Archive for the 'General Discussion' Category
05 4th, 2010
In is weekly column, Harlan Ullman of the Atlantic Council writes about a new specter that is haunting the world with great vengeance.
“Today’s specter is bad governance,” he writes. “Bad governance tops the list of the real and potential disasters facing virtually all states. Unless or until this failing can be addressed, resolving other issues will be difficult if not impossible.”
03 9th, 2010
Many thanks to Andrew Kelly, Katrina Brodin and others for bringing me to Glagow’s Aye Write Book Festival. Their hospitality, conversation and tutelage in the origins of the Glasgow Kiss will be unforgettable. Thanks also to Marc Lambert for skillfully guiding my session on globalisation. With the raconteur and journalist Alex Perry, the urbane and challenging Dominique Moisi and a stimulating audience we teased out some crucial issues. I like this one:- One of the bigger fall outs from the Western economic crisis is that China has been given a seat at the top table a decade or so too early. The greed for bankers bonuses tilted the strategic balance of power.
01 16th, 2010
The Economist has published one of the most carefully argued pieces I have seen on the democracy debate.
Here is an extract, but I urge you read the whole article:- Click here: Crying for Freedom – Democracy’s Decline
For freedom-watchers in the West, the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat. Semi-free countries, uncertain which direction to take, seem less convinced that the liberal path is the way of the future. And in the West, opinion-makers are quicker to acknowledge democracy’s drawbacks—and the apparent fact that contested elections do more harm than good when other preconditions for a well-functioning system are absent. It is a sign of the times that a British reporter, Humphrey Hawksley, has written a book with the title: “Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote?”.
01 10th, 2010
Some sixty countries, mostly from the developing world, are planning to use nuclear power in the near future. Many believe that their fuel supplies could be blocked by Western sanctions totally unrelated to their nuclear ambitions, creating the nightmare scenario that they will begin enriching their own uranium. One solution is to create stockpiles of uranium, controlled by the United Nations, that these governments could draw upon. They would be known as international nuclear fuel banks. Two have already been earmarked – one in Russia and one in Kazakhstan – from where Humphrey Hawksley was given unprecedented access.
We were in a wilderness that used to be home to a string of Stalin’s Gulags. Emerging from a swirl of driving snow, the skyline of a brand new city appeared — mirage-like — in the distance. It rose from the frozen white Central Asian Steppe, a city of trophies, of boulevards and monuments, a pyramid, a circular tower, a grand arch and, at the outskirts, a mosque with its four minarets flanked protectively, but respectfully, by commercial sky-scrapers.
The scene reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Was this like a creation of Shelley’s Ozymandias King of Kings with his ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’ standing as symbols of misused power in the desert? Or was it another architectural glimpse of the Asian century whose confidence is stretching from Beijing to Delhi and beyond.
The city was Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, built on the site of a once-isolated railway town in the middle of no-where. Kazakhstan is an oil and gas frontier land and, despite its questionable democracy, a darling of the West.
It used to be a Soviet republic, famous for nuclear testing and its arsenal of weapons – which is why in the coming months it could also become a pivotal global player.
I arrived in Astana from Ust Kamenogorsk, a remote city in the east, once closed to the outside world, whose factories used to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, Kazakhstan stockpiled enough for 55,000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs.
My destination had been the Ulba Metallurgical Plant to look at an idea that had been suggested back in 1953 by President Eisenhower. It was too idealistic at the time and never got off the ground. But now, prompted by the Iran nuclear crisis, it could be right on the button. Eisenhower wanted to create international stockpiles of nuclear fuel available to any country for — as he put it — the peaceful pursuits of mankind.
Wrapped up against the sub-zero cold, we walked under a line of snow-covered pipes to a building where a guard pulled back a huge metal door. In front of us were green freight cars on a railway line; then, to our right a cavernous expanse of warehouse. Down the end was a wired off area inside which were rows of metallic cylinders containing uranium hexafluoride gas – a key stage of the nuclear fuel cycle.
The idea, if it comes off, would be to turn this area into diplomatic territory under United Nations jurisdiction. The International Atomic Energy Agency would control the nuclear fuel stored here and ready for use by any government that needed it for peaceful purposes – regardless of its politics or human rights record.
It would be known as an International Nuclear Fuel bank.
There are some sixty governments planning to use nuclear power in the future. Some, like Syria or Burma, are viewed as hostile to the West. The nightmare scenario is that many start enriching their own uranium, edging them closer to making nuclear weapons. The solution is that they won’t need to because their supplies will be guaranteed through a mechanism like this.
“Kazakhstan, with its experience in handling nuclear materials, is an ideal place to host a fuel bank,” explained the Kazakh foreign minister Kanat Saudabaev. “And this can be a key lever in stopping proliferation, not just for Iran, but also for many other countries.”
We were sitting with his interpreter in the gleaming ministry building in Astana. Like the whole city, it smelt of newness, with tapestries on the walls and minimalist furniture.
“So how come,” I asked, “that you made a decision to give up your nuclear arsenal, when Iran and other countries seem to be chaffing at the bit to get one?”
“It wasn’t easy,” he replied. “At that time, plane after plane arrived with government leaders offering us jumbo jets filled with dollars if we kept our nuclear weapons.”
“Who?” I asked.
His brow crinkled, but he didn’t answer. I eyed the interpreter. “The Muslim countries,” he whispered.
“What, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria….”
The interpreter answered with a barely perceptible nod, and it was then that I remembered what exactly the futuristic skyline of Astana had reminded me of.
It was Iraq. When building his convention centre in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein had commissioned a mural of a similar scene of mosque’s and skyscrapers in his vision of Iraq as forward-looking state of the Islamic world. But he had failed, largely because he opted for confrontation over his weapons of mass destruction.
“By renouncing nuclear weapons,” the foreign minister was saying, “we gained the world’s trust and a huge amount of foreign investment has come in.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “We can only imagine what might have happened if we had kept them. By now we would have become a pariah state.”
01 7th, 2010
Tom Friedman writing in the New York times:-
……no laws or walls we put up will ever be sufficient to protect us unless the Arab and Muslim societies from whence these suicide bombers emerge erect political, religious and moral restraints as well — starting by shaming suicide bombers and naming their actions “murder,” not “martyrdom.”
Murder is about other people; martyrdom is about themselves. It’s the ‘me, me, me,’ thing again.
01 2nd, 2010
In British society the ‘put-down’ is seen as a clever social mechanism in which one person feels good by making another feel bad. One hint of why America works differently comes in the wonderful New York Times illustrated essay by Maria Kalman called And The Pursuit of Happiness in which she lists George Washington’s ‘rules of civility and decent behaviour in company and conversations.
Rule 1:- Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect for those who are present.
01 1st, 2010
A debate on private school curriculla cropped up shortly after midnight at the colourful and imaginatively risque Chelsea Arts Club New Year’s Ball. Two guests, Katie and Lucy, both single, were former pupils at Cheltenham Ladies College. Each fancied men connected with the band — the Peter Golding T Bones Players; one a song writer; another the lead guitarist. Each was introduced, then swiftly back-pedalled, complaining that their school had not taught them how to pull rock musicians. Given the £170,000 plus annual salary of the Cheltenham head teacher, many revellers became drawn into their quandry and thought this skill should be added to the Ladies’ College curriculum. Lucy later conceded, however, her relief at not having to go through the difficult process of eviction in the morning.
11 30th, 2009
The mainly Christian Swiss have voted to ban the building of any more minarets on Muslim places of worship. Now is this liberal or illiberal democracy at work?
11 14th, 2009
Peter Gordon on Democracy Kills in the Asian Review of Books.
Hawksley has an uncanny ability to connect transnational dots in an uncomfortable matter. He writes fluently and easily, whether about Africa, the Middle East, Asia or the Balkans, with a knack for merging observation, anecdote, opinion and analysis, moving from place to place and topic to topic, never dwelling so long on any one point that it becomes repetitive. His descriptions of the chocolate trade in the Ivory Coast and the mess in Iraq are devastating, emotionally as well as intellectually.
Click here: Asian Review of Books — Democracy Kills
11 13th, 2009
Kishore Mahbubani author of The New Asian Hemisphere pays tribute ot Francis Fukiyama in a stimulating piece in the New York Times. He argues that modernisation has spread across the world, but it has been accompanied by de-Westernisation and provocatively states that Francis Fukiyama’s famous essay End of History may have done some serious brain damage to Western minds…which believed that the ‘end of history’ equalled the triumph of the West.’
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/opinion/12iht-edmahbubani.html?_r=1&ref=global
