Speakers’ Corner, LKY School and soft power: Thank you, Joseph Nye

WASHINGTON - Not many would know that former Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) dean Joseph Nye, who famously coined the term “soft power” in international relations, played a role in Singapore’s decision to set up the Speakers’ Corner.

Dr Nye, who also served in national security positions in the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton administrations and led efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons,

died on May 6 at the age of 88

.

The story of his role in how Singapore’s version of London’s Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park came about was related by founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, then Senior Minister, to an American journalist in early 1999.

“Joseph Nye, head of the Kennedy School, recently came to Singapore as part of our international advisory board to get our universities to improve their standards,” Mr Lee told The New York Times columnist William Safire during an interview in Davos, Switzerland.

“At the time he was there, there was this little fuss about a dissident who said, ‘I’m going to speak at Raffles Place... without a permit.’”  

The reference was to opposition figure Chee Soon Juan, who had been arrested for breaching the Public Entertainments Act.

“He (Dr Nye) asked, ‘Why don’t we let him speak?’ I said the law has been on the statute book for the last 50 years. 

“If everybody just turns up at a busy junction at lunchtime and makes a speech and runs around, and everybody does it, there would be pandemonium. We are not that kind of a society.

“He says, ‘Why don’t you have a Hyde Park?’ I said, ‘Yes, we’ll think about that.’ We’ll probably do it.”

Sure enough, Speakers’ Corner was set up in Hong Lim Park the following year, on Sept 1, 2000.

Dr Nye, who oversaw a period of expansion at HKS as its dean for around a decade starting from 1995, also left an imprint on the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School).

Former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, the founding dean of the LKY School, told The Straits Times that he had consulted Dr Nye while setting up the institution that trains students for careers in government and civil society.

He said he first met Dr Nye in 1991 when he was the first Singaporean to become a fellow at the Centre for International Affairs where Dr Nye was then the director.

He said he received valuable advice from Dr Nye when he consulted him after taking charge as the dean of LKY School in 2004.

“He told me, for example, that the curriculum of a school of public policy rested on three pillars: politics, economics and leadership studies,” Mr Mahbubani said. 

“Joe also spoke to me about his close friendship with Mr Lee Kuan Yew,” he added.

“He was particularly proud that he had seeded the idea of a Speakers’ Corner in Singapore with Mr Lee,” said Mr Mahbubani, an honorary Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

He highlighted that his own memoir and Dr Nye’s were both released in 2024. What is more, they had similar titles.  

“Mine was called Living The Asian Century and his was called A Life In The American Century,” Mr Mahbubani said, adding that they had both been scheduled to speak about their books together at Harvard.

“Unfortunately, his wife, Molly, fell ill on that day,” Mr Mahbubani reminisced. 

“He was a remarkably decent guy who tried to invest to create a better America and a better world,” he said.

“Trump must have been a disappointment to him, but he was always polite in public.”

Dr Nye, who had said US President Donald Trump does not “understand” soft power, would not have disagreed.

“His background in New York real estate gave him a truncated view of power limited to coercion and transactions,” Dr Nye wrote in an essay for the Financial Times on March 6. 

“How else can one explain his bullying of Denmark over Greenland, his threats to Panama, which outrage Latin America, or his siding with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, which weakens seven decades of the Nato alliance – not to mention his dismantlement of the US Agency for International Development that John F. Kennedy created? 

“All undercut American soft power.”

In a 2020 interview discussing his book, Do Morals Matter? Presidents And Foreign Policy From FDR To Trump, Dr Nye elaborated on the concepts of hard and soft power.

“Power is the ability to get the outcomes you want, and you can influence others’ behaviour by coercion, payment or attraction. The first two behaviours I call hard power, and they remain crucial,” he said. 

“Soft power”, he continued, “is the ability to influence others by attraction rather than coercion or payment. It is not more important than hard power, but when skilfully combined with hard power, it is a force multiplier.”

Singapore has proved a quick study, leveraging Dr Nye’s concept to enhance its global positioning as a global hub for business, education, governance and diplomacy despite its small size and limited hard power.

Several of Singapore’s top leaders, including President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong, have studied at HKS.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s own association dates back to the late 1960s when he visited Harvard for an extended residency at the then newly established Institute of Politics, seeking to understand American society and politics as he formulated Singapore’s strategy.

Dr Nye recounted that he had once asked Mr Lee Kuan Yew why he did not think China would surpass the US as a global power any time soon.

“One reason he cited was the United States’ ability to draw on the talents of the entire world and to recombine them in diversity and creativity. Given its ethnic Han nationalism, this kind of openness would be impossible for China,” Dr Nye recalled.

But the great danger for the US, as Dr Nye saw it, is populism, if it leads the US to toss away its valuable cards of immigration, foreign students, alliances, international institutions and openness.

In Mr Trump’s second term, Dr Nye had predicted, American soft power will have a hard time.