"We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming." - Don Delillo
***
Shifting Patterns of Global Power (Part 3)
Chris Patten
30th October 2008
Hosted by: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
Questions and Answers
Q: The enemy [of climate change] is invisible. The impact is going to be gradual and a major disaster will take decades to hit us.
So how do we convince politicians to act now rather than wait for disaster to hit us? Human nature is perverse, and people won't act until there's a disaster.
How do we persuade governments to do what the UK government did yesterday and pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050, though I don't know how possible this is.
If you could speak to Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao how would you convince them, and say that they wouldn't have to sacrifice growth and poverty alleviation?
A: It is easier to convince them when a crisis is around, e.g. We toughened the Montreal Protocol on the Ozone layer because there was clear evidence of the hole in the Ozone layer, for example Cancer in Chile, Australia and Southern Hemisphere countries.
But this triggers a thought. At the time, Australia was pressing as hard as anyone for applying the precautionary principle before things were absolutely, 100% clear. It accepted that developed economies had to jump first because they were more responsible for CFCs and Halons.
When it came to C02, it was disappointing that the Australian government had a different point of view, that it was unfair to put Australia at a disadvantage viz-a-viz Indonesian businesses etc. That was a pretty dodgy and doubtful proposition.
Now the Australian government welcomes change. The evidence of climate change is one of the reasons for that. The drought in Australia, the impact on the agricultural economy, the Murray river basin, the wheat crop in Southwestern Australia all helped - together with 'The Weathermakers' by Tim Flannery, which change public attitudes.
There is plenty of examples of exising evidence of climate change. 4 years ago, the then-Chief Scientific Officer in the UK, David King (now at Oxford), said he thought climate change was a bigger threat to the international community than terrorism.
He was criticised, but it's true. No terrorists are capable of melting the permafrost or changing Atlantic patterns to prolong drought in Darfur, or melt glaciers.
I think what's going to attract the attention of Indian/Chinese policymakers is that 6 of their great rivers rise on the Tibetan plateau and are affected by glacier melt. Already some of their rivers don't hit the sea for parts of the year.
In the future, at schools like this (or maybe you do already), people will study the relationship between maldistribution of resources and conflict, e.g. water. I bet right now Indian and Chinese military strategists are looking at the dangers if either side divert the headwaters of the 6 rivers starting on the Tibetan plateau.
Politicians and the public see increasing evidence of what problems climate change might bring, which will encourage them to be bolder than they might otherwise be. 11/12 of the last summers were Europe's hottest on record. In the UK we have storms and floods. The political mecury in the barometer is going up rapidly.
Q: There is a demographic deficit in Europe, with a projected 20% decline in population. Why can't Europe do what the Americans do and import 2-3 million immigrants a year? Why is it so hard to assimilate immigrants?
A: Partly because it's smaller. Take the most densely populated states in the North East US - they are well below the population density in England. It's similar for the rest of europe. This is at least part of the explanation.
In any case, it's true the American population is going up by 1% a year: it's almost entirely immigration from Latin America and Asia.
In Europe we need migrant labour to perform certain tasks. Some countries need it more than others. Also it's due to our economic and trade policies. For example we're not open to agricultural products from the south of the Mediterranean. So since their tomatoes or olives don't come in, we get their illegal labour instead.
In Southern Spain, there are crops which must be grown under plastic bags with water brought down from the North of Spain at great expense. It's lunatic social and economic policy.
Q: Oxford wants to set up a Public Policy school, looking at this one to try to improve on it. What visions do you have for Oxford's Public Policy School? What strengths can you offer people? For example history is not a strong component of Public Policy but there is prescriptive and descriptive potential from history.
A: 2 simple points:
1) We want a Public Policy school which is not focused solely on Public Policy in America and Europe. It doesn't add value if we replicate Harvard or one or two other places. It is imperative to devlop a Public Policy school with global scope/interests.
As a Chancellor of Oxford, I have "impotence assuaged by magnificence" (in the words of one of my predecessors). The Vice Chancellor runs things. But I would want a Public Policy school run by non-British and Americans.
2) We must do more than in the past to crossbreed disciplines and work across them. This is done and starting to be done in one of our institutes, the James Martin 21st Century School, getting epidemiologists to work with migration experts and those in international law. Engineers work with lawyers, and there is genuine cross-fertilisation and we start to see extremely beneficial effects.
A school of Public Policy could draw on the strengths in social science at Oxford university, and in the sciences also. The challenge is to get better postgraduate funding. We could meet the challenge by cutting the number of PhDs provided. Right now we have now 250-60 more a year than Harvard, but Harvard and other American universities fund them better, so more pple can be 100% funded.
Q: In the long and torturous political history of mankind, there has been the Pax Romana of conquest, the Pax Hispanica of golden treasure, the Pax Britannica of Enlightenment and Beneficence and last but not least the Pax Americana of democracy.
China has proferred peace and goodwill in the concept of a 'Harmonious World'. Do you, Lord Patten, see a Pax Sinitica of peace in the East? And that we'll miss a Clash of Civilisations between the East and West?
A: Good question. We would stand the best chance of having a Pax Humanitas if each of us were more honest about our own history.
I have no difficulty at all with historians who point out some of what was indefensible and awful abt the Pax Britannica and the British Empire.
I wrote in my book that we were pretty good at laying railway lines in India, but we were pretty murderous when we thought our interests were on the line as well, for example at Amritsar.
An important part of a civilised society's development is to honestly look at history. The Americans do that to an astonishing degree. Yesterday Henry Kissinger said something about the Vietnam war.
I hope the chinese will do that too. Chinese history has not been about one society of the same size which has never changed and been continuous. China today is twice the size, not just in population but territory, as at the start of the Ming.
We must be more honest about our histories for the Pax which you rightly identify.
I hope we will learn from China some of the real lessons of Confucianism. Had Confucius been listened to recently we wouldn't have had the rout of the financial markets, for example.
Q: There is military spending in the US, but not in Europe. China has a professed desire to rise. Russia is preventing/will prevent a peaceful Pax Humanitas because of their ego/general view of self from a Russian perspective.
A: Well, I will come clean on Russia.
On Mr Putin, I dealt with him a lot when European Commissioner and I never felt then when looking into his eyes that I could see his face.
Tsar Nicholas II said the same thing about Rasputin as Bush said about Putin. You can take the man out of the KGB, but you can't take the KGB out of the man.
Russia has been led in a fundamentally wrong direction for the past few years. With the colapse in the oil price, and Russia's difficulty in extracting gas to meet contractual obligations, in the next few years it will have trouble holding social infrastructure together. I've never felt Russia is a power in the sense China, India and Brazil are.
Is there anyone in the house with anything Russian in their houses?
Tommy Koh: Tchaikovsky
Others: Petrushka, Vodka
Chris Patten: The latest of which is called 'Kalashnikov'.
Russia has great civilization, but I don't think Mr Putin has added to it.
Take an economic comparison. Even with oil and gas at peak prices, the Russian economy was smaller than Spain's. And per capita, it was a lot smaller than Spain's.
I think China, India, and Southeast Asia will shape the 21st century. And Russia?
We must try to persuade Russia it has a better role in the world than simply making trouble. It should settle for a broader role and be part of the European family (not the EU - it doesn't want to join). It shouldn't apply pressure on its neighbors in a Tsarist way, acting like a 19th century post-Congress of Vienna power with spheres of influence around its borders. It's not tolerable, and not how a modern state operates.
Russia's problems are demography: a falling population and high mortality, especially among young men (partly due to alcohol); a violent and criminal recent past; and an unsavory relationship between big business, the security services and organised crime. It will be difficult for them to cope with a lower price for energy. I hope for a change, and a belief in strong institutions rather than strong men (which is a Russian motif).
Q: You are a strong advocate for democracy in the Greater China region, but there has been a rise in Chinese Nationalism since Taiwan introduced democracy. A way to get strong popular power in China if it became a democracy would be to advocate revenge on Japan, in which case the safest place to be would be on a beach in New Zealand.
A: There is no democracy now, but that doesn't mean there is no nationalism in China. Since Communism is no longer advocated in a Communist/Marxist way, it has lost its moral core so nationalism wielded as substitute.
It is difficult to explain with a straight face what the intellectual components of Chinese communism today are. In the book "What China Thinks" [Ed: I think it's "What Does China Think?"], a European scholar visited the main thinktanks in China and asked people to explain where they thought China was going, and what China's political philosophy was, and they produced fairly vacuous answers.
I don't blame China in the context of Chinese-Japanese relations as much as Japan. It's extraordinary: I get sent academic magazines on foreign policy from Japan with articles from retired diplomats etc explaining away Nanjing, and saying it was not N thousand who were murdered but N-Y thousand, brackets maybe it didn't even happen at all.
It's quite astonishing that Japanese apologies for World War II are so attenuated (to put it politely).
I've been to Nanjing and it is very moving. One reason the site was so powerful was that the Chinese authorities did not overdo the explanation of sentiments you'd come away with anyway having seen things with your own eyes.
Japan behaved appalingly in China and elsewhere in the 1930s
japan would be happier if more resolutely recognised
[Ed: I felt this was very unfair to Japan.
It's only 2-3 of the hundreds of history textbooks that are controversial, and a minority of politicians who indulge in revisionism: the majority of Japanese don't feel the way they are accused of feeling (actually they're probably apathetic, but to use his words it's better that they're Venus rather than Mars).
This is not to say that Japan is guiltless, but compared to China which actively brainwashes and indoctrinates its citizens to hate Japan, and allows the organisation of anti-Japanese riots, boycotts and protests, what Japan does is nothing.
Indeed, it's arguable that what China does about its own history is worse - a betrayal by a loved one or a trusted friend hurts that much more due to the intimacy and presumed alignment of interests. Likewise for crimes committed by a government against its citizens.]
I pay a great tribute to the Germans, both about their most recent history and their history before that. In the last couple of years there have been 2 movies by Germans. Downfall and one about the Stasi state, which are exoriatingly truthful about Germany's past. This is one reason why Germany has become a solid (some say too solid) democracy with a strong civil society.
I hope Japan and China reach some sort of reconciliation like what France and Germany have reached, but we need a lot more openess and transparency and generosity on the part of some Japanese politicians.
The main trigger for EU with its extraordinary institution, though they are far from perfect, was Franco-German reconciliation. Never forget World War II was a European civil war, though we drew the whole world in.
My wife's father was killed one day after D-day. Not by the Germans but the RAF - Friendly Fire. He was an Olympic athlete. In 1936 he ran. He was from Cambridge in the generation after Chariots of Fire.
His war memorial in Cambridge has British, American, Canadian, Australian, Native American - and also German names, because before those terrible wars, it brought the best and brightest across Europe to study the humanities, classical tradition and works of art, then they went home and learnt to kill one another.
Ending that was reconciliation. Kohl and Mitterand's (who didn't like each other) photo at the ossuary at Verdun with piles of bones from World Wwar I is the kernel of the story of EU. Sooner or later there will have to be that sort of reconciliation between Japan and China
Till then America will be drawn, slightly against its will, into holding the peace between the 2. Otherwise, there will be tensions.
Tommy Koh: ASEAN's aspiration is to reconcile the 2 great countries.
L'origine de Bert
Showing posts with label chris patten. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chris patten. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." - John Cage
Figures.
***
Shifting Patterns of Global Power (Part 2)
Chris Patten
30th October 2008
Hosted by: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
Thirdly, clearly, Asia is going to be a major player in shaping the 21st century.
Again, the tendency is for Europe and the US to talk about the rise of Asia like it is a new phenomenon, but if you look at Angus Madison, whio I regard as the greatest Economic Historian, until 1820 and the Industrial Revolution India and China accounted for more than 50% of the world's GDP (India 16-17%, China 33%).
China was the largest economy in the world in 18 of the last 20 centuries, and will be again this century (but not in per capita gdp - there is doubt it will become first division here).
India and China are reemerging, not emerging.
There is no need to tell this story in detail in Singapore unlike Europe and America with 'gee whiz' statistics. Let me share 2 very simple anecdotes about China.
1) My first sighting of China was as a young MP. In 1979 I went to Hong Kong to visit "our territories" - a euphemism for Hong Kong.
I was taken to a police post in the New Territories, Lo Wu, and shown China of the millennia, the sleepy fishing village of Shenzhen, with slow moving barges, duck ponds and a few peasants on Flying Pigeon bikes.
This was 10 years after the Cultural Revolution which destroyed the education of an entire generation.
Today, it is Adam Smith out of Hieronymus Bosch.
Now there are 743 Chinese students in Oxford. 42% of our math undergraduates/postgraduates are Chinese. I sometimes tell British audiences "and we worry about competition from Polish plumbers".
China is undergoing a transformation. It is the workshop of the world and more besides. India has escaped what Indians themselves called "the Hindu rate of growth", partly because of Manmohan Singh, whom I am proud to say is an Oxford alumnus, due to the exchange rate crisis of the early 90s.
India is more successful than China in producing global brands and MNCs but exports 1/7 of the marketable goods of China. India is good in IT, pharmaceuticals and back office operations - it has elbowed its way into the BRICs (I have my doubts about Russia).
There is extraordinary success in both, but I am reluctant sometimes to accept graphs showing lines continuing exponentially into the future.
One of my favourite pictures in my book shows the Archduke and his wife in 1914 setting out in Sarejevo. One person says "Stop. The car's going to take the wrong turn. There's a mad young Serbian student out there waiting to shoot you".
Only 20 years ago, 6/10 of the largest banks in world were Japanese. 20 years ago Sumitomo bought large chunk of Goldman Sachs.
China and India face problems. China with social equity, especially the divide between rural and urban areas; China's rural mortality is on par with the Congo, but urban mortality is on par with Mexico.
Also with environmental degradation. 16/20 of the most polluted cities in the world are in China.
There is an existential question - how China is sometime going to bring its political structures into line with its economic and social ones. This topic has been opened up once or twice bravely by Wen Jiabao, for example about melamine and accountability in governance.
India has different problems. They are not existential, but there are serious problems of infrastructure. For example the labour market - Indians talk about a demographic boon, with faster population growth, and a younger population than China. But if there are no jobs it'll become a demographic time bomb, if the Communists and friends prevent labour market reform - since unlike in China they still believe in Communism.
There are also social issues, like the Naxalite insurgency in a large number of Indian states.
An overall back of envelope summation: in many respects the party state in China is too strong and the party state in India is too weak.
Nonetheless they will play a major role. And unless the transatlantic community recognises this, they cannot tackle a single problem successfully.
Fourth is the agency shaping our affairs called globalisation.
There is a relationship between population and economic/trade growth. The impacts of globalisation increase as technology quickens and augments it. From 1500-1820 there was a 1% growth in world trade per year. Since then it's been 3.5%.
There was a surge in globalisation from the late 19th century to just before the First World War due to a few factors. The Midwest was opened in America, exemplified by the building of Chicago. There was a successful British championing of free trade, and technology affected productivity: the telegraph, steam ship and railway engine.
In the last few years there has been a similar outburst of globalisation.
China and India are now in the world economy. 2.5 billion people are in the global marketplace. There has been trade liberalisation and the dismantling of trade barriers. China's average tariffs were about 41% when I was in Hong Kong. Now after WTO ascension they are 5-6%. We have seen the effect of the dismantling of trade barriers and technology on productivity: air travel, containerisation, the Internet and IT in general.
Both periods of globalisation lifted people out of poverty with a deflationary boom. One reason America can cope with social inequality, and the flat average earnings of the last few years is that Chinese goods have been falling in price. In the last 10 yrs the price of clothes, textiles and shoes have fallen by 30% in the US. Walmart, for a few years after 2000, was a larger trade partner with China than Russia or Australia.
The agents of globalisation also allowed perils to nation states to move around the world more rapidly and on a larger scale. Globalisation has not destroyed the nation state, but it has demonstrated its porous frontiers. Nation states must cooperate to deal with challenges.
The 9/11 hijackers used credit cards to fund their operations. Money was laundered through opened-up banking systems. Containerisation has let all sorts of goods, including counterfeit goods, slaves and drugs to be moved using commercial airlines and transport. The drugs business is worth $300 billion on the streets.
There has been a spread of disease, like SARS. We were lucky in retrospect that the infected SARS patients landed in Toronto rather than Durban or Lagos, where the infection wouldn't have been picked up so fast and would have spread like wildfire.
There has been a dark side of globalisation. The small arms trade, terrorism, nuclear proliferation. We need greater cooperation between nation states, like we are seeing now with the response to the financial meltdown.
The nation state has not been destroyed but we need to look at 'soveregnty' in different ways. We must recognise that nation states can only deliver what citizens expect by working more effectively together. [Something] provoked into doing so by the first Bush administration's unilateralism.
I have 2 other points.
The international community must find a way to deal with failed or failing states which use sovereignty to oppress their own citizens like Zimbabwe or Burma, or states which can't use sovereignty to protect their own citizens like the Congo - 5 million have now died in fighting over the last few years over pillaged resources.
Or states which trade their sovereignty to launder money, or states like Tuvalu which sell their international telephone code for phone sex operators. Or states which support terrorist organisations; till 2001 I thought Afghanistan was less a state that supported a terrorist organisation than a terrorist organisation with a state.
We must find way globally through the UN to cope with failed/failing states. We cannot ghettoise them. Global challenges polluting regional environments are incubated there.
Finally, the biggest threat facing all of us. Climate change and global warming. We're going to need extraordinarily skilled diplomacy to resolve this problem. It demands that developed economies recognise their historic responsibility but also that emerging economies recognise the need to start to address issues alongside developed economies.
It is a huge task to agree to a deal on climate change. Without understanding between China and the US there will be no successful followup to Kyoto.
In an ideal world, President Obama would deal with the problems of Palestine and Israel in the way suggested by Prime Minister Olmert when leaving office, so he can concentrate more on America's relationship with Asia which has been badly ignored over the last few years.
I have been accused in my book of being too pessimistic or optimistic (even panglossian). My view is simple. To set out problems we face in stark detail, taking account of historical roots doesnt mean we're staggering toward an earthwreck. We can solve them. To say we can doesn't suggest a wacky excess of optimism. We've got through worse problems and difficulties in the past.
But we need bold political leadership. It entails, above all, treating the average man/woman as better than the average and appealing to our better judgments than our baser motives. So let's hope we find political leaders in America and Europe and Asia who can do that.
Then I can write my next book about my relationship with my grandchildren.
(Continued in next and last post, with the Q&A)
Figures.
***
Shifting Patterns of Global Power (Part 2)
Chris Patten
30th October 2008
Hosted by: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
Thirdly, clearly, Asia is going to be a major player in shaping the 21st century.
Again, the tendency is for Europe and the US to talk about the rise of Asia like it is a new phenomenon, but if you look at Angus Madison, whio I regard as the greatest Economic Historian, until 1820 and the Industrial Revolution India and China accounted for more than 50% of the world's GDP (India 16-17%, China 33%).
China was the largest economy in the world in 18 of the last 20 centuries, and will be again this century (but not in per capita gdp - there is doubt it will become first division here).
India and China are reemerging, not emerging.
There is no need to tell this story in detail in Singapore unlike Europe and America with 'gee whiz' statistics. Let me share 2 very simple anecdotes about China.
1) My first sighting of China was as a young MP. In 1979 I went to Hong Kong to visit "our territories" - a euphemism for Hong Kong.
I was taken to a police post in the New Territories, Lo Wu, and shown China of the millennia, the sleepy fishing village of Shenzhen, with slow moving barges, duck ponds and a few peasants on Flying Pigeon bikes.
This was 10 years after the Cultural Revolution which destroyed the education of an entire generation.
Today, it is Adam Smith out of Hieronymus Bosch.
Now there are 743 Chinese students in Oxford. 42% of our math undergraduates/postgraduates are Chinese. I sometimes tell British audiences "and we worry about competition from Polish plumbers".
China is undergoing a transformation. It is the workshop of the world and more besides. India has escaped what Indians themselves called "the Hindu rate of growth", partly because of Manmohan Singh, whom I am proud to say is an Oxford alumnus, due to the exchange rate crisis of the early 90s.
India is more successful than China in producing global brands and MNCs but exports 1/7 of the marketable goods of China. India is good in IT, pharmaceuticals and back office operations - it has elbowed its way into the BRICs (I have my doubts about Russia).
There is extraordinary success in both, but I am reluctant sometimes to accept graphs showing lines continuing exponentially into the future.
One of my favourite pictures in my book shows the Archduke and his wife in 1914 setting out in Sarejevo. One person says "Stop. The car's going to take the wrong turn. There's a mad young Serbian student out there waiting to shoot you".
Only 20 years ago, 6/10 of the largest banks in world were Japanese. 20 years ago Sumitomo bought large chunk of Goldman Sachs.
China and India face problems. China with social equity, especially the divide between rural and urban areas; China's rural mortality is on par with the Congo, but urban mortality is on par with Mexico.
Also with environmental degradation. 16/20 of the most polluted cities in the world are in China.
There is an existential question - how China is sometime going to bring its political structures into line with its economic and social ones. This topic has been opened up once or twice bravely by Wen Jiabao, for example about melamine and accountability in governance.
India has different problems. They are not existential, but there are serious problems of infrastructure. For example the labour market - Indians talk about a demographic boon, with faster population growth, and a younger population than China. But if there are no jobs it'll become a demographic time bomb, if the Communists and friends prevent labour market reform - since unlike in China they still believe in Communism.
There are also social issues, like the Naxalite insurgency in a large number of Indian states.
An overall back of envelope summation: in many respects the party state in China is too strong and the party state in India is too weak.
Nonetheless they will play a major role. And unless the transatlantic community recognises this, they cannot tackle a single problem successfully.
Fourth is the agency shaping our affairs called globalisation.
There is a relationship between population and economic/trade growth. The impacts of globalisation increase as technology quickens and augments it. From 1500-1820 there was a 1% growth in world trade per year. Since then it's been 3.5%.
There was a surge in globalisation from the late 19th century to just before the First World War due to a few factors. The Midwest was opened in America, exemplified by the building of Chicago. There was a successful British championing of free trade, and technology affected productivity: the telegraph, steam ship and railway engine.
In the last few years there has been a similar outburst of globalisation.
China and India are now in the world economy. 2.5 billion people are in the global marketplace. There has been trade liberalisation and the dismantling of trade barriers. China's average tariffs were about 41% when I was in Hong Kong. Now after WTO ascension they are 5-6%. We have seen the effect of the dismantling of trade barriers and technology on productivity: air travel, containerisation, the Internet and IT in general.
Both periods of globalisation lifted people out of poverty with a deflationary boom. One reason America can cope with social inequality, and the flat average earnings of the last few years is that Chinese goods have been falling in price. In the last 10 yrs the price of clothes, textiles and shoes have fallen by 30% in the US. Walmart, for a few years after 2000, was a larger trade partner with China than Russia or Australia.
The agents of globalisation also allowed perils to nation states to move around the world more rapidly and on a larger scale. Globalisation has not destroyed the nation state, but it has demonstrated its porous frontiers. Nation states must cooperate to deal with challenges.
The 9/11 hijackers used credit cards to fund their operations. Money was laundered through opened-up banking systems. Containerisation has let all sorts of goods, including counterfeit goods, slaves and drugs to be moved using commercial airlines and transport. The drugs business is worth $300 billion on the streets.
There has been a spread of disease, like SARS. We were lucky in retrospect that the infected SARS patients landed in Toronto rather than Durban or Lagos, where the infection wouldn't have been picked up so fast and would have spread like wildfire.
There has been a dark side of globalisation. The small arms trade, terrorism, nuclear proliferation. We need greater cooperation between nation states, like we are seeing now with the response to the financial meltdown.
The nation state has not been destroyed but we need to look at 'soveregnty' in different ways. We must recognise that nation states can only deliver what citizens expect by working more effectively together. [Something] provoked into doing so by the first Bush administration's unilateralism.
I have 2 other points.
The international community must find a way to deal with failed or failing states which use sovereignty to oppress their own citizens like Zimbabwe or Burma, or states which can't use sovereignty to protect their own citizens like the Congo - 5 million have now died in fighting over the last few years over pillaged resources.
Or states which trade their sovereignty to launder money, or states like Tuvalu which sell their international telephone code for phone sex operators. Or states which support terrorist organisations; till 2001 I thought Afghanistan was less a state that supported a terrorist organisation than a terrorist organisation with a state.
We must find way globally through the UN to cope with failed/failing states. We cannot ghettoise them. Global challenges polluting regional environments are incubated there.
Finally, the biggest threat facing all of us. Climate change and global warming. We're going to need extraordinarily skilled diplomacy to resolve this problem. It demands that developed economies recognise their historic responsibility but also that emerging economies recognise the need to start to address issues alongside developed economies.
It is a huge task to agree to a deal on climate change. Without understanding between China and the US there will be no successful followup to Kyoto.
In an ideal world, President Obama would deal with the problems of Palestine and Israel in the way suggested by Prime Minister Olmert when leaving office, so he can concentrate more on America's relationship with Asia which has been badly ignored over the last few years.
I have been accused in my book of being too pessimistic or optimistic (even panglossian). My view is simple. To set out problems we face in stark detail, taking account of historical roots doesnt mean we're staggering toward an earthwreck. We can solve them. To say we can doesn't suggest a wacky excess of optimism. We've got through worse problems and difficulties in the past.
But we need bold political leadership. It entails, above all, treating the average man/woman as better than the average and appealing to our better judgments than our baser motives. So let's hope we find political leaders in America and Europe and Asia who can do that.
Then I can write my next book about my relationship with my grandchildren.
(Continued in next and last post, with the Q&A)
Post ID: 4772792230768055151
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again." - Franklin P. Jones
***
[Ed: The following is late due to a personal tragedy and my laptop breaking down]
Shifting Patterns of Global Power (Part 1)
Chris Patten
30th October 2008
Hosted by: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
For easier transcription, the following is written in First Person narrative (i.e. from the perspective of the speaker). Personal comments are clearly noted.
Professor Tommy Koh, introducing Chris Patten:
I admire him because he's the son of Irish immigrants to Britain and he's the first member of his family to go to university, so I see him as the poster boy of British meritocracy
[Ed:
Meritocracy - used, misused and abused chaos
"Michael Young "invented" [the word] in 1958 in his book "The Rise of the Meritocracy," according to Quinion. Young had pointed out in an article in the Guardian newspaper last month that he had intended a prophetic satire on what might happen if we placed gaining formal educational qualifications over all other considerations. "This, he had argued, would lead to the permanent rejection of anybody who was unable to jump through the educational hoops, including many otherwise able working-class men and women," wrote Quinion. It would also result in the rise of a new exclusive social class as discriminatory as the older ones. "So the word as he used it," claims the British wordsmith, "was not a positive one, but deeply negative in its implications for the future of society.""]
He lost his Parliamentary seat in the 1992 elections because he worked too hard for his party. "He's the best Prime Minister Great Britain never had", was how one newspaper described him.
Many of us would remember him for being the last governor of Hong Kong, and he left Hong Kong with a good legacy. There are only 2 cities in Asia with the prospect of becoming the global city of Asia - Hong Kong and Singapore.
The lecture is based on his fourth and latest book - "What's next", which I recommend.
Contrary to many Political Scientists' theories, we still live in a world of nation states, and Asian thinkers don't disagree. However, the concept of sovereignty needs to be re-examined - not the narrow minded conception of the past, but one based pooled sovereignty like the EU and working together to respond to global challenges, since many problems cant be solved by any one country, no matter how powerful. Patten is a hard-headed internationalist - a narrow-minded conception of sovereignty is not the way to go. Like Obama, he is a critic of the Bush administration.
Talk proper by Chris Patten:
The introduction was one my father would've much enjoyed and my mother would've believed.
My ambition for Oxford is that one day it will have a School of Public Policy. It's absurd we don't.
3 of the best-known young Asian or African-American politicians in the US are in their 30s - and were alumni of Oxford.
It is partly to find our way around our past that we have found it convenient in past years to divide history into suitable chunks. In Europe, the Hellenic age, Roman Empire, Dark Ages, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
When does modern history begin? I read modern history at Oxford in 1962. In Oxford then it started at 410 AD. This was considered daring because it was 410 AD and not 410 BC. In 410 AD, Alaric pillaged Rome, and the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain.
1962 is now part of the historic era, as much so as the Holy Roman Empire.
In the 1960s, in my first term in Oxford we had the Cuban missile crisis. It was one of the moments in global history when it seemed possible we'd blow ourselves up. We had years of peace secured by the certainty of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
Today, when I'm told the world is more dangerous than in the past I can't help but think of the days when the prospect of nuclear holocaust haunted us all.
My parents weren't great readers. They had a few Readers Digest issues and novels lying about. One novel was about the survival of people on a beach in New Zealand while there were mushroom clouds in the north.
That world seemed to have ended at the end of the 80s.
A friend of mine was Thatcher's Minister of Eerope - not a happy appointment. He was visiting Berlin and on the first day of his visit a young East German was shot climbing the Berlin Wall. He wanted to protest publicly, but the diplomats advised he not do so - they would handle it quietly because they knew how to deal with the East Germans.
6 months later, there was no Wall and no East Berlin or East Germany. They were swept into the ashcan of history with the End of Cold War.
So was it then that the modern world began?
Was it when Deng Xiaoping took over and unleashed the energy and enterprise of 1.25 billion people?
In the early 90s, Fukuyama wrote "The End of History". He bragged that Liberal economic and political values had won the day. There would be no more wars between states or serious political argument.
Huntington wrote against that. He posited battles between civilisations, not states. Religions, civilisations and ethnicities would be fighting.
Was it on 9/11 that the modern world began? Was this the Clash of Civilizations which Huntington had warned about?
Or was it this autumn with the extraordinary events, for example Alan Greenspan admitting to a flaw in his thinking and the humilitation of the Masters of the Universe?
The 1st law of economics of Herb Stein is that things that can't go on forever don't. In the US in the last 30 years there've been flat average earnings, with domestic consumers being unable to face up to Galbraith's "inability to accept the concept of reasonable sufficiency".
American consumers bridged the gulf between flat earnings and the American Dream by borrowing spectacular amounts ofmoney. Household debt at the beginning of the period was $680 billion. Now it's $14 trillion. On average there're 13 credit cards/household. 40% of these carry debt. The American national debt was $10 trillion, and it has doubled since the beginning of the century.
This mountain of debt (the UK is also guilty) came about by 'leveraging' - it was sustained by financial instruments which were not only incomprehensible to us but to the people who traded them as well.
18 months ago, a young man explained how the mortgage of an unemployed single parent in Alabama could be sliced, diced and morphed into an investment vehicle which could be traded in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Frankfurt.
I didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. Unfortunately as it turned out, neither did he.
He worked for Lehman Brothers, as it turned out.
Debt and the failure to regulate incomprehensible instruments plus greed and fear have led to the biggest financial crisis in our lifetimes with economic and political consequences which will reverberate.
This is not the death of capitalism. It is not time to relearn the words of the Socialist Internationale. But as Barney Franks points out, it will be some time before someone tells Reagan's favourite joke: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
[Ed: He forgot about the libertarians.]
There has been a lot of discussion about global financial architecture. It is easier to talk about that than to run decent conservative fiscal policy.
Some things need to be done. The G8 is an absurdity. We need IMF, WB to give places at the table to emerging economies, especially Brazil, India and China. In the coming months they will have an agreement to strengthen the surveillance of the IMF of international economics, but the IMF has been pointing out for years that the US UK etc have been borrowing too much money, but the governments did nothing.
One thing we can be sure about is the truth of Flaubert's remark at the start of the Franco-Prussian war: "When this is over, we shall still be stupid". In the meantime it is impossible for America, the EU etc - financial deregulation to piggyback on the opening of tradeable markets [Ed: My notes are unclear about how the two parts of last sentence are linked]
I hope we won't see America and Europe turning in a protectionist direction, to throw out the good of globalisation with what's bad.
This is the main thrust of my argument of the "modern world". I hope nothing in the coming months will oblige me to change these paragraphs. How is the Modern World shaped and by who?
Despite the incontinent draining away of treasure and blood in the 'Thankless deserts of Mesopotamia' (Churchill), what's happened to Wall Street and the moral authority lost at Abu Ghraib, the US is still the global superpower. The only country which matters everywhere.
Open a newspaper from Bangkok to Bogota - there will be something abt the US on almost every page. My own view: if you want to see your own country disappear, you go to America and open an American newspaper.
America matters absolutely everywhere. It has dominance of the global commons:
Militarily (it spends as much on military technology as everyone else combined) whether space, air, land or sea.
America also still has extraordinary eonomic vitality. The US will probably recover more rapidly than, say, the UK.
The US still has a lot of soft power - it won't be long before a, say, President Obama can reestablish the US as a global leader with excellence.
I hope the US will be the principal agent dealing with the problems I'll talk about. We need America to lead, because no one else will.
With the first 4 years of unilateralism of the Bush administration, there has been 4 years of drift, and nothing has gotten easier to solve.
President Obama will have a large agenda. I hope it won't be distorted by protectionism in Congress. It would be a tragedy for America to be multilateralist in foreign security policy, but unilateralist in economic policy.
Europe will play a role in shaping it too. It has substantial civilian power, not military. It is not going to be a military superpower. Those like Robert Kegan criticise Europe for being Venus, not Mars, but we tried Mars, and the consequences were pretty horrendous.
One reason we are not, and will not be a military superpower is that we don't spend enough on defence. Maybe not for the UK and France but certainly for the Germans. Our grandparents and parents worried the Germans spent too much on armaments. I think it's better to worry they are not spending enough. It's a step in the right direction.
Europe still has huge potential for global leadership, on economic issues. Trade, development policy and environmental issues. The victims of this financial crisis are the poorest African countries - their aid is slashed.
Europe has a big demographic challenge which it has not confronted sufficiently. There will be a 20% fall in the population between now and the middle of the century, especially in the countries with the most traditional Catholic social values: Poland, Italy and Spain.
Besides the fall in population there will be aging also. If Europe is to avoid having a falling share of world trade, population and output, it needs to have a fundamental change to increase its rate of economic growth.
But there are problems. Europeans have a standard of living and quality of life rightly identified as the best in the world, and they are nervous about doing anything that might change it, so they are resistant to reform.
The greatest political novel written by a european, in my view, was Lampedusa's "The Leopard". "Things have to change in order to remain the same". There is a reluctance in Europe to accept that.
(Continued in a future post)
***
[Ed: The following is late due to a personal tragedy and my laptop breaking down]
Shifting Patterns of Global Power (Part 1)
Chris Patten
30th October 2008
Hosted by: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
For easier transcription, the following is written in First Person narrative (i.e. from the perspective of the speaker). Personal comments are clearly noted.
Professor Tommy Koh, introducing Chris Patten:
I admire him because he's the son of Irish immigrants to Britain and he's the first member of his family to go to university, so I see him as the poster boy of British meritocracy
[Ed:
Meritocracy - used, misused and abused chaos
"Michael Young "invented" [the word] in 1958 in his book "The Rise of the Meritocracy," according to Quinion. Young had pointed out in an article in the Guardian newspaper last month that he had intended a prophetic satire on what might happen if we placed gaining formal educational qualifications over all other considerations. "This, he had argued, would lead to the permanent rejection of anybody who was unable to jump through the educational hoops, including many otherwise able working-class men and women," wrote Quinion. It would also result in the rise of a new exclusive social class as discriminatory as the older ones. "So the word as he used it," claims the British wordsmith, "was not a positive one, but deeply negative in its implications for the future of society.""]
He lost his Parliamentary seat in the 1992 elections because he worked too hard for his party. "He's the best Prime Minister Great Britain never had", was how one newspaper described him.
Many of us would remember him for being the last governor of Hong Kong, and he left Hong Kong with a good legacy. There are only 2 cities in Asia with the prospect of becoming the global city of Asia - Hong Kong and Singapore.
The lecture is based on his fourth and latest book - "What's next", which I recommend.
Contrary to many Political Scientists' theories, we still live in a world of nation states, and Asian thinkers don't disagree. However, the concept of sovereignty needs to be re-examined - not the narrow minded conception of the past, but one based pooled sovereignty like the EU and working together to respond to global challenges, since many problems cant be solved by any one country, no matter how powerful. Patten is a hard-headed internationalist - a narrow-minded conception of sovereignty is not the way to go. Like Obama, he is a critic of the Bush administration.
Talk proper by Chris Patten:
The introduction was one my father would've much enjoyed and my mother would've believed.
My ambition for Oxford is that one day it will have a School of Public Policy. It's absurd we don't.
3 of the best-known young Asian or African-American politicians in the US are in their 30s - and were alumni of Oxford.
It is partly to find our way around our past that we have found it convenient in past years to divide history into suitable chunks. In Europe, the Hellenic age, Roman Empire, Dark Ages, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
When does modern history begin? I read modern history at Oxford in 1962. In Oxford then it started at 410 AD. This was considered daring because it was 410 AD and not 410 BC. In 410 AD, Alaric pillaged Rome, and the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain.
1962 is now part of the historic era, as much so as the Holy Roman Empire.
In the 1960s, in my first term in Oxford we had the Cuban missile crisis. It was one of the moments in global history when it seemed possible we'd blow ourselves up. We had years of peace secured by the certainty of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
Today, when I'm told the world is more dangerous than in the past I can't help but think of the days when the prospect of nuclear holocaust haunted us all.
My parents weren't great readers. They had a few Readers Digest issues and novels lying about. One novel was about the survival of people on a beach in New Zealand while there were mushroom clouds in the north.
That world seemed to have ended at the end of the 80s.
A friend of mine was Thatcher's Minister of Eerope - not a happy appointment. He was visiting Berlin and on the first day of his visit a young East German was shot climbing the Berlin Wall. He wanted to protest publicly, but the diplomats advised he not do so - they would handle it quietly because they knew how to deal with the East Germans.
6 months later, there was no Wall and no East Berlin or East Germany. They were swept into the ashcan of history with the End of Cold War.
So was it then that the modern world began?
Was it when Deng Xiaoping took over and unleashed the energy and enterprise of 1.25 billion people?
In the early 90s, Fukuyama wrote "The End of History". He bragged that Liberal economic and political values had won the day. There would be no more wars between states or serious political argument.
Huntington wrote against that. He posited battles between civilisations, not states. Religions, civilisations and ethnicities would be fighting.
Was it on 9/11 that the modern world began? Was this the Clash of Civilizations which Huntington had warned about?
Or was it this autumn with the extraordinary events, for example Alan Greenspan admitting to a flaw in his thinking and the humilitation of the Masters of the Universe?
The 1st law of economics of Herb Stein is that things that can't go on forever don't. In the US in the last 30 years there've been flat average earnings, with domestic consumers being unable to face up to Galbraith's "inability to accept the concept of reasonable sufficiency".
American consumers bridged the gulf between flat earnings and the American Dream by borrowing spectacular amounts ofmoney. Household debt at the beginning of the period was $680 billion. Now it's $14 trillion. On average there're 13 credit cards/household. 40% of these carry debt. The American national debt was $10 trillion, and it has doubled since the beginning of the century.
This mountain of debt (the UK is also guilty) came about by 'leveraging' - it was sustained by financial instruments which were not only incomprehensible to us but to the people who traded them as well.
18 months ago, a young man explained how the mortgage of an unemployed single parent in Alabama could be sliced, diced and morphed into an investment vehicle which could be traded in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Frankfurt.
I didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. Unfortunately as it turned out, neither did he.
He worked for Lehman Brothers, as it turned out.
Debt and the failure to regulate incomprehensible instruments plus greed and fear have led to the biggest financial crisis in our lifetimes with economic and political consequences which will reverberate.
This is not the death of capitalism. It is not time to relearn the words of the Socialist Internationale. But as Barney Franks points out, it will be some time before someone tells Reagan's favourite joke: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
[Ed: He forgot about the libertarians.]
There has been a lot of discussion about global financial architecture. It is easier to talk about that than to run decent conservative fiscal policy.
Some things need to be done. The G8 is an absurdity. We need IMF, WB to give places at the table to emerging economies, especially Brazil, India and China. In the coming months they will have an agreement to strengthen the surveillance of the IMF of international economics, but the IMF has been pointing out for years that the US UK etc have been borrowing too much money, but the governments did nothing.
One thing we can be sure about is the truth of Flaubert's remark at the start of the Franco-Prussian war: "When this is over, we shall still be stupid". In the meantime it is impossible for America, the EU etc - financial deregulation to piggyback on the opening of tradeable markets [Ed: My notes are unclear about how the two parts of last sentence are linked]
I hope we won't see America and Europe turning in a protectionist direction, to throw out the good of globalisation with what's bad.
This is the main thrust of my argument of the "modern world". I hope nothing in the coming months will oblige me to change these paragraphs. How is the Modern World shaped and by who?
Despite the incontinent draining away of treasure and blood in the 'Thankless deserts of Mesopotamia' (Churchill), what's happened to Wall Street and the moral authority lost at Abu Ghraib, the US is still the global superpower. The only country which matters everywhere.
Open a newspaper from Bangkok to Bogota - there will be something abt the US on almost every page. My own view: if you want to see your own country disappear, you go to America and open an American newspaper.
America matters absolutely everywhere. It has dominance of the global commons:
Militarily (it spends as much on military technology as everyone else combined) whether space, air, land or sea.
America also still has extraordinary eonomic vitality. The US will probably recover more rapidly than, say, the UK.
The US still has a lot of soft power - it won't be long before a, say, President Obama can reestablish the US as a global leader with excellence.
I hope the US will be the principal agent dealing with the problems I'll talk about. We need America to lead, because no one else will.
With the first 4 years of unilateralism of the Bush administration, there has been 4 years of drift, and nothing has gotten easier to solve.
President Obama will have a large agenda. I hope it won't be distorted by protectionism in Congress. It would be a tragedy for America to be multilateralist in foreign security policy, but unilateralist in economic policy.
Europe will play a role in shaping it too. It has substantial civilian power, not military. It is not going to be a military superpower. Those like Robert Kegan criticise Europe for being Venus, not Mars, but we tried Mars, and the consequences were pretty horrendous.
One reason we are not, and will not be a military superpower is that we don't spend enough on defence. Maybe not for the UK and France but certainly for the Germans. Our grandparents and parents worried the Germans spent too much on armaments. I think it's better to worry they are not spending enough. It's a step in the right direction.
Europe still has huge potential for global leadership, on economic issues. Trade, development policy and environmental issues. The victims of this financial crisis are the poorest African countries - their aid is slashed.
Europe has a big demographic challenge which it has not confronted sufficiently. There will be a 20% fall in the population between now and the middle of the century, especially in the countries with the most traditional Catholic social values: Poland, Italy and Spain.
Besides the fall in population there will be aging also. If Europe is to avoid having a falling share of world trade, population and output, it needs to have a fundamental change to increase its rate of economic growth.
But there are problems. Europeans have a standard of living and quality of life rightly identified as the best in the world, and they are nervous about doing anything that might change it, so they are resistant to reform.
The greatest political novel written by a european, in my view, was Lampedusa's "The Leopard". "Things have to change in order to remain the same". There is a reluctance in Europe to accept that.
(Continued in a future post)
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