«Soft Power»: Specificities of Domestic Understanding

Abstract

The concept of «soft power» has long been the subject of domestic social, political and scientific discourses. At the same time, the current specificity of the Russian understanding of “soft power” as “comprehensive toolkit” for achieving country’s foreign policy objectives without the use of armed violence leads to attempts to define its structure, measure its effectiveness and further optimization. Such an approach has a number of consequences. Firstly, it impoverish the scientific discussion, secondly, it leads to an inefficient building of a communication system with the foreign policy environment. An instrumental approach that prevailed in the domestic political science and foreign policy practice deflect the attention and the resources to create channels and forms of communication to the detriment of its content. The key problem, according to the author, is the content of communication channels, the use of historical memory, as the main resource of “soft power”. An appeal to a common historical past makes it difficult to communicate in the Post-Soviet space, especially during the creation by the Post-Soviet community their national versions of the “long” history and it causes the alarm among political elites in Post-Soviet space.