Katarzyna Kaczmarska and Vincent Keating Feared for all the wrong reasons? The workings of Russia’s conservative soft power opendemocracy.net /od-russia/katarzyna-kaczmarska-vincent-keating/feared-for-all-wrong-reasons-workings-of- russia-s-con Western pundits and policymakers often see Russian influence in terms of the hybrid threat. But the lens of soft power explains more in terms of Russia’s attraction for marginal politicians. CC BY-2.0 haylee / Flickr. Some rights reserved.In the past year there has been an increased fear over Russia’s influence across western states. A 2016 resolution by the European Parliament stressed the need to counter the anti-EU propaganda stemming from Russia. The media strongly reacted to a US intelligence report on Russia’s interference in American presidential elections. Andrew Parker, British domestic intelligence chief described the threat posed by Russia as comprising: “military means, propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber-attacks to achieve its foreign policy aims”. The Financial Times called for developing European strategy that would provide a defence against expected Russian disinformation campaign. And in January 2017, the former US diplomat, Nicholas Burns, described Europe's 2017 electoral landscape as “the next battlefield”. What these warnings have in common is that they concentrate solely on the threat posed by Moscow’s propaganda and disinformation tools. Clearly, the Kremlin attempts to confuse and mislead global audiences, but this debate is missing an important factor: Moscow’s growing ideological soft power. That is, Russia’s growing ability to inspire genuine ideological followership among populist parties on the right and the left, who are attracted to the values advocated by the current government and use Russia’s conservative or “alternative” example to further their own political goals. As we demonstrate here, and argue in more detail in a recent publication ( unpaywalled pre-print), Russia watchers may have misjudged Moscow’s soft power because of the liberal bias imprinted in this term. The literature on soft power presupposes that only liberal democratic ideals are seen as inherently attractive. By definition, then, the conservative values put forward by the Russian regime can never generate soft power. This unquestioned expectation that people in Europe are naturally committed to liberal values is an assumption we 1/7