Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Saturday, January 22, 2005
LONDON Japan is once more going from strength to strength, and this time not just on the economic front. Militarily, diplomatically and in terms of cultural influence and general global activism, Japan is transforming itself, and at speed - not merely into a “normal” country, but into a formidable player across a wide front.
.
Militarily, the Japanese have embarked on a huge upgrade of their overall power-projection capabilities, reinforced by a big expansion of intelligence resources and of their already large satellite program.
.
In effect, this is a farewell to the old “Yoshida doctrine,” which based security strictly on national self-defense. Instead, it ushers in a new phase of “equal partnership” defense arrangements, especially with the United States, with interlocking ground, air and maritime forces at an unprecedented level of interoperability and intimacy.
.
This is going hand in hand with the procurement of a mass of new sophisticated weaponry and an extensive command-and-control make-over, adding up to a force structure second only to that of the Americans, and in some areas equal to it in quality and certainly well ahead of most other military establishments around the world.
.
Japan is not “going nuclear,” and there is no great interest in that option. But the decision has been made to procure a full system of ballistic missile defense, and to work further with the Americans in this area.
.
In short, Japan is re-emerging as a major military power both in East Asia and globally. But that is only part of the new picture.
.
After years of immobilism, Japan has now wheeled forward a strongly proactive foreign-policy-making system, which puts it at the center of the world diplomatic scene. For example, the country is playing a central role in Indian Ocean rescue-and-recovery operations, and it won out against China over the route of the proposed oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific.
.
Japan’s passion for balance and harmony is satisfied by the matching of much closer U.S. security links with heavy economic gravitation toward China. Thus bets are hedged all around, with some far-sighted policy makers eyeing India as the next big destination for Japanese investment - a counterweight to the Chinese counterweight, so to speak.
.
If all this sounds like old-style realpolitik and “hard power” talk, then look at the cultural front - clothes designs, interior décor themes, films, art, food, lifestyles - where American brands are being challenged and driven out by “Tokyo cool.”
.
After Japan’s decade of stagnation and the prolonged quagmire of deflation and non-performing loans, its banks are gradually cleaning their balance sheets, consumers are cautiously spending again and cutting-edge innovation is re-emerging all across the manufacturing front. But is this recovery just another phase in the cycle of the country’s amazing ups and downs since World War II?
.
It is indeed more than just a commercial replay of the past - it is Japan on a fundamentally new policy trajectory. What strikes the outsider is how the repositioning this time is being given an intellectual underpinning of admirable depth and thoroughness.
.
This is both refreshing and necessary, since Japanese public opinion is being asked to turn from its years of pacificism to the opposite - a strong forward stance in world affairs, as exemplified by the expanding commitment in Iraq and even a willingness to sign up to pre-emptive security doctrines which, so their American partners insist, are an essential part of the war on terror. These are the new tests of “normal country” status that Japan is thinking through and to which it now seeks to adjust.
.
All this is something new on the world stage, as yet little noticed in the West, and it could prove to be either good news or bad news.
.
The obvious “good” arises from the prospect of the world’s second-largest economic power at last stepping confidently and determinedly into the international arena and sharing the burden of tackling and soothing the world’s many sicknesses. The less happy prospect is of a Japan more enmeshed than ever with American military power and therefore arousing even more hostility in a prickly China, regardless of Japanese investment.
.
Despite these dangers, the positive outcomes from Japan’s new direction look worth backing. But they need to be understood and interpreted correctly by the West, not lost in translation.
.

Japan I
 
LONDON Japan is once more going from strength to strength, and this time not just on the economic front. Militarily, diplomatically and in terms of cultural influence and general global activism, Japan is transforming itself, and at speed - not merely into a “normal” country, but into a formidable player across a wide front.
.
Militarily, the Japanese have embarked on a huge upgrade of their overall power-projection capabilities, reinforced by a big expansion of intelligence resources and of their already large satellite program.
.
In effect, this is a farewell to the old “Yoshida doctrine,” which based security strictly on national self-defense. Instead, it ushers in a new phase of “equal partnership” defense arrangements, especially with the United States, with interlocking ground, air and maritime forces at an unprecedented level of interoperability and intimacy.
.
This is going hand in hand with the procurement of a mass of new sophisticated weaponry and an extensive command-and-control make-over, adding up to a force structure second only to that of the Americans, and in some areas equal to it in quality and certainly well ahead of most other military establishments around the world.
.
Japan is not “going nuclear,” and there is no great interest in that option. But the decision has been made to procure a full system of ballistic missile defense, and to work further with the Americans in this area.
.
In short, Japan is re-emerging as a major military power both in East Asia and globally. But that is only part of the new picture.
.
After years of immobilism, Japan has now wheeled forward a strongly proactive foreign-policy-making system, which puts it at the center of the world diplomatic scene. For example, the country is playing a central role in Indian Ocean rescue-and-recovery operations, and it won out against China over the route of the proposed oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific.
.
Japan’s passion for balance and harmony is satisfied by the matching of much closer U.S. security links with heavy economic gravitation toward China. Thus bets are hedged all around, with some far-sighted policy makers eyeing India as the next big destination for Japanese investment - a counterweight to the Chinese counterweight, so to speak.
.
If all this sounds like old-style realpolitik and “hard power” talk, then look at the cultural front - clothes designs, interior décor themes, films, art, food, lifestyles - where American brands are being challenged and driven out by “Tokyo cool.”
.
After Japan’s decade of stagnation and the prolonged quagmire of deflation and non-performing loans, its banks are gradually cleaning their balance sheets, consumers are cautiously spending again and cutting-edge innovation is re-emerging all across the manufacturing front. But is this recovery just another phase in the cycle of the country’s amazing ups and downs since World War II?
.
It is indeed more than just a commercial replay of the past - it is Japan on a fundamentally new policy trajectory. What strikes the outsider is how the repositioning this time is being given an intellectual underpinning of admirable depth and thoroughness.
.
This is both refreshing and necessary, since Japanese public opinion is being asked to turn from its years of pacificism to the opposite - a strong forward stance in world affairs, as exemplified by the expanding commitment in Iraq and even a willingness to sign up to pre-emptive security doctrines which, so their American partners insist, are an essential part of the war on terror. These are the new tests of “normal country” status that Japan is thinking through and to which it now seeks to adjust.
.
All this is something new on the world stage, as yet little noticed in the West, and it could prove to be either good news or bad news.
.
The obvious “good” arises from the prospect of the world’s second-largest economic power at last stepping confidently and determinedly into the international arena and sharing the burden of tackling and soothing the world’s many sicknesses. The less happy prospect is of a Japan more enmeshed than ever with American military power and therefore arousing even more hostility in a prickly China, regardless of Japanese investment.
.
Despite these dangers, the positive outcomes from Japan’s new direction look worth backing. But they need to be understood and interpreted correctly by the West, not lost in translation.
.

Japan I
 
LONDON Japan is once more going from strength to strength, and this time not just on the economic front. Militarily, diplomatically and in terms of cultural influence and general global activism, Japan is transforming itself, and at speed - not merely into a “normal” country, but into a formidable player across a wide front.
.
Militarily, the Japanese have embarked on a huge upgrade of their overall power-projection capabilities, reinforced by a big expansion of intelligence resources and of their already large satellite program.
.
In effect, this is a farewell to the old “Yoshida doctrine,” which based security strictly on national self-defense. Instead, it ushers in a new phase of “equal partnership” defense arrangements, especially with the United States, with interlocking ground, air and maritime forces at an unprecedented level of interoperability and intimacy.
.
This is going hand in hand with the procurement of a mass of new sophisticated weaponry and an extensive command-and-control make-over, adding up to a force structure second only to that of the Americans, and in some areas equal to it in quality and certainly well ahead of most other military establishments around the world.
.
Japan is not “going nuclear,” and there is no great interest in that option. But the decision has been made to procure a full system of ballistic missile defense, and to work further with the Americans in this area.
.
In short, Japan is re-emerging as a major military power both in East Asia and globally. But that is only part of the new picture.
.
After years of immobilism, Japan has now wheeled forward a strongly proactive foreign-policy-making system, which puts it at the center of the world diplomatic scene. For example, the country is playing a central role in Indian Ocean rescue-and-recovery operations, and it won out against China over the route of the proposed oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific.
.
Japan’s passion for balance and harmony is satisfied by the matching of much closer U.S. security links with heavy economic gravitation toward China. Thus bets are hedged all around, with some far-sighted policy makers eyeing India as the next big destination for Japanese investment - a counterweight to the Chinese counterweight, so to speak.
.
If all this sounds like old-style realpolitik and “hard power” talk, then look at the cultural front - clothes designs, interior décor themes, films, art, food, lifestyles - where American brands are being challenged and driven out by “Tokyo cool.”
.
After Japan’s decade of stagnation and the prolonged quagmire of deflation and non-performing loans, its banks are gradually cleaning their balance sheets, consumers are cautiously spending again and cutting-edge innovation is re-emerging all across the manufacturing front. But is this recovery just another phase in the cycle of the country’s amazing ups and downs since World War II?
.
It is indeed more than just a commercial replay of the past - it is Japan on a fundamentally new policy trajectory. What strikes the outsider is how the repositioning this time is being given an intellectual underpinning of admirable depth and thoroughness.
.
This is both refreshing and necessary, since Japanese public opinion is being asked to turn from its years of pacificism to the opposite - a strong forward stance in world affairs, as exemplified by the expanding commitment in Iraq and even a willingness to sign up to pre-emptive security doctrines which, so their American partners insist, are an essential part of the war on terror. These are the new tests of “normal country” status that Japan is thinking through and to which it now seeks to adjust.

Posted at 11:50 PM · Comments (0)

1/30/05

When Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point five years ago, he had no idea what a sensation it would be. It was so difficult to classify that he wasn’t even sure where it would be put in bookshops. Yet his guide to the spread of ideas, trends and fads went on to become a global bestseller, selling more than 800,000 copies. It helped to launch the field of viral marketing and has been described as one of those rare books that changes the way you think. So it is no surprise that his new book - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - has been a bestseller on Amazon for months, even though it is not due to be published until next week.

Gladwell has suggested we meet in Savoy, a chic Mediterranean-style restaurant in SoHo, downtown Manhattan, among the fashionable boutiques and artists’ lofts. He wrote much of Blink here, on leave from The New Yorker magazine, where he is a staff writer and thinker-at-large, renowned for thought-provoking essays on subjects as diverse as plagiarism, drug prices and the science of tomato sauce.

Savoy is a warm respite from the driving rain outside, and the upstairs restaurant is quiet - just a few couples and some businessmen. Minutes after the agreed meeting time, Gladwell slips into the seat opposite, greets me warmly and apologises for his late arrival. “I normally eat the burgers here, which are excellent,” he says. “But I was just in Scotland where I had some great sausages.” It takes me longer to choose grilled spiced lamb kebab with cucumber salad and yoghurt vinaigrette on whole wheat flatbread from the Savoy’s richly annotated menu.

Gladwell is quietly spoken and casually dressed in T-shirt and V-neck jumper. My first impression is of a young academic, but with an ineffable air of coolness, an image enhanced perhaps by his Jimi Hendrix Afro hairstyle. (His mother is Jamaican; his father English.)

He looks different from the press photos I have seen. His hair is longer and herein lies a tale, and the genesis of Blink. Gladwell says his life started to change “in many small ways” when he decided to let his hair grow a few years ago: he started to get picked up for speeding, he was taken out of the line at airports; he was even mistaken by the police for a rapist. “I was amazed at the impact of such a small change. It got me thinking about snap judgments. How powerful they are when they are right and how dangerous when wrong,” he says.

The waitress takes our order. Gladwell dispenses with a starter and wine, and I follow suit.

You could say Blink is about trusting your intuition, though Gladwell won’t. “I hate that word, it’s so overloaded - it’s a way of demeaning this process, saying it’s all emotional. I really want people to take snap judgments seriously. Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t obliterate its legitimacy,” he says, twisting a lock of wiry hair around his finger.

Blink is what Gladwell calls an “intellectual adventure story” in the spirit of The Tipping Point. However, instead of big theories about social dynamics, Gladwell has turned his attention to the first couple of seconds in which we make decisions, what he variously dubs “rapid cognition” or “thin slicing”. His thesis is this: quick decisions based on first impressions are often much better than those made after lengthy analysis; less information can be better than more; or simply: sometimes the best way to judge a book is by its cover. (Although he also shows how people can make extraordinarily bad, tragic, snap decisions.)

Gladwell introduces an array of characters who excel at “rapid cognition” in different contexts. As in The Tipping Point, he draws stories from a wide range of domains: food tasting, car sales, war games, chair design, even speed-dating. I ask him where he gets his ideas. “People tell me a lot. And I root aimlessly around libraries. Everything in Blink comes from a different place, comes out of some idiosyncratic encounters with a book or someone who told me a story,” he says, making it seem deceptively easy.

I ask whether it was difficult to write Blink following the huge success of The Tipping Point. “No, not at all. The success of The Tipping Point was totally unexpected. It was a gift. It was like a bolt of lightning,” he says. “I will accept whatever fate this book grants me. Personally, I feel it is a more rigorous book. I don’t know whether that makes the book better or worse - but as a writer it’s a little bit more satisfying.

”I realise, however, that I have fallen completely into the rock band problem - a very popular first album, then a second album where they ‘want to do something more interesting’ but it turns out to be much worse,” he says with a wry smile.

He dubs this “the Radiohead problem”. Gladwell has a gift at coining sticky catchphrases to describe and present his ideas - such as the “tipping point” itself. Blink is full of them: the Warren Harding Error, the Storytelling Problem, the Perils of Introspection - it is one reason why he is unlikely to suffer from the “Radiohead problem”.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided people into foxes, who know many little things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing and Gladwell, unsurprisingly, identifies himself as a fox. He believes his eclecticism and curiosity is due in part to his upbringing. Although he grew up in Canada, he is English. “The best kind of English person,” he jokes. “One who has left.” (His parents moved to Canada in the late 1960s to escape the racial climate in Britain at the time.)

”There is something about being an immigrant that allows you to explore your surroundings with enthusiasm, without any fetters or allegiance. And my parents are very curious and open-minded people, they encouraged this kind of ethnicity.”

The conversation turns to marketing, a subject close to Gladwell’s heart. In Blink, he reveals an astonishing fact: simply by asking someone to explain their personal preferences, their preferences change. People are not good at expressing what they like, so when asked to choose something new, that they don’t understand, they opt for the familiar. This is particularly true when products are experienced briefly, divorced from their context. Gladwell says this is why focus groups, the bedrock of marketing research, don’t work, particularly when it comes to new or radical ideas. “Most people who use focus groups hate them. Yet everyone participates in this fiction to get the answer they want. We have inadvertently created a culture of conservatism in large corporations. We don’t… realise we are doing it, so that’s a significant cost,” he says.

The proprietor arrives at our table and greets Gladwell warmly. “I am being interviewed. I have turned your restaurant into a place of business,” he jokes.

One of the most provocative sections of Blink concerns a military simulation undertaken by the US military in 2002. Gladwell tells how a marine officer, Paul van Riper, recruited to play a rogue military leader in the Gulf in the war game, fought US forces that were equipped with the most comprehensive and developed information systems known to man. Using a low-technology approach, combined with the element of surprise, he won.

”One of the themes here is the unwarranted overconfidence that comes from thinking you have all the information,” he says. “In Blink, I quote the study where doctors are given various kinds of information about a patient.

”And you discover that there is no difference in the accuracy of the diagnoses whether they receive two pages, five pages or 10 pages of information. The only thing that is different is the confidence in these judgments.

”There is this myth that the US military did no planning. They did do planning. It’s just that the planning was preposterous. They were just massively overconfident, they knew that country, they had been there 10 years before, they thought they knew Saddam Hussein, they thought that they had all the pieces,” he says wiping his plate clean with some bread.

Although Gladwell has been doing most of the talking, he finishes eating well before me. After we order coffees and dessert, the conversation drifts over a broad terrain: twins, Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris (of The Fog of War fame), the recent election (on which he is scrupulously neutral). Gladwell is innately inquisitive, always voluble, but also a very good listener.

Before we leave, I want to talk about the subject of priming, possibly one of the most fascinating ideas in the book. In Blink, Gladwell reveals how people’s behaviour can be powerfully influenced by their frame of mind. “Prime” students in a quiz to think of professors and they perform better; prime them to think of soccer hooligans and their performance deteriorates. Ask black people to fill in their race in a questionnaire and they achieve lower test scores. Gladwell paints a picture of a mutable, highly malleable personality, under the influence of unconscious forces that are poorly understood. It’s radical stuff, I suggest.

”While writing Blink I became profoundly sceptical of our ideas of personhood. I think that we have a set of highly specific idiosyncratic responses to specific situations but I no longer believe much in the idea of character,” he says. “It is radical, but that’s why it’s fun.”

Posted at 11:16 PM · Comments (0)

JAN. 30 is here at last, and the light is at the end of the tunnel, again. By my estimate, Iraq’s election day is the fifth time that American troops have been almost on their way home from an about-to-be pacified Iraq. The four other incipient V-I days were the liberation of Baghdad (April 9, 2003), President Bush’s declaration that “major combat operations have ended” (May 1, 2003), the arrest of Saddam Hussein (Dec. 14, 2003) and the handover of sovereignty to our puppet of choice, Ayad Allawi (June 28, 2004). And this isn’t even counting the two “decisive” battles for our nouveau Tet, Falluja. Iraq is Vietnam on speed - the false endings of that tragic decade re-enacted and compressed in jump cuts, a quagmire retooled for the MTV attention span.

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But in at least one way we are not back in Vietnam. Iraq hawks, like Vietnam hawks before them, often take the line that to criticize America’s mission in Iraq is to attack the troops. That paradigm just doesn’t hold. Americans, including those opposed to the war, love the troops (Lynndie England always excepted). Not even the most unhinged Bush hater is calling our all-volunteer army “baby killers.” This time, paradoxically enough, it is often those who claim to love the troops the most - and who have the political power to help alleviate their sacrifice - who turn out to be the troops’ false friends.

There was, for instance, according to the Los Angeles Times, “nary a mention” of the Iraq war or “the prices paid by American soldiers and their families” at the lavish Inauguration bash thrown for the grandees of the Christian right by the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton. This crowd cares about the troops much the way the Fifth Avenue swells in the 1936 Hollywood classic “My Man Godfrey” cared about the “forgotten men” of the Depression - as fashion ornaments and rhetorical conveniences. In that screwball comedy, a socialite on a scavenger hunt collects a genuine squatter from the shantytown along the East River. “All you have to do is go to the Waldorf-Ritz Hotel with me,” she tells her recruit, “and I’ll show you to a few people and then I’ll send you right back.”

In this same vein, television’s ceremonial coverage of the Inauguration, much of which resembled the martial pageantry broadcast by state-owned networks in banana republics, made a dutiful show out of the White House’s claim that the four-day bacchanal was a salute to the troops. The only commentator to rudely call attention to the disconnect between that fictional pretense and the reality was Judy Bachrach, a writer for Vanity Fair, who dared say on Fox News that the inaugural’s military ball and prayer service would not keep troops “safe and warm” in their “flimsy” Humvees in Iraq. She was promptly given the hook. (The riveting three-minute clip, labeled “Fair and Balanced Inauguration,” can be found at ifilm.com, where it has seized the “most popular” slot once owned by Jon Stewart’s slapdown of Tucker Carlson.)

Posted at 10:58 PM · Comments (0)

DAVOS, Switzerland: After decades languishing as the last item on the global agenda, seemingly helpless to stem its own decline, Africa is poised this year for what the rock-star Bono called “its moment” - a time when the world will be pressed to provide the money and the will to reverse a continent’s slide.
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To reinforce the point Thursday at the World Economic Forum in this Swiss resort, an American billionaire, a former American president, a British prime minister, two African presidents and Bono himself took to the stage to drum home the point to an assembly of more than 2,000 of the world’s rich and powerful people.
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If their entreaties had a loud subtext, though, it was that the Bush administration will come under mounting pressure this year to underpin an effort to give Africa a new boost. Washington, that is, will be called upon to maintain its commitment to spending billions of dollars to counter AIDS and foster development and to expand the portion of its wealth that it spends on the continent.
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“The United States needs to move further up the table” of aid donors, as listed by the proportion of their overall wealth that they contribute to development aid, Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, said at a news conference. Gates, who has just announced a $750 million gift to help poor children gain access to vaccines, was speaking shortly before he, Bono and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joined Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and the former U.S. president Bill Clinton at a public session that ranked as one of the heavyweight events here…

…This year, Prime Minister Blair has pledged to use his chairmanship of the G-8 wealthy nations and Britain’s forthcoming presidency of the EU to begin what he called Thursday “a big, big push forward.”

Africa’s battle with AIDS, poverty and decline were “so shocking that it almost defies our imagination,” he said.

“If what was happening in Africa happened in any other part of the world there would be such a scandal and clamor,” he said. “Africa is the one continent that has been going back over the last 30 years.”
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The response, Blair said, would come through increased aid, efforts to end African conflicts and moves to end official corruption and tyranny.
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It would also come through enhanced campaigns against killer diseases such as AIDS and malaria.
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One British idea, called the International Finance Facility, is to tap an extra $50 billion in development aid around the world by raising money in advance on global financial markets.
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Those themes are familiar but Westerners are hoping that African leaders will take charge of their destiny after a history of colonialism and cold war division. In changing some of its institutions to deal with its own social and economic problems, Obasanjo said, African leaders had shown that “we want to help ourselves.” But, he said, the levels of aid to deal with deficiencies in food, jobs, schools and health care were not enough.
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“We are getting aid, but what are we getting it for? We are getting aid when we have flood, disaster. We are not getting the critical mass of funds to make development possible,” he said.
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Not only that, but with conflicts in Darfur, Congo, Ivory Coast and other places, Mbeki said, “the priority we have set ourselves is to say: obviously we have to address matters of peace and stability on the continent, make sure that we end all these conflicts, because without that we don’t have development.”
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The issue is as much how to raise new money as how to ensure it is spent effectively at a time when western governments are preoccupied with matters such as the war in Iraq, nuclear policy in Iran and with disasters such as the Asian tsunami that threaten to divert aid from Africa.
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Moreover, Clinton said, while America’s business and political elite were beginning to pay more attention to Africa, “we have never created an effective political constituency” in support of the continent’s development needs.
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“It is never a voting issue” that politicians see as likely to determine whether they win elections, Clinton said.
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At the conference, President Jacques Chirac of France suggested a series of international taxes to raise money to combat AIDS and promote development - including a levy on money transfers into countries like Switzerland with strict banking secrecy laws.
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But that idea - which won some support from the financier George Soros on Thursday - did not seem to meet with much approval on the podium.
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Clinton warned against “us getting diverted into that instead of keeping people alive.” The issue of America’s keeping promises that President George W. Bush has already made seems likely to recur.
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The United States “should not retreat under the weight of these crushing budget deficits,” Bono said.
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Against that, Senator Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, said America led the world in Tsunami relief efforts and provided 60 percent of the world’s emergency food supplies.
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“We are the world’s single biggest resource of aid,” he said.
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Talk of the Tsunami disaster inspired Obasanjo to say that he had thought “the milk of human kindness had been sucked from humanity” by the world’s weariness with giving.
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But the generosity of the global charitable response to the Asian disaster “gives me courage, gives me hope and makes me feel that we can still make it.”
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Bono offered one more reason why the world should help. Around 40 percent of Africa’s people are Muslim, he said, and some African states risked becoming labeled failed states as Afghanistan was under the Taliban regime.
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“Africa is not the frontline of the war against terrorism,” he said. “But it could be soon.”
.

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See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
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< < Back to Start of Article
DAVOS, Switzerland: After decades languishing as the last item on the global agenda, seemingly helpless to stem its own decline, Africa is poised this year for what the rock-star Bono called “its moment” - a time when the world will be pressed to provide the money and the will to reverse a continent’s slide.
.
To reinforce the point Thursday at the World Economic Forum in this Swiss resort, an American billionaire, a former American president, a British prime minister, two African presidents and Bono himself took to the stage to drum home the point to an assembly of more than 2,000 of the world’s rich and powerful people.
.
If their entreaties had a loud subtext, though, it was that the Bush administration will come under mounting pressure this year to underpin an effort to give Africa a new boost. Washington, that is, will be called upon to maintain its commitment to spending billions of dollars to counter AIDS and foster development and to expand the portion of its wealth that it spends on the continent.
.
“The United States needs to move further up the table” of aid donors, as listed by the proportion of their overall wealth that they contribute to development aid, Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, said at a news conference. Gates, who has just announced a $750 million gift to help poor children gain access to vaccines, was speaking shortly before he, Bono and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joined Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and the former U.S. president Bill Clinton at a public session that ranked as one of the heavyweight events here.
.
For as long as it has been in decline, of course, much of Africa has been the object of earnest debate and handwringing, even as other regions of the world once known for their poverty struggled to gain niches in the global economy. The themes of poverty and disease have changed little, except to worsen.
.
This year, Prime Minister Blair has pledged to use his chairmanship of the G-8 wealthy nations and Britain’s forthcoming presidency of the EU to begin what he called Thursday “a big, big push forward.”
.
Africa’s battle with AIDS, poverty and decline were “so shocking that it almost defies our imagination,” he said.
.
“If what was happening in Africa happened in any other part of the world there would be such a scandal and clamor,” he said. “Africa is the one continent that has been going back over the last 30 years.”…

see the entire article at the link below.
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Posted at 3:41 PM · Comments (0)

An interesting follow-up to the Lawrence Summers controversy.

Posted at 3:23 PM · Comments (0)

This is absolutely hilarious. Listen for yourselves at the link below.

Posted at 3:20 PM · Comments (0)

2004 was the year of jun-ai (pure love), epitomized by the huge popularity of Yon-sama (the reverential nickname for Bae Yong Joon, star of the hit Korean drama “Winter Sonata”) and a craze for sentimental love stories that gripped the nation from Hokkaido to the Okinawa.

So what exactly is a jun-ai relationship? Well, it should be platonic or, at most, include just one sexual encounter. A jun-ai couple should also be faced by many obstacles contrived to keep them apart and pining for a romantic reunion. Jun-ai quotient also rises if it’s a hatsukoi (first love) situation — a pair who fell in love when they were 15 and somehow managed to keep those nascent emotions intact in spite of the passage of time.

The Japanese set great store on the hatsukoi thing, being convinced that the purest love comes when one has never loved before. For this reason hatsukoi is considered sacrosanct, a treasure that will never be tarnished with petty problems that inevitably plague a relationship between seasoned lovers.

Ideally, one or the other of the hatuskoi couple will die (preferably in his/her teens) at the peak of their love, thereby preserving the memory of the relationship, in all its purity, beauty and fervor, forever. Which brings us to “Seka-chu” (short for “Sekai no Chushin de Ai wo Sakebu [Crying out Love in the Center of the World]”), the miniseries that rivaled “Fuyu-Sona” (short for “Fuyu no Sonata [Winter Sonata]) in terms of hankie-wringing. Even the Shibuya gals called out “Seka-chu mitaina koi ga shitai!” (I want to have a relationship like the one in ‘Seka-chu’!) and subsequently toned down their makeup in preparation for the pure, honmono no koi (genuine love).

Yes, the once-chic otegaru na kankei (casual affair) is out — along with burgers, konbini (convenience stores) and other evils of fast-food culture. Nothing is tackier than having a string of sefure (sex friends) but no real kareshi (boyfriend) with whom to take walks, dinners and enjoy long, meaningful conversations. The important thing (for women, anyway) is to get into rabu modo (love mode) before they throw themselves into a full-fledged relationship, to be ready for romance so that when the daarin (darling) does come along, he will spot the signs immediately. Then they can both launch into that most coveted of states: uru-uru na ai (starry-eyed love).

According to the numerous rabu ankeeto (surveys about love and relationships) printed in Japan’s myriad fashion magazines this time of year, young women long more for shinmitsusa (intimacy) over sex and enjoy the process of seduction far more than its consummation. For this, women polish their bodies and hydrate their skins (the effect is called rabu-hada, or skin that’s made for love) in order to appear jun (pure), shiawase (happy) and stress-free and emulate the lovely, almost-unattainable heroine in a jun-ai monogatari (story).

They also welcome a bit of pain, for what’s true love without a thin icing of setsunasa (sadness) over all the delicious sweetness? The phrase setsunai yo (I feel a little blue) has practically become a compliment when spoken between two lovers; it means they’re capable of finely nuanced emotions and that by sharing their depression they feel that their relationship could last a long time.

What a lot of women say, however, is that the young men of this country are too thick to understand this need for emotional drama. Twenty nine-year-old Minako says resignedly: “Kono kuni no otokowa fukami ga nakute nijigenteki sugiru” (The men in this country have no depth and are too two-dimensional).

The men, on the other hand, say that it’s enough to kokuru (confess their love) with commitment and sincerity; after that, where’s the need to discuss emotions? “Suki to ittandakara mou iiyo” (I said I love you, so that’s that) is a famed line spoken by the hero in one of the torendii dorama (trendy dramas) the networks churn out with regularity.

Men are also bound by tradition: For a long time, any Japanese male who spewed forth about kojinteki kanjyou (personal feelings) was considered a big-time wimp and a loser. However, recognizing society’s need for men to hone their verbal skills, many companies now encourage their male employees to participate in company-sponsored communications classes. Whether this new trend will transform them all into Japanified versions of “Yon-sama” remains to be seen.

And another, somewhat related piece, by Phil Brasor, another of my favorites at the JT:

MEDIA MIX

Single thirtysomethings under the spotlight

By PHILIP BRASOR

Last weekend, Nihon TV broadcast a two-hour program based on Junko Sakai’s bestselling book “Makeinu no Toboe (The Howl of the Loser Dog),” a piece of nonfiction. The show, however, was a standard trendy drama, meaning long on ritzy real-estate and product placements, short on situations that resemble real life.

Thanks to Sakai, “makeinu” has become an everyday word that the media uses to describe a female thirtysomething who’s not married but wishes she were. In the book, however, the definition is narrower: women approaching 40 with insecure jobs and no marriage prospects in sight.

The drama took a predictably neutral view. The three makeinu represented three distinct types: One was a very successful businesswoman who longed for marriage and children but who found fulfillment in her professional responsibilities; another was a divorced, childless woman who didn’t see any point in going through marriage again; and the third was a ditzy fashion fatality who wanted to marry but only if the man had lots of money and she didn’t have to give up her frivolous lifestyle.

For balance, a kachiinu (winner dog) was written into the story, a housewife who once worked with the businesswoman but now finds satisfaction taking care of her husband and son full-time.

At some point in the drama, each character came to doubt the direction her life had taken, but, in the end, they all learned to appreciate what they had. The forced even-handedness was infuriating, but the show’s lukewarm attitude was a welcome corrective to the media’s more judgmental interpretation of the terms. As one character put it, “Makeinu and kachiinu are just words,” meaning they make it easy to stereotype women.

Stereotypes are easier to work with than complex issues, and makeinu has become a convenient buzz word in the escalating public debate about later marriages and declining birthrates.

The makeinu stereotype implies that responsibility for Japan’s birthrate crisis lies with unmarried women in their 30s. The weekly magazine Aera has been instrumental in promoting this view. In a recent issue, there was an article that focused on a 37-year-old man who makes about 7 million yen a year and owns a condominium in Tokyo but can’t find a woman who’s interested in him. He attends matchmaking parties but finds that single women his age are looking for someone with more money and a higher position.

Sakai, it should be noted, wrote in defense of makeinu and blamed men for the marriage stalemate, saying that single Japanese males in their 30s were immature and uninterested in “real women.” But the Aera article says the opposite, and supports its assertion with its own survey. Their most interesting finding is that 80 percent of the single male respondents said they would marry a woman who made more money than they did, while only 10 percent of the single women said they would marry a man who made less money than they did. Similarly, 60 percent of the men said they would gladly become househusbands, while an equal percentage of women said they would never want their spouses to be homemakers.

The upshot is that, contrary to popular belief, it is men who have become more open-minded about the economic aspects of marriage and not women. As one scholar in the Aera article put it, tradition says that in marriage women have the right not to have to make a living, while men have the right not to do housework. But as earning a living has become more difficult, housework has become easier. In the process, most men have decided to give up their privelege but most women haven’t.

To feminists and anyone who believes in equality, such a development is depressing, but one has to keep in mind that everything is discussed within the realm of matrimony, which is a limiting concept. Aera implies that makeinu are materially obsessed. They not only do not want to worsen their financial situation when they marry, but look upon a potential husband as less a partner than as something that “confirms” their worth as a human being.

In the new Jun Ichikawa movie, “Tony Takitani,” based on a story by Haruki Murakami about people devoid of endearing qualities, a character played by Rie Miyazawa epitomizes this idea when she says that she buys designer clothing because it “fills in the part of me that’s missing.”

Media pundits complain that such women are undermining Japanese society, but regardless of their implied “irresponsibility,” there is no turning back. Makeinu are a natural product of the consumerist ideals that have driven the Japanese economy for the past 40 years. They are blamed for the dropping birthrate because they see husbands as commodities, but maybe it’s the institution of marriage as an economic contract that needs to be reconsidered.

Several weeks ago the Mainichi Shimbun published the results of its own survey, which found that even married couples don’t want to have children until their lives are not just stable but affluent. It’s an understandable desire, but a very recent one. Only since the 1960s have people in the industrialized world had the luxury to put off having a family for whatever reason. Makeinu can’t be blamed for a process they have no control over.

Posted at 4:41 PM · Comments (0)

Last week, I asked readers to help kick off this new series on the China gold rush by sending me suggestions, contacts, and stories. I am grateful for and startled by the quality of the response. I am sorry I have not yet had time to thank each writer individually.

As I started thinking about China, I asked myself what the possible ways are to make money doing business there, and I decided to write today about what seems to be the most obvious one: direct investment—that is, buying or starting China-based businesses. The country’s cities, valleys, and hillsides are strewn with decaying factories and idle workers, relics of the failed central-planning experiment, and global markets are hungry for the fruits of low-cost production. So if one just finds an undercapitalized factory and adds some management expertise …

Ah, the dream world. I assumed direct investment might be easy money until I picked up Mr. China, one of the 17 China business books piled up in my study. A memoir written by the former president of ASIMCO, one of the first big China funds, Mr. China describes in hilarious detail what happened when the author bought a bunch of Chinese auto-parts factories. The book suggests that the direct-investment strategy is, if not a complete hallucination, close.

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Author Tim Clissold first visited China in 1988, while working as an accountant in London. Captivated, he quit his job and moved to Beijing, where the hazards of the planned economy quickly became clear: The government set the price of cabbages too high that year, encouraging farmers to grow little else, and the city soon filled with massive piles of rotting produce. Clissold finished his studies in 1992, the year Deng Xiaoping turbocharged economic reform by saying, “To get rich is glorious.”

Clissold joined forces with an ex-Wall Street boss named Jack Perkowski and an ex-Red Guard in the Ministry of Foreign Investment named Ai Jian. The trio visited an endless series of government ministries in search of opportunity: “iron and steel, telecommunications, paper, electronics, chemicals, rubber, building materials, float glass, cement, light industry, power generation, even aircraft maintenance.” The usual practice was to diversify risk by investing in multiple industries, but Perkowski and Clissold decided to focus primarily on auto parts. Over the course of nine months, they visited 100-odd component factories in 40 cities, looking for deals.

In China, as elsewhere, it’s usually not what you know, but who you know, and the players were factory bosses, municipal bureaucrats, and party officials. The courting ritual often began with a banquet, such as the one thrown for Clissold and Perkowski by the mayor of Changchun. The festivities were fueled by baijiu, a liquor that, from Clissold’s description, is not far removed from diesel fuel.

The goal of the Chinese banquet is “to impress,” and this is accomplished by serving bizarre animal parts. At the Changchun banquet, as the baijiu flowed, Clissold and Perkowski were treated (hazed?) with duck webs, cow’s lung, goose stomach, fish lips, goat’s tendons, ox’s forehead, tortoise casserole, steamed rabbit ears, duck’s tongues, black scorpions, and deer penis. The Changchun deal blew up, but others didn’t, and over the next few years, ASIMCO invested $400 million in about 20 Chinese factories. Then the real fun began.

There was Pang, the factory boss in Harbin, who was fired but wouldn’t leave. Instead, he just squatted in his office and continued giving orders, telling workers to choose between “the factory and the foreigners.” Pang couldn’t be physically dragged out because he was the chairman of ASIMCO’s joint-venture partner, so the business imploded.

There was Wang, the manager of a brake-pad factory in Zhuhai, who disappeared after attending a trade show in Las Vegas. The first theory was that he had been mugged or killed, but then someone noticed the missing $5 million. The chief of the Zhuhai anticorruption bureau was willing to investigate—if ASIMCO gave him some cash and a car. A Beijing court deemed the case “confusing” and held ASIMCO liable for all losses and costs.

There was the drunken argument at a “picnic” on the grasslands of Mongolia, in which a translator sliced off a factory director’s ear. There were the irate investors in New York, forever screaming through speakerphones, demanding that managers be sacked and the staggering cash bleed controlled. There was the faux pas at the Beijing brewery, when ASIMCO went over the head of the local bureaucrat, Madame Wu, and schmoozed some ministry bigwigs instead. ASIMCO won the deal and invested $60 million—only to discover that, a few days later, about $2 million remained. (The vanishing $58 million temporarily overshadowed the brewery’s quality control problems: When the cheap glass bottles weren’t exploding in the markets of Beijing and maiming or killing people, they were often filled with only an inch of beer, or an inch of leaves, or, in one case, a ball of adhesive tape.) After soothing the jilted Madame Wu and trying but failing to fix the business, ASIMCO unloaded the wreckage on Tsingtao.

After eight years in China, Clissold was waylaid by a “weird viral attack that had inundated my heart and liver and gotten into my joints.” The doctors misdiagnosed the symptoms as a heart attack and attributed it to stress.

The near-death experience gave Clissold a chance to think, and his first thought, not surprisingly, was to quit. Then, he decided that he would instead “find a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem.” China, he concluded,

was a society that had no rules—or, more accurately, plenty of rules that were seldom enforced. China seemed to be run by masterful showmen: appearances mattered more than substance, rules were there to be distorted, and success came through outfacing an opponent. … One thing was for sure: if you played by the rules, you were finished.

At the time Clissold collapsed, the fund was on track to lose everything. After another few years of effort, he and his partners salvaged about half of the original investment, and ASIMCO, still run by Perkowski, evolved into China’s major auto-components supplier. (Clissold eventually took refuge at Goldman Sachs.)

So the lesson, perhaps, is that success in Chinese direct investment requires decades of commitment, deep government relationships, and superhuman effort. New regulations allow total foreign ownership in some industries, thus reducing the use of joint ventures, which Clissold describes as “incredibly difficult to manage because Chinese and Westerners don’t think in the same way.” The structural advantage of total ownership, however, is probably offset by the fact that, after 15 years and billions of dollars of capital, the low-hanging fruit is probably gone. There’s no easy money left, and it wasn’t that easy to begin with.

******

Posted at 2:24 PM · Comments (0)

This came to my attention thanks to Janet, whose taste is impeccable. It arrived today in the mail, and I’m listening now. Details to come…

Details are in: This is wonderful stuff, rara rhythms from Haiti and jazz combined, fantastic drumming and incantatory singing. Try Konbit Rara for starters.

Posted at 2:18 PM · Comments (0)

I finished reading this on my return flight from the States the other day, and it was splendid throughout, even if it struck me as three books in one: a beautifully written tale of personal growth and emergence into worldly, sensitive adulthood; a well-researched and compelling account of the Buddha’s life, philosophy and impact on the world; and least expectedly a reflection on modern history, from nationalism to globalization.
I will be adding some excerpts here when time allows.

Posted at 2:12 PM · Comments (0)

An extraordinarily learned look at the history of cities, their lives and their problems from Sumer, Memphis, ancient China and Rome to the cities of today’s world.
John Reader wrote one of the best books on Africa in the last 10-20 years, “Africa, A Biography of the Continent,” and he has shown his versatiliy and virtuosity here with this typically industrious effort.

Posted at 2:10 PM · Comments (0)

Strolling to the bus stop, fidgeting during a meeting, standing up to stretch, jumping off the couch to change channels, and engaging in other minor physical activities can make the difference between being lean and obese, researchers reported yesterday.

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 20 pounds a year, the researchers found.
_____Obesity_____
• Brazil Newspaper Slams NY Times Over Obesity Story (Reuters, Jan 27, 2005)
• Part of McDonald’s Obesity Suit Revived (Reuters, Jan 25, 2005)
• Part of McDonald’s Obesity Suit Revived (Reuters, Jan 25, 2005)
• Study: Obesity May Hinder Cancer Screening (Associated Press, Jan 24, 2005)
• Study: Obesity May Hinder Cancer Screening (Associated Press, Jan 24, 2005)
• More Stories



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“There are these absolutely staggering differences between people who are lean and people who are obese,” said James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research published in today’s issue of the journal Science. “The amount of this low-grade activity is so substantial that it could, in and of itself, account for obesity quite easily.”

Perhaps more importantly, Levine and his colleagues also discovered that people appear to be born with a propensity to be either fidgety or listless, indicating that it would take special measures to convert the naturally sedentary into the restless — especially in a society geared toward a couch-potato existence.

“Some may say this is a story of doom and gloom — that people with obesity have no choice. It’s all over. I would argue exactly the opposite,” Levine said. “There’s a massive beacon of hope here. But it’s going to take a massive, top-down approach to change the environment in which we live to get us up and be lean again.”

Other researchers agreed, saying the new study, while small, provides powerful new evidence that a major cause of the obesity epidemic is the pattern of desk jobs, car pools, suburban sprawl, and other environmental and lifestyle factors that discourage physical activity. And despite generations of parents’ admonitions to the contrary, people should be encouraged to be fidgety.

“Figuring out ways to increase physical activity — not necessarily getting people jogging every day but just building physical activity into a person’s day — are reasonable strategies that have the promise to combat this epidemic of obesity,” said William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The number of Americans who are overweight has risen dramatically in recent years, with more than two-thirds now overweight or obese, raising the prospect of an epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and other weight-related ills. The reason for this is a subject of intense debate, with many experts blaming a combination of too much junk food and too little exercise.

Levine and others have done earlier studies suggesting a dearth of routine activity may be part of the problem, but the new study is the most exhaustive to date.

“We all know people who can’t seem to stand still and others who hardly move,” said Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote a commentary on the study. “This is really the first time this has been assessed in this level of detail.”

For the study, Levine and his colleagues developed a system that can detect the smallest tap of a toe — high-tech underwear resembling bicycle pants and sports bras or T-shirts embedded with sensors, originally designed for fighter jets, that take measurements every half-second.

Ten men and 10 women, half of them lean and the other half mildly obese, wore the garments 24 hours a day for 10 days as they went about their usual routines. They went to the Mayo Clinic every morning to be weighed, get new undergarments so researchers could download the data from the previous day’s undergarments, and get their meals for the day, so the researchers knew exactly what they were eating. All considered themselves “couch potatoes” because they eschewed regular exercise.

Based on millions of bits of data, the researchers determined that each day, the lean subjects spent at least 150 more minutes moving in some way than the obese subjects.

Next, the researchers overfed nine of the lean subjects and put seven of the obese subjects on diets to see if losing weight would make the obese more fidgety, or if gaining weight would make the lean less active. They then monitored them for another 10 days.

“It could be the obesity was making the difference — not the other way around. We thought, ‘Well, in that case if they lost weight they’d start standing more, and surely then if they got heavier they’d gravitate to their chairs more,’ ” Levine said. “Neither of these things happened. The obese person remained a sitter, and the lean person remained a stander.”

Other research has indicated that some people may be born with a predisposition to move while others are born the opposite.

Posted at 12:33 PM · Comments (0)

at 4:25 AM PT

Smoke free by decree
If you’re indignant that your boss just shut the smoking room and outraged that you have to leave the bar to light up, take heart. Life could be worse. You could be Bhutanese.

The tiny, trendy Himalayan kingdom recently became the world’s first nonsmoking nation. Since Dec. 17, it has been illegal to smoke in public or sell tobacco. Violators are fined the equivalent of $232—more than two months’ salary in Bhutan. Authorities heralded the ban by igniting a bonfire of cigarette cartons in the capital, Thimphu, and stringing banners across the main thoroughfare, exhorting people to kick the habit. As if they have a choice.

Meddling with an issue as personal as smoking is always tricky, and politicians err at their own peril. Yet Bhutan’s ban appears to be sticking and with little public outcry. Even the country’s smokers seem resigned to a smoke-free future. “If you can’t get it, you can’t smoke it,” concludes Tshewang Dendup, who works for Bhutan’s only broadcaster. He picked up his smoking habit while studying at Berkeley, but says he is now rapidly “downsizing” his consumption.

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So, how has Bhutan managed to pull off a nationwide smoking ban while other nations dither? Bhutan is a Buddhist nation, and many Buddhists believe smoking is bad for their karma. Then again, Sri Lanka and Thailand are also predominantly Buddhist, and plenty of people smoke there.

The answer lies not in Bhutan’s religion but in its famous quirkiness. This is a country that has elevated contrariness to a national trait. Convention says an impoverished yet stunningly beautiful nation like Bhutan should welcome tourists with open arms—and count the dollars. Yet Bhutan restricts the number of foreign tourists (about 9,000 last year) and charges fees of $200 per day. Convention says that gross national product is the best measure of national progress. Yet Bhutan is aiming for another mark: What it calls “gross national happiness.” If Bhutan were a celebrity, it would be Johnny Depp—reclusive, a bit odd, but endearing nonetheless.

The Himalayas that surround and engulf Bhutan are a curse and a blessing, cushioning the nation from the shock waves that globalization has generated in other developing countries. The first foreign tourists only arrived in 1974. Television and the Internet are even more novel, having arrived only in 1999. Yet Bhutan largely remains the Shangri-la that wealthy tourists crave. Thimphu is the world’s only capital city with no traffic lights.

So, having sat out the traditional development rush, Bhutan hopes to steer its own course, avoiding the mistakes of the industrialized world. Because of its homogenous and small population (anywhere from 800,000 to 2 million people, depending on which estimates you believe), Bhutan just might succeed in barring the demon weed. The nation’s unusual culture makes a sudden and complete tobacco ban possible. The country is ruled by a benevolent king, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, who is widely revered and universally obeyed. “Bhutanese are pretty happy to sacrifice for their fellow citizen,” says Linda Leaming, an American who has lived in Bhutan for the past eight years. “The individual is subjugated to the good of society.”

It also helps that Bhutan has few smokers compared other nations. Only about 1 percent of the population lights up, according to the health ministry. (Foreign observers believe the actual figure is 3 percent or 4 percent.) Tobacco isn’t grown in Bhutan. It is a very small, poor market, and it costs a tremendous amount to import goods. All these are factors that have reduced interest in cigarettes.

Yet, even in obedient Bhutan, a few whispers of dissent have cropped up—where else?—on the Internet. “Policy makers wake up,” griped one anonymous Bhutanese, writing about the smoking ban on the Web site www.kuenselonline.com. “There is something called personal rights that should be upheld. Educate rather than force or impose.” Others worry the tobacco ban will merely encourage a black market in Marlboros. Also others chime in that Bhutan faces more pressing problems than smoking: corruption, alcoholism, and a penchant for doma or betel nut, which Bhutanese chew habitually. Doma, a stimulant that turns your saliva red, has been linked to higher incidence of oral cancer.

Bhutan’s parliament, which passed the smoking ban, anticipated complaints. It added a few sizable loopholes. Foreigners can still smoke and import tobacco (but if caught selling it to Bhutanese they will be charged with smuggling). Bhutanese are, technically, allowed to smoke in their homes and can even import small quantities of tobacco for “personal use,” though they’ll pay as much as 200 percent in customs duties and sales taxes for the pleasure.

Bhutanese officials say that, by banning tobacco, they hope to set an example for the rest of the world. Ireland recently banned smoking in public places, though the sale of tobacco remains legal. Other European countries, such as Norway, are enacting less-stringent smoking bans.

In most of Asia, though, the trend is toward more smokers, not fewer, as countries rush to emulate Western habits and as tobacco companies look east for new customers. Once again, Bhutan finds itself the exception to the rule.

Posted at 9:55 AM · Comments (0)

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.

SEYMOUR HERSH: About what’s going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what’s been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed — I don’t know whether he thinks he’s doing God’s will or what his father didn’t do, or whether it’s some mandate from — you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He’s going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he’s inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that’s what we’re going to have.

It’s hard to predict the future. And it’s sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us — you have to — I can’t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is — we’re in right now, because most of you don’t understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon — by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. “They did it to us. We’ve got to do it to them.” That is the attitude that — at the very top of our government exists. And so, I’ll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can — you know, there’s not much more to go on with.

I think there’s a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let’s all forget this word “insurgency”. It’s one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba’athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started — they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn’t because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they’re very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it’s — it’s — it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they’re doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we’re up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don’t know what’s coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it’s — somebody in the system, an officer — and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.

There’s a lot of anxiety inside the — you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do — there’s a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways — one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside — the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people — serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that’s what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That’s what’s happening. The real target has been “diminish the agency.” I’m writing about all of this soon, so I don’t want to overdo it, but there’s been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.

On the other hand, the facts — there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he’s doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here’s the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don’t really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That’s the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It’s simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don’t ask. We’re not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they’re going to carry out an election and if they’re going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq — some of you remember Vietnam — Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I’m one of the people — I don’t call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we’re doing. This is deliberate. It’s being done. They’re not telling us. They’re not talking about it.

We have a President that — and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper — when a reporter or journalist asked — actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we’re going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn’t involved in the process. Words mean nothing — nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don’t do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what’s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That’s into the not the issue is. They’re fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven “bad seeds”, enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn’t excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We’re not seeing it. They’ve gotten away with it.

So here’s the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted — his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, “Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I’m still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.” There’s going to be — you know, when I did My Lai — I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had — for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers — the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don’t see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It’s always hidden. There’s inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They’re “rag-heads”. They’re less than human. The casualty count — as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we’re killing. In any case, you know, it’s — in this case, these — a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up — they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit — the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn’t shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment — one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn’t killed. When they were sitting having the K rations — that’s what they called them — MRE’s now — the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began — and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, “Plug him,” he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn’t do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac’d out. As he was being medevac’d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, “God has punished me, and he’s going to punish you, too.”

So a year-and-a-half later, I’m doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, “I’m coming to see you. I don’t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to – I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell’s. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It’s a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old – hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I’m here to see your son, and she said, okay. He’s in there. He knows you’re coming. Then she said, one of these great — she said to me, “I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.” So you go on 35 years. I’m doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that’s unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of — The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for — you know, these — some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not — this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over — as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly — over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What’s going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes — the daughter had come home — before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a — I hadn’t thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows — she doesn’t know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just — I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn’t say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became — one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn’t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man — pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There’s another story.

For me, it’s just another story, but out of this comes a core of — you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we’re hopeless. We’re nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That’s just the way it is. It’s a system built on fear. It’s not lack of integrity, it’s more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It’s a system that’s completely been taken over — by cultists. Anyway, what’s going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there’s wards that you will never hear about. That’s wards — you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don’t know about the vegetables. There’s ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We’re going to learn more and I think you’re going to see, it’s going to — it’s — I’m trying to be optimistic. We’re going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You’re beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I’m not suggesting we’re going to have mutinies, but I’m going to suggest you’re going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It’s going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe — Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I’m talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody — it’s going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit — our — we’re spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We’re going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

Posted at 9:53 AM · Comments (0)

Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, has written a remarkable but flawed defence of the global market economy: Why Globalisation Works: The Case for the Global Market Economy (Yale University Press). Wolf conceives globalisation in essentially economic terms. The book says little about the political, social, cultural and environmental aspects of globalisation, although he does argue that nation states remain the locus of political debate and legitimacy and that the best way to combine economic globalisation with political stability is via liberal democracy. But it is economic globalisation - meaning greater openness of trade, free movement of capital, expansion of foreign direct investment - which is the focus because it is, in Wolf’s view, the key to boosting prosperity and the life opportunities of all.

Wolf’s mission is to dispel the illusions about globalisation promulgated by the forces of what he calls anti-globalisation.com, or the “new millennium collectivists.” The book is about the intellectual clash between liberal capitalism and its opponents. Wolf is on the streets fighting a new wave of dark forces. The stakes are high: disorder and the fragmentation of the global economy threaten unless they are defeated. And defeating them requires both showing them they are wrong and offering hope for a better future.

Wolf’s voice is clear, serious and didactic, and his book offers a carefully crafted account of the global market economy and the strengths and limits of his opponents’ views. Yet there is also something anachronistic about the book and the territory it covers: its agenda seems to have been set a few years ago when the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak and hundreds of thousands were marching against the forces of economic globalisation. These days, after 9/11 and the war in Iraq, it is seldom asked whether we are for or against globalisation. The ground has shifted to a debate about the type of globalisation we want. On these grounds, Wolf’s contribution is less impressive.

I have been thinking and writing about globalisation and global governance arrangements for over a decade, and have considered much of the material that informs Wolf’s book. It is therefore interesting to reflect on the points of similarity and difference in our background and approach.

Wolf begins his book with a brief autobiographical essay, describing his recent family history and its influence upon him. His father was an Austrian Jewish refugee who came to Britain before the second world war, and his mother was from a Dutch Jewish family. My parents were both Jewish and born in Germany, one in Leipzig and the other in Berlin. Both came to Britain in the early 1930s fleeing the Nazis. Wolf, like myself, was brought up with a strong sense of the menace of authoritarian dictatorships, and we both learned early about the importance of the values of an open society and of the forces, from the left and right, which might threaten it.

Both Wolf and I grew up in communities strongly committed to the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy and the pursuit of reason - the impartial pursuit of truth - and with a strong sense of the fragility of the world’s commitment to them. But while he believes that the liberal market economy is the best means of embedding these ideals, and that markets and liberal states create a framework for humans to be free and equal, I consider that the Enlightenment ideals remain unfulfilled in important respects and that the neoliberal form of globalisation to which Wolf subscribes is a challenge to them.

We have both been influenced by Friedrich Hayek. Wolf takes him as one of the great champions of personal liberty, of the market economy as a necessary condition of democracy, and of the dangers of intrusive government. I, like Wolf, take Hayek as one of the great theorists of the market, and of its advantages over other systems. But I also think that Hayek failed to grasp the nature of markets as systems of power which can also threaten liberty and democracy. Wolf conceives of markets as powerless mechanisms of co-ordination, while I understand them as highly fluid and risk-laden - often generating damaging externalities with regard to health, welfare, income distribution and the environment.

This is not an argument for abandoning the market, but it is an argument - explored in my new book Global Covenant - for reframing it. If we want to guarantee personal liberty and the efficient and just operation of the market, we must build bridges between economic and human rights, between the commercial and the environmental, and between national and international jurisdictions. Hayek does not help here at all. For both Hayek and Wolf, at the feast of the global market, power is largely absent.

Nevertheless, both Wolf and I believe that globalisation has been much misrepresented. We agree, for example, that globalisation is more than Americanisation; that there has been no straightforward collapse in welfare, labour or environmental standards (although there are big challenges); globalisation does not mean the end of the state; it has not just compounded the globe’s inequities; the gap between the world’s richest and poorest states is greater than it has ever been and is growing, yet there is some evidence that the proportion of those living in extreme poverty is falling; global economic processes have not always reinforced corporate power; developing countries do not always lose out in world trade; and economic globalisation and the current structure of economic governance do not exclude the voice and influence of developing countries. Most of Wolf’s book is devoted to examining propositions such as these, and while he does not paint a wholly rosy picture of economic globalisation, the force of the book is to show that anti-globalisation.com has precious little to offer.

We agree on the need to dispel these myths, but Wolf’s portrait of economic globalisation does not get to the heart of the problems of globalisation in its current neoliberal form. I will stress three of them here: global market integration is not the indispensable condition of development; a “market first” political philosophy cannot provide adequate terms of reference for thinking about a range of transborder problems and the capacities of multilateral organisations to cope with them; and liberal market philosophy is the wrong philosophy for the age in which we live. We require, instead, a cosmopolitan social democratic philosophy to guide a world of overlapping communities.

Wolf’s main argument is that “a successful move to the market, including increasing integration in the world economy, explains the success stories of the past two decades.” Developing countries which have prospered, notably in Asia, have all followed this path. But his argument needs questioning in a number of respects.

First, the experience of China and India - along with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan earlier - shows that countries do not have to adopt liberal trade or capital market policies in order to benefit from enhanced trade and faster growth. All these countries have grown relatively fast behind protective barriers. It is true that as these countries have become richer, they have tended to liberalise their trade policy, but there is not a simple causal relationship at work. As Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, has shown, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that countries become more open as they become richer.

Furthermore, recent research has found that one of the main factors limiting the capacity of the poorest countries to develop is the liberalisation of capital. Geoffrey Garrett, a professor of political science at UCLA, has shown that what hurts developing countries faced with a broad liberalisation programme is not the pursuit of free trade per se, but the free movement of capital. While tariff liberalisation can be broadly beneficial for low-income countries, rapid capital liberalisation in the absence of sound domestic capital markets can be a recipe for “volatility, unpredictability and booms and busts in capital flows.” Countries that have rapidly opened their capital accounts have performed significantly less well in terms of economic growth and income inequality than countries that have maintained tight control on capital movements but cut tariffs. An IMF study published in March 2003 found that there is no consistent support for the theory that financial globalisation per se delivers a higher rate of economic growth.

Economic protectionism does not work as a general strategy, but there is evidence to suggest that a country’s internal economic integration - the development of its human capital and national market institutions, and the replacement of imports with national production where feasible - can be stimulated by state-led industrial policy. The evidence indicates that the development of state regulatory capacity, a sound public domain, the ability to focus investment on job creating sectors in competitive and productive areas and the protection of infant industries are more important priorities than integration into world markets. This finding should not come as a surprise, since nearly all today’s rich countries began their growth behind tariff barriers and only lowered them once their economies were relatively robust.

The argument here should not be taken, as Wolf might suspect, as a simple endorsement of old leftist, state-centred development. Public objectives can be delivered by a diversity of actors, public and private. And the development of civil society is an indispensable part of national development. Although there can, of course, be conflicts between economic development and the strengthening of civil society, all countries need sufficient autonomy to work out their own ways of managing this conflict.

Developing nations need the latitude to create individual polices and institutions which may depart from the orthodoxy of global market integration. Similarly, organisations such as the WTO need a broader range of policies to encourage the different national economic systems to flourish within an equitable, rules-based global market order.

Wolf acknowledges elements of these arguments throughout his book, especially in his discussions of the work of Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang (see Michael Lind’s essay in Prospect, January 2003). He accepts that there is much more involved in successful development than trade liberalisation, and that financial liberalisation carries risks. He does concede some ground to the critics of market liberalisation and global economic integration. But he never allows that these concessions have implications for the very basis of his liberal market approach - for its explanatory power and prescriptive value.

There are many ways of conceiving and categorising the global challenges that we face. Jean-François Rischard, vice-president for Europe of the World Bank, usefully thinks of them as forming a triumvirate of problems, concerned with sharing our planet (global warming, water deficits, biodiversity and ecosystem losses), our humanity (poverty, global infectious diseases, conflict prevention), and our rulebook (intellectual property rights, unsustainable debt, trade, finance and tax rules). Wolf seems to think that global challenges such as these can be addressed by the current interstate order, even if it does require reform (notably in relation to the IMF and the WTO). But how urgent global problems might be resolved is far from clear, for the problem-solving capacity of the international system is not effective, accountable or fast enough. There are three main difficulties.

To begin with, there is no clear division of labour among the many international governmental agencies: functions overlap, mandates conflict, and aims and objectives get blurred. This is true, for example, in the area of health and social policy, where the World Bank, the IMF and the World Health Organisation often have competing priorities.

A second, related set of problems surrounds those issues which have both domestic and international dimensions. These are often insufficiently understood or acted upon. There is an ultimate lack of responsibility for problems such as global warming and the loss of global biodiversity. Institutional fragmentation means that these issues fall between agencies. This latter problem is also manifest between the global level and national governments.

A third set of difficulties relates to an accountability deficit in the international agencies which stems from power imbalances among states. Multilateral bodies need to be more representative of the states involved with them. Developing countries are under-represented in many international organisations. There must also be arrangements in place to ensure consultation and co-ordination between state and non-state actors, and these conditions are seldom met in multilateral decision-making bodies.

Underlying these institutional difficulties is a lack of symmetry or congruence between decision-makers and decision-t