Communicative narratives as soft power: case study of the "17+1 cooperation platform" using CODA method

Social constructivism within the field of International Relations focuses on  rules international community is built upon. According to N.Onuf particular rules can be disguised under various regulative or potentially regulative acts - starting from speech acts and ending with embedded normative elements, such as judicial agreements and laws. The objective of particular article is to deconstruct communicative narratives of "17+1 cooperation platform" (Cooperation between China and 16 Central and Eastern European countries)  thus identifying elements of soft power by testing CODA method. The scope of research materials includes official "17+1 cooperation platform's"  public documentation and speeches of China's president - Xi Jinping. Adjusted research method is cognitive discourse analysis (CODA) which focuses on those properties of discourse that are accounted for in terms of cognitive concepts, such as various types of mental representation, modelling of common knowledge and which are usually defined in cognitive terms, such as metaphors, overall topics or themes, coherence, presupposition, relevance, and others. In course of CODA several communicative narratives were identified that supports "17+1 cooperation platform" as instruments of soft power: 1) Narrative of visible hand - as a counter argument on liberal economics (and to invisible hand concept by Adam Smith) with it's unpredictability.  Element of soft power lies in governmental resources to deal with market uncertainties.2) Narrative of silver bullet - a twin narrative of visible hand only in domain of political decisions. Includes assumption that effective cooperation with China as a leader within community implies quick solutions to any sorts of decision making problems.3) Narrative of multi-layer multilateralism - includes promise of spill over of cooperation from one domain to another. CODA is promising method for narrative identification in international relations even in dynamic environment of multilateral cooperation platforms.