For its inaugural edition, the EIPS Pen Contest challenged participants from all backgrounds with the following prompt:

“Can culture and soft power matter more than armies in geopolitics?”

The topic, selected six months ago, feels increasingly prescient in light of recent global developments, asking whether military might is necessarily the ultimate arbiter of power.

The ESCP International Politics Society (EIPS) received insightful essays from across the globe; however, three were selected by our jury — composed of academics and journalists — as the most persuasively argued and rigorously researched.

Martin Morandet, a Bachelor in Management student at ESCP Business School, won this year’s contest and the €100 prize. Congratulations!

If you did not have the chance to compete this year, the EIPS Pen Contest will return next year for its second iteration. Follow our social media pages to stay up to date with our latest events and competitions.

---

Martin Morandet, France — “When the Pen Outguns the Sword: Why Soft Power Is Winning the Long Game”

We live in a period of paradox. Russia invades Ukraine with tanks and missiles, yet loses the information war. China operates the world’s largest naval force but its “wolf warrior” diplomatic approach isolates them from the countries it wishes to control. Meanwhile, South Korea, a
country with mandatory military service and a hostile neighbor 50 kilometers from its capital, conquers global youth culture with K-pop and Korean dramas, inspiring billions without firing a shot.
Here is my thesis: Armies win battles. Cultures wins minds. The question is: which game are we playing?

The first observation shows that armies win war. Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Israel’s military domination of the Middle East. The United States global military operation through 750 bases. Hard power produces instant results which people can easily see. Hard power offers
immediate and tangible results, being the equivalent of a knockout in a geopolitical sense.

However there is a catch, hard power is costly, ephemeral, and ineffective.

Joseph Nye introduced the concept of “soft power” in 1990 through his demonstration that attraction methods outperform coercive methods for achieving success.

Take the Cold War, the USSR spent as much military as the U.S. did, building nuclear arsenals and controlling all European areas beyond the Iron Curtain. Yet it lost. It was a war of ideals rather than of military combat. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it wasn’t destroyed by artillery, it was dismantled by people who lost faith in communism, seduced by Western culture. The USSR exhausted its resources by engaging in military competition but America achieved victory through the marketing of democratic liberty and culture.

Fast forward to today. The Russian invasion of Ukraine led to the biggest military assistance program Europe has ever seen while it brought NATO members together and made Volodymyr Zelensky into a worldwide famous figure. Moscow obtained new land but its authority became invalid. The military budget of Russia exceeds Ukraine’s by a large margin yet Ukraine gained international support which led to its blue and yellow flag being displayed across buildings from Paris to Tokyo. The actual event demonstrated how soft power can successfully overcome hard power.

The critics of soft power fail to understand that geopolitical competition requires long-term strategies instead of short-term approaches. Armies secure borders, but culture shapes the system
itself.

Take China, The Belt and Road Initiative receives $1.4 trillion from Beijing which enables the construction of ports and railways and infrastructure throughout 150 different nations. Impressive, except that local resentment is rising. The Chinese development initiatives in Sri Lanka and Malaysia and Kenya have become known as “debt traps” throughout these countries. Workers complain about exploitative labor practices. China maintains strong economic power through its hard capabilities yet its lack of soft power creates a major weakness. The United States implemented the Marshall Plan to create liberal democratic systems in post-World War II Europe and Japan through economic backing and an enduring democratic structure. Europe
joined NATO because they believed in the values not because they were held hostage. Or consider the European Union. The city of Brussels operates without an army yet it maintains its position as a major international political power. How? Through what scholars call “soft
power with a hard edge.” The EU single market is so powerful that global companies and even state-owned firms like Gazprom must adapt to its regulations, allowing the EU to exert subtle but lasting influence through attraction and regulation…

But lets not be naive. Soft power alone does not have the ability to stop missiles from being launched. Ask Ukraine in February 2022 or Taiwan. The question is not whether armies matter, they do. The question is whether they matter more.

And the answer is: only in the short term.

Smart nations understand this. Japan’s pacifism since 1945, enabled the nation to assert itself as the world’s second-largest economy (until recently) through the combination of foreign aid, technological progress and cultural export of anime, manga and sushi. Tokyo started to build up its Self-Defense Forces and strengthen its military ties with the United States after North Korea gained nuclear weapons and China militarized the South China Sea. Japan continued to use its soft power strategy while introducing hard power components to create “smart power”.
Turkey followed a similar path. The Erdoğan administration expanded Turkish influence throughout the Middle East and Africa through its delivery of humanitarian assistance and its implementation of cultural diplomacy programs and economic cooperation initiatives. The soft power approach reached its boundaries when the UAE and Russia started resisting Turkish influence, so military facilities were established in Qatar, Libya and Somalia. Not instead of soft power. Alongside it.

The lesson? The most effective actors between soft and hard power select neither option. They calibrate.

So can culture and soft power matter more than armies? Here is my final answer: Yes but only if you’re playing the right game.

One game is defined by territorial control (Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan) where hard power out performs soft power. The other game, which will determine who writes the rules of the coming century, follows Sun Tzu’s principle that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without
fighting.” This soft power shapes international systems through attraction rather than coercion.

Consider this: The Chinese military holds the power to capture Taiwan through force but such an action would result in worldwide condemnation which would lead to economic sanctions that would devastate their national economy. The United States has the ability to bomb Iran but such action would radicalise the Middle East for generations. Russia can seize Ukrainian land, but it cannot make Ukrainians want to be Russian. Hard power delivers Pyrrhic victories. Soft power compounds.

The future belongs to nations that master both. In the end, you need the sword to defend the pen, but the pen writes history.

---

Pablo Fernández Curbelo, Spain — “Beyond Armies: How Culture Shapes Global Power”

I warmly recall the morning when I watched Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976) for the first time. During the film, one of the characters says to another, ‘The Yankees have colonised our subconscious’. This phrase summarises American influence in a post-war Germany divided by the Iron Curtain, and it illuminates what political scientist Joseph Nye would call soft power in the early 1990s. However, soft power is not a recent invention; it has always existed, and predictably, it will carry even more
weight in the future. Although less overt than military force, it is no less effective; rather than occupying territories, its ambition is to colonise the very voice of thought, as Wenders anticipates.

Unlike hard power, soft power relies in the ability to ‘get others to want what you want’ without coercion. Power thus arises from attraction, prestige, and credibility. Initially conceived as a complement to economic and military force, soft power is now almost indispensable in an interdependent world of multilateralism and intense global
cooperation, where brute force is more costly and often less effective. Soft power fills the gaps left by hard power: it shapes imaginations, fixes desires and produces consensus that can serve the interests of others unnoticed. Ultimately, its advantage over occupation is that it penetrates thought and legitimises power from within.

The problem lies in the comparison. Claiming that soft power ‘matters more’ than armies is misleading because it suggests that a novel is more powerful than a Eurofighter. Realists would deny this, recalling Thucydides: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. In immediate crises, military primacy is difficult to dispute. However, in the gradual establishment of power and the formation
of alliances, soft power can be pivotal: it may not replace armies, but it often determines which causes are endorsed and which orders are considered legitimate.

Before Nye coined the term, US foreign policy had already grasped this logic,particularly in its efforts to promote liberal, democratic values during the Cold War. The establishment of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961 was partly in response to this objective, namely to transform aid and cooperation into instruments of influence. Eisenhower quickly recognised the Cold War as an ideological
dispute and the importance of culture. In the late 1950s, for instance, the State Department sent musicians abroad to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism and showcase the merits of the free world.

The Americanisation that took place after the war, referred to by Wenders’ character, is perhaps the most visible example of soft power. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this process accelerated, becoming more intense alongside globalisation. The mechanism is sophisticated: unlike classical imperialism, which was based on
occupation and imposition, today many countries not only consent to, but actively seek to integrate into a US-centred world order. Hegemony is no longer primarily imposed by force, but by seduction, which confirms that Machiavellian idea that power is ultimately intangible.

This is why, unlike military force, soft power is difficult to measure or to quantify in terms of impact. This opacity also explains why some still doubt its effectiveness. Nonetheless, cultural hegemony does not lose strength by spreading ideas, habits and values; quite the opposite, in fact.

Although the United States is the most visible case, it is not the only country to exercise soft power. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union attempted to seduce the world with the ideal of the New Soviet Man and the prestige of its revolutionary promise. In his book When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli also discusses how culture and diplomacy were closely linked in the 18th century and how international world’s fairs in the 19th century were functioning as soft power avant la lettre.

The British Empire was then the dominant global power, exporting the rule of law, the English language, and a literary culture spanning Dickens to Stevenson; yet, despite attempts to rebrand itself through ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s, it has not regained the systemic reach of the soft power it wielded at its imperial peak.

Long before that, Alexander the Great realised conquest could not be sustained by weapons alone. To consolidate power, a common language and an education system rooted in classical Greek culture that incorporated the vanquished were needed. Athens’ symbolic prestige as Europe’s cultural capital fuelled philhellenism, later helping mobilise support for the Greek Revolution of 1821 against the Ottoman Empire.

This shows that, while culture cannot replace armies, it can create the moral framework in which intervention becomes conceivable and acceptable.

More recently, it is hard to imagine that the American occupation of post-war Japan would have been as effective without the export of American baseball, beer and Hollywood. In this sense, I recall Yasujirō Ozu’s film Good Morning (1959), in which two children in Tokyo find themselves in hot water for absconding from their English lessons to view baseball on the recently inaugurated television. Over time, Japan has also managed to displace some memories of the Second World War through a strategy of cultural prestige associated with Cool Japan, supported by anime, pop culture, and global brands such as Nintendo. Those who still doubt the effectiveness of soft power need only recall Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, dressed as Mario at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.

In an era where political leaders, government agencies and large media corporations are deliberately exercising soft power, few would argue that a country’s foreign ministry is more influential than global cultural platforms such as Paramount or Disney. However, whether this matters ‘more’ than an army depends ultimately on a misunderstanding of what we mean by power in geopolitics. The real question is not whether culture replaces weapons, but what kind of power determines obedience: the power that imposes, or the power that persuades?

---

Julen Aparicio Martínez de Antoñana, Spain

After the Second World War the world experienced a reconfiguration of power on a global scale. This new order was strongly marked by the trauma produced by a conflict of such magnitude, which meant that from the very beginning the new hegemon, the United States, understood that in order to influence other states it no longer needed to rely primarily on brute force, but could instead use international aid as an instrument of foreign policy.

This new way of understanding power emerged in the context of the Cold War, a period of competition between the United States and the USSR. In this competition, the arms race was particularly intense, especially in its early years. This led to a situation that Herz termed
the security dilemma, in which “striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others” Herz, J.H. (1950). Despite the anxiety produced by an anarchic international system, the development of nuclear weapons and the loss of the US monopoly over them generated a new fear: that of mutual annihilation. Faced with this, efforts toward cooperation between states emerged, materializing in the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Although there were moments of cooperation, this did not mean that wars ceased to be fought, rather, they were displaced to other levels. Violence was largely relegated to the periphery, while in the core soft power began to be increasingly valued in states’ foreign policies. The first major examples of soft power in foreign affairs can be found in the
Marshall Plan and in the aid given to Japan after the Second World War. However, with the end of the Cold War, development aid and international cooperation declined considerably, since the United States, in its unipolar moment, no longer needed them.

Today, with the rise of new actors, China has become the main promoter of this form of neoimperialism in the 21st century, not only in its region of influence in the Asia-Pacific, but also in Africa. According to the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, in 2024 Chinese investment in Africa reached 3.37 trillion US dollars. The countries receiving the most investment are Algeria, South Africa, Mozambique, Mauritius, and Niger. One actor stands out in these investments: the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which since 2008 has owned more than 20% of Standard Bank of South Africa.

At the same time, we see how the West is preparing for an imminent rearmament. The European Commission has published its plan ReArm Europe, Readiness 2030, a strategy to finance EU defence, for which Member States aim to mobilize 800 billion euros to boost defence spending (European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025)) . For its part, the United States remains the country that spends the most on the military, investing 997.31 billion US dollars in defence, according to World Bank data. (World Bank. (2026)).

These two realities make the question “Can culture and soft power matter more than armies in geopolitics?” more relevant than ever.

To understand the turbulent international situation, we turn to the Gramscian concept of interregnum. Gramsci (1971) defines the interregnum as that moment when the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born, a time in which “the most varied morbid phenomena” appear. International reality seems to fit well with these “most varied morbid phenomena” to which Gramsci refers: the erosion of the EU’s legitimacy, the rise of far-right movements, the breakdown of the previous geopolitical order, processes such as Brexit, or the 2008
economic crisis are all symptoms of interregnum, but so too are the violent forms that imperialism is once again employing in geographies such as Ukraine or Venezuela.

Under these conditions of interregnum, in which China seems to be overtaking the United States in the race for hegemony, the US becomes a wounded animal. Dying while killing seems to be the US’s only foreign policy. In this new war of all against all, the security of the international order collapses, and the dilemma posed by Herz returns to the forefront once again.

Tolerance towards the imperialist policies of Donald Trump in Venezuela and its claims towards Greenland, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and acquiescence to the genocidal policies of the State of Israel, among others, prove that those who consider themselves strong no longer need to hide the fact that they can use brute force to impose their will.

The institutions that should be responsible for mediation, such as the UN, the ICJ, or the EU, have demonstrated their ineffectiveness, leading to a crisis of their legitimacy and of international law itself. For this reason, the realist perspective of international relations, which holds that armies matter more than culture and soft power in geopolitics, has imposed itself as the dominant way of understanding the current context.

In conclusion, in the current international order, defined by anarchy, power competition, and the erosion of multilateral institutions, I believe it is unrealistic to claim that culture and soft power can outweigh military force. Persuasion and attraction operate effectively only under
conditions of relative stability and shared rules. Yet in a moment of interregnum, this logic of force reasserts itself. The global rearmament process, the normalization of violence, and the impunity of major powers, demonstrate that when core interests collide, culture loses its
determining role. Soft power may accompany power, legitimize it, or disguise it, but it cannot replace it. In periods of crisis, it is armies and not ideas that ultimately define the limits of world politics.