Archive 1986 – 2017

Dr Pranab Mukherjee, Finance Minister of India, the second fastest growing state in the world, expects India to break through the 10% a year economic growth barrier by the end of next year or early 2012. Then the world’s press will all be talking about the implications of this big race when the horses are going are going at full tilt, neck to neck. In fact, India will appear to be leading by a head if after 20 years of 10% growth China’s falls back a step or two, which is predicted. I was talking two days ago with Dr Mukherjee in his Kolkata home – a simple flat in a modest building, close by a noisy, fumy, honking, main street. He grew up in West Bengal and returns to Kolkata for the weekend as often as he can. He was chosen by Euromoney as the best finance minister in...

I sometimes wonder if the Americans don’t understand the most perceptive, clean and honest politician in Pakistan because they don’t play cricket. Imran Khan, when captain of the Pakistan team, was feted round the cricketing world. Even here in India, 9 years after he “retired” he remains a hero. No other Pakistani has more reach into Indian affections than Imran Khan. Not so long ago I sat next to him at a private dinner party in Islamabad. For over an hour we talked about the ins and outs of volatile and ultra destructive Pakistani politics. Head of his own small political party he made no effort to browbeat me with his youthful charisma. Instead, I found a careful, lucid, almost ordinary guy, showing me the way to cut through the labyrinth of Pakistan’s often destructive, sometimes deadly, political minefields. He could never be accused of being Anti-American or Anti-European. Yet...

To understand what is going on in Korea it is helpful to try to see the conflict from the other side, from that of North Korea. There is no peace agreement after the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement. There is still a state of war between the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK, and the United States. The Armistice Demarcation Line is the 38th parallel. However, no agreement has been reached regarding where that line continues in the sea. The sovereignty of the waters where the recent shelling occurred is disputed. As I write this article, on November 30, 2010, marine forces from South Korea together with US units are conducting a military maneuvre in these disputed waters. Such operations have in the past often been opposed by the North. When shots were fired from the South as a part of that exercise, the North...

Will historians a hundred years hence look at the end of the twentieth century much as we now look at the end of the nineteenth and say, “unfortunately the peace and prosperity of that moment was but an interlude before the bloodiest century in mankind’s history?” Will they conclude, as Aldous Huxley did, that “Every road towards a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war, preparations for war? That is the truth, the odious and unacceptable truth.” Is it? Last weekend’s successful Nato summit with Russia in attendance showed that old tensions can be buried. The agreement to work together on missile defence and other military issues shows that both presidents Barack Obama and Dimitri Mevedev understand the need to cooperate to maintain and further their peace unlike their immediate predecessors. Nevertheless, the pessimists of our day have grist for their mill...

Just before he died at the end of the twentieth century, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin said, “It was the worst century that Europe ever had. Worse, I suspect, even than the days of the Huns. And why? Because in our modern age nationalism is not resurgent; it never died. Neither did racism. They are the most powerful movements in the world today cutting across many social systems”. In his book “Pandemonium”, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that “there are just eight states on earth which both existed in 1914 and have not had their form of government changed by violence since then”. These are the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Switzerland, Sweden and New Zealand. “The defining mode of conflict in the era ahead is ethnic conflict”, wrote Moynihan. “It promises to be savage. Get ready for 50 new countries in the world in the next 50 years....

when in a flurry of diplomatic activity over the Spratlys, Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, worked his way round the Southeast Asian countries which also lay claim to the islands. Even this month there have been naval exercises  in the South China SeaThe trip was only a partial success. Mr Zhu did his best with a tight brief to give the impression that China is more interested in conciliation than conflict. Nevertheless, his spokesman indicated that China is not prepared to modify its total and exclusive claim to “the historic waters” of the South China Sea. Even in recent months there have near clashes between China and the Philippines – and, long continuing, China has verbally clashed with Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and the Philippines. All of the smaller countries are united in believing that the threat from China will continue to hang over them until there is a binding legal...

The country most advanced in dealing with the interrelated problems of child trafficking and prostitution is Sweden. Helene Karle, the secretary general of the Swedish branch of Ecpat, a world wide organization based in Bangkok to counter the commercial sexual exploitation of children, told me of two horrific incidents. The first was of a brothel in Thailand which caught fire. They found the bodies of 12-15 year old girls tied to the beds. A second was of an 11 year old girl killed by a man with a vibrator that broke inside her vagina. Neighbours, hearing her cries in the dark, rushed her to hospital but it was too late. She had lost too much blood. Both of these incidents were girls “serving” foreign tourists. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “Several million people are the victims of human trafficking every year. About 80% is related to...

26 October, 2010 Jonathan Power First, a guess about the mid-term elections in America. Second, historical facts. The guess: if the Democrats lose their majorities in the House of Representatives and even the Senate it will serve President Barack Obama well in the general election in two years’ time. Obama can use the Republican majority to his advantage: showing up with sharp clarity what the Republicans want to do to substitute for the Obama achievements- the best list of passed legislation and executive decisions made by any president since Franklin Roosevelt. This will give the Republicans an almighty headache as they have no policies they agree on, apart from dismantling the health care bill. An attack on that will fall short as the benefits of it become much more tangible over the next two years. Not least, the Republicans could more easily than hitherto be shown up for the mess...

Georgi Arbatov, who died this month, was the Soviet Union’s supreme two timer. On one side was the Soviet Union. On the other was the US. He spoke to them both, attempting to bring them together. He advised four Soviet leaders. When Mikhail Gorbachev took the top job he became his closest foreign affairs advisor. Gorbachev told his secretary that whenever Arbatov phoned she was to put him right through. He wasn’t exactly a chameleon but he was a fixture in US foreign policy circles where at the height of the Cold War he argued the case for détente, suggesting it was in America’s interest as well as the Soviet Union’s. The USSR, he maintained, was not hostile to the West and wanted to get out of the straightjacket of the Cold War. At times he could sound like an American liberal Democrat. Indeed Senator Edward Kennedy was a friend...

I have just returned from a different world – one I would imagine that the British astronomer, Steven Hawkings, has never thought of. It made me think that if we are making a list of the underdeveloped countries we had better add to that North America and most of Europe and Japan. I’ve been in Norway, the world’s most advanced country, apart from Iceland, in successfully pursuing the art of making women equal. In a week I’ve met all sorts of women- women in high positions in companies, women working whilst the man stays at home with the baby, senior female civil servants and female doctors, who form a majority in the hospitals. I should add to that school girls and female university students who are away ahead of boys in terms of achievement. I don’t want to drown you in statistics but here are a handful of the main...

If Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy as the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom it is now living out in real time its almost forgotten societal dream, an economic-cum-social revolution. The retiring president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, has bequeathed the nation a vibrant capitalist economy with a human face- an economy that has raised income per head quite substantially (it is now twelve times that of India or China), has almost abolished daily hunger and given the large majority of the poor an income supplement in return for families sending their children to school. Still, after 8 years of Lula, the country struggles to stay ahead of its burgeoning population, the inequities of the feudal land system that cast millions into shanty towns and a murder rate in the slum favelas that...

, just as it did in 1894 and 1932. Three hundred years ago both India and China, by world standards, were heavyweight economies. But even at their zenith they never considered going to war, as the Europeans regularly did. Neither do they today, even though one school of Indian strategists argue with no real evidence that China is India’s enemy number one, not Pakistan. They say that India had to develop a nuclear arsenal not because of a possible Pakistani threat but because of China. Nevertheless, it is true that China has been raising its defence spending, especially on its navy (but from a very low base) – in sharp contrast to the days of Deng Xiaoping, the great economic reformer, who put China on its present high growth capitalist projectory, at the same time sharply cut defence spending. China is active abroad – in Africa it has become its...