This does not mean that the idea of an open, interdependent and connected world is to be thrown away. Rather, that world needs to be rethought and updated so as not to close the doors to change, which is in many ways inescapable, while redefining, updating and improving the rules of the game.
This is the spirit that has been animating a group of international scholars, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, managers, and civil servants for some years now, who have given life to the Soft Power Club at the instigation of Francesco Rutelli. The club members, of global origin and extraction, are driven by the common desire to contribute to relaunching a pragmatic and effective multilateralism. And they do so from Italy, a country that, due to its history, tradition and capacity for innovation, has a unique role in promoting soft power at global level.
These days, in Rome, the Club is meeting to address challenges that were unheard of even a year ago, given the speed of change around us. The conference will deal with two major themes: measuring the soft power of countries and working against the use of emerging technologies and platforms for interference and manipulation.
The first issue is crucial. The effectiveness of any of our actions is now defined in terms of measurability. If something is not measurable, it is simply considered useless or superfluous. How do we measure the economic impact of a country’s culture? How much is its image worth? How much power do its heritage, its food, its cultural innovation generate? These questions were recently answered by two eminent economists from the International Monetary Fund, who were the first to develop a synthetic index to measure the soft power of countries on a global level. It is a complex and articulated index that one of the authors, Serhan Cevik, will present at a conference in Rome, hosted by the Bank of Italy. With speeches by Lord Charles Powell, former Chief of Staff to Margareth Thatcher, the Mayor of Rome Gualtieri, a city that embodies history and innovation that can be widely measured, as is well demonstrated by the data on the reception of pilgrims from all over the world during the Jubilee that has just ended, and representatives of our Central Bank, the World Bank and the Mattei Foundation, the members of the Club will work on an increasingly precise and solid codification of an index capable of measuring the impact of soft power on the success, positioning and economic and social growth of countries, starting with our own. The work of the International Monetary Fund already makes it unequivocally clear that power has no single dimension and should therefore not be measured only through the percentage ratio of military expenditure to Gross Domestic Product.
This same session will be an opportunity to announce the launch of a permanent Observatory on the geopolitics of food, again an aspect that puts Italy at the centre of the new global competition. Promoted by the Soft Power Club, Confagricoltura and Future Proof Society, the Observatory will, among other things, work on the development of an index of the soft power of food.