What is soft power, and how can we analyse it empirically? The article proposes a social constructivist take on soft power by anchoring it to the concept of collective identity, and by suggesting a set of criteria that can be used to assess whether soft power is present in a relationship between two or more states. It argues that soft power is generated through continuous renegotiation of collective identity. We can assess the weight of a state's soft power vis-a-vis another state by investigating the extent to which the discursively constructed collective identity projected by the first state is accepted or rejected by different audiences in the second state, and by examining the ability of these audiences to affect the process of foreign policy decision-making. To illustrate this approach, the article applies it to an analysis of Russia's relationship with Ukraine prior to the 2014 crisis. In the late 2000s-early 2010s, Russia's dominant identity was increasingly associated with the idea of a 'Russian world' -an imagined community based on the markers of the Russian language, the Russian culture and the common glorious past. Despite a significant increase in Moscow's public diplomacy activities in Ukraine around that time, those efforts did not and could not fundamentally transform the psychological milieu in Moscow's relationship with Kyiv because the projected identity was inherently incompatible with one of the main identity discourses in Ukraine and was only partially compatible with another.
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Belarus and Ukraine are 'lands in between', pulled by their language, religion and history towards the west but also towards the former Soviet republics in the east with which they were for so long associated. The evidence of national representative surveys between 2000 and 2010 suggests that feelings of 'Europeanness' have been declining, as is also the case in Russia; so has the wish to join the European Union (although it remains a popular option) or NATO. 'Soviet nostalgia' has been declining in parallel, more so in Belarus and Ukraine than in Russia; but there is a strong wish in all three countries to associate more closely within the Commonwealth of Independent States. Cross-tabulating, the evidence suggests that Ukraine is the most sharply polarised between these two foreign policy orientations, and the one in which popular attitudes are most likely to constrain the actions of its governing authorities; more generally, it suggests that a constructivist analysis is particularly appropriate in cases in which rival national security complexes are rooted in domestic cultural divisions and expressed through competing political elites.
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