Month: June 2006

Bennett on the Origins of The Anglosphere Challenge

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Jim Bennett responds to a (positive) review of his book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century in the (very good) Australian magazine Quadrant. If you have not yet read TAC, pick it up and use it for beach reading this summer.

Bennett’s post shows the development of his thinking as he worked on the book, and how his initial idea was that technology would drive the creation of a networked world a “Network Commonwealth”. As he worked on it further, he came to see more and more the existence of an “Anglosphere” with its own distinct characteristics — and this idea came to predominate in the book and in his thinking. He notes in particular that he was well along in the writing of the book before he came across the writing of Claudio Veliz and Alan Macfarlane, who had a major impact on his thinking.

An example of Veliz’s approach is this article, entitled ” Peron, Whitlam, Argentina and Australia”, comparing the development of Australia and Argentina. Macfarlane, of course, I have mentioned frequently on the blog, e.g. here. He has devoted his professional life to the study of ” the most mysterious, yet portentous, change of the last two thousand years of human history, the origins of industrial capitalism.” This short piece entitled Some Reflections on the Origins Of Industrial Capitalism in a Comparative Perspective gives an indication of Macfarlane’s intellectual approach. A short version of Bennett’s thinking is the Anglosphere Primer, which is very good but really needs a new edition to capture the stuff he has been working on, reading, discussing and thinking about for the last several years. But it is still a good overview.

Gerson Leaves

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I’ve often linked to Bush’s speeches here; it is only appropriate to link to the writer’s departure.

Jay Leno cracked: “Another Bush team member is stepping down. This time it’s long time speechwriter, a guy named Michael Gerson. He was President Bush’s speechwriter for seven years. Isn’t that amazing? President Bush had a speechwriter?”

Well, yeah. But this resignation will, indeed, be a loss.

“He’s one of the few people who is irreplaceable,” Bolten said. “He’s a policy provoker, a grand strategist and a conscience who in many cases has not only articulated but reflected the president’s heart.”

Gerson’s speeches created memes that defined Bush’s presidency, if not always repeated & analyzed in newspapers the next day. The images & vision may have seemed archaic, certainly foreign to many, who often seemed unclear about some of the allusions (as was I, with a weaker Biblical background). However, Bush’s own vision seemed aligned with those speeches, even if their fluidity & complexity were at odds with his own idiolect, his own sometimes inarticulate speech.

Bush’s sense of personal informality and institutional formality was reinforced by the clear differences in those two levels: the formal speeches resonated in time and space; his natural informal speech was full of nicknames, joviality & familiarity. Even before he was elected he saw as distinctly different the respect due him as George Bush & that due the presidency. But the speeches were Gerson’s words & we are likely to remember the apparently shared vision intrinsic to both. Gerson

was a formulator of the Bush doctrine making the spread of democracy the fundamental goal of U.S. foreign policy, a policy hailed as revolutionary by some and criticized as unrealistic by others.

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Note on India

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A&L notes a Foreign Policy article, “The India Model”, that may interest. Sample argument:

India’s greatness lies in its self-reliant and resilient people. They are able to pull themselves up and survive, even flourish, when the state fails to deliver. . . . Indian entrepreneurs claim that they are hardier because they have had to fight not only their competitors but also state inspectors. In short, India’s society has triumphed over the state.

But in the long run, the state cannot merely withdraw. Markets do not work in a vacuum. They need a network of regulations and institutions; they need umpires to settle disputes. These institutions do not just spring up; they take time to develop. The Indian state’s greatest achievements lie in the noneconomic sphere. The state has held the world’s most diverse country together in relative peace for 57 years. It has started to put a modern institutional framework in place. It has held free and fair elections without interruption. Of its 3.5 million village legislators, 1.2 million are women. These are proud achievements for an often bungling state with disastrous implementation skills and a terrible record at day-to-day governance.

. . . . Even though the reforms have been slow, imperfect, and incomplete, they have been consistent and in one direction. And it takes courage, frankly, to give up power, as the Indian state has done for the past 15 years. The stubborn persistence of democracy is itself one of the Indian state’s proudest achievements. Time and again, Indian democracy has shown itself to be resilient and enduring — giving a lie to the old prejudice that the poor are incapable of the kind of self-discipline and sobriety that make for effective self-government. To be sure, it is an infuriating democracy, plagued by poor governance and fragile institutions that have failed to deliver basic public goods. But India’s economic success has been all the more remarkable for its issuing from such a democracy.

I especially liked the observation that it takes courage to give up power. Democacy requires a deferential libertarian vision as much as an assertive one.

Pei — China’s Trapped Transition

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Pei, Minxin, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Harvard Univ Press, 2006. 294pp.

As much as the end of the Cold War, the big story of the tail end of the 20th century was the movement toward economic liberalism in mainland China after 1979. After twenty-five years on a new compass heading, how are things going?

For the interested general reader, business, foreign policy, and military websites provide deeply contradictory news. On the one hand, China seems to have dramatically increased its per capita wealth and changed its peoples’ lifestyle faster than any other nation in history. On the other hand, the vast majority of Chinese are stuck in unproductive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or subject to the whim of central authorities when it comes to the pricing of agricultural goods. That translates into hundreds of millions of people with little hope of climbing the Chinese ladder of prosperity in their lifetimes. China, according to the demographers and “best-case” economists, will still grow old before it grows rich.

On the military front, China appears as the most likely candidate for super-power status with a central autocratic government, a growing economic engine to fund military purchases, a massive population, a compliant diaspora funneling international secrets homeward (Time article [subscription] from early 2005), and a chip on its shoulder lovingly nurtured for centuries as a substitute for an effective political theory. The naysayers, in contrast, claim that China is fortress with no one manning the walls … an army, navy, and air force more effective on paper than in reality, and a billion people dangerously dependent on potential enemies for the raw materials and consumer markets that would subsidize any military modernization.

Which is it?

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