THE NEED FOR A SOFT POWER STRATEGY FOR ROMANIA. ELEMENTS

The importance of soft power strategies in recent decades has been both overstated in some cases, and understated in others. Both approaches have come with negative effects for the initiators, as well as the recipient societies. We can still encounter both approaches in contemporary societies, but we also encounter more moderate and more balanced successful approaches as well. Our assessment is that a balanced, professional, realistic approach and, above all, having as its final goal collective benefits for several states, for an entire region, not only for the initiating state, a soft power strategy that does not conceal hard power goals behind it, would be extremely welcome for Romania, and we propose several elements for it. It would be even more necessary in an area like ours, where different soft power strategies are seen in action, and they have broader strategies concealed behind them, usually characteristic of hard power, with revisionist aims, namely to resuscitate old empires. We can give the example of neo-Ottoman strategies of Recep Erdogan’s Turkiye, Vladimir Putin’s strategies or Viktor Orban’s. In some cases, the hard power strategies disguised in soft forms have been revealed, in others, not yet.