails to fully realize the potential of deploying culture as a soft power resource. Hereby, the dissertation shows the value of having a structured theoretical framework, with a power-as-resource perspective for the realm of culture, as a means to investigate soft power capabilities of international actors. Furthermore, the framework can serve as a systematic and coherent analytical tool for future case studies.