Soft Power in the Integrated Review: More promise than delivery, so far

Among many other things, the Integrated Review was intended to re-boot the United Kingdom’s approach to so-called ‘soft power’ – that natural magnetism of a successful society that operates differently and largely outside any direct government control.

That’s where the more tangible levers of power seem to reside; economic manipulation, control of services, regulations, threats, inducements and, yes, coercion, policing or military action in some cases. Soft power, in any case, is much harder to define, still less to manipulate in a strategically meaningful way. And using ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power in a judicious combination that is generally labelled as ‘smart’ requires the efficient mobilisation of all branches of government to a definable purpose – much easier said than done.

Nevertheless, the Prime Minster has always been an enthusiast for soft power. He spoke about it expansively at the 2016 Conservative Party Conference, highlighting the UK’s ‘irresistible soft power – the vast and subtle and pervasive extension of British influence around the world that goes with having the language that was invented and perfected in this country’. And the Integrated Review, when it was formally announced in 2020, made clear that since it was ‘the largest review of the UK’s foreign, defence, security and development policy since the end of the Cold War’, was therefore designed to consider ‘the totality of global opportunities and challenges the UK faces’ and ‘how the whole of government can be structured, equipped and mobilized to meet them’.

In the event, the Integrated Review declared that the UK was a ‘Soft Power Superpower’ and it listed some of the attributes of that status – its system of law and government, institutions like the Monarchy, and its standing in education, science and innovation, professional standards-setting, creative industries, tourism, its diaspora communities, sports, entertainment and not least, its active international aid and development policies. The defence command paper, which appeared the following week, correspondingly listed the contributions of defence to the broader ‘Global Britain’ aspirations and highlighted the intention for UK forces to offer ‘persistent engagement’ and ‘forward presence’ overseas with both traditional and new partners, helping through technical support and mentoring to build up others’ capabilities in a number of different ways.

The Integrated Review, however, is an ongoing process. Its conclusions in many areas were either to indicate the main lines of anticipated development – as in the technical transformation of the three armed services – or else to initiate yet more sectoral reviews – as in the working of the National Security Council or the creation of new policies for industry in defence. But it left its soft power aspirations assertively stated though without mentioning any obvious follow-up activity. Those parts of the Review’s avowedly dynamic intentions were all left notably static. In part, this may be a recognition that

But governments can also work much harder to influence the environment in which other non-governmental institutions of soft power – the education, sports and entertainment industries, for example – normally operate. While the defence component of the Review mentioned some of the things it anticipated the armed forces doing in the service of rebooting the UK’s soft power, there was precious little anywhere else that indicated the government intended to take a practical grip of some of the things it might do to underpin the UK’s strong – but arguably waning – soft power attributes in the world.

Three Tests for Soft Power

It is still early days to make judgements on the fate of the Integrated Review, but three tests can be defined against which its soft power aspirations, in particular, can be measured over the next couple of years.

– making a reality of the Fusion Doctrine, which it only name-checks in passing, but which remains nevertheless critical to the Review’s success across the board. It is in the very nature of soft power attributes that direct influence with them, or over the international environment in which they operate, resides in many different parts of the governmental system. The evidence to date of more efficient coordination within government is patchy.

The recommendations of the Commission for Smart Government to create a distinct ‘Prime Minister’s Department’, alongside the new Situation Centre, cutting into the Treasury’s natural authority over Whitehall ministries, and pulling more Cabinet Office functions directly into the Prime Minister’s orbit, suggests a powerful drive to improve the nervous system between the centre and periphery of the governmental machine. Of course, the urge to centralise data and policy discussion around No 10 is understandable among Prime Ministers (not least this one), particularly at times of national challenge. But a powerful apex doesn’t automatically make the complex machine underneath it more naturally efficient or integrated. The fact is that the Government is still thinking (i.e. undecided) about how the NSC will emerge from the National Security Adviser’s review of its functioning, how greater ministerial control will be exercised in order to put more emphasis on ‘policy delivery’, and what other central mechanisms should galvanise more integrated thinking lower down in the machine – and not least among the devolved administrations of the UK, which regularly complain that they are not meaningfully consulted.

Most of the effort to create institutions that strategize better, it has to be said, is so far devoted more to foreign and security affairs – driven also by the shock of the Covid-19 crisis – than to the wider elements that the Integrated Review said made the UK a ‘soft power superpower’. The MoD, the NSC, and Cabinet Office structures are all evolving in response to the Integrated Review. In this respect, they may become more genuinely integrated. But the Foreign Office is still digesting its merger with the Department for International Development; the Home Office remains in permanent crisis mode; the Department for International Trade is totally focussed on pursuing its Brexit agenda; the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy are both preoccupied with post-Covid recovery; and Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is not a ministry of any significant spending power. Meanwhile, the Treasury – which has had a pretty good Covid-19 crisis so far – is once again sparring with No. 10 for practical control over the government machine. Soft power, not to mention its delivery, is easily lost in the growing noise.

From a soft power perspective, the second test is the degree to which governmental strategy for it is pitched in a sufficiently long-term way. Soft power seldom manifests itself quickly. Though when it does appear, its effects can be decisive. The UK’s reactions to the Skripal poisonings were a classic case of policy operating ‘smartly’. It involved excellent forensic, intelligence and police work alongside assertive government statements that rapidly called out Russia for the attack. That was all hard-edged. But the UK’s soft power also swung in behind the policy. The rest of the world believed the UK’s intelligence agencies, regardless of anything Moscow said about the case; and the unfettered world of comment, comedy and satire just ran with the issue to the point where it did the Putin administration some real diplomatic harm. Moscow was reportedly shocked by the push-back in the international reaction.

It combined the hard power of Britain’s demonstrated ability to produce an early vaccine, with the soft power messages that this could be done transparently and safely without recourse to clumsy propaganda. While Oxford’s Jenner Institute was involved in producing the Covid-19 vaccine, it also made a massive breakthrough in anti-malarial vaccines, which could well have an even bigger impact on global health. All that was smart. These successes will continue to be occasional, however, as long as governmental understanding of soft power politics rates it only as a useful adjunct to British external policy, as opposed to an important end of a power spectrum that is there to be exploited.

With the next General Election likely as early as spring 2023, new and more attractive policy targets may absorb No 10’s attention rather than driving the hard yards to achieve 2021 targets.

The third soft power test might be described as policy consistency. Soft power arises from the way UK society, in the round, tends to be perceived by others. Governments can get away with some inevitable tacking in their policy – zig-zagging under the immediate pressure of events – because soft power works over the long term and can normally weather some contradictory short-term policy shifts on the part of any one government. But some policy areas like foreign aid, visa procedures for visitors, working conditions for foreign nationals, attitudes to migration, and so forth, can have a much more immediate impact on international perceptions of the UK as a society.

The UK’s soft power is also expressed by the degree to which its natural soft power institutions have some shaping effect on their own international environments. Government regulatory policy – say in tax exemptions, financial services, agricultural and food standards, building safety levels and so on – can have important impacts, either favourably or unfavourably, on the ability of private institutions in the UK to influence, or even structure, their own international environments.

Strategizing for soft power and creating policy consistency in some key areas is therefore important to its sustainment and promotion. Again, the current indications are contradictory.

In 2018 the Foreign Office announced an increase in its number of overseas posts and in June 2020 the long-anticipated merger of the FCO and DFID was confirmed. In some respects, this should – eventually – create greater depth and consistency in the way hard and soft power might be instrumentalised. In a similar vein, the government made the biggest ever single investment in British culture when the Treasury and the DCMS announced in July 2020 it was putting £1.57 billion into the arts, creative and heritage industries to help them weather the Covid-19 storm and to maintain, and build, on their high international reputations. Then in May 2021, the FCDO, which had been responsible for BBC World Service funding since 2016, announced an 8.4% increase in its funding – bringing another £8 million to make up to £94.4 million what the BBC World Service would receive for 2021- 22 – specifically to help counter disinformation and extend its digital presence among its 440 million weekly global audience.

In the more intangible realm of values, the government has taken a number of generally consistent stances on China since 2019, particularly in relation to its eventual decision to ban Huawei technologies from the UK’s 5G network, offering refuge to many Hong Kongers who may decide to leave the territory, being ready to criticise China’s treatment of its Uyghur population and its growing military threats against Taiwan. These stances all have a soft power effect in projecting democratic British values to the wider world and appear to have made some global impact on its image; though

There are, however, at least as many downsides to these soft power-relevant initiatives that have attracted equal attention. In terms of projected national values, while statements that stand up to Chinese bullying may bolster an international impression of the UK as a defender of the ‘rules-based order’, that perception is countered by the Government’s threats deliberately to break international law in the Internal Market Bill, in the highly contentious Overseas Operations Act which creates, among other things, what the Law Society described as a virtual ‘statute of limitation’ for British troops facing certain war. crimes charges; and, not least, in the draconian terms outlined in the recent Nationality and Borders Bill that will be confronted by a slew of legal challenges. None of these suggest a country that is truly confident and outward-facing. And in contrast to the inclusive

simplicity of the European Union’s regime for the free movement of peoples, the UK must now operate complex visa and visa-waiver arrangements alongside the new points-based immigration system in respect to citizens from the EU, the European Economic Area and Switzerland.

The Integrated Review made much of the country’s existing achievement and its future potential in science and technology. It placed a big bet on S&T to facilitate the transformed armed forces of the future. And recognised eminence in S&T is also a key soft power attribute in itself and an important driver of many others. In the Prime Minister’s own words in the Review: ‘Our aim is to have secured our status as a Science and Tech Superpower by 2030, by redoubling our commitment to research and development, bolstering our global network of innovation partnerships, and improving our national skills. The pedantic observation that ‘redoubling our commitment’ would imply a fourfold increase in the previous level of commitment only serves to emphasise the stark reality. The Review commits itself to raising – by 2027 – the UK’s total S&T expenditure, public and commercial, to 2.4% of its GDP. But it was at 3.0% in 2011 and 2.7% even in 2016. The 2.4% figure is exactly the current OECD average.

In June 2021 funding for the British Council was cut by £10 million, at a time when its own commercial income had collapsed, directly cutting or affecting the Council’s work in more than 20 different countries. But this was merely an echo of a much more contentious decision to cut the UK’s overseas aid budget from its statutory 0.7% of GNI to 0.5%. This decision has become something of a cause celebre in the discussion over the real meaning of ‘global Britain’. Overseas aid is one of the prime instruments of soft power projection in a variety of different ways, and has a big bearing on the local images the rest of the world form of any particular donor country. The decision was described by virtually all but government spokespeople in both Houses of Parliament as strategically incoherent. The government points out that the current global average is 0.3% and the European average 0.5% of donor’s GNI. But from the perspective of strategic coherence, the amount of money is not the current point. A cut in the headline figure necessitated deep and rapid cuts in those parts of the overseas development aid budget that were available to be cut immediately. The Prime Minister insisted (and was widely disbelieved) that this reduction would only be temporary. So, in the process of making ‘temporary’ cuts, overseas aid has been slashed in some of the countries, and on some of the schemes, that matter most to British security. Funding on conflict prevention, particularly in Africa, has been slashed in programmes covering Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria. Programmes that the UK championed on girls’ education and sexual health have been cut. De-mining programmes in Afghanistan are cut and NGOs, already barred from the €1 billion funds of the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, have suffered around 60% cuts in their programmes covering many parts of Africa, Yemen and Syria. UNICEF has also seen a 60% reduction in the UK’s contribution to its work. The damage of all this to the UK’s international reputation is still being assessed.

In terms of the third test of soft power therefore,

as the Review asserted in its opening pages. In the case of UK overseas aid policy and Parliament’s confirmation of continuing cuts of at least £4 billion annually, the reality appears to be quite the opposite.

It is clear to most British policy analysts that the defence establishment is getting on with the business of implementing the Integrated Review. Since it accounts for over £40 billion of the £60-65 billion the government devotes to external affairs in all its guises, including the direct and indirect contributions to UK soft power, that is not surprising. It is not so evident that other parts of the governmental system are similarly engaged. While it is still early to make too many definitive judgements, it is possible that the grand, overarching, ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’, will soon come to be seen as little more than another quinquennial defence review. And, in that event, one of the lost opportunities would involve the loss of a generational chance to reassess – and reassert – the UK’s ‘precarious’ soft power assets.

Michael Clarke is Visiting Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London and the former Director General of the Royal United Services Institute. His latest book, with Helen Ramscar, is: Britain’s Persuaders: Soft Power in a Hard World (London, I B Tauris/Bloomsbury). It will be published on 15 November 2021.

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