HOW many rankings of global power have put Britain at the top and China at the bottom? Not many, at least in the past hundred years or so. But on July 15th an index of “soft power”—the ability to coax and persuade—ranked Britain as the mightiest country on Earth. If that was unexpected, there was another surprise at the foot of the 30-country index: China, three times as wealthy as Britain, 20 times as populous and 40 times as large, came dead last.
Diplomats in Beijing won’t lose too much sleep over the index, compiled by Portland, a London-based PR firm, together with Facebook, which provided data on governments’ online impact, and ComRes, which ran opinion polls on international attitudes to different countries. But the ranking gathered some useful data showing where Britain still has outsized global clout.
Britain scored highly in its “engagement” with the world, its citizens enjoying visa-free travel to 174 countries—the joint-highest of any nation—and its diplomats staffing the largest number of permanent missions to multilateral organisations, tied with France. Britain’s cultural power was also highly...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, Softly does it
No comments:
Post a Comment