05 ISSUE I
DECEMBER 2024
DECEMBER 2024
The Global Influence Delusion
The documentary film Influence challenges us to trace how the world we inherited emerged and urges us to think beyond narrow national interests. At stake is the hope for a functional, global civil society.
By Nolan Young
In 1970, Tim Bell helped found the famed British advertising and marketing firm Saatchi & Saatchi. Soon, he would take his talents and his firm to politics. He found a willing partner in Margaret Thatcher, a young Conservative Party MP leading a revolution in her own party. He shared with Thatcher a brutal and hostile outlook towards the working class and a willingness to employ advertising techniques as tools of public manipulation. In 1979, Bell applied these skills to create a notably successful campaign for Thatcher and the Conservatives against the governing Labour Party.
The next two decades would usher in an era when Western politicians, from Ronald Reagan to Silvio Berlusconi, and their staffs were learning to manipulate the new media environment to build political clout and win elections.
However, Bell’s story inflates in scope when he merges his PR powers with other existing centers of corporate influence in British society. First, he struck a deal with the influential British tabloid newspapers to garner more widespread support for the Conservatives. Then, after Thatcher got into office, Bell ingratiated himself with a broader array of corporate forces that supported Thatcher’s rightwing economic policies. Bell is propelled to dazzling heights of international power and disgrace from this launching pad.
The 2021 documentary “Influence” tells this fascinating story of Bell’s career. Bell is an admittedly entertaining presence whose rotten breath you can nearly smell through the screen, moral indifference and slipperiness give you chills, and geopolitical impact makes you think twice about how national sovereignty works. His recounting early on of his conversations with Rupert Murdoch, then the owner of Britain's most influential tabloid newspaper, The Sun, is one of many moments of stunning honesty in the film, ditching the euphemisms commonly employed to shroud outright corruption.
At that point, Bell can’t just be seen as working on behalf of politicians—putting a ‘gloss’, as he says, on the images and campaigns of others. Instead, he is an integral connective tissue of this network of economic and political elites. It is vital to see him and the industry of ‘influence’ — or ‘corporate PR,’ ‘strategic communication’ or ‘political consultancy’ — as unified in their class interests. The public manipulation Saatchi & Saatchi carries out against British society on behalf of Thatcher and the Conservative Party is a clear exhibition of a top-down imposition of those class interests— an outright insurrection against civil society that paved the way for the neoliberal turn of the era.
What begins to shock as the film progresses is how Saatchi & Saatchi disrupt the traditional conception of the ‘public sphere’ as an integral element of civil society in which organic political discussion occurs among citizens and the state draws its legitimacy from it. As depicted in this documentary, reality is organized much differently: powerful interests at the top of society, allied and well organized, playfully control of the public sphere. However, the story of Tim Bell does not end here, and the film goes on to trace how not just the national public sphere but also the global public sphere is put into submission by the overwhelming power of this burgeoning industry.
In 1985, Bell left Saatchi & Saatchi to go freelance. By the decade’s end, he had founded his firm, Bell Pottinger.
Bell Pottinger’s first major assignment is to run an election campaign for General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s brutal dictator and Thatcher’s friend. Next, he goes to South Africa to work for F.W. de Klerk (the last white president of South Africa) in his election campaign against then-recently freed Nelson Mandela, leader of the ANC. Later, Bell would return to South Africa to work for the ANC to do reputation-management for its new leader, Jacob Zuma, who oversaw massive corruption of the South African state.
South Africa forms the heart of the documentary. The filmmakers Diana Neille and Richard Poplak do a superb job in evoking the chillingly effective campaign by Bell Pottinger to play off of the divisions of the nation, as well as stoke racial tensions and violence (Zuma and his cronies - a family of immigrant businessmen from India – mask their state corruption as an effort to deracialize the South African economy and society). Around the same time, Bell Pottinger is involved in another campaign: a $560 million contract from the US military to attempt to manipulate the people of Iraq to support the “rebuilding efforts” of US occupation forces.
‘Influence” powerfully subverts and complicates the concept of “soft power.” This concept, first popularized by international relations scholar Joseph Nye in the mid-1980s, describes governments’ ability to co-opt rather than coerce foreign publics. Firstly, the film complicates the standard conceptualization of soft power as functioning at the national level— as in possessed and deployed by single nations. The type of soft power for which Bell is a conduit is located supranationally as a constellation of friendly and cooperative governments across the globe that create local conditions beneficial to powerful governments, corporations, and financial interests in the global north. It doesn’t make sense to think of Bell as working to further the soft power of only Britain or the US, but rather working on behalf of an international ruling class. Secondly, the film undermines the idea that a nation’s soft power—specifically that of the U.S., as argued by Nye—is established on the basis of moral authority. The film's reality does not communicate a set of ascendant values but the manipulation of publics abroad. “So much with power is an illusion,” Bell says, “and so much of influence is a delusion.”
Throughout the film, there is a recurring set of interviews with a man from this influence profession named Nigel Oakes. He was a former employee of Saatchi & Saatchi and went on to found his own strategic consulting company, SCL Group. A self-described proud ‘weapons builder’, Oakes’ intermittent analyses of the history and implications of strategic communications balance Bell’s vague musings and amoral indifference. Towards the end of the film, it is revealed he has cancer, and he reflects on how his contributions to this system will affect the world.
Interestingly, after the whole story we were just told, Oakes seems very concerned about Russia, and he is echoed by a chorus of voices who echo the ominous threat of Russian misinformation. The movie ends with a shot of a young Putin at a martial arts photoshoot. This ending to the documentary could have been more satisfying on so many levels. Firstly, it introduces a vague and unfocused target of critique. While the narratives promoted by Russian media surely impact our society, the viewer is not given the same sort of access to the machinations of the Russian state media machine. Why linger on this rather than the set of actors from whom we heard candid and detailed accounts throughout the documentary?
Additionally, this concluding focus loses impact by not highlighting the transnationality of the depicted system. Perhaps the most impactful and valuable piece of the documentary— and what sets it apart from just another story about elite corruption and public manipulation— is the illustration of Bell Pottinger being at a certain nexus of financial, military, and geopolitical power beyond the bounds of a single nation and its soft power aspirations. While worth our attention, the Russian case seems to be a bit different and outside this particular system.
To a certain extent, the film left me with a lingering, and I think essential, question of how the Russian project of global disinformation might be different from that of other systems of public influence in world politics—both in its manifestations and the interests behind it. However, this did not seem to be the film’s intention. Instead, by only highlighting the overlap between the two cases, the film pulls its punches in making a more robust critique of how these mechanisms function on a global scale, leaving the viewer with a vague, floating concept of ‘influence’, detached from any political economy analysis.
The film challenges us to trace how the world we inherited emerged, urging us to think beyond narrow national interests. At stake is the hope for a functional, global civil society.
Nolan Young is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.