CaptMorgan68
01-10-2010, 12:13 AM
Conrad Black: Who's hot and who's not
Last week, I suggested some candidates for the title of most capable national leader in the world. The takeaway message of that review should be the astounding rise, economically and in political sophistication, of most of what used to be the Third World.
China is still a dictatorship. It has a terrible problem with corruption ($35-billion vanished inexplicably last week from government accounts), and many of its economic figures are not believable. But China, India, Indonesia and Brazil are four of the five most populous countries in the world (the United States is third), with approximately 2.95 billion people, about 47% of the world’s population. In the last 20 years they have moved from negligible economic growth, outstripped by population growth, a doomsday scenario, to average economic growth of about 6%, more than three times collective population growth.
I well remember when Jawaharlal Nehru and then his daughter, Indira Gandhi, sat in probably the same chair in the same garden in New Delhi, fondling a rose from the same bush, and explained that India was the world’s moral leader despite the grinding poverty of hundreds of millions of Indians, the utter corruption of their government and the hypocrisy of India’s foreign policy.
I also remember the hilarious carnival of Brazilian politics, highlighted by the candidate for high office about 50 years ago, who, when it came to light that he had several illegitimate children, changed his campaign slogan from some platitude about social justice to “Vote for me, I could be your father.”
This stunning change in quality of government in these large countries bulks far more importantly for the world than the uncharacteristic doldrums of some of the world’s historically most advanced countries. Great nations and doughty peoples are irrepressible over time and will find their balance again.
(A side note: I thank Maureen Taft-Morales for pointing out that Michèle Louis-Pierre was not the president, but prime minister of Haiti, and was ousted from that position in the autumn of last year. I relied on the Economist Yearbook for this entry in my best leaders list, having no access to the Internet here. I substitute Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, who concluded her speech to the U.S. Congress in 2006: “Small, war-torn, and impoverished though we are, we have not lost faith in God and ourselves.” I expect Ms. Pierre-Louis’ return to office in Haiti and cite her as a person to watch this year.)
In the same tentative spirit as last week, I suggest that the most interesting, though not the most hopeful, governmental arrangement in the world right now is in Russia. No large country has ever sustained such a gigantic geopolitical reversal without being overrun, as Russia did with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, into 15 sovereign republics, cutting Russia’s population by more than half.
The society of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky is one of the most advanced cultures in the world, and Russia has been one of Europe’s great powers at least since Peter the Great 300 years ago, 150 years before the unification of both Germany and Italy. (Ivan the Terrible proposed marriage to Elizabeth I, 430 years ago. She declined, but then again she declined all suitors. It could have been one of history’s most pyrotechnic marriages.)
Throughout that time, there has been a sharp division in Russia between the Western emulators, from Peter the Great to Yeltsin, and the nativists, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin — and including most of the lions of Russian literature and music, including Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, even Prokofiev, who returned from the West in the 1930s, but not Diaghilev, who never returned. Upon this tug of war depends whether Russia is part of the West or a vast realm unto itself.
Russia is still reeling from the amputation of most of its population, a steady demographic bust and decline in life expectancy, chronic alcoholism, all the transitional pains of a former command economy, the oscillations generated by crony capitalism, and only a rudimentary system of justice and government. (Russian judges recently acquitted an accused rapist because “the birth-rate has to be promoted”; and an airline pilot who flunked a post-flight breathalyzer was deemed to have required “in-flight stimulation.”)
The current Russian leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is in the tradition of anti-Western nationalists, has balanced himself with an apparently modernist, somewhat Western-seeming president, Dimitry Medvedev. It is as if the Romanov two-headed eagle emblem has been retrieved and enacted. Attempting to unite these two strains in one regime is ambitious and imaginative, like Charles de Gaulle resolving the 170-year conflict between five monarchies and four republics in France, by setting up the most successful system France has had, the Fifth Republic, which is in fact an elected presidential monarchy, which he ruled with the ceremony of Louis XIV and Napoleon I. If Putin’s effort succeeds, it will be a comparable achievement.
***
Leaders to watch this year include the likely new president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire. His victory would be a gain for the enlightened right from the moderate left and would influence the left-right contest in Latin America between the Chavez-Castro-Ortega-Morales “Bolivarians” and the free-market democrats such as Colombia’s Uribe and, despite some of his foreign policy affectations, Brazil’s Lula da Silva.
The most interesting politician in Europe is London’s mayor, Boris Johnson. His Conservative Party is almost certain to win this year’s general election, because it is time for a change, not because of any obvious policy differences with Labour. Most of what Margaret Thatcher fought for has been forsaken, except for the end of the domination by organized labour and state ownership of the “commanding heights of the economy.” We are back to “Butskellism,” the look-alike politics of the 1950s, named after Conservative deputy leader Rab Butler and Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell.
Britain needs an alternative, not just Buggins’s Turn. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is an Obama emulator, and cites only leftists as his intellectual inspiration for what he unpromisingly calls “the Big Society” (please, not again). The prominent presence of Boris Johnson in this government would give it definition and personality, and some brakes against mindless Eurointegration.
***
On mayoral matters, I had been cranking up to urge John Tory to make the race in Toronto when I got a confirmed account of his radio comments about my legal travails. I don’t expect him to know much about them, but he seems not to understand that as I am not guilty and am in the appeals process, treaty transfers out of the United States are not possible. I have known and admired the Tory family for many years, starting with this man’s grandfather, but if John Tory has become just another municipal radio blowhard, Toronto can do better. (And since he has just announced he won’t be running for mayor after all, it looks like it will.)
Other elections to watch in 2010 include Ukraine, where the alluring Yuliya Tymoshenko is the comparatively pro-Western candidate against the Russian-leaning former president Viktor Yanukovich; Brazil, where I doubt if Lula will succeed in elevating his protege, Dilma Rousseff, an electoral newcomer, and the conservative Jose Serra, should win a further victory for the moderate right in Latin America; and the U.S. mid-term elections, where, barring a miracle (and this health care bill is not it), the Republicans will regain a lot of lost ground, no matter how violently Obama beats the Bushes, blaming his predecessors.
National Post
cbletters@gmail.com
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/09/conrad-black-who-s-hot-and-who-s-not.aspx
Last week, I suggested some candidates for the title of most capable national leader in the world. The takeaway message of that review should be the astounding rise, economically and in political sophistication, of most of what used to be the Third World.
China is still a dictatorship. It has a terrible problem with corruption ($35-billion vanished inexplicably last week from government accounts), and many of its economic figures are not believable. But China, India, Indonesia and Brazil are four of the five most populous countries in the world (the United States is third), with approximately 2.95 billion people, about 47% of the world’s population. In the last 20 years they have moved from negligible economic growth, outstripped by population growth, a doomsday scenario, to average economic growth of about 6%, more than three times collective population growth.
I well remember when Jawaharlal Nehru and then his daughter, Indira Gandhi, sat in probably the same chair in the same garden in New Delhi, fondling a rose from the same bush, and explained that India was the world’s moral leader despite the grinding poverty of hundreds of millions of Indians, the utter corruption of their government and the hypocrisy of India’s foreign policy.
I also remember the hilarious carnival of Brazilian politics, highlighted by the candidate for high office about 50 years ago, who, when it came to light that he had several illegitimate children, changed his campaign slogan from some platitude about social justice to “Vote for me, I could be your father.”
This stunning change in quality of government in these large countries bulks far more importantly for the world than the uncharacteristic doldrums of some of the world’s historically most advanced countries. Great nations and doughty peoples are irrepressible over time and will find their balance again.
(A side note: I thank Maureen Taft-Morales for pointing out that Michèle Louis-Pierre was not the president, but prime minister of Haiti, and was ousted from that position in the autumn of last year. I relied on the Economist Yearbook for this entry in my best leaders list, having no access to the Internet here. I substitute Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, who concluded her speech to the U.S. Congress in 2006: “Small, war-torn, and impoverished though we are, we have not lost faith in God and ourselves.” I expect Ms. Pierre-Louis’ return to office in Haiti and cite her as a person to watch this year.)
In the same tentative spirit as last week, I suggest that the most interesting, though not the most hopeful, governmental arrangement in the world right now is in Russia. No large country has ever sustained such a gigantic geopolitical reversal without being overrun, as Russia did with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, into 15 sovereign republics, cutting Russia’s population by more than half.
The society of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky is one of the most advanced cultures in the world, and Russia has been one of Europe’s great powers at least since Peter the Great 300 years ago, 150 years before the unification of both Germany and Italy. (Ivan the Terrible proposed marriage to Elizabeth I, 430 years ago. She declined, but then again she declined all suitors. It could have been one of history’s most pyrotechnic marriages.)
Throughout that time, there has been a sharp division in Russia between the Western emulators, from Peter the Great to Yeltsin, and the nativists, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin — and including most of the lions of Russian literature and music, including Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, even Prokofiev, who returned from the West in the 1930s, but not Diaghilev, who never returned. Upon this tug of war depends whether Russia is part of the West or a vast realm unto itself.
Russia is still reeling from the amputation of most of its population, a steady demographic bust and decline in life expectancy, chronic alcoholism, all the transitional pains of a former command economy, the oscillations generated by crony capitalism, and only a rudimentary system of justice and government. (Russian judges recently acquitted an accused rapist because “the birth-rate has to be promoted”; and an airline pilot who flunked a post-flight breathalyzer was deemed to have required “in-flight stimulation.”)
The current Russian leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is in the tradition of anti-Western nationalists, has balanced himself with an apparently modernist, somewhat Western-seeming president, Dimitry Medvedev. It is as if the Romanov two-headed eagle emblem has been retrieved and enacted. Attempting to unite these two strains in one regime is ambitious and imaginative, like Charles de Gaulle resolving the 170-year conflict between five monarchies and four republics in France, by setting up the most successful system France has had, the Fifth Republic, which is in fact an elected presidential monarchy, which he ruled with the ceremony of Louis XIV and Napoleon I. If Putin’s effort succeeds, it will be a comparable achievement.
***
Leaders to watch this year include the likely new president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire. His victory would be a gain for the enlightened right from the moderate left and would influence the left-right contest in Latin America between the Chavez-Castro-Ortega-Morales “Bolivarians” and the free-market democrats such as Colombia’s Uribe and, despite some of his foreign policy affectations, Brazil’s Lula da Silva.
The most interesting politician in Europe is London’s mayor, Boris Johnson. His Conservative Party is almost certain to win this year’s general election, because it is time for a change, not because of any obvious policy differences with Labour. Most of what Margaret Thatcher fought for has been forsaken, except for the end of the domination by organized labour and state ownership of the “commanding heights of the economy.” We are back to “Butskellism,” the look-alike politics of the 1950s, named after Conservative deputy leader Rab Butler and Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell.
Britain needs an alternative, not just Buggins’s Turn. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is an Obama emulator, and cites only leftists as his intellectual inspiration for what he unpromisingly calls “the Big Society” (please, not again). The prominent presence of Boris Johnson in this government would give it definition and personality, and some brakes against mindless Eurointegration.
***
On mayoral matters, I had been cranking up to urge John Tory to make the race in Toronto when I got a confirmed account of his radio comments about my legal travails. I don’t expect him to know much about them, but he seems not to understand that as I am not guilty and am in the appeals process, treaty transfers out of the United States are not possible. I have known and admired the Tory family for many years, starting with this man’s grandfather, but if John Tory has become just another municipal radio blowhard, Toronto can do better. (And since he has just announced he won’t be running for mayor after all, it looks like it will.)
Other elections to watch in 2010 include Ukraine, where the alluring Yuliya Tymoshenko is the comparatively pro-Western candidate against the Russian-leaning former president Viktor Yanukovich; Brazil, where I doubt if Lula will succeed in elevating his protege, Dilma Rousseff, an electoral newcomer, and the conservative Jose Serra, should win a further victory for the moderate right in Latin America; and the U.S. mid-term elections, where, barring a miracle (and this health care bill is not it), the Republicans will regain a lot of lost ground, no matter how violently Obama beats the Bushes, blaming his predecessors.
National Post
cbletters@gmail.com
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/09/conrad-black-who-s-hot-and-who-s-not.aspx