What Winning Stories Teach: The Marshall Plan and Atlanticism as Enduring Narratives

So now we know: It was “soft power” that won the cold war. Harvard professor Joseph Nye’s formulation, which dates back to 1990, has made his fortune. In 2009 Google.com listed more than 16 million references to the notion, and no week passes without some new discussion of its relevance for the modern world, especially today with the America (“hard power”) versus Europe (“soft power”) confrontation.1