Tomorrow’s cultural diplomacy may be much less the work of states and specialised institutions and far more the domain of algorithms, platforms, and millions of individual users who never imagined themselves as practitioners of diplomacy. Cultural influence, then, is not disappearing—it is simply channelling itself through increasingly informal routes, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Anton Bespalov.
Cultural exchange has long accompanied political and economic interactions between states, yet it was only in the twentieth century that cultural diplomacy emerged as a deliberate state policy. From the 1960s, the remit of public diplomacy broadened beyond cultural dissemination to include the shaping of foreign public opinion, the communication of policy objectives, and the countering of stereotypes. In the 1990s, the term “soft power” entered mainstream discourse. While it significantly overlaps with public and cultural diplomacy, it is also broader in scope: soft power can emanate not only from state actors but also from civil society, business, and popular culture.
The phenomenon itself, of course, predates the terminology used to describe it. Culture and power have always been historically intertwined. The conquests of Alexander the Great were accompanied by the spread of Hellenistic culture from West to East; the cultural influence of the early Islamic centuries radiated simultaneously in multiple directions. Interestingly, the diffusion of cultures is not necessarily contingent on military victory: Napoleon’s defeat, for instance, did little to diminish the appeal of French culture across Europe and beyond.
It is no coincidence that “soft power” emerged as a concept at the end of the Cold War. Western values and lifestyles, transmitted through informal channels and—more rarely—official ones, played a significant role in eroding official ideologies within the Eastern Bloc, and thus in shaping the outcome of the bipolar confrontation. Though the term “weaponisation” has only recently entered common parlance, culture was widely instrumentalised during the Cold War, as Frances Stonor Saunders convincingly demonstrates in her Who Paid the Piper? In the following years, encouraged by their perceived success, Western nations waged a campaign for hearts and minds across the non-Western world, establishing numerous institutions dedicated to the promotion of soft power.
Today, however, soft power instruments are discussed considerably less than they were ten or fifteen years ago. In the West, the rhetoric of classic, “hard” power has grown increasingly resonant. The mobilisation of European public opinion against Russia and Donald Trump’s threats to “destroy” Iranian civilisation have become almost routine by contemporary standards. At the same time, Western soft power is currently undergoing a serious reputational crisis. The gap between professed values and actual policies—whether in terms of double standards in conflict management or global economic governance—renders cultural and diplomatic messaging ever less persuasive for non-Western audiences. Where once a vision of a desirable future was conveyed, such messaging is now increasingly perceived as an instrument of coercion.
Non-Western states, in the decades following the Cold War, largely adopted the Western playbook. Through various cultural institutions—as well as media outlets targeting foreign audiences and modelled largely on Western templates—countries such as Russia and China essentially replicated Western models of cultural influence. Yet they too have encountered resistance, as evidenced by sanctions against Rossotrudnichestvo, the closure of Confucius Centres in Western countries, not to mention the blocking of RT and Sputnik. While it remains an article of faith within the Western liberal mainstream that “democracies” will always enjoy an advantage over “autocracies” in the open marketplace of ideas, a significant discursive shift has taken place. The soft power of non-Western states is now increasingly viewed, by default, as potentially harmful to Western interests—rebranded as “sharp power.” Joseph Nye, who coined the term, once warned of the need to distinguish between the two and not to impede the legitimate soft-power efforts of non-Western countries; recent experience, however, suggests otherwise.
In China, the recognition of soft power’s limitations has led to growing discourse on “discursive power”—the ability to shape the international agenda, craft narratives, and determine the frameworks within which key issues are debated. The goal is no longer simply to be liked, but to speak in a language that others are compelled to heed. The effectiveness of this approach remains open to debate, but the shift in emphasis is itself quite telling.
Russia’s recent experience offers another instructive example, from a different angle. Attempts to “culturally cancel” Russia since 2022 have spanned a wide spectrum: from barring Russian athletes from competing under their own flag to removing works by Russian composers from concert programmes. The scale of these measures has been unprecedented in recent decades. Nevertheless, Russian culture has not vanished from the global arena; the Russian language has held its ground in regions where it is traditionally strong; and perceptions of Russia in the Global South have shifted only marginally—in some cases, even for the better.
In this context, new technologies—above all, artificial intelligence—deserve close attention. Historically, language barriers have been one of the main obstacles to the organic diffusion of cultures. Today, the development of automated translation tools for video content, for instance, is helping to overcome this obstacle. Viewers in Brazil or Indonesia, who gain direct access to Russian, Chinese, or Iranian video materials in their native languages, form their own perceptions of these countries. This does not guarantee sympathy—direct exposure can generate both attraction and repulsion—but it at least affords the possibility of a more complex, nuanced perception, capable of overcoming the weight of entrenched stereotypes.
In this sense, technological advances open up entirely new possibilities. Tomorrow’s cultural diplomacy may be much less the work of states and specialised institutions and far more the domain of algorithms, platforms, and millions of individual users who never imagined themselves as practitioners of diplomacy. Cultural influence, then, is not disappearing—it is simply channelling itself through increasingly informal routes. States that recognise this and build policies that provide space for such channels will find themselves in a stronger position than those that persist in trying to control this unruly instrument from the top down.
