Considered opinion Russia's influence is much more than propaganda and fake news

By Vincent Charles Keating and Katarzyna Kaczmarska

Published 5 April 2018

This liberal bias of Western political culture has led the majority of Russia-commentators to miss something which is in plain sight: that Russia’s conservative values are increasingly attractive among populist groups in the West, and that this attraction is doing what soft power is supposed to do: generating support for Russia’s foreign policy. The ideological attraction of the values put forward by the Russian regime cross several categories, including moral conservatism, illiberal governance, and strong leadership. This means that Russian propaganda is not simply being delivered to a uniform audience that needs to be convinced or confused: it is being delivered to a differentiated audience, some of whom – on the populist, far-right side of the spectrum — will buy into the messages put out by the Russian regime because it conforms with their ideological values. Countering Russian influence in the West is thus not simply a matter of fact-checking to counter the propaganda efforts: with populist, far-right movements the problem is fundamentally ideological.

The concern over Russia’s influence in the West has grown considerably in the past few years, particularly the Russian government’s use of information technologies to malign unfriendly Western politicians and undermine the Western public’s faith in democracy. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, for instance, argued that Russia’s influence strategy is based on a “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model, grounded in a “shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions” through multiple channels simultaneously.

Vincent Charles Keating and Katarzyna Kaczmarska write in Euronews that, similarly, the term “sharp power” was recently coined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig to describe Russia’s behaviour, which is a type of influence that “target[s] audiences by manipulating or poisoning the information that reaches them.”

Keating and Kaczmarska continue:

Though it is clear that the Russian regime has used propaganda and disinformation as tools in their versatile foreign policy, the majority of the discussion over Russian influence has focused solely on this point. We argue that, in doing so, the debate has overlooked an important factor that not only affects how we should understand Russian influence, but what should be done about it: Russia’s growing soft power among Western populists.

Soft power, according to Joseph Nye, who coined the term, is a particular power of attraction to a state based on the appeal of its culture, political values, and foreign policy. States that have soft power can influence other states to get what they want internationally.

But the question is: which political values will be attractive to others? While Nye argues that this is likely to be contextual, in his discussions of soft power, he comes back again and again to one particular answer: liberal democracy. This assumption, in turn, is reflected in almost all other commentary about soft power. Liberal values are the only values that can be truly attractive. Thus, when Nye talks about the potential for non-liberal states like Russia to increase their soft power, his recommendations are always based on liberal democratic values, such as “unleash[ing] the full talents of their civil societies.”