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Recently a little-known but symptomatic incident occurred in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a place symbolic of America’s deep South and once an important center of the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist ideas. Surprisingly, in this instance, the victim of a xenophobic and anti-immigrant local government was not a poor African-American or a Hispanic illegal immigrant. It was Detlev Hager, a 46 year-old German citizen and a Mercedes-Benz executive, a company that is one of the largest employers and foreign investors in the state.
A lot happened in 2011. This year's news roundups will surely be long and interesting. In this column I am not going to run through the main news stories but rather focus on five ideas that had a bad year.
Despite the widespread disenchantment with politics and politicians, there are two events that often engage even the most cynical and uninterested. Voting on election day is one of them. Everywhere, the number of people who actually abstain from voting tends to be lower than what the pre-election opinion polls suggested. On election day, something magical happens, and many of the erstwhile reticent stand in line and vote. The other magical events that engage even those least interested in politics are the televised debates between contending candidates.
The elites didn’t revolt and the people didn’t take to the streets. What ended Silvio Berlusconi’s 17-year run as Italy’s most powerful man was the skyrocketing spread between Italian bonds and the German bunds. Had this stayed at under five per cent, Il Cavaliere would still be in power today.
Some weeks ago I was in Brussels, and by chance found I was sharing the same hotel as many members of the delegations to the EU summit, with whom I had numerous conversations after work or at breakfast. Their tales, anxieties and exhaustion (working nonstop through months dominated by emergencies, bad news and frustration) brought back many memories.
Today's emergencies are crowding the thinking about the long-term. The anxiety over Europe's economic crisis, the political infighting in the United States, social unrest in many other countries, and a possible slowdown of growth in China, are just some of the concerns about the immediate future that are preventing us from thinking beyond the coming weeks or months. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the think tank where I work, has just celebrated its 100th anniversary. Spurred on by the centenary, we are considering the dilemmas that will define the world in the coming century. Many will quickly dismiss such an exercise. Why bother? It is not very likely that the answers will turn out to be true and, in any case, we will not be around to see if we got it wrong - or to deal with the consequences. Yet, these are questions that stimulate interesting ideas and synthesize our options in a number of critical areas. Just thinking about alternative futures and the factors that will shape them helps us better understand where we are, where we might be heading, and which efforts are needed to take us closer to the more desirable scenarios.
Being stuck in traffic is more bearable if the other lanes are moving. If all lanes are jammed for a long time, tempers flare. And if the police eventually arrive and let a few selected cars get out of their lanes and move through a special path, a riot is likely to ensue. This in short is the sentiment that propels the Occupy Wall St protests. We should take note.
His name is Mansour Arbabsiar, his nickname is "Scarface" and some of his friends in Texas, where he has lived for many years, call him Jack. He is one of Iran's James Bonds. If Jack is Teheran's 007, then Gholam Shakuri, a member of Iran's Al Quds unit, the special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, may be 006. Abdul Reza Shahlai is perhaps the equivalent to Miss Moneypenny, who in the Bond movies was the secretary to M, the boss of all the spies.
While the world's attention remains glued to the crisis in Greece (population 11 million), in China (population 1.34 billion) things are going on that we are mistakenly overlooking. Should the world's economic engine stall, the consequences would be much more serious than any Greek problem, even taking into account its impact on the wider European economy. Here are a few boring facts about what is happening in China: manufacturing has fallen for the third consecutive month; the construction boom is about to bust; property prices are falling, and companies in the sector are finding it hard to access financing. Local government debt is now equivalent to 27 percent of the economy, and experts say that 80 of that debt cannot be recovered. Share prices of Chinese companies on the New York Stock Exchange fell on the news that regulators found serious faults in their accounts.
Denial (nothing's the matter). Rage (why me?) Negotiation (what can I do to postpone the inevitable?). Depression (why do anything more? It's all over). Acceptance (the world will go on). According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, these are the five stages one goes through in facing death or catastrophic loss. Perhaps she never imagined how useful her schema would be in understanding the behavior of a government faced with a grave financial crisis. The Argentineans (several times), Brazilians, Mexicans, Russian and Asians passed through these stages. Now it is the turn of Europe (and the US, but that's another story). I do not know (and think nobody knows) how the present economic convulsions will evolve, or how the governments and the financial markets will react in their interminable interplay. We know that the 150 billion that the EU sent to Greece did not buy much, and that heretofore unimaginable austerity measures have been passed in Italy, Spain and other threatened countries. But nothing seems to work.
The downgrade crisis, and the financial mess that preceded it, has resulted in a raft of doomsday-like pronouncements on the future of the United States.
The main cause of coming conflicts will not be clashes between civilizations, but the anger generated by the unfulfilled expectations of a middle class, which is declining in rich countries and booming in poor countries.
I've just got back from China. Like most other regular visitors, I am amazed at the lightning speed of the changes in that country. My last visit was not that long ago and yet this time I noticed further enormous changes. This is what happens when a giant economy grows by 10 percent every year.
There's one good thing to be said about earthquakes -- they reveal otherwise inaccessible information about the deepest geological contours of our planet. The International Monetary Fund has just been shaken by two strong earthquakes: the arrest of its director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the controversy over who should replace him. This second earthquake has provided interesting data about the messy workings of the system that governs today's world. Some of the data confirms things we already knew and the rest clarifies some of the new realities of global power today.
Brazil’s problems of poverty, crime and inequality remain significant. But Brazilians are cheerful, and with good reason: their boom has lifted millions out of poverty and their impressive business performance has seen the nation grow as a global force. But this leads to a common conversation: how long will the party last?
A stench of colonialism is wafting around 19th and H streets in Northwest Washington, site of the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. These foul fumes do not originate in the fact that the powerful, wealthy 62-year-old Frenchman who until this week ran that institution stands accused of sexually assaulting a young and poor African maid in a posh New York hotel. They’re emanating instead from the strong colonial legacy that is already tainting the selection of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s successor.
Why are the United States and Europe attacking Tripoli with bombs and Damascus with words? Why are they putting so much effort into bringing down Libya's brutal tyrant and so timid in their dealings with his equally cruel Syrian counterpart?
During the worst days of the financial crisis, investors and policymakers talked of decoupling, asking if emerging economies would continue to grow if the rich countries crashed. They did. But this spawned another mantra: the two-speed world, in which emerging markets surged even as the advanced nations stagnated. We believe it is time to start talking about another, more ominous moniker for the times ahead: the four-speed world, and the dangers it poses to global growth.
Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda he led are both so last century. The current al Qaeda, and whoever becomes bin Laden's successor, will have a hard time adapting to the twenty-first century. Today's al Qaeda has different capabilities and constraints and also faces different strategic challenges from the organization bin Laden founded in 1988.