Preface

This book is about how Canada projects itself to the world through its "soft power," a term coined by the American scholar Joseph S. Nye, Jr., to refer to the ability of a country to persuade and attract followers through the attractiveness of its culture, political ideals, and policies.1 Nye pronounced that Canada, as a middle power, was well positioned to project such soft power and thus to increase its global influence. 2 In the Canadian context, the idea of soft power is most firmly associated with Lloyd Axworthy's tenure as foreign minister (1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000), when it became the guiding concept for the Liberal government's human security agenda and led to notable achievements such as the Ottawa Convention on the banning of anti-personnel land mines.3 Throughout history, the use (and abuse) of hard power -the ability to coerce through military and economic might -has been the primary organizing principle of the international system.However, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, with growing levels of interdependence resulting from an expanded multilateral system and advances in communications technologies, not to mention the blurring of lines separating international and domestic policy, countries began to pay increasing attention to how their images and policies played out in the international public domain.There is now a global consensus that the array of interrelated international challenges -running the gamut from increasingly unequal levels of development to environmental degradation and the threat of global terrorism -cannot be resolved by military intervention or development assistance alone.For most countries, exercising soft power has become a necessary complement to hard power (or a substitute for hard power in the case of less affluent nations) to ensure economic prosperity and greater security.

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