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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Copyright The New York Times

By Howard W. French
Published: May 30, 2007

CHONGQING, China: Stand in the right spot in this gigantic city and hills draped with apartment complexes can remind you of Hong Kong, the density of habitation will recall Tokyo and the river-spanning brawn, replete with an immense new structure over the Yangtze that echoes the Brooklyn Bridge, might recall New York City.

Everywhere one looks here, there are new expressways, new bridges and towering new housing complexes rising, so many in fact that it is the occasional glimpse of something old, rather than the sight of anything new, that takes one’s breath away.

China has built megacities before, of course.

The country’s rich east abounds with them, strung along the coast from Tianjin in the north to Shenzhen in the far south like so many pearls.

But the swift rise of Chongqing represents a departure: the fruits of a major push by the government in Beijing to spread the fruits of China’s economic boom to the country’s vast interior, home to three Chinese in four. A consensus has emerged among Beijing’s leadership that the way to ease poverty in the interior is to encourage people by the tens of millions to abandon the land for the cities.

“This is the path every developed country has taken,” said Tang Jun, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “To ask whether China wants urbanization is like asking whether a person needs to eat.”

In 1978, a mere 18 percent of Chinese lived in cities and towns. By 2010, the authorities estimate that 50 percent will, as part of what demographers and other experts say is the greatest migration in history.

One after another, the big cities of the interior have eagerly entered the race to urbanize, with many openly brandishing the objective of becoming a “world city” within the space of a few years.

Whether judged by its size, its ambition or the scale of transformation, however, Chongqing, with its 12 million people, remains in a class by itself.

The city’s economic growth is drawing about 200,000 new residents a year. But the city fathers are not content to stop there. They are also expanding the city limits, rapidly incorporating rural areas adjacent to Chongqing under a plan the city calls the “one-hour economy circle.”

Under this plan, which is being emulated by other big inland cities, the city wants to move two million rural residents into newly urbanized areas within one hour’s driving distance from the city center in the next five years and another two million in the five years after that.

As an inducement, the city is enticing landholders to surrender their claims on their rural plots in exchange for prized urban residency permits that offer not only legal residence in a city but also access to social services and benefits unavailable in rural areas.

Chongqing is already comfortably the biggest inland city in China, but within a decade or so initiatives like these could push it into contention with Shanghai and Beijing for the title of the nation’s biggest city.

As with anything on this scale, however, the process has been full of hiccups, gigantic hiccups in some cases, all of which are on display most every day here. One of the most obvious problems is the environment. Even in a country full of grimly polluted places, Chongqing, whose economy is based on river transportation, steel, smelting and the manufacture of motorcycles and automotive spare parts, bears special mention. A haze hangs in the air even on good days, and for much of the rest of the year the city’s skyline simply disappears at any distance.

Chongqing has plans to move a giant steel mill that belches smoke night and day from the city center to the outskirts and has undertaken other measures to improve air quality that residents say have begun to produce limited results.

“For 10 days this winter, you could see clear blue skies and white clouds, which is something that didn’t exist in previous winters,” said Wu Dengming, leader of a local environmental group called the Green Volunteer League.

Asked about the future, given the rapid population growth, however, Wu sounded markedly more pessimistic. “There are more and more pressures on the environment, and the population is the main reason,” he said. “More people means more consumption, more production and more waste.”

Increasingly, the city’s expansion is attracting people who might otherwise have migrated to the east or beyond. Yun Zhao, a bright 31-year-old woman who now works in a large insurance company here, was drawn back after studying in Toronto and becoming a legal resident of Canada, something that has long been close to an irresistible dream for many Chinese.

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Posted at 8:39 PM · Comments (5)

Copyright Slate
May 28, 2007

During the early debates over the Iraq war, one was constantly being challenged to contrast the “unilateralism” of the Bush administration with the more mature and “European” approach of Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, and Vladimir Putin, the gleesome threesome who (along with the Chinese dictatorship) protected Saddam Hussein at the United Nations. What a difference a couple of years has made. Tony Blair may be stepping down as prime minister of the United Kingdom, but for the first time in a very long time, the heads of state in Paris and Berlin are both “Atlanticist” in their outlook. One might add that Chirac quit the Élysée Palace looking and sounding like a stroke victim who had long ceased to have anything relevant to say and that Schröder disgraced the German Social Democrats by barely waiting to leave office before signing up as a lobbyist for a Russian-based energy cartel. And is it necessary to add that Putin has revived the worst traditions of Great Russian chauvinism, crushing all domestic opposition at home while bullying Ukraine, Georgia, and most recently Estonia, and flaunting his connection to the ultra-reactionary Russian Orthodox Church. What a crew they were and are! The fourth member of the anti-Bush coalition of the willful, the cold-eyed Chinese post-Stalinists, are still engaged in a blood-for-oil scandal whereby Beijing provides the sinews of war to the genocidal regime that cleanses Darfur, while paying to buy most of Sudan’s petroleum.

The single best symbol of the change in France is the appointment of Bernard Kouchner to the post of foreign minister. Had the Socialist Party won the election, it is highly unlikely that such a distinguished socialist would ever have been allowed through the doors of the Quai d’Orsay. (Yes, comrades, history actually is dialectical and paradoxical.) In the present climate of the United States, a man like Kouchner would be regarded as a neoconservative. He was a prominent figure in the leftist rebellion of 1968, before breaking with some of his earlier illusions and opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—the true and original source of many of our woes in the Islamic world. The group he co-founded—Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières—was a pioneer in the highly necessary proclamation that left politics should always be anti-totalitarian. (His former counterpart, Joschka Fischer of Germany, also took a version of this view before Schröder’s smirking Realpolitik became too much, and too popular in Germany, for him to withstand.)

His principles led Kouchner to defend two oppressed Muslim peoples—those of Yugoslavia and Iraqi Kurdistan—who were faced with extermination at the hands of two parties daring to call themselves socialist. The Serbian Socialist Party of Slobodan Milosevic and the Arab Baath Socialist Party of Saddam Hussein are at last receding into history, leaving behind them a legacy of utter stagnation, hysterical aggression, and mass graves. I personally find it satisfying that a French socialist was identified with both these victories. Kouchner was instrumental in altering French policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina and later in filling the position—between 1999 and 2001—of U.N. representative in liberated Kosovo. Prior even to that, he had been extremely active in calling attention to the genocidal policy of Saddam in Kurdistan and in helping to introduce Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the then-president of France, to the exemplary role that she played in opposing it. A few years ago, he wrote the introduction to the French edition of The Black Book of Saddam Hussein, a vitally important volume that educates readers in the pornographic nature of that regime: a nightmare government that is now widely considered by liberals to have been framed up by the Bush administration.

Since taking office, Kouchner has convened some very serious meetings in Paris to beef up the French policy toward the African Union’s flagging commitment to save the people of Darfur. He has also flown to Lebanon, visited the grave of the country’s murdered leader Rafik Hariri, and announced that the U.N. tribunal investigating Syrian complicity in the assassination must be taken seriously. (This at a time when our own secretary of state is looking for ways to “make nice” with local despotisms of any stripe, whether Sunni or Shiite.)

Shortly before leaving the office that he had so much discredited and allowed others to discredit even more with the “oil for food” racket—a racket that, by the way, reached very deeply into the highest circles of the French state—Kofi Annan saved a few shreds of moral credit by announcing that the United Nations had “a duty to protect.” In the age of globalization and international law and universal jurisdiction, member states could no longer claim “internal affairs” as an alibi for genocide, deportation, famine, and other tactics of cleansing. Nor could they destabilize their neighbors in this dangerous manner. What a shame that such a doctrine was not in force at the time when France was arming and protecting its genocidaire clients in Rwanda. But the initial phrase, about the relationship between duty and protection, was, I believe, coined by Bernard Kouchner, who now forces us to rethink our glib counterposition between unilateralism on the one hand and passivity and acquiescence—even complicity—on the other. I suppose there is some irony to be found in the fact that, while such a person takes command of the foreign policy of France, the only apparent test of liberalism in the United States is the speed with which it proposes to abandon the Arabs and Kurds of Iraq once again.

Posted at 6:14 PM · Comments (0)

Coming around a bit late to this one, a deserved clasic about the outbreak of war in Shanghai, and aftermath in the life of a young British boy. Reading this puts me in the mood to take Shanghai street pictures. Very effective writing.

Posted at 12:11 PM · Comments (0)

Occasionally glib, more often vigorous, though. A quick, tidy and strongly argued brief for economic (and other sorts of) freedom.

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Here, Wayne Shorter brings back the warm evenings, the liquid air of summer evenings, the big golden disk of the setting sun, red clay, sweat in the car waiting for Mom to make the last purchase in a round of errands, the crisp, lemon-tinged toast of a glass of perfectly chilled wine, an afternoon stroll in Paris in August with the French all away at the beach.
This is hard bob that gets away from the formulaic and earns its strips in the most beautiful and unflashy way.

Posted at 12:54 AM · Comments (0)

Senegalese music helped define “World,” that strange and vaguely condescending category that roughly means everything that’s not from the USA, Canada, and Western Europe. As amorphous as the category is, the sound of Senegalese music is so distinctive as to help lend it a sort of foundation.
Youssou N’dour has been the most commercially succesful and easily recognizable of the Senegalese acts, with his extraordinary vocals strong enough to stand out in any crowd.
Baaba Maal, though, is sneakier. He grows on you, and in my book, his music has more bottom than any of the readily accessible Senegalese acts. His voice cannot compare to Ndour’s, but his ensemble sound has big chops - just check out the percussion here, which in my view is worth the admission all by itself.

Posted at 12:42 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

I tend to cry at weddings and graduations, though rarely at funerals. There is something so final about funerals that emptiness itself seems the only place to occupy. Weddings and graduations, on the other hand, mark beginnings, and usually hopeful ones; they move me powerfully. I like to see young people (and older ones, too) take a step forward, putting behind them a certain discrete period in their lives, moving with the world all before them.

Graduation is not a ceremony that, as a faculty member, I ever want to miss. I look forward on this day to marking an array of changes. There is saying goodbye to older faculty members who are taking the bold step into retirement; they will possibly return at future graduations, but only in the role of an emeritus professor — an ambiguous honor, at best, as many of them seem a bit lost on the campus, knowing few of the younger faculty members and probably none of the students about to graduate. I like seeing those who have made tenure congratulated at graduation and welcomed into the community on a permanent basis. Yet there is often a double edge, as I think of those who have not gotten tenure (a situation I was once in myself, so I have a visceral sense of the pain involved). A faculty has a way of reshaping itself, always shifting, always adding and subtracting. And then there are the students: waves of them, breaking on the shores of adult life. They love this day, as do their parents behind them.

I know the deal only too well, with three sons of my own, two currently in college. Graduation is, for every family, a time to celebrate the conclusion of a massive joint effort that has taken many years. One recalls the nights of horrendous homework assignments, the research projects, the school plays and games, the examinations taken well or badly, the financial anxieties. For many in the audience, this day marks the turning of a huge aircraft carrier, and such maneuvers do not happen easily.

At the center of the ceremony, for most, is the speech. This is one of the few occasions in life when speeches really matter. Everyone sits up, hopeful. I am always quite certain that my life will be changed. In that, I’m a fairly typical American, in the mold of Ben Franklin: always eager to improve myself, to take instruction, to shift my way of looking at the world in a manner that will benefit me and those around me. I really want the graduation speaker to do a bang-up job — to inspire and challenge me in unexpected ways — and when he or she doesn’t, the disappointment hollows me out.

I’ve attended more than 30 graduations as a member of a faculty, and so I’ve heard quite a range of speeches (and given several myself). In too many cases, I can’t recall who gave the speeches, which cannot be a good thing. A forgettable speech is by definition a poor one. One can recite the bare outline, as it rarely varies: How nice to see you on this important and beautiful day. Here is a little joke my uncle told me when I graduated. The future lies ahead of you. You should take note of how accomplished I am, which may inspire you to become accomplished yourself. Go forward, not backward. Congratulations to you all. You look so happy and handsome. Do I really have to stay to lunch? Is the plane on the runway? Where is my next stop?

Sometimes a famous name is enough to carry the day. This year, at Middlebury College, we have Bill Clinton lined up, and everyone is thrilled. We know exactly what the speech will sound and look like, right down to the puffed-out lip and the wincing aside. That he will say anything especially moving is unlikely, and it doesn’t really matter. (I saw him give a graduation speech at the University of Oxford when he was still in office, and it was a splendid occasion, with the presidential helicopter landing beforehand in Christ Church meadows. The sheer spectacle of a president, even when he’s become a former president, carries the day.) Were Bill Clinton to cancel suddenly, there would be no joy in Middlebury.

For the most part, however, politicians are the worst graduation speakers. I have a vivid image of the former senator Bill Bradley in my head. I like Bradley, mind you. I’d vote for him in a minute. But he was terrible. He had those strange semi-invisible prompters before him, and he read his boring speech as though he were speaking a foreign language, sounding out the words by phonetics, and doing a bad job of it. Rudy Giuliani, whom I would never vote for, at least made an effort to connect to the crowd and showed some life. But it’s a bad idea to invite politicians to graduations for the simple reason that they are partisan by definition. Politics of an obviously partisan character should be put aside on this sacred day. It’s a time to think deeper, about issues that really matter. It’s a time to think structurally, wondering what is right or wrong about the system. It’s a time to ask what our duties to our neighbors really are, and how the young people about to graduate should begin to think about their purpose in life. Is it all about the money? Does fame matter? Do spiritual values obtain? What are those values anyway?

My favorite speaker was Mr. Rogers, the pioneer in television for children. He came to the campus only a year or two before he died and was as modest and kind as you would expect. I can’t think how many mornings as a young parent I had sat before the television and watched that skinny, awkward fellow singing so movingly in his awful voice. I loved to watch him put on his sweater, button it up slowly, and welcome us to his neighborhood. I felt included, as did my children. His values were obviously based on a genuine sense of community. He didn’t have to say much. Everyone knew him and what he represented. He only had to speak softly, as he did. His presence called us back to what Abe Lincoln famously termed the “better angels of our nature.” I really did break into tears when he came to the podium and invited the audience to sing the neighborhood song, and everyone in the audience sang. Community itself became real, concrete, and deeply loved.

A famous professor from Harvard University gave the speech that most disappointed me. I liked writing that phrase: a famous professor. He was famous to me, at least, and many members of the faculty had read his books and essays. I won’t say his name, in part because he is dead, and in part because he was so terrible as a graduation speaker — perhaps as a consequence of his final illness. He was making notes for the speech on the back of an envelope on his lap before he stood up, at which point it became utterly apparent that he had forgotten to prepare a speech of any kind. He rambled, hemmed and hawed, misquoted a few famous lines. There was a huge relief everywhere when, after a mercifully short spell of perhaps 10 minutes, he sat down in bewilderment, to tepid applause. I saw him standing by himself after the graduation, as if wondering where he was. In a moment of fellow feeling, I approached him, my hand out to shake his. “I have liked your books so much,” I said, and meant it. He gave me a wan smile, bowed, and withdrew into the shadows.

For the most part, I think it’s good when scholars — or “public intellectuals” — give the graduation speech. Scholarship and the acquisition of knowledge are the point of academic villages. We should celebrate those who have lived their lives accordingly, putting aside the pursuit of great wealth or power. A graduation speaker is, implicitly, a model for the students to emulate, admire, acknowledge as good. If the speaker has done nothing but accumulate wealth at the expense of the community or become a “personality” in the media, that is not enough. I always find it discouraging when well-known people who mirror the worst values in society are given honorary degrees. There should be honor in honorary degrees. And the person chosen to speak to graduates should understand that he or she has 15 or 20 minutes to talk frankly about life as he or she sees it, asking important questions. What are lessons in the art of life? What does the effort to acquire an education mean? What obligations and responsibilities come with that amazing privilege — one that so many in the audience will take for granted, but which most people in the world will never experience?

Ah, Bill Clinton has his work cut out for him.

Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His most recent book is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (George Braziller, 2005).

Posted at 12:15 AM · Comments (0)

25 May 2007
Copyright The Wall Street Journal Asia

(c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. To see the edition in which this article appeared, click here http://awsj.com.hk/factiva-ns
When 10 policemen barged into the Beijing apartment of Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan last Friday morning and told them that they were under house arrest and prohibited from leaving the country, it was more than just the latest incident in a long-standing crackdown against human-rights activists. It was also an indication of how China intends to handle dissent between now and the Olympic games that will open in Beijing in August 2008.
Mr. Hu and Ms. Zeng, who are expecting their first child in September, are the most prominent figures of a new generation of rights activists in the mainland. They take the Chinese government’s promises at face value, insisting that provisions protecting rights in China’s constitution and laws be upheld. And they are savvy about how to put pressure on the government, aware that the Olympics provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put China’s abysmal rights record under the international spotlight.
Mr. Hu started in Beijing as an HIV/AIDS activist a decade ago, and quickly came to realize that without freedoms of speech and press, China’s nascent civil society would never be a serious actor in addressing China’s many social challenges, such as its acute environmental crisis, the lack of a social safety net for the poor, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Mr. Hu soon became one of the primary advocates for other activists facing jail or threats, relaying information to Chinese citizens and the outside world. For this, he spent more than 200 days under house arrest last year; this followed detention for over a month the previous year — a period in which the police never informed Ms. Zeng about her husband’s whereabouts.
Ms. Zeng has also become a noted human-rights activist since her husband’s arrest. She started blogging about Mr. Hu’s disappearance and later about their 200 days under house arrest, and quickly attracted a large following. Together, they made a 31-minute documentary about their ordeal, “Prisoner of Freedom City,” which shows on camera for the first time the harassment that dissidents and critics are subjected to by state security personnel. Her blog (zengjinyan.spaces.live.com) has now been blocked in China, but is still available abroad. Recently, she was named by Time magazine as one of the World’s “100 most influential people.”
When they were placed under house arrest last Friday, Mr. Hu and Ms. Zeng were minutes from leaving for a two-month trip to Europe, where they intended to speak about the human-rights situation in the run-up to the Olympics and to screen their documentary in various national capitals. Instead, the police took Mr. Hu to the police station for four hours of interrogation, telling him that he and his wife were suspected of “harming state security” — the kind of ill-defined charges often leveled against dissenters.
Preventing government critics from traveling abroad is becoming a regular feature of China’s repressive tactics. In February, 20 mainland writers were prohibited from traveling to Hong Kong for a major conference organized by PEN, an international writers association. In March, the authorities tried to prevent 80-year old HIV/AIDS activist Dr. Gao Yaojie from going to the U.S. to receive a human rights award (they did an about face when this provoked an international outcry). In April, five rights activists from Beijing, Chongqing and Wuhan were prevented from traveling to a legal conference in Hong Kong. In these instances, as in Mr. Hu and Ms. Zeng’s case, the police provided no legal basis whatsoever for their order.
Indeed, there is no basis under Chinese law for ruanjin. Literally meaning “soft arrest,” ruanjin is imposed at the complete discretion of the police, outside of any legal procedure. Ruanjin subjects one’s daily life to the whims of the secret police. In practice it means 24-hour surveillance by unidentified and often aggressive police officers, confinement at home, and restricted and monitored telephone and Internet communications. When a foreign diplomat tried to visit Mr. Hu last year, the police sealed off the entire housing block and turned the visitor away.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hu and Ms. Zeng’s case isn’t unique. Chinese rights activists are routinely put under house arrest. It is a life in limbo: One never knows when it will come and when it will end. It can last a long time, as it has for Liu Xiaobo, the famous Beijing writer and dissident who has endured ruanjin on and off for over a decade.
Despite the large number of security officials ruanjin entails, with often dozens of law-enforcement personnel mobilized on a single person or family for months, for the Chinese authorities “soft arrest” presents several advantages over formal arrest and jailing. Putting a dissident in prison attracts greater attention and condemnation from the international community. Formal charging and jailing of activists for expressing their opinions also gives the lie to China’s promise to make improvements in the human rights situation before the Olympics. House arrest, on the other hand, attracts less notice, while still intimidating countless others.
The Olympics may be a year away, but the government’s efforts to silence critics are already in full swing. There is little reason to think the wave of arrests will slow — if anything, they’ll accelerate as opening day approaches. The international community isn’t powerless; countries participating in the Olympics, and the Olympic committee itself, can lodge protests and lobby to prevent future arrests. At the very least, no one can sit quietly when critics and human-rights defenders are silenced in this way.

Posted at 12:08 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

May 25, 2007 | Well, I found it. I didn’t want to find it, but I knew it was out there somewhere, and since I travel a lot, I suppose it was destined to happen. Suddenly there it was, my home for an agonizing seven hours in the middle of the night.

What I found was the World’s Worst Airport. I introduce to you the Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport, in Dakar, Senegal. There are plenty of people with travel résumés more impressive than mine, but I’d have a hard time believing there’s a more awful big-city airport anywhere on earth than this one.

In the past I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the caliber of terminals in the most unexpected places, from the down-home charm of Roanoke, Va., to the classical Sudanese architecture of Timbuktu. Imagine, for a moment, the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Is this what you pictured? How about Santiago, Chile? Not that you’d expect anything horrible in Chile, but Arturo Merino Benítez International is one of the nicest facilities I’ve seen anywhere.

Maybe in your mind the name “Dakar” carries a certain mystique, conjuring up thoughts of Saint-Exupéry, who flew the treacherous Aéropostale mail route between Dakar and Toulouse, France, in the late ’20s. His first book, “Courier Sud” (“Southern Mail”), was written in Dakar. Decades later, Concorde was a regular visitor, stopping for fuel as part of Air France’s service between Paris and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

That was then.

I’d arrived in the late afternoon after the long drive from the Sine-Saloum delta region, four hours south of the capital, where’d I’d spent two days. With my flight (Alitalia) not leaving until after midnight, the plan was to hunker down at the airport and save the cost of a hotel. Besides, I like airports, and can always find something to do: grab some food; stake out a view and watch planes; visit the various airline counters and fatten up my timetable collection. But this time, the minute the taxi pulled away, I knew I’d made the wrong choice.

Getting from sidewalk to terminal is the first chore, and hardly an easy task owing to the throngs of cabdrivers, touts and self-declared “porters” blocking the way. No rush, however, because once you’re inside there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. The tiny central lobby is a filthy, two-story chamber soaked in greasy fluorescent light, ringed with a series of kiosks and counters, several of them mysteriously unmarked. Sullen-faced employees sit idly behind the partitions. Some of them are sleeping. To the right is the check-in hall, a slightly nicer space but off-limits until two hours prior to departure. To the left, on the other side of immigration, is the dreary arrivals lounge and baggage claim. Note to landing passengers: If you have to pee, do so on the aircraft prior to disembarking. There are no lavatories in the arrivals area save for a miserable, closetlike latrine in the far corner that doubles as a mosquito-breeding station.

There are people all around, but few of them are passengers. They are touts, hawkers, vagrants, drifters, thieves — a melee of dubiously intended hangers-around, each of them eyeing you with the stubborn, languid glare of a vulture. Set against a back wall, the sole ATM is flanked by armed guards, whose duties are particularly effortless, since the machine doesn’t work.

There is nowhere to sit, no seats. Which really is all right because the worst thing you can do is cease moving. The approximately 5-to-1 scoundrel-to-passenger ratio ensures you’ll never remain unmolested for more than a few seconds. The moment you stop, somebody is hovering over your shoulder, mumbling incoherently. Brush him away, and he is instantly replaced by a man asking if you’d like to buy a plastic watch or a counterfeit phone card. Well, “asking” isn’t quite the right word. His demeanor suggests you are required to buy a watch or a phone card. Resistance is futile, and in the honored tradition of third-world hustlers, he is a man of many trades. Do you need any souvenir trinkets? Do you need to exchange currency? Do you need a hotel room; it’s just up the road and his “cousin” is the “owner”? No? OK, then maybe you’re the giving sort and would be generous enough to simply hand over some money, along with a few of your clothes? You know, a gift, a small cadeau — to invoke that ubiquitous, reckless plea that floats about French-speaking Africa like a desperate wail. Your sneakers … what are those, New Balance? “Yes, you can give me those please, thank you. I can have your sneakers now. Cadeau? Cadeau?”

Avoid eye contact. Keep walking.

Posted at 10:37 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
May 18, 2007

KASUNGU, Malawi: A surprising exercise in revisionism is taking place in this quiet country, a southern African democracy tucked away in an obscure corner of Africa’s Rift Valley that is not generally known for surprises or, for that matter, news.

Rival political parties here are competing over ways to honor the country’s first president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, a man whose stern and prolonged rule would have to place him near the top of any list of Africa’s most absolutist leaders.

To know the full, official name of this man, who died in 1997, after 31 years of rule is to get the picture. Newspapers were obliged to call him His Excellency The Life President (Paramount Chief) Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the Ngwazi. The unfamiliar last word means conqueror in Chichewa, the national language. For good measure, Banda, who was indeed a medical doctor, also carried the titles of minister of foreign affairs, defense, justice and agriculture.

Despite Banda’s many excesses, including calling political opponents “food for crocodiles,” the Malawian Parliament recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of honoring him. This follows the construction, a few years ago, of an expensive mausoleum in the capital, Lilongwe.

These days, in a country that has managed to democratically elect two presidents in Banda’s wake, the country’s politicians are locked in a contest to claim his mantle, which the current president, Bingu wa Mutharika, summed up simply in a recent speech, saying that Banda had devised a “development agenda for the country.”
Today in Africa & Middle East
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In the Freudian world, true adulthood only comes after the death of one’s parents, and it is in this light that what is happening in Malawi, and indeed in many African countries today, is most striking. The continent’s first generation of leaders, larger-than-life men who very often made outsized mistakes, frequently gave way to a second wave of leaders who rejected their legacies and renounced their politics.

In many cases, these second-generation men had little notion of how to govern beyond the obsession with being “anti” figures: anti-Banda, anti-Nkrumah, anti-Lumumba, etc. In their haste to emerge from the large shadows of their predecessors, big new mistakes were made, and lessons that should have been absorbed were discarded.

Throughout, the West, which regarded all of this with a distracted eye, understood little. This remarkable first generation of African leaders was treated in almost comic book fashion, blindly patronized in the face of real excesses, in the case of a Banda or of a Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast, or reduced to two dimensional caricatures, alternately evil or buffoonish.

In retrospect, what most often separated the two groups were the outside world’s own ideological sympathies. What has most often been lost in the exercise of this triage is an appreciation for the difficult choices that these early leaders faced, and for the fact, as Malawians are rediscovering, that many of their decisions were indeed inspired.

At independence, in country after country, university graduates were few and indigenous lawyers, doctors, economists and engineers could often be counted on a single hand. Africa was truly starting from scratch, without so much as an entrepreneurial class, and was expected to make the Western-style political structures it inherited function with the flick of a switch.

Looking back, it should not surprise us that for so long so many failed, but rather that 50 years after Ghana became the first sub-Saharan country to emerge from European colonialism, quite a few have succeeded.

There is no better place to remember the staggering challenges of that era than in this small town, all but lost on an endless plain of largely empty scrubland that bakes under a giant sky that seems impossibly blue.

Here, very nearly in the middle of nowhere, Banda built his most famous creation, the Kamuzu Academy, an Eton-like school complete with teachers from Britain. Banda exhorted the poor masses in his country to strive for the essentials: “enough food, decent clothes, roofs that don’t leak.” At great expense, meanwhile, with an eye to the future, he invested in creating a new class of the best and brightest, schooling them in the classics and insisting on discipline.

Even now the choice seems like an eccentric one, but we forget all too easily the onrush of events of the last 50 years, and the triumphal narrative that has accompanied it in the West. The pressures of outside powers during the Cold War impelled leaders to choose between two competing models: statist authoritarian and nominally leftist on the one side and capitalist and democratic, if only nominally so, on the other.

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Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: May 8, 2007

SHANGHAI — When work began on the Shanghai World Financial Center in 1997, in the headiest days of China’s economic takeoff, Shanghai was already a city that was hard to impress.
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Ryan Pyle for The New York Times

When completed the Shanghai World Financial Center will be taller than the Jin Mao tower nearby, but not quite as tall as a skyscraper that went up recently in Taiwan.

Even then, the erstwhile farmlands of Pudong District boasted two icons: the Oriental Pearl Tower, looking like a science fiction movie prop with its rocket-on-the-launching-pad trunk and glittering, spacestation-like orbs, and the nearby Jin Mao tower, a bejeweled spire of stacked pagodas that boasted the world’s highest hotel lobby.

With competition like that, the man behind the project — one of Japan’s foremost real estate developers, Minoru Mori — knew he had to aim high to make his mark. By the time of the groundbreaking it seemed as if his team had struck on the right plan.

Mr. Mori, who has a Trump-like three dozen or so buildings in Tokyo that bear his name, would offer Shanghai the world’s tallest building, at 1,614 feet. For extra effect the roof of his new building would be formed by a giant enclosed circle that would house specially outfitted cars, a sort of Ferris wheel at the top of the world.

If skyscrapers can be said to have journeys, what has happened since has been one long, strange trip indeed. These days workers are racing to complete the 101-floor building on schedule, mounting skyward floor by floor toward a hitherto unaccustomed view that looks down on the neighboring landmarks.

But in truth, neither the schedule nor the building itself bears much resemblance to the original plans, which for many of the people involved must by now seem like a lifetime ago.

Record-breaking skyscrapers have a long and uncanny history of association with economic crisis — the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, for example, were both conceived in the 1920s and completed during the Depression years — and Mr. Mori’s gaudy Shanghai dream would be no exception. Within months of the groundbreaking a financial crash struck Asia, ripping the bottom out of stock markets and real estate markets throughout this region.

Work was halted on the Finance Center, partly out of fears of a shortage of tenants and partly out of doubts over the unspoken premise that lay behind the project: that China’s economy was set to lead the world. For five long years the huge work site sat idle, with nothing reaching skyward save for overgrown grass behind a plain cement wall.

A holding pattern like that would have been enough to sink many developers, but not Mr. Mori, for whom completing the project appears to be a point of pride.

“We are not a listed company, so we are able to control our costs very carefully,” said Michiho Kishi, a spokesman for the company. “If we had been a listed company, our C.E.O. would have been forced to resign, very simply. That’s what makes us unique.”

What Mr. Mori was unable to control was what happened while his project was frozen. Five years, it turns out, is an eternity in the record-breaking-skyscraper business, with countries all over Asia throwing their hats into the ring with new structures, each taller than the last.

For Shanghai’s would-be title holder, the delay resulted in the building being surpassed even before it could be built, with the additional indignity that the new champion, Taipei 101, a 1,671-foot structure, is in the capital of Taiwan, the diplomatic rival that China considers a renegade province.

But that was not the only setback. With anti-Japanese sentiment swelling in China, questions began to be asked about the Shanghai building’s design. Some said the large hole at the summit was suspiciously reminiscent of the sun that sits at the center of the Japanese flag. That was a sore point for many Chinese, who still harbor resentments over Japan’s military invasion of the country in the 1930s.

Mr. Mori’s representatives gamely protested that the circle with the sky ride was based on a traditional Chinese symbol, the moon gate, but in the end they quietly backed down, replacing the hole with a squarish slot and ditching the Ferris wheel concept altogether.

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Copyrigh City Journal

Arthur Koestler’s life and work embodied the existential dilemmas of our age.

Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.

“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”

Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”

How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor? One can see in this trifling incident how being with anyone less brilliant than Arthur Koestler must have seemed intolerably dull to any woman who had been in love with him.

As it happens, Koestler’s relations with women now have more to do with his reputation than does anything that he ever wrote. Since the 1998 publication of David Cesarani’s biographical study, Koestler’s name has been synonymous with rape, possibly serial in nature, and the abuse of women. I tested this association on several friends with literary interests: though none had read Cesarani’s book, in each case, the first thought on hearing Koestler’s name was of rape. It is doubtful whether any biography has ever affected the reputation of an author more profoundly than did Cesarani’s; and its effect is proof, if we needed any, that books have an influence far beyond their actual readership.

Cesarani is a serious scholar, not a man to manufacture sensational claims for non-scholarly purposes; and, in fact, his widely publicized revelations, which came as a considerable shock, receive a kind of confirmation from a scene in Koestler’s novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943.

The book is at least partly autobiographical. Its protagonist (hero would be too positive a word) is Peter Slavek, a young refugee and former Communist militant from an unnamed Balkan country now under Nazi occupation. Slavek arrives in the capital of a neutral country—clearly Lisbon, Portugal—from which he hopes to reach England and enlist in the British forces, the only ones still fighting the Nazis at that time. Koestler himself reached England from Portugal with the same idea in mind, and his description of Lisbon’s wartime atmosphere clearly draws on firsthand experience.

While in Lisbon, Slavek falls in love with, or forms an infatuation for, Odette, a young French refugee awaiting a visa for America. Odette has taken no notice of Slavek, but one day she visits a friend’s apartment, where the Balkan refugee is temporarily staying. The friend is absent, so Slavek and Odette are alone. There follows a scene that suggests that Koestler was as personally acquainted with rape as he was with the fervid atmosphere of wartime Lisbon.

Slavek declares his love for Odette; she rejects him and prepares to leave. “He jerked himself to his feet, reached the door almost in one jump and got hold of her as she was passing into the hall,” Koestler writes. Then the author says of Slavek that he was doing what several rapists have told me that they sought to do—protect their victims: “As if the door were a death-trap and she were in danger of falling into it, [he] pressed her against him with a protecting gesture, while with his foot he kicked the door shut.” Odette struggles, but “her very struggling,” Koestler writes, makes Slavek’s grip “close tighter around her, like the noose of a trap”—not the activity of an agent but the operation of a mechanical contrivance.

The situation calms a little, and Slavek realizes that he should have let his arms drop with embarrassment, but then “she began struggling again in renewed fury, and this automatically made him tighten his grip.” Koestler describes Slavek as more terrified than Odette.

Then comes the actual rape:

She struggled breathlessly, hammering her fists against his breast … God, how unreasonable she was… . All he wanted was to make her understand that he didn’t want anything from her… . By her furious struggling she caused him to press her back, step by step, from the door. His lips babbled senseless words that were meant to calm; but now it was too late, the flames leapt up, enveloping him … . With blind eyes he fell as they stumbled against a couch … [and he] rammed his knee against her legs, felt them give way and a second later her whole body go limp.

After it is all over, Odette cries. Slavek takes her hand, and feels encouraged when she does not withdraw it to explain and justify his actions: “You know, I am not so sure that you will always regret it, although for the moment you are still angry with me.” Then he contrives to blur the distinction between voluntary and coerced sexual relations: “Nowadays things often start this way, the end at the beginning I mean. In the old days people had to wait years before they were allowed to go to bed and then found out that they didn’t really like each other, it had all been a mirage of their glands. If you start the other way round you won’t need to find out whether you really care.”

Odette’s reply absolves Slavek of any need to feel remorse: “The whole point is that if you knock a woman about for long enough and get on her nerves and wear her down, there comes a moment when she suddenly feels how silly all this struggling and kicking is, so much ado about nothing.” Sexual intercourse, then, has no more moral significance than urination or any other physiological function. “You probably think what an irresistible seducer you are, while in fact all you did was get her to this zero level where she says—after all, why not?” And to confirm the Slavek-Odette-Koestler theory, Slavek and Odette go on to have a short and intense love affair.

Koestler’s description of a rape seems to be from the inside; and if Cesarani is right, it gives us the very model of Koestler’s conduct and experience. He might even have suffered from (if “suffered from” is quite the right phrase) what psychiatrists call “coercive paraphilia”: sexual excitement brought on by the act of physical subjugation, a pompous name sometimes being the nearest that medical science can come to an explanation. Slavek’s argument, of course, is virtually a rapist’s charter. But the uncomfortable fact is that some of the women whom Koestler abused remained friends with him for the rest of their lives. It would take an entire book fully to explore all the evasions in the passage that I have quoted, as well as the social and psychological questions that it raises.

There is much more to Koestler, of course, than sexual perversity, even if it is difficult nowadays to read anything that he wrote without first donning rape-tinted spectacles. Arrival and Departure is not just about Slavek’s love life: it passionately engages with the most important political questions of the day.

For example, the book gave the most graphic description until then published of the gassing of the Jews in Eastern Europe, not as isolated massacres, but as part of a deliberate genocidal policy; and it drew an explicit comparison—now banal and commonplace, but then brave and arresting—between Hitler and Stalin, pointing out their similarities, despite their enmity. Meeting an intelligent Nazi agent called Bernard, Slavek asks him why the Nazis, so anti-Communist, nevertheless copied Soviet methods “to a considerable extent.” Bernard replies:

There is of course a certain affinity between your ex-fatherland and ours. Both are governed by authoritarian state bureaucracies on a collectivist basis; both are streamlined police states run by economic planning, the one-party system and scientific terror… . It is a phase of history as inevitable as was the spreading of the feudal, and later of the capitalist, system. Our two countries are merely the forerunners of the post-individualist, post-liberal era.

To have written this passage at a time when books praising our gallant Soviet allies poured forth from the press—when even conservatives, always very few among the intelligentsia, had replaced their visceral hatred of the Soviet Union with admiration—was an act of considerable courage.

Koestler’s reputation as a writer had declined well before Cesarani’s revelations. He had become an author of the kind one encounters during late adolescence or early adulthood, whom one catches like the literary equivalent of glandular fever, but to whom, once read, one develops a lifelong immunity. Once one of the world’s most famous authors, he became as dated as the youthful fashions of three decades ago.

There were several reasons for this. By 1980, if not before, the burning political issues of his early adulthood—Communism, the rise of fascism, and the establishment of a Zionist state—were of less concern to new generations of readers. Many regarded Koestler’s subsequent obsessions—Indian mysticism, Lamarckian biology, non-reductionist science, and parapsychology—as bizarre or even dotty, the symptoms of a mind that had lost its way. In his will, he endowed a chair in parapsychology at Edinburgh University. He regarded telepathy and precognition as established facts, largely because of the now-discredited experiments of J. B. Rhine at Duke University. He began to collect examples of startling coincidences, as if they could tell us something about noncausal relations between events. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before him, he seemed to the public to have traveled from serious authorship to spiritualist crankdom.

The penultimate nail in the coffin of his reputation, before Cesarani’s revelations, was his double suicide with his wife, who was 20 years younger, in 1983. While he had both severe Parkinson’s disease (causing a decline in his mental powers) and leukemia (from which he was soon to die, in any case), his wife, who swallowed a fatal dose of barbiturates with him, was in perfect health. Many believed—without adequate evidence—that Koestler had bullied his wife into ending her life with him.

This was the second double suicide of a great Central European writer of adopted British citizenship and his wife—the first being that of Stefan and Lotte Zweig. But whereas Zweig killed himself in despair at the state of the world, Koestler killed himself in despair at the state of his health—no doubt a commentary on the direction, not wholly bad, in which the world had moved in the intervening 40 years. But it suggested great egotism and cast doubt on the sincerity, or at least disinterestedness, of all Koestler’s previous commitments.

Koestler does not deserve such summary dismissal, for if any figure could claim to have encapsulated in his own life—and recorded—the political, intellectual, and emotional tribulations of the twentieth century, it is he.

He was born in Budapest in 1905 to assimilated Jewish parents. His father was a businessman who failed most of the time but who occasionally hit the jackpot: immediately before and during the first half of World War I, he made a fortune (soon lost) by manufacturing and selling soap that contained radium. Radioactivity was then a recently discovered phenomenon, and many believed the rays to be life-enhancing and disease-curing.

Koestler’s father spent the rest of his days dreaming of a new product that would restore his fortune at a stroke; and, in a sense, the young Arthur shared this kind of illusion but transposed it to the intellectual, political, philosophical, and spiritual spheres. As a young man, Koestler saw in radical Zionism the answer to his existential problems, though he had no religious belief or cultural or philosophical affinities with Judaism (much later, moreover, he wrote a book still cited by anti-Zionists, The Thirteenth Tribe, which claims that most Jews are not of Semitic origin but descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism). Then Koestler converted to orthodox Marxist Communism, followed by a stage of crusading anti-Communism, itself replaced by a prolonged search for a spiritualism founded on evidence and rational inference. Koestler was not a man to do things by philosophical halves: he was a drinker of infinity, to quote the title of one of his books.

Young Arthur, gifted scientifically and mathematically, studied engineering in Vienna but did not graduate. Instead, the ardent Zionist went off to Palestine to live on a kibbutz. He did not last long; his personality ultimately would not allow absorption into a collective enterprise. On the verge of starvation, he was saved by a fortuitous appointment as the Palestine correspondent of the Ullstein Trust, the largest German newspaper group, which later assigned him to its Paris office. He then moved to Germany, where he served as the science editor of one newspaper and foreign editor of another, among other exploits flying in a zeppelin to the North Pole via Soviet Russia.

Koestler joined the Communist Party, later explaining that it seemed the only viable alternative to Hitler, but this led Ullstein to sack him. Returning to Paris after traveling in the Soviet Union, he wrote political propaganda under Comintern direction until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when a British liberal newspaper assigned him to visit Franco’s headquarters. Denounced as a Communist, he managed to escape, but Franco’s forces captured him during a subsequent trip to Spain and sentenced him to death. An international campaign secured his release. Koestler’s years as a Comintern agent—in which he, the most egotistical of men, willingly subjected himself to the Party’s discipline on the grounds that it represented the sole judge of transcendent truth—gave him unparalleled insight into the psychology of Party members suddenly accused of counterrevolu-tionary treason.

He then lived in France, breaking for good with the Communist Party over the show trials. When war broke out in 1939, the French government arrested him in Paris for being a potentially hostile alien and imprisoned him in a concentration camp; a second international campaign won his freedom. Fearing rearrest, he joined the French Foreign Legion and managed, by a very circuitous route, to reach Lisbon. From there, he flew—illegally—to London, where he again found himself imprisoned, this time for six weeks. In his prison cell, he corrected the proofs of Darkness at Noon, which would be his most famous book.

Released from prison, he at once joined the British army, which, he said, had a salutary effect upon his life. “I found myself transformed from a member of the grey, piteous crowd of refugees—the scum of earth—into a best-selling author,” he wrote. “This is a dangerous experience for any writer, but before it could turn my head I was also transformed into Private No. 13805661 in 251 Company Pioneer Corps, which was not given to lionizing intellectuals.” It says something of Koestler’s life until then that he called the three years he spent in blitzed London, where he survived a close bombing, “among the most uneventful (I almost said peaceful) of my life.”

By the age of 37, Koestler had traveled widely; spoke Hungarian, German, French, Russian, and English fluently, as well as some Hebrew (having invented the Hebrew crossword while in Palestine); had been imprisoned several times, including under sentence of death; had been a Zionist, a Communist, and an anti-Communist; and had written books in Hungarian, German, and English. Shortly after arriving in England, he knew and was friendly with its most prominent writers and intellectuals: George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Ayer, and many others.

Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in German while living in Paris, expecting at any moment to face arrest. It is the story of Rubashov, a Bolshevik intellectual modeled largely on Nikolai Bukharin, the economist and darling of the Party who wound up executed after a 1938 Moscow show trial.

At the time of the book’s publication in 1940, and for a long time afterward, the public confession of many old Bolsheviks to self-evidently absurd crimes that carried the death penalty—for example, that from the very beginning of their careers they had served foreign intelligence services—mystified many in the West. How had Communist officials obtained these confessions? Did the Russians have some extremely sophisticated and secret technique of interrogation, unknown in the West?

Of course, some in the West, Communists and ardent fellow travelers, believed that the trials were fair and that the confessions were unforced and entirely veridical. Among the most influential was a prominent British lawyer, D. N. Pritt, who actually wrote a book testifying to the Moscow trials’ fairness. As late as 1972, a fellow medical student, at the time a fierce Maoist, tried to convince me that the trials were genuine by lending me transcripts of the proceedings.

So Koestler’s imaginary reconstruction of how Rubashov was persuaded to confess, to which he brought his own intimate knowledge of how people thought and acted who had made the Party their whole life, was entirely new and original. Koestler’s solution to the puzzle was that Rubashov, and those like him, confessed not because of any physical torture (though Rubashov is deprived of sleep, a technique that interrogators did use in obtaining confessions) but because it was logical for them to do so. All their adult lives, they had believed that the end justified the means; moreover, and crucially, they had delegated to the Party the exclusive right to judge both end and means. Who were they, then, to object when the Party decided that it needed to sacrifice them, irrespective of whether they were guilty of anything?

Koestler is sufficiently sophisticated a novelist not to make Rubashov wholly admirable. Indeed, the Communist has failed to intervene on behalf of his own secretary, Arlova, with whom he has had a love affair, when she is accused of preposterous crimes. He reasons that his life is worth more to the cause than hers.

Koestler has the aristocratic Rubashov interrogated by a proletarian functionary named Gletkin. The climax comes when Gletkin argues that Rubashov’s private dissent from the Party line must, logically and objectively, lead to civil war and possibly to the destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat and that, therefore, his confession “is the last service the Party will require of you.”

“Comrade Rubashov, I hope that you have understood the task which the Party has set you.”

It was the first time that Gletkin called Rubashov “Comrade.” Rubashov raised his head quickly. He felt a hot wave rising in him, against which he was helpless. His chin shook slightly while he was putting on his pince-nez.

“I understand.”

See the link below for the full article.

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Saturday, May 5, 2007

The Communist Party should decide at its 17th congress to ditch members who do not truly believe in Marxism or risk seeing the party become a mere instrument for the protection of vested interest groups, according to a prominent scholar.

The call from Liu Fuyuan , former vice-president of the National Development and Reform Commission’s (NDRC) Macroeconomic Research Academy, is a sign of rising frustration among scholars about social inequality and the party’s quiet departure from Marxism despite insisting it remains communist.

“Capitalism is not scary. What is scary is to take capitalism as socialism and confuse people’s beliefs,” Mr Liu wrote in Strategic Choices for the Communist Party of China, an 81-page paper urging the party to initiate reforms at the congress later this year.

“If anyone in our party has discovered any new ideas that keep up with the progress of time and are better than Marxism, that would be a special contribution to humanity and he should openly declare it. Why should they confuse people by wearing Marxism as a jacket?”

He said the party should not only tell people publicly whether the mainland was pursuing capitalism, it also should retain its own characteristics without becoming an instrument of vested interest groups.

“If we truly believe class struggle is history, we should have the courage to dismantle the Communist Party,” Mr Liu said. “But if people turn it into a party that encompasses all people, it is denying the characteristics of a political party.”

He said members of a political party should not exceed a certain proportion of the population or it would no longer be a political party but a loosely organised association.

“Among our working population of some 800 million, there are more than 76 million Communist Party members, making up 9.5 per cent of the working population,” he wrote.

“There is one Communist Party member for fewer than 11 people and the party is on the verge of losing the characteristics of a party.”

Mr Liu urged the party to reregister all its members and persuade those who did not believe in Marxism to give up their membership.

“If all our Communist Party members truly believe in Marxism, how can it be possible to have so many corrupt people?” he said.

In an earlier interview, Mr Liu said he believed only about one-fifth of party members met the requirements and would be able stay if the proposal was adopted. He also urged the party to spend more than half of the wealth created by society on social welfare and condemned vested interest groups inside the party for their resistance to reforms.

Mr Liu warned that if the party failed to take action to drive these people out, the future of the party and the country would be bleak.

“With the extraordinary wisdom of the Chinese people, we don’t even need a colour revolution, the rulers of the country will be changed.”

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Copyrigh Harvard magazine

Here is an image calculated to ruffle the feathers of all red-blooded Americans:

Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary Colossus—to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato—then the image may be worth pondering.

This charge of unfitness for duty has been laid at our doorstep by the lively young Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, Harvard’s (relatively) new Tisch professor of history and Ziegler professor of business administration. And he is far from done with us: “Consider…the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping—that is to say, constabulary duties.” He clarifies his position:

Unlike most European critics of the United States…I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job.…The United States has good reasons to play the role of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture.

“All I mean,” continues Ferguson in his controversial book Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (2004), “is that whatever they choose to call their position in the world—hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership—Americans should recognize the functional resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and should try to do a better rather than worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors.”

Though he argues in another of his contentious books, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002), that the British empire was, on the whole, a successful enterprise, well worth imitating, we Yanks, he says, just do not have the stomach for it. We suffer, says he, from three fundamental deficits, which hinder us from flexing our muscles and making the world a better place: an economic deficit, a manpower deficit, and “most serious of the three,” a huge attention deficit. The economic deficit is remediable, though not entirely without risk down the road: “[Americans] can carry on borrowing from abroad since there seems to be an insatiable appetite on the part of foreign investors for dollar-denominated securities, no matter how low the return on them.”

The manpower deficit is problematic because, as he notes, Americans do not want to spend long years abroad serving in the armed forces or supervising a colony somewhere. He offers a mischievous proposal: “If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless, and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army.” More seriously: “One of the keys to the expansion of the Roman Empire was, after all, the opportunity offered to non-Romans to earn citizenship through military service.”

But our attention deficit may well be our undoing: we are a people sunk in unseemly denial. Ferguson quotes a dispirited American general: “We preach about values, democracy, human rights, but we haven’t convinced the American people to pony up….”

With which Ferguson essentially agrees: like it or not, we Americans not only can afford to “play a more assertive global role, but [can]not afford not to.”

If Ferguson has had a signature theme, it is this: the importance of an energetic liberal empire and how best to carry it off, as did, for the most part, the British and Romans. Though his next few years will be dedicated to his other principal interests, namely money, German-Jewish history, and power, it is his multiple works on empire that have brought him notoriety.

At the age of 43, the prodigious Ferguson has produced eight meaty, weighty books, and has another two in progress; hundreds of scholarly articles, tumbles of introductions and book chapters, and an assembly line of regular columns and op-eds for American, British, and German newspapers, all while editing the Journal of Contemporary History. (He once told an interviewer, “My puzzle is with people who spend 10 years not producing a book. What do they do?”) And all while commuting among Harvard, the Hoover Institution at Stanford (where he is a senior fellow), and the United Kingdom, where his wife Susan, a media executive, and their three children live.

Moreover, in the United Kingdom, he is also quite the media celebrity. In 2002-3, for Britain’s Channel 4, he wrote and starred in a six-part history of the British empire. In 2004, he followed with American Colossus—both programs based on his books. And in 2006, Britons watched his six-part The War of the World, dramatizing his latest, a huge volume subtitled Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West.

Visiting Ferguson in his office at the Center for European Studies, I asked him about the strain of separation from home and family, what he has called his transatlantic “trilemma.” “I can testify that it is extraordinarily hard,” he said. “It’s unfair to the family, and I’d so much rather they were here. But with every passing year, as children get older, they become harder to move. So I feel that I’ve lost this particular argument.” After a pause, though, he added, “Another way to look at it is that historically it’s not that abnormal for husbands and fathers to spend significant time away from their families—seamen, army officers, colonial administrators. Actually, funnily enough, these long separations perhaps do allow me bouts of extreme work, which suits my temperament.”

In the oration Ferguson delivered at Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises in June 2004, he noted: “Throughout much of my life, the United States has seemed to be tapping on my shoulder, urging me to quit the Old World for the New.”

Niall (pronounced “NEEL”) Campbell Douglas Ferguson—born in Glasgow in 1964, his father a doctor, his mother a physics teacher—grew up in the west of Scotland, except for two years in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father had taken a job teaching. (His younger sister is now a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania.) He prepared at The Glasgow Academy, which he describes as “a school produced by the Scottish bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century to educate their sons for commerce. I was lucky because, though it was clear that I wasn’t going into business or law, the school was encouraging of those who were obviously effete intellectuals, and encouraged us to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. My parents never opposed this path. My father wasn’t the kind of man who wants to clone himself—he was delighted that I was academically motivated. The ethos of my family was work and education.”

So it was off to Oxford, where he promptly went straight to the devil. “In the true tradition of Calvinist lads who lapse,” he says, “I spent two years doing everything but work. I played the double bass in the jazz quintet, debated rather badly at the Oxford Union, edited a student magazine, and even appeared as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, hookah and all.” At that moment, says he, he fortuitously discovered he was not cut out for the stage and, according to his account, sprinted to the Bodleian Library in the nick of time. “Oxford, unlike Harvard, doesn’t do continuous assessment. If you can get it together for your final examinations, which in those days meant 10 three-hour papers over seven days, it won’t matter how bad you’ve been before.”

Dare we say the rest is history? Graduating with first-class honors in 1985, he was a demy (a foundation scholar) at Magdalen College until 1989. He then spent two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, where he learned German, worked on his dissertation (subsequently his first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927), and worked as a journalist for British and German newspapers—using a variety of pseudonyms, to avoid academic reproach. At this point, he took up a research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, soon afterwards moving to a lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, and in 2000, he was appointed professor of political and financial history. Two years later he jumped the Atlantic to take the Herzog chair in financial history at the Stern Business School of New York University (where he was voted “Professor of the Year” in 2003). In 2004, the year he arrived at Harvard, Time magazine included him in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Ferguson is a bonnie and beamish lad—genial, open, and charming. His admirers have suggested that in a movie he might be played by Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. In Alan Bennett’s recent play and film, The History Boys, he is the model for the contrarian teacher Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore. But there is no reason he could not play himself. He certainly has the media savvy and experience. In his films he uses to great effect his mellifluous actor’s voice, Oxonian wrapped in unmistakable burr. As he does his good looks: In the film of Empire, he treks all over the former British colonies, looking very cool, from the Caribbean to Africa to India, speaking from dungeons and castles, from churches, gardens, and deserts, from parades, bazaars, and ritual ceremonies, from dugout canoes and rickshaws, and even while clambering up peaks, all the while overflowing with names, dates, customs, exotic anecdotes, and even the occasional familiar chestnut, such as “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!”

To those inclined to turn up their noses a bit at the concept of a media historian, Simon Schama, University Professor of art history and history at Columbia, and himself a media celebrity in much the same mold as Ferguson, snaps, “Well, let them try it themselves before they sniff. Trying to be a historian and a public intellectual is the most demanding, challenging task one can undertake. My professor, Jack [Sir J.H.] Plumb, and a mentor of Niall’s, taught that reaching a wide public is the most exacting challenge you can have as a scholar, without compromising the truth and the complexities of what you want to say. Niall does that extremely well, both on the printed page and on television. I am his number- one fan!”

On the other hand, it will come as no surprise that some of the concepts expounded by Ferguson rub many people the wrong way. Indeed, the very word “empire,” it seems, touches off severe reactions. To take but a couple of examples, the British journalist Johann Hari, under the headline “There can be no excuse for Empire,” writes in the Independent: “For over a decade now, Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right, arguing that the British Empire from the Victorian period on was a good thing with some unfortunate ‘blemishes’ that have been over-rated and over-stated.” In a review in the Guardian, entitled “The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale,” Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge, says that Ferguson, whom she refers to as a “neocon ideologue,” is rewriting history, “driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right….Colonialism—a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement—is rewritten into a benign developmental mission….” Ferguson is used to these imprecations. Although he did write a published letter chiding “Horrible Hari” (the epithet alludes to the Horrible Histories series by British author Terry Deary), Ferguson says this kind of criticism comes with the (imperial) territory.

We cannot deal here with all these charges. Anticolonialism, after all, is Gopal’s career. But take, for example, Gopal’s charge of slavery—an integral element, she says, of empire. In Ferguson’s film, one of the most significant points made is that Britain abolished slavery in its empire. Returning to Empire, the book, one reads in the section on the Clapham Sect about this evangelical group’s success in bringing about abolition:

It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people. It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart.

He goes on to discuss the broad and diverse leadership of the campaign for abolition, and its unstoppable resolve, so that the slave trade was abolished in 1807 (and slavery itself in 1833). “From now on,” he continues, “convicted slavers faced, by a nice irony, transportation to Britain’s penal colony in Australia.” (In short, “indentured labour.”)

Furthermore, despite the anti-Western imperial scenarios constructed by his critics, Ferguson (without denying the undeniable) is emphatic about the benefits that accompanied British rule, including active efforts to eliminate female infanticide and sati (the self-immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre).

“Without the spread of British rule around the world,” he continues, “it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.”

Those empires that adopted alternative models—the Russian and the Chinese—imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today. India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models.

Ferguson is resolute in his defense of the relative stability and calm created by the British empire. In fact, one of the three principal causes of the “extreme violence of the twentieth century,” he writes in The War of the World, was the fracturing of empires—the British, yes, but also the others, the Axis powers, “the worst empires in all history.” (The two other determinants he cites—to simplify the vast tapestry of this book—were the violent coming apart of multiethnic societies and the boom and bust of economic volatility.) If the British empire was far from unblemished—and Ferguson describes the blemishes in great detail—it was also impressively noble in its “finest hour” against the Axis powers; and

what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?

The War of the World takes the reader on a long and gruesome march through the century-long racial tensions and economic uncertainties that led to the Second World War and the “descent” of the West: that is, the descent into unimaginable horror, and the concomitant political rise of the East. His conclusion essentially is that the war would have been less costly in every way if the West, instead of fretting and temporizing, had taken pre-emptive action in, say, 1938. Hitler’s goal, he writes,

was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials.

However, “Hitler wanted not merely a Greater Germany; he wanted the Greatest Possible Germany. Given the very wide geographical distribution of Germans in East Central Europe, that implied a German empire stretching from the Rhine to the Volga. Nor was that the limit of Hitler’s ambitions, for the creation of this maximal Germany was intended to be the basis for a German world empire that would be, at the very least, a match for the British Empire.”

But the British and their allies continued to dither. “Thus,” in Ferguson’s view, “the only one of the options that was never seriously contemplated was pre-emption—in other words, an early move to nip in the bud the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany…. [T]he tragedy of the Second World War is that, had this been tried, it would almost certainly have succeeded.”

But war is not always inevitable, as Ferguson stresses in his magisterial earlier book, The Pity of War. The book’s title is taken from Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”:

For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now, I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Ferguson plays on the subtle double meaning of the word: pity as the infinite sadness of war, and perhaps even more heartbreaking—pity as the avoidability of war.

In the very beginning of the book, he tells us about his grandfather, John Gilmour Ferguson, who joined up at age 17 and was sent to the trenches as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders, the “devils in skirts.” He was wounded and gassed, reminding us of the more famous Owen poem, “Dulce et decorum est,” with its vivid “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!….” But the lucky John Ferguson returned to Scotland to become in time a grandfather, unlike a huge number of his comrades.

The book is full of unexpected conclusions, not least that the outbreak of war itself took almost everyone by surprise. In spite of decades of predictions, treaties, broken treaties, and precautions; in spite of the fact that virtually every member of royalty throughout Europe was related and constantly in touch; in spite of all the spies and double agents and best-selling books; in spite even of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, “thanks to the most famous wrong-turning in history”—the fact is that on August 4, 1914, it seems that the whole world was shocked that war had begun.

But was it avoidable? In Ferguson’s words:

Had Britain stood aside—even for a matter of weeks—continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today—but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars. Perhaps too the complete collapse of Russia into the horrors of civil war and Bolshevism might have been averted.…And there plainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world. Granted, there might still have been Fascism in Europe in the 1920s; but it would have been in France rather than Germany that radical nationalists would have sounded most persuasive….

In addition, perhaps “the inflations and deflations of the [succeeding decades] would not have been so severe.” But of course, Germany would have been the victor. Not such a terrifying prospect in 1918. In fact:

With the Kaiser triumphant, Adolf Hitler could have eked out his life as a mediocre postcard painter and a fulfilled old soldier in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain. And Lenin could have carried on his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to collapse—and forever disappointed.

“It was Germany which forced the continental war of 1914 upon an unwilling France (and a not so unwilling Russia), but it was the British government which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war, a conflict which lasted twice as long and cost many more lives than Germany’s first ‘bid for European Union’ would have….It was,” he concludes, “nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”

Schama, who says this book is probably his favorite—“I just love the narrative, the passion, the way it is written”—is nevertheless not sure he agrees with Ferguson’s conclusion. “Though I’m not a complete determinist,” says he, “I have a little bit more of the predestination person in me.”

Also disputing Ferguson’s position is Saltonstall professor of history Charles S. Maier, who co-teaches a conference course, History 1965 (“International History: States, Markets, and the Global Economy”), with Ferguson. “He makes his arguments with great verve and panache and learning,” says Maier, “but I don’t agree that Britain might have been better advised to stay out of the war. I don’t agree with him in that I think the Germany that would have won would not be the Germany of today—no one could have foreseen the Third Reich.” As Maier writes in a review of the book, “Ferguson’s thought-experiments are warranted for reflecting on the irony of unintended consequences, but not to persuade us that the statesmen of 1914 should have acquiesced in German demands….” No, he continues, “World War I was fought with a pervasive consciousness of iron inevitability.” For himself, Maier writes, “the abiding lesson of this stimulating book is that rational choices can produce absolutely catastrophic outcomes. For that sobering demonstration, I am grateful to Ferguson as well as to his grandfather.”

The “thought-experiments” mentioned by Maier are the “counterfactuals” through which Ferguson arrives at his painful conclusion in The Pity of War. It is history in the subjunctive past perfect, a jeu d’esprit that he deploys with the utmost seriousness throughout his work and teaching. Anyone needing more background on Ferguson’s opinion that Britain’s entry into the war was indeed “the greatest error of modern history,” is herewith referred to his detailed essay, “The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Britain had ‘stood aside’ in August 1914?” This is one of nine chapters in Virtual History, edited by Ferguson, who, along with eight other historians, plays the game of “What if?”—toying with concepts such as “What if Germany had invaded England in May 1940?” “What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War?” “What if John F. Kennedy had lived?”

Ferguson admits that the book comprises a “series of separate voyages into ‘imaginary time.’ It may smack of science fiction to offer the reader glimpses through a series of worm holes into eight parallel universes.” But far from apologizing, he argues, “The world is not divinely ordered, nor governed by Reason, the class struggle or any other deterministic ‘law.’”

Though counterfactual history has been dismissed by some historians as a parlor-game, a red herring, even “the complete rejection of history,” Ferguson will have none of it. “Virtual History,” he says in his office, “was a very important moment in my intellectual development. It came about because my Ph.D. had ended up posing a counterfactual question: What if the Germans had stabilized their currency in 1920 and not embarked on their deranged hyperinflationary policy? Without actually knowing what I was doing, I tried to think that through, and argued that there really was an alternative, that it wasn’t inevitable, that there was a moment when, as a result of a series of very bad decisions, Germany ended up plunging into hyperinflation.

“I sent off an article making that point, and it came back with a referee’s report from one of the grand old men of German economic history, denouncing the very notion that an historian could ask a what-if question.

“I thought about this damning report, and I decided that he was wrong, and in a sense Virtual History was born at that moment. My feeling was, and I’m still very committed to the notion, that we need to ask this stuff. We can’t duck these questions. There’s a reluctance among mainstream historians to engage what seems to me a philosophically irrefutable point: that if we’re going to propose anything of a causal nature, we’ve got to make explicit the counterfactual that statement implies. I think it’s almost fraudulent not to make your counterfactual explicit. You’re cheating your readers and your students. If you really do think that, let’s say, the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression, then you have to show how a different monetary policy would have avoided it.

“The other thing I deeply believe,” he continues, “is that it helps you recapture the uncertainty of the past. We are about recapturing past thoughts, recapturing and reconstructing them, like the moment in August 1914, when absolutely nobody knew what was coming. Historians have been writing for years and years that the origins of the First World War date back to the 1890s. Well, that’s not how it felt at the time.”

Then there was Colossus, the book, he says “that managed to annoy just about everybody.” “Back in the dying days of the Clinton administration,” he says, “I concluded—somewhat heatedly—that ‘the greatest disappointment facing the world in the twenty-first century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.’ Little did I imagine that within a matter of nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of September 11, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated. Since the declaration of the war against terrorism, the question has ceased to be about guts. It is now about grit, the tenacity to finish what has been started.”

It is not hard to see why this book “managed to annoy just about everybody.” And it becomes easier to understand why his liberal critics call him a neocon stooge of the American hard right. (Especially when it gets around that he was, in his words, a “confirmed Thatcherite.” He had fallen in with the Thatcherites at Oxford—“clearly the most interesting people there,” but was too “junior and insignificant” to do more than write “a lot in support of her, and Reagan, too.” As he once told an interviewer, “Britain was on the road to becoming Argentina” when, fortunately, Lady Thatcher came along to the rescue.)

But he claims he has never had the slightest contact with the Bush administration, and says the “neocon” charge is “absolutely malicious.” He notes, “I was always consistent in saying that the United States was not likely to make a success of the invasion of Iraq because, unlike Britain, it had the three deficits I wrote about: in manpower, capital, and above all, staying power. I also opposed British involvement in the war. I wrote in the Financial Times that this may have been in the interest of the United States, but it was not in Britain’s interest. But I was heeded neither in London nor in Washington.

“My lament and refrain in those distant days was, ‘Why does America ignore British history? Why does nobody here talk about 1920, and Britain’s experiences in Baghdad?’ Remember what Churchill said: ‘At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of sitting on an ungrateful volcano out of which we will in no circumstances get anything worth having.’ It was a revelation to me that Americans were so parochial. I must say I came here no doubt with all kinds of illusions, but I was still surprised. I think that what happened is that people said, ‘Well, this guy is in favor of empire (which empire they don’t say), so therefore he must be in favor of the war.’ What I did say was that the United States should use its power more aggressively to get rid of rogue regimes and failed states, but the notion that that had any role to play in 2003 is absurd.

“I also said that the time for a ‘surge’ was 2004—I mean, if you’re going to do it, do it right. And the piece I wrote then for the New York Times, which got me into a lot of trouble, said the time for ruthlessness was at that moment. You had to stop the insurgency then and there; you had to whack Fallujah, you had to whack al-Sadr. But the army backed off, and that was a disastrous mistake. The credibility and legitimacy of U.S. forces on the ground have only gotten shakier.

“We need another idea at this point. I’ve suggested putting in UN troops.” (This column was roundly derided, too—particularly in that part of the media where the UN is synonymous with fecklessness and corruption, opinions he actually shares.) But, he persists, “I’m thinking of, say, Indians with blue helmets. Where in the world can the United States expect to find an ally prepared to put up sincere interest and support? Perhaps in India; India is a country with a large conventional force, and with a commitment to fight the war on terror.”

One way out of the appearance, so distasteful to his critics, of creating an empire in Iraq, is, to put it succinctly: hypocrisy. He wrote in the New Republic:

As in Bosnia, the United States should hand over some of the dirty work….But that will only be possible if the Europeans get what they want: the semblance of an imminent U.S. handover of power in Iraq. Note the word semblance. As the British showed in Egypt, you can keep up this kind of hypocrisy for quite a long time before you actually have to restore self-government for real.

“I don’t think running away is an option,” he explains. “I think regardless of who is president, we are still going to have a military presence in Iraq by 2012. It’s not like Vietnam; you can’t just walk away, leaving it to go to hell, with everybody killing one another. As bad as that was, it had no geopolitical cost at all for Americans; the costs of failure were zero. Whereas the geopolitical cost of running away here is almost unimaginable. Not only would a full-scale regional civil war create all sorts of opportunities for Iran. It creates all sorts of opportunities for the Iranian-backed Shi‘ah and the wildest Sunni radicals who are behind al Qaeda. It makes your most important ally in the region, Israel, desperately vulnerable.”

These dark and freighted subjects—Vietnam, Israel, indeed most of the life-and-death questions of the last half-century—will be examined in Ferguson’s forthcoming undertaking: a biography of Henry Kissinger. It will be a “global” biography in the sense, he says, that “there isn’t a government that doesn’t have a view of this man. You’re dealing with an individual who had a significant role in almost every international crisis of the 1970s.”

Kissinger himself invited Ferguson to write the biography, and gave him access to his papers, upon which work has begun. But first, Ferguson must finish his book on Siegmund Warburg, who, though hardly known in the United States, was highly influential in European financial circles between the 1950s and 1980s. The Warburg book began back in Ferguson’s days in Hamburg, when he met a Warburg relative who invited the young Scot, a historian now morphing into an economic historian, to look at the family papers.

“So there I was,” Ferguson recalls, “sitting in the M.M. Warburg bank offices in Hamburg, and it was there that I really had my first encounter with serious historical research. Reading through the Warburg papers, I realized that here was an economic story I needed to understand. Why did the Germans lose control of their currency? What exactly had gone wrong?

“But there was another story which was not new to me. I’d always understood its importance. This was the story of the German Jews and their predicament. I was gripped by the most important and certainly the most perplexing tragedy of modern history, which was the tragedy of the Jews. The Jews—tremendously successful, not only in economic life, but also in cultural life, the standard-bearers of modernity in the arts and in political innovations of the modern period, and of course the ultimate victims of the backlash against it in the 1930s and ’40s.

“That really started my interest in German-Jewish history,” he continues. “And it wasn’t long after finishing my book, Paper and Iron, in which the Warburgs were central figures, that I was asked to look at the Rothschild archives, with a view to writing a substantial work on the history of the Rothschilds. It was an opportunity I seized with both hands, and I spent five years practically living in the Rothschild archives in London, with visits to important stuff in Russia and Frankfurt. By the time I was done, I think I was about as deeply immersed in German-Jewish history as it’s possible for a non-Jew to be; after all, it was ironic that somebody with my background was asked to write this book.”

The House of Rothschild has been called the finest book ever written about this dynasty, a work that “reaffirms one’s faith in the possibility of great historical writing,” according to historian Fritz Stern. Dense with family details, it unfolds a formidable skein of transactions, contracts, codes, and regulations that took the family from the ghetto of Frankfurt to the status of wealthiest family in the world—perhaps in history—in a deft shadow play illuminated against the grievous background of the ugliest kind of anti-Semitism.

But why is Ferguson destined to find himself so “deeply immersed in German-Jewish history”? Has he not enough to do defending and perhaps perpetuating his arguments on empire? There is no answer—yet—to the “irony” that a disputatious Scot should be chosen to write the story of not one, but three, German-Jewish world players who dominated history. Perhaps a hint can be found in Ferguson’s own suggestion that the Scots are in many significant ways similar to the Jews: “Scottish Calvinism gave rise to impulses comparable to those we associate with Jews in the modern period. A high regard for literacy. An emphasis on education as a route to social mobility. An aptitude for finance and for science.” Whatever the reason, he says with a laugh, “through it all, I have become a thorough philo-Semite.”

For more on this irony, we must await the coming cascade of books. Meanwhile, we might contemplate a possible counterfactual: What if we prove Ferguson wrong, don the purple, and show up as the next empire?

Janet Tassel is a contributing editor of this magazine.

Posted at 5:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Published: May 2, 2007

HARAR, Ethiopia: It is tempting to see the incident last week in eastern Ethiopia, in which nine Chinese oil workers were killed and seven briefly kidnapped, as a sort of inflection point in Beijing’s fast-evolving relationship with Africa.

As tempting as it is, though, to assume that a single attack caused China to awaken to the risks of its full-court press to embrace the continent that is home to the world’s richest and most varied trove of natural resources, it would be mistaken.

For much of the rich world, Africa is often seen as a nagging ache that won’t go away. You apply salves. You take medicine. You might even consult a doctor from time to time, but the basic hope is that you can stop thinking about it for as long as possible, or perhaps forever.

For China, the emerging superpower and a manufacturing giant with a bottomless hunger for raw materials, Africa represents something altogether different. This is where the inputs for its industries will increasingly come from in the future, and as it sinks roots deeper and deeper here, China has been on a crash course to understand the continent.

Part of the steep learning curve has been a spate of incidents, from attacks on oil workers in Nigeria and a popular backlash against the fast-rising Chinese presence in Zambia, to the events that unfolded recently not far from here. Perhaps the biggest discovery for China has been the gradual realization that Africa, long ignored as a dismal sideshow, will increasingly become the stage where China’s image as a global actor of the first rank will be forged.
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Beijing’s push into the heart of the continent will soon make a mockery of its recent tradition of diplomatic standoffishness and see-no-evil moral indifference to misery inflicted on a grand scale by governments against their own people.

China, for the first time since Mao’s revolutionary activism in foreign affairs, will have to decide what kind of power it wants to be, and a very large part of the answer will be determined by its relationship with Africa.

That security interests follow economic ones is all but an iron-clad law of world history, and there is little likelihood that things will prove any different for China in this regard.

A whole generation of Chinese have grown up, however, believing the government’s post-Mao rhetoric - that Beijing will never “interfere in the domestic affairs” of other countries. As many Chinese people will tell you, getting one’s hands dirty in other people’s crises is a peculiarly American predilection, and not at all a Chinese one.

Indeed, Chinese reporting on the attack that killed the oil workers was strangely muted for an event of such violent scope, which is probably a sign of confusion or at least uncertainty among the country’s censors, who provide “guidance” to news organizations on what they deem to be sensitive subjects.

Still, one could find quotes like this, which appeared in The China Daily and was attributed to an unidentified official of Sinopec, the oil company whose workers were killed: “There is no way we will withdraw from Africa due to the fear of risk. This is not a game for us. We will try to improve security in the future, but there is no way we will withdraw.”

There are already signs that China’s leaders understand the political and security implications of the country’s dependence on African resources, and are starting to prepare public opinion for a change of course.

One level of the coming official response will be a more assertive stance on security for Chinese workers and interests, with all that implies: tighter defense relationships, more Chinese peacekeeping, greater involvement in conflict resolution and ultimately, where the stakes are sufficiently high, the deployment of troops to defend Chinese installations.

As big as steps like these are, they are not all. Even now, China is groping toward a more refined approach toward diplomacy across the continent. This flows from an awareness that the old “business is business” approach - which is what Zhou Wenzhong, a deputy foreign minister told me in an interview in 2004, justifying Beijing’s lucrative relationship with Sudan in the midst of a genocide - will no longer cut it.

“It is not in China’s interest to be at the head of a coalition of despots and genocidaires,” said Stephanie Klein-Ahlbrandt, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is an increasingly sharp reassessment of its political interests, which are looking more like those of a great power and less of a developing country struggling to protect its sovereignty.”

For the complete article, please see:
Published: May 2, 2007

Posted at 12:54 AM · Comments (0)

I’m traveling for the next few weeks in Africa, hence the sporadic updates here. I’m in Ethiopia now, and have been having a fascinating time, about which I’ll report more in future dispatches.
For anyone interested, you can follow my footsteps through pictures I’m posting on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aglimpseoftheworld/.
Once I’m in a position to do so, I also intend to post galleries from each of the countries on my itinerary right here.

Posted at 4:41 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Posted Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Men brandish a human skull during Decoration Day in Monrovia Click image to expand.Men brandish a human skull during Decoration Day in Monrovia
MONROVIA, Liberia—There is a time to mourn and a time to dance. So says Ecclesiastes. It’s a passage people cite often in Liberia, where salvation is sought with the hunger of the famine-stricken. But on a recent March morning in a graveyard in downtown Monrovia, Ecclesiastes seemed a dubious guide to reality. A group of young people danced on a tomb to ear-splitting hip-hop, tipping back bottles of beer, and a man with dreadlocks brandished a human skull on a stake. He said the skull belonged to Uncle Sam. “One day you will be like him, too,” he yelled to me. “I wish you could be my wife!”

Nearby, Abraham George, a 32-year-old theology student, offered the opposite view. “Today is a day to remember people who were taking care of you, and they died,” he said, struggling to make his voice heard above the music. “It’s not a day to be happy. It’s a day to be sad.”

It was Decoration Day, a national holiday whose meaning I was struggling to unravel. I had been in Liberia about two and a half weeks, long enough to have heard Chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes on the lips of preachers and politicians for whom it has become a useful shorthand for talking about the country’s transition from war to peace. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” the King James Version begins. “A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.” Liberia’s 14-year civil war ended in 2003, leaving at least 250,000 dead in a country of 3 million. Today, 14,000 U.N. peacekeepers patrol, and the government is trying to revive the ruined economy, rebuild roads, and restore electricity. This, everyone says, is Liberia’s time to heal.
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But such transitions are rarely as simple as the Bible makes them sound. On Decoration Day, mourning and dancing were simultaneous and sometimes indistinguishable, reminding me of jazz funerals in New Orleans. The graves look like New Orleans’ too: raised, whitewashed stone tombs, an echo of the American South in a country founded by freed slaves. In America, Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day, and freed blacks are said to have been among the first to celebrate it as a way of honoring the Union dead after the Civil War. In Liberia, people troop to the graveyards to clean and paint the tombs, sometimes adding inscriptions from the Bible or a drawing of the hand of Jesus.

A few days earlier, I had met some of the graveyard’s living residents. Since the war, Monrovia’s Center Street cemetery has become home to a desperate community of pickpockets and petty thieves, prostitutes and ex-combatants, who gave up their weapons but haven’t found a legal way to survive. Some are addicted to crack cocaine, especially the former fighters, who got hooked when they were given drugs to make them brave in battle. They sleep on the tombs and sometimes inside them, removing the human remains or pushing the bones aside. Police raid the graveyard regularly, beating people and chasing them away, but they keep coming back. They say they have nowhere else to go.

There is a time to be born and a time to die—but what can be said about a country where the living usurp the resting places of the dead? Ecclesiastes glosses over a key reality: War disrupted every aspect of life here. Death is not an abstraction but something that people know intimately, like the pressure of the sun on covered heads or the unpredictable music of water coursing through old pipes, which sends women running with buckets. The war gave rise to many reversals. Drugged, heavily armed children overpowered adults, and peace sometimes feels as unnatural as conflict, as if people are simply marking time until the fighting starts up again

As I walked deeper into the cemetery, even Liberia’s fervid Christianity seemed to loosen its grip. A medicine man wandered amid the graves, his face smeared with a thick chalk paste that he said enabled him to see invisible enemies. People smoked pot under the banyan trees, and groups of boys drummed and danced ecstatically, drunk on cane juice and gin.

Near the large, freshly painted grave of his mother and sister, Joseph Mason poured palm wine on the ground and asked their spirits to bless him. A man standing nearby explained that the dead are wiser than the living and more powerful. He translated Mason’s words, spoken in one of Liberia’s indigenous tongues: “We do not know actually what is going on, so help us with our money, with any work that our hand is touching. And let us live peacefully.”

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