Sire of Soft Power

Throughout its 150th anniversary year, GSAS is foregrounding the voices of some of its most remarkable alumni and students as they speak about their work, its impact, and their experiences at the School.

Joseph Nye is the Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Named in 2011 one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, Nye has served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, chair of the National Intelligence Council, and deputy undersecretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology. He talks about discovering a topic for his doctoral thesis at GSAS, the concept of “soft power,” and the importance of paying attention to deadlines.

“There’s My Thesis Project!”

In my second year at GSAS, I was at a loss for a thesis topic. I was enrolled in a seminar taught by John Kenneth Galbraith and Edward S. Mason, who told us that the World Bank had puzzled over whether to plan for a Ugandan market of 8 million people or an East African Common Market of 30 million. He said the answer was outside his competence as an economist and would require a political scientist. I immediately thought, “There’s my thesis project!” I developed a proposal, won a grant from the Ford Foundation, and lived in East Africa for a year and a half. The result was Pan Africanism and East African Integration, which became the first of the 16 or so books I have written.

Ironically, my career eventually focused on international relations rather than the comparative politics of African development, but it helped me to come to world politics through a side door rather than the front door. I felt the dominant realist approach that focused on balance of power among states was correct but failed to take sufficient account of ideas, social processes, and economic integration. Studying those aspects of relations among states gave me a different perspective on my field.

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Nye, Jr. with wife Molly at White House State Dinner for Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, 2015.

Soft Power

While I regard my work with Robert O. Keohane in Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition as most important, I am probably best known for creating the concept “soft power”—the ability to affect others through attraction rather than coercion or payment. I developed it as an analytic concept in my description of American power in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Little did I imagine, as I jotted notes on a yellow pad at my kitchen table, that in 2007 the president of China would urge his country to invest in “soft power.” It also became used by European leaders and in the press. I was amazed at how popular the term has become with over a million Google references.

Deadline Drama

At the end of my first year at GSAS, my fall course grades came back with all A’s. I felt prepared to ask for the renewal of my graduate fellowship. I was stunned to learn it was impossible because I had missed the deadline and only the calendar, not grades, determined renewal. Bob McCloskey, the chair, said he would allow me to earn money by teaching a sophomore tutorial and becoming a research assistant before my general exams. That solved the financial problem but meant a lot of pressure in the first year of my married life. Credit goes to my wife, Molly.