World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

We sometimes talk about the “hard” and “soft” power of a state in the international system.  Hard power is defined as those assets that are tangible and can be used to directly influence the decisions of other states.  Soft power is less concrete and is made up of attributes that make the influence of a state attractive to others.  For example, much of American influence in the world comes from the fact that many in the world enjoy American culture:  rock and roll, jeans, McDonalds.  For a long time, the liberal systems embraced by the West (representative democracy, market capitalism, and human rights) were viewed by others as a desirable objective.  Steven Erlanger of The New York Times suggests that the attractiveness of those liberal systems is waning in world affairs.

Timothy Snyder is the author of an important book, The Bloodlands, in which he chronicles the land between Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War and how both regimes unleashed genocidal forces on the populations living there.   He has written an op-ed for the New York Times in which he parallels the desire of states for agricultural land in the expected process of climate change and how those desires will lead to similar genocidal forces.  Unfortunately, most of the “available” arable land is on the continent of Africa, and there is plenty of evidence that countries such as China are attempting to access that land.

Although Germany has indicated that it is willing to take up to 800,000 refugees from war-torn countries, making it one of the most open countries in Europe, it just announced that it is implementing emergency border controls that appear to be inconsistent with the open borders promised by the Schengen Plan of the EU.   The two positions are not necessarily inconsistent, it is clear that any slowdown in processing the refugees will leave many of them trapped in openly hostile countries like Hungary.  The flood of refugees is an unprecedented crisis (the most dramatic movement of refugees since World War II) and governments are clearly unprepared to deal with the crisis. The US remains an incredible laggard in the crisis, promising only to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees.