Borrowed Threads, Unbought Power

PHOTO: UN Security Council chamber during a verification-mission briefing, Fotografía oficial de la Presidencia de Colombia on Wikimedia Commons

What South Korea and India reveal about the gap between cultural reach and institutional power

Does cultural influence actually buy a rising power anything that matters — a seat, a vote, a veto in the institutions that set the rules of the international system? Or does it simply circulate as prestige, a currency incumbent powers can afford to watch them spend, because it costs them nothing structural? South Korea and India offer a natural test of that question: two of the most culturally visible rising states in the world today, on markedly different paths toward converting that prominence into institutional weight. So what actually happened differently?

PHOTO: Korea K-POP World Festival, Korean Culture and Information Service on Wikimedia Commons

The gap between them is stark. In 2025 alone, South Korea’s “K-content” exports were valued at close to US$14.9 billion, and its pop acts topped US$300 million in global album sales. When that output gets lifted overseas without payment, Seoul treats it as a matter for formal state enforcement, not just public complaint, mounting a crackdown on what one industry outlet has dubbed “borderless K-IP pirates.” 

India’s cultural exports circulate just as widely — diaspora networks, cuisine, fashion, film — but the state apparatus behind them looks very different. When Ralph Lauren put jhumka-style earrings and Rajasthani bandhani patterns on the Paris runway in 2026, unattributed, the backlash across Indian social media was immediate, echoing a nearly identical complaint that had followed Prada’s use of Kolhapuri-style sandals not long before. But the backlash changed nothing about India’s ability to compel credit, royalties, or leverage from the firms involved — it registered as outrage, not as cost. That small, viral episode is a symptom worth noting, not the argument itself; the argument is institutional, and it runs much deeper than a runway.

This is, in effect, a stress test of soft power theory; a term coined by the political scientist Joseph Nye to describe a state’s ability to get others to want what it wants through attraction rather than force. Culture, values, and a country’s international image, in Nye’s account, can do work that has traditionally relied on hard power: military coercion or economic pressure. Korea and India, both riding genuine waves of global cultural attraction, are effectively two live experiments in whether that substitution actually happens, whether soft power can stand in for hard power, or whether it only ever supplements hard power a state has already built for other reasons. Put plainly: does the ability to make the world watch your films, wear your jewelry or stream your music translate into a stronger hand in the structures that run the world — trade architecture, security alliances, permanent influence at the United Nations? Or does that older, harder currency remain largely closed to rising states no matter how loudly their culture travels? The incumbents already holding it, chiefly the United States, may simply be keeping their structural grip even as their share of global cultural gravity shrinks.

Seoul’s Conversion

Korea’s answer, on current evidence, looks like a qualified yes: cultural visibility has converted into real institutional and economic weight, qualified because it converts only where Seoul built the machinery to convert it years in advance. Long before Squid Game or BTS became a global shorthand for Korean culture, South Korean industrial policy had already spent decades constructing an export-oriented manufacturing base and an enforceable intellectual-property regime. The cultural wave landed on infrastructure that already existed to capture and protect its value once it left the country. None of that was inevitable. It was built.

PHOTO: K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer, Defense Citizen Network on Wikimedia Commons

That same infrastructure logic now shows up in a much harder currency: weapons. South Korean defence exports reached US$15.4 billion in 2025, a 60 percent jump on the year before, with the country’s own Export-Import Bank projecting the figure could clear US$27 billion in 2026. Poland alone has signed more than US$4 billion in contracts for Chunmoo missile systems, Romania has bought K9 self-propelled howitzers and ammunition vehicles, and K9 units are now stationed in Finland, Estonia and Norway. They are the kind of contracts that embed a country inside the rearmament plans of NATOs eastern flank, arrangements that come with technology-sharing agreements, maintenance partnerships and a seat, however informal, at conversations about European security planning.

Correlation is not leverage, though, and it would be a mistake to read this as K-pop directly buying Korea a defence contract. A more critical read complicates the story: Korea’s arms exports have surged largely because European states are rearming in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an external demand shock that has little to do with Korean soap operas or pop charts. It is equally plausible that Korea’s cultural success and its defence-export success are parallel effects of the same underlying cause — a manufacturing base and state industrial strategy built over decades — rather than one causing the other. What the two successes share is not causation but a common source: enforceable infrastructure built well before either payoff arrived.

The enforcement mechanics behind the IP crackdown show what “conversion” actually looks like in practice. South Korean authorities now run direct cooperation channels with Interpol and US Homeland Security Investigations, pursue cross-border server seizures and extraditions against illegal streaming operators, and — rather than relying on the largely ineffective tactic of blocking websites domestically — track and freeze the advertising revenue and cryptocurrency holdings that make piracy profitable in the first place. Seoul is even exploring civil liability for foreign hosting platforms that turn a blind eye to infringement. This is a state treating its cultural output the way it might treat a shipping lane or a supply chain: as an asset worth the diplomatic and legal capital of pursuing across borders.

Delhi’s Ceiling

Both countries showcase different transitioning aspects of soft power in geopolitics. If South Korea successfully illustrates how soft influence can convert into hard power through global impact, then India also reveals the persistent costs of its absence. India’s narrative exemplifies particular attention towards at the institutional tier, where the consequences far exceed those of a mere fashion-week attribution. New Delhi recently oversaw the G20, has cultivated a prominent Global South platform via BRICS, and has, since at least 2004, sought without success a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Prime Minister Narendra Modi contends that any Council omitting “the world’s most populous country and its largest democracy” lacks genuine representative legitimacy. Yet specialists monitoring the campaign characterise India, despite its third-place ranking on the Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index , as a chronic underachiever in converting persistent capacity into tangible geopolitical leverage. They point to setbacks in India’s own neighbourhood, where governments less favourably disposed toward Delhi have taken power in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives in recent years, and to India’s limited mediating role in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, despite maintaining working relationships with more or less every side in each.

That “underachiever” framing deserves its own scrutiny before it is accepted. Limited mediation in Ukraine or the Middle East could equally reflect a deliberate choice, consistent with India’s long-standing tradition of non-alignment and strategic autonomy, rather than a demonstrated inability to broker outcomes. Restraint should not automatically signal failure or a lack of influence. “Underachievement” assumes an ambition to mediate that Delhi has not clearly stated as a goal in the first place. The neighbourhood setbacks are harder to explain away this way, since regional influence is closer to a core objective than global mediation is — but even there, election outcomes in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives reflect domestic politics in those countries as much as any failure of Indian diplomacy. The institutional ceiling is real. The reasons behind every data point used to prove it are less settled than the framing suggests.

PHOTO: Group photograph of leaders and delegates at BRICS Business Forum 2026, New Delhi, Government of India on Wikimedia Commons

India isn’t without its institutional wins – it gets a rotating seat on the Security Council roughly once a decade and is presently campaigning for another, for 2028–29. India’s G20 presidency produced a consensus declaration for the African Union’s admission as a permanent G20 member, that is a genuine diplomatic achievement. What it has not secured, despite three decades of explicit campaigning, is the permanent Security Council seat that would convert prestige into a permanent vote. That limit stays put no matter how widely India’s culture spreads in the meantime. On the regulatory side, India’s Geographical Indication system can protect a craft at home but barely reaches once the design gets copied overseas, which is exactly the enforcement hole the jhumka episode showed in small scale. The same pattern shows up everywhere that is plenty of visibility, but no real way to lock it in.

Why the Gap, Not the Grade

So why the difference? Not because one government is more competent than the other. None of this is a report card, and treating it as one would miss the more interesting explanation: this is a question of sequencing. Korea’s industrial and intellectual-property infrastructure predates its cultural export boom by decades; the culture rode on rails that already existed. India’s cultural globalisation, amplified by the internet and an unusually large and connected diaspora, is arriving before the regulatory and industrial base has caught up to protect or convert it with a Geographical Indication regime with little extraterritorial force, and a defense-manufacturing sector that, despite a determined indigenisation push in recent years, remains far more import-dependent than Seoul’s now is. The gap between the two countries says less about which one “deserves” recognition and more about how long structural conversion actually takes, and how much of it depends on decisions made in ministries, years or decades before any cultural wave arrives to test them.

But “sequencing” should not be allowed to quietly launder into an excuse. Korea did not simply get an earlier start by chance — successive governments made deliberate, costly choices to prioritise export manufacturing and IP enforcement over other spending, including through periods of authoritarian rule where that choice was not democratically tested. India’s slower institutional build-out is also a choice, made across decades of governments of different ideological stripes, not a natural handicap it was born with. Sequencing explains the timeline; it does not settle whether either country’s choices were the right ones, and it should not be read as absolving either state of responsibility for closing the gap it now faces.

South Korea’s export-oriented industrial drive, and the chaebol-led manufacturing base that came with it, dates to state planning from the 1960s and 1970s — decades before Hallyu became a recognisable global export category in the 2000s and 2010s. India’s equivalent opening to global markets began only with the 1991 liberalisation reforms, roughly a generation later, and its cultural globalisation — driven less by state industrial strategy than by the internet, streaming platforms and an increasingly online diaspora — has largely been a phenomenon of the last ten to fifteen years. Korea, in short, had a two-generation industrial-policy head start before its culture went global; India’s culture and its industrial base are, on current evidence, arriving on the world stage at roughly the same time.

The Receipts, Not the Applause

Set side by side, Korea and India suggest that whether cultural visibility converts into institutional weight is neither a clean yes nor a clean no. Cultural power can convert into institutional weight, but apparently only when a state has already built the industrial and regulatory scaffolding to hold it; in the absence of that scaffolding, visibility can travel a very long way without ever cashing out. That carries an uncomfortable implication for how the “rise of the rest” tends to get discussed: media coverage of cultural globalisation often treats visibility itself as evidence of a shifting balance of power, when the Korea-India contrast suggests visibility is, at best, a downstream signal — one that established powers like the United States can watch unfold without it costing them very much, for as long as the industrial and institutional groundwork behind it stays incomplete.

That points to a sharper, more testable claim than multipolarity is arriving unevenly: industrial and regulatory capacity, not diplomatic visibility or cultural reach, is the better predictor of whether a rising state’s moment on the world stage turns into a permanent seat at the table. If that holds, commentary that treats a country’s trending soundtrack or a single fashion controversy as evidence of arriving geopolitical weight has the causal arrow backwards — mistaking the most visible symptom of power for its source. The more useful diagnostic for any rising state’s actual trajectory is not how far its culture travels, but how much of its own capital — industrial, legal, financial — that state has already committed to defending what its culture is worth.

Other rising cultural exporters will likely sit somewhere on the same spectrum: Indonesia’s creative economy, Nigeria’s Afrobeats and Nollywood industries, Brazil’s cultural and diplomatic reach through its own BRICS role. Whether their moments in the global spotlight convert the way Korea’s has, or stall the way India’s currently has, is a question worth tracking case by case rather than answering in advance; the pattern here doesn’t license a general theory of an arriving multipolar order, only a sharper question to ask the next time a country’s culture starts trending: what, structurally, is actually standing behind it? A culture can go viral in a week. The infrastructure to defend what that culture is worth takes decades to build, and a great deal longer to catch up on if it wasn’t started early enough. On that measure, a viral runway controversy is never the story. It is only ever the receipt.