Lawrie Phillips
British University in Egypt
This study explores the soft power that is currently generated on and through the Facebook pages of the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Egypt and British Council in Egypt. In his classic text, ‘Soft power: The Means to Success in World Politics’, Joseph Nye argues that successful international institutions and policies should be based on both hard power (coercion, military power, and payment) and soft power (consent, attraction, and seduction). This paper claims that the social media pages of the British Embassy and British Council generate and disseminate soft power in order to pursue the interests of national institutions based in Britain such as the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and British universities and schools. This research is based on a nuanced critical multimodal discourse analysis of posts published on their Facebook pages between June the 1st, 2023 and May the 1st, 2024. These social media platforms highlight mutual spheres of public interaction between the UK and Egypt, synergising large-scale public and private interests in building British prosperity, ‘safeguarding’ British national security, and supporting British nationals, in that order of priorities (FCDO 2024). This nuanced analysis of soft media power concludes that these social media pages represent the doctrine of ‘Foreign Aid in the national interest’ (USAID 2002) in which large-scale private British interests prevail. Official Facebook posts tend to be static and monolithic rather than dynamic and interactive, presenting and promoting rather than personalising or debating large-scale national policies and initiatives.
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