Was the EU’s Soft Power Ever Real?

For much of the past five decades, the European Union was described as a soft power: an international actor that shaped behaviour not through force, but through rules, norms, and persuasion. This idea was never about military strength. It was about how influence was exercised, and whether that influence could be considered legitimate.

From a republican perspective—one concerned less with outcomes than with procedures—this claim made sense. EU external action relied heavily on consent, institutional alignment, and voluntary rule adoption. Enlargement policy, neighbourhood conditionality, and regulatory diffusion all operated through processes that avoided overt coercion. On those terms, the EU could plausibly claim that when it exercised power, it did so in a non-dominating way.

Crucially, legitimacy and effectiveness were never the same thing. The EU was not a great power in the traditional sense, but that was not the standard it set for itself.

What has changed over the past decade is not the internal logic of this argument, but the world in which it operated.

Russia’s increasingly revisionist use of hard power, combined with the erosion of US security guarantees and a more isolationist turn in American politics, has exposed a structural weakness in Europe’s approach. Soft power presupposes a relatively stable international environment, shared minimum rules, and—often implicitly—a hard-power backstop provided by others. As those conditions have deteriorated, the limits of EU influence have become harder to ignore.

Even in its strongest domain—trade—the EU’s soft power has proven more constrained than often assumed. US retrenchment into protectionist policies has revealed fractures in Europe’s ability to shape outcomes beyond its own and neighbouring markets. While threats of tariffs have frequently remained rhetorical rather than fully enacted, their political effect has been real: encouraging accommodation, delay, and strategic caution rather than confident rule-setting. This suggests that EU economic influence is not immune to external pressure, even when formal coercion is absent.

At the same time, the EU’s use of economic conditionality appears to have been most effective where attraction already existed. Access to the single market has functioned as a powerful incentive primarily for countries that were geographically closer, economically interdependent, and at earlier stages of development. In these cases—particularly among neighbouring states and emerging economies—alignment with EU rules offered tangible growth prospects and a credible path toward deeper integration. Elsewhere, where market access was less central or alternative partners were available, conditionality has been markedly less persuasive.

This pattern complicates the image of EU soft power as globally diffuse. Rather than radiating outward evenly, it has tended to operate selectively, reinforcing convergence among those already oriented toward Europe while struggling to reshape preferences beyond its immediate economic orbit.

This helps explain why critiques such as those voiced by Mario Draghi resonate. His argument is not that the EU lacks influence altogether, but that its influence is uneven—strongest where markets and regulation dominate, and far weaker where strategic competition, speed, and coercive leverage matter most.

That does not mean the EU’s soft power project was misguided or illusory. Rather, it suggests that it was structurally dependent on favourable conditions: a rules-based international order, limited great-power rivalry, and partners already inclined toward economic and institutional convergence. As those conditions erode, soft power becomes harder to sustain—not because it lacks normative appeal, but because its scope is narrower than once assumed.

Seen this way, the problem facing the EU today is not simply one of weakness, but of misalignment between tools and environment. The challenge is no longer whether non-coercive influence can be legitimate, but whether it can remain effective in a world where attraction alone no longer suffices.