Soft-Power Internationalism
Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order (May 2021)
The term “soft power” was coined in 1990 to foreground a capacity in statecraft analogous to military might and economic coercion: getting others to want what you want. Emphasizing the magnetism of values, culture, and communication, this concept promised a future in which cultural institutes, development aid, public diplomacy, and trade policies replaced nuclear standoffs. From its origins in an attempt to envision a United States–led liberal international order for a post–Cold War world, it soon made its way to the foreign policy toolkits of emerging powers looking to project their own influence.
This book is a global comparative history of how soft power came to define the interregnum between the celebration of global capitalism in the 1990s and the recent resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism. It brings together case studies from the European Union, China, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States, examining the genealogy of soft power in the Euro-Atlantic and its evolution in the hands of other states seeking to counter U.S. hegemony by nonmilitaristic means. Contributors detail how global and regional powers created a variety of new ways of conducting foreign policy, sometimes to build new solidarities outside Western colonial legacies and sometimes with more self-interested purposes. Offering a critical history of soft power as an intellectual project as well as a diplomatic practice, Soft-Power Internationalism provides new perspectives on the potential and limits of a multilateral liberal global order.
REVIEWS
“This rich book discusses cultural influence in international relations as soft power through case studies on the United States, Europe, Turkey, Brazil, and China. Soft power’s conceptual vagueness, ambiguity, and fecundity (in the form of its smart and sharp power descendants) have created an intellectual project of surprising generative capacity and have shaped diplomatic practices with wide circulatory potential.”
—Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University
“Baykurt and de Grazia begin their cogent and cohesive edited volume with essays that provide a sophisticated theoretical discussion of soft power. The comparative case studies that follow include China, Brazil, and Turkey. This interdisciplinary collection is a must-read that contextualizes the institutions that provide the scaffolding for the diffusion of Western political cultural practices.”
—Mabel Berezin, author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe
“Soft-Power Internationalism offers a highly informative deep dive into the post–Cold War period when soft power was considered the ultimate method of peace building. It shows how a concept largely promulgated by the West was successfully upended by emerging countries for the sake of their own postcolonial narrative. An essential eye-opener for policy makers seeking a better understanding of today’s vacillating world order.”
—Pierre Vimont, Ambassador of France, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe
“A bold and original rereading of soft power, internationalism, revitalized nationalism, and the internet. Baykurt and de Grazia enlarge our understanding of a familiar idea through a new taxonomy of influences, a new perspective on shifts in global power, and a new map of actors of significance as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first.”
—Monroe E. Price, author of Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication
The Perfect Fascist
A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy (July 2020)
Italian translation forthcoming, Giulio Einaudi Editori, Winter 2022.
German translation forthcoming, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022.
Through the story of one exemplary fascist―a war hero turned commander of Mussolini’s Black Shirts―the award-winning author of How Fascism Ruled Women reveals how the personal became political in the fascist quest for manhood and power.
When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife. In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.
The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.
De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.