Azerbaijan Tourism and Management University

Joseph Nye sees EU as the only opponent to the United States soft power. European art, literature, music, design, fashion and food have long been a global cultural magnet. He notes that each of European countries has a strong cultural appeal and half of the 10 most spoken languages in the world are in Europe. Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America, English is the language of the United States, and the 50 Francophonies, whi­ch meet at a summit every two years should be particularly mentioned. France spends about $ 1 billion a year to spread the French civilization around the world [3, p.76]. Sometimes the European Union is des­cri­bed as a 'civil force', 'normative power', 'metro-sexual power', 'postmodern power', 'power of multilateralism', 'community of democracy ' and other universal values [1, p.3]. The “Project of European Union” is identified as the most successful example of soft power that has ever existed. So far, Europe's ability to transform post-So­viet Europe with encouragement and persuasion rather than force is quite astonishing [1, p.7]. Not a single European country can expect to compete with the US on a large-scale, but when taken as a whole, Euro­pe has an equivalent market and a larger population [3, p.77].