Waterloo Sunset
|  17 Mar '07 11:23 : 0 recs
SO,
I am pleasantly surprised that you posted Philip Stephens article, I was thinking of doing so myself. And the bits you highlight are key as well. Europe is absent the world as I keep banging on and the denoument
the rising powers will discover over time that they have the same stake in an ordered world. But getting from here to there will not be an easy journey.
is PRECISELY it. There is no US or liberal conspiracy, the capitalist system of liberal economics simply the optimal way to organise human affairs, thats why when allowed ALL societies move towards it and those that do produce the most well being for their populations.
How can you see all this SO and yet still hold such crazy views? Surely the way is to educate, open up economically, and intervene where forces obstruct free peoples passage to their own flavour of this universal recipe.
Yet you seem set on control of people, of centralisation, of inward looking policy.
What have I misunderstood SO? Are we agreed that we are all going to end up at broadly the same propserous, peaceful, stable future and that our intterests are in fact aligned if only we could see it? Or are you saying this is not truie and or that the USA is opposed to this?
To me the overlying maps show what happens when unearned income can be used to sell unreason.
Independence for Scotland before the oil price falls back to the "normal" level of around $20 to $30
WS |
Slightly Optimistic
| 16 Mar '07 20:54 : 0 recs
In search of the priority, the FT published today:
The west cannot hide from the disordered world beyond
Next time you have a spare moment turn over a few pages in an imagined atlas of our muddled world.
The first of its maps highlights what you might call disordered spaces – where states have lost the monopoly of force needed to sustain order and the rule of law. A second delineates the parts of the globe where poverty and disease are endemic. The next plots flashpoints – centres of extremism, insurgency and political violence. A fourth, those regions with young and mobile populations. The fifth and final in the series delineates rich concentrations of natural resources – oil, minerals and the rest.
By now, you will have guessed where this is leading. Lay each of the maps one on the other and, to a remarkable extent, the contours coincide. The characteristics of many of these places are mutually reinforcing. Poverty and disease provide fertile ground for violence and disorder; extremism, religious and otherwise, flourishes among disaffected youth; weak governance invites violent uprisings; mineral wealth tempts the corrupt. And, yes, these troubled parts of the world are places upon which we, the inhabitants of ordered and prosperous spaces, depend for the raw materials to feed our economies. Unsurprisingly, the Middle East and Africa loom large.
The implication is obvious. We can proudly declare ourselves isolationists, resolve to eschew “imperialist” adventures, decry liberal interventionists such as Britain’s Tony Blair and damn the neo-conservatives around US president George W. Bush. But, one way or another, the west cannot avoid getting involved. On this, moral impulse and hard-headed interests are as one.
The atlas idea is a clever one. I can say that because I do not claim it as my own. I picked it up from a very smart official in Washington. To forestall any misunderstanding, this was not a neo-con zealot. His purpose was not to justify the failing effort to spread democracy at the point of a gun or, for that matter, to promote any particular aspect of current US policy. Rather, he was putting another inconvenient truth on the table. Whatever happens in Iraq, retreat from the world is not an option.
The reality of interdependence in a world shrunk by globalisation cannot be wished away. The United Nations predicts that something like 2m migrants will arrive in the developed world every year from now until 2050. The west cannot build walls high enough to keep out the refugees from war and poverty, the criminal gangs, and, of course, the jihadi terrorists. Disorder travels.
Alas, voters want to think otherwise. Europeans, by and large, seem ever more anxious to shut themselves off from the world. Americans, badly bruised by the cost in lives and prestige of the war in Iraq, are probably heading in the same direction. If the strategic imperative remains international engagement – in all its dimensions from civil assistance and aid to, occasionally, the deployment of force – the public mood is otherwise.
Opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority of European voters believe “peace” comes before all else. Nothing wrong with that except when the inference is that Europe’s eternal role is that of the concerned bystander; and sometimes, not even overly concerned. Thoughtful policymakers have been struck, and dismayed, by apparent public indifference towards the plight of Darfur. As depressing, is a visible weakening in the resolve of European governments to defeat the Taliban.
At the back of European minds, I suppose, is an assumption that, if things get too bad, Washington will handle them: the US has too many interests to let chaos reign. Well, yes and no. America, as one of my regular readers reminded me the other day, is no longer in the mood to “solve everyone else’s problems”. The bloody chaos in Iraq may not drive Washington into isolationism. But it will make the next US president think thrice before putting more young Americans in harm’s way.
Here, in any event, the picture becomes still more complicated. You can add a sixth map to the aforementioned atlas. This charts the present, dramatic shift in the geopolitical centre of gravity. It was drawn for me by an array of foreign policy experts assembled by the BBC for a forthcoming radio programme on the present global disorder*.
A common refrain of these experts from three continents was that the rise of China and India has robbed Washington of the capacity to act alone. The US remains for the time being the sole superpower – uniquely able to project power everywhere.
Yet it cannot settle things unilaterally. It needs allies and multilateral institutions.
A second shared conclusion was that it is too early to expect substantive reform to re-energise the existing global institutions. Too many of the old powers – and, one or two of the new, have a vested interest in preserving, at least for now, a stultified status quo.
On the other hand, some of the more alarmist predictions about looming confrontations between east and west owe more to imagination than cool analysis. Those, for example, who suggest that China and India are joining with Russia in a threatening triple alliance against the west ignore the serious strategic frictions between these three powers.
Readers who have perservered this far will have gathered that this is not one of those columns offering neat designs for a new international architecture. There are no such blueprints. For the foreseeable future governments are much more likely to have to manage disorder through shifting coalitions and à la carte multilateralism. The carefully structured world imagined by the west’s leaders after the collapse of communism has proved a mirage.
The temptation will be to stand back. The Hobbesian perspective that has driven Mr Bush’s muscular unilateralism might just as easily persuade his successor to try to keep chaos at a distance. Europeans will try hard to continue believing that they can huddle in their comfortable corner against the storms.
They will discover otherwise. The west’s interests as it navigates this rugged geopolitical terrain are as they have ever been: to export security, prosperity and, yes, liberal democratic values beyond its frontiers. As it happens, the rising powers will discover over time that they have the same stake in an ordered world. But getting from here to there will not be an easy journey.
*Analysis, BBC Radio 4, Sunday March 18
The book 'The Pentagon's New Map' is a helpful primer. Whether global security in order to enable economic connectedness merits a topic on its own? |
