Squid Sport gripped viewers in 94 international locations, turning into probably the most watched Netflix present ever. The Oxford English Dictionary added 26 Korean phrases. The Ok-pop band BTS has topped charts internationally and met Joe Biden on the White Home this summer season. After sweeping by means of Asia years in the past, hallyu – the “Korean wave” of tradition – has crashed upon western shores too, as documented in a brand new exhibition on the V&A in London.
It is a critical enterprise. A latest ebook, Shrimp to Whale, performs on an previous saying portraying Korea as a tiny creature surrounded by leviathans and captures its triumphant postwar ascent from abject poverty and trauma. South Korea nonetheless regards itself as a center energy. However in economics, expertise and particularly tradition it’s now a powerhouse. One authorities supply jokes that tender energy – a rustic’s capacity to get what it needs by means of attraction fairly than coercion or cost – is the South’s nuclear weapon.
Joseph Nye, who coined the time period tender energy within the late Nineteen Eighties, has steered that it is determined by a nation’s tradition, political values and overseas insurance policies. Constructing it’s not as simple as amassing the bombs and tanks required for onerous energy. China has invested closely in soft-power initiatives, however has but to provide a Blackpink or Snowpiercer. Its willpower to micromanage cultural initiatives hampers the flexibility to enchantment to overseas audiences. (Prof Nye has steered that its affect will stay restricted for so long as it “followers the flames of nationalism and holds tight the reins of celebration management”).
In distinction, democratic South Korea has pursued an arm’s-length strategy, modelled partly on UK initiatives such because the British Council. Squid Sport and the Oscar-winning Parasite hardly shed a flattering gentle on the nation that produced them: they’ve triumphed by capturing the monstrous cruelties and inequality of recent capitalism there, in a method that has resonated extra extensively.
The technique is a recognition that tender energy belongs to nations, not governments. The origins of South Korea’s standing as a cultural behemoth are complicated. But when the state can take some credit score, civil society ought to take extra. There was outrage in 2016 when it emerged that then-president Park Geun-hye’s administration had blacklisted 1000’s of artists and entertainers – a reversion to the sort of censorship and punishment as soon as seen below authoritarian leaders, together with Ms Park’s father. It’s the individuals who have nurtured, promoted and defended media and creative independence.
Globally, that is an period wherein diplomatic platitudes have been stripped away, and power laid naked as soon as extra. Nationalist strongmen are in cost around the globe. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was the final word assertion of onerous energy. But the video addresses by Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has so consummately inhabited the function of conflict chief; the sharing of every day life by residents; even the defiant humour of postage stamps have all helped to bolster public assist for Ukraine in different international locations. In doing so, they’ve helped to keep up the political will to maintain supplying it with heavy weaponry within the face of Russian menace. Tender energy is tough to outline and more durable to grasp. But it surely counts.
