Men, step aside: tackling terrorism is women’s work
Guardian Unlimited, UK If persuasion, attraction and understanding are the new arts of power, then the future looks profoundly female
Indra Adnan
Thursday July 27, 2006 The Guardian
In the barren, brutal knockabout of British parliamentary politics, to be called “soft” on anything is clearly one of the worst schoolyard curses. John Reid has proven his hard credentials in the debate about “soft” sentencing (practised by “soft” judges), by promising tough sentences for even minor crimes. Another opportunity, no doubt, for Tony Blair to taunt David Cameron on a willingness to “talk tough” about the issue, but “act soft” when voting.
But it’s by no means clear that the charge of “being soft” in public and political life is always going to be read negatively. Cameron commanded headlines for championing his “soft” offensive - asking us to “show love” to hoodies. “Soft-focus conservatism” may be the critique on the lips of commentators, but the polls show it’s having an effect on potential voters.
Yet “soft” might not always mean fuzzy, warm and yielding. For over a decade, the political analyst Joseph Nye has been proposing “soft power” as an alternative US foreign policy - in his words, “the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will.” When Condoleezza Rice explicitly invoked soft power in the US’s new approach to Iran, it seemed to signal that attraction and persuasion were being added (or restored) to the political toolkit of the west. But as the crisis in Lebanon demonstrates, when conflict erupts into zero-sum violence, it takes a different kind of courage to persist with these new tools over the familiar hard-power options. [more]