Power is probably not adapted
in its traditional version
to face this new kind of situation,
and the real question is what about power
in a world in which states
have no more the monopoly
of the international functions?
Ladies and Gentlemen,
four consequences of these very high
but underestimated transformations.
First military power
is more and more powerless.
We could observe that
during the decolonization war,
when France was defeated
by the small Vietnamese army in Dien Bien Phu.
But US experience the same
when the US was defeated in 1975 in Vietnam,
but the same for Somalia, Afghanistan,
Iraq and so on, the same for Libya.
Is military power adapted
to these new conditions?
Probably not.
The second question is:
is soft power a clear and efficient substitute?
When the US was defeated in Vietnam
some American scholars like
Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane
elaborated the concept of soft power
and established the hypothesis
that when hard power is no more working,
soft power can be considered as a substitute.
Soft power is a strong power, probably,
for diffusing the dominant culture,
the cultural hegemony of the super power.
But the question is:
if you drink Coca Cola or if you wear blue jeans,
do you, for this reason,
support the American foreign policy?
The reality is that there is no transitivity
between the support you give to soft power
and the support which is expected
in the field of diplomacy and foreign policy.
The third question
is what about power in a world
in which protest is playing
more and more a central and major role?
There are in our present world
so many new protest diplomacies
or deviant diplomacies,
in which protesting against an hegemony
is much more important that proposing
a new international order.
Is the traditional vision of power able to face
this new culture of international protest?
It’s quite clear that it couldn’t.
