"We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming." - Don Delillo

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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.