Testing the impact of geopolitics on European democratic countries’ soft power use

ABSTRACT

Using statistical analysis of 29 European democracies, this article looks at the impact of geopolitical threat on democracies’ soft power reliance. For the time-period of 1999–2010, geopolitical threat is a statistically significant variable that boosts soft power use. This geopolitical theory posits that political elite create a narrative that focuses on national security and start to rely on a higher level of soft power to balance against threats. The findings provide answers regarding countries’ alliance-building processes as well as suggest that the three main paradigms of international relations are more compatible than previously stated.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitics
• soft power
• international relations
• foreign policy analysis
• IR paradigms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Walt (1985) specifically used Finland as a country that bandwagons, but this article argues that in terms of its soft power use, Finland has been balancing since its independence in 1917. Finland’s recent declaration of wanting to join NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) also confirms the balancing theory.

2. My study treats governments’ threatening actions the same as if they completed the action. These are all code as hard power actions because they coerce the receiving state.

3. Diplomatic actions such as making an empathetic comment or appeal for diplomatic cooperation were coded as soft power actions, and disapproval of diplomatic cooperation were coded as hard power actions.

^4. Events datasets were specifically created to capture the interactions between actors and not the transactions between them (Laurence 1990).

5. The highest GPT score assigned in the sample is 6 and not 8. Only Russia and Turkey scored 6. Eight countries score 0 GPT: Switzerland, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Slovenia (Hiers et al. 2017).

6. Buddhism and non-religious variables were not significant in various models created; therefore it was not included in the final model presented here.

7. Because GDP and CINC are both resource variables, I tested a Model with each of the variables without the other, to see if the Model was still significant. I found that the Model is still significant when only GDP or only CINC is present with the other variables.

8. Buddhism and non-religious variables were found statistically not significant so they were not included in this model.

9. According to the literature on comparative religion, Islam and Catholicism are seen as more restricted and less embracing of outsiders relative to Protestants, Hindus and Buddhists (Landes 1998, La Porta et al. 1999).

10. Polity 5 is the latest version of the Polity project and includes a variable called polity2 which converts standardized authority codes such as −66, −77 and −88 into conventional polity scores such as −10 or 10. This is very useful for time-series.

11. As stated earlier, while during the time-frame of this paper Finland relied on soft power to balance against Russia, due to Russian aggression in 2022, Finland decided to join NATO.

12. Bold indicates the most commonly used events.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judit Trunkos

Judit Trunkos is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Robert Morris University. She has been researching why countries use soft power. Dr. Trunkos has created a new soft power dataset that is able to measure countries’ soft power reliance.