Europe's Soft Power: the "Invisible Hand"

This richly comic article by Mark Leonard, foreign policy director of the pro-EU think-tank the Centre for European Reform, contrasts Europe´s "soft" with the USA´s "hard" power.

Leonard prophesies that the soft variant will rule the world, and that we will all soon be living in the "New European Century". Among claims that Europe has dragged "successive waves of countries out of dictatorship and into democracy", he is also remarkably forthright about the way the EU´s soft power insinuates itself into national institutions, chameleon-like, so as to defuse opposition. By disguising itself as weakness, Leonard writes, European power suffers none of the hostility aroused by American power. As a result, the European Way will become the World´s Way before too long, and the USA will be sidelined.
Europe's transformative power by Mark Leonard