The rise of Shinzo Abe to the premiership of Japan is portent of the growing tension between it and China.
The election of Shinzo Abe as leader of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) is a portent of growing tensions between Japan and China. The retiring prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, who Abe will succeed next Tuesday, has presided over a steady deterioration of relations with China. Abe, however, is a different kettle of fish altogether. Koizumi was not rooted in Japan’s rightwing nationalist tradition: he was a pragmatist and a populist. Abe, in contrast, is a rightwing nationalist. Unlike Koizumi, for example, he has questioned the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials of Japan’s wartime leaders, which found many of them guilty of war crimes.
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The umpire at the centre of the ball-tampering row has a record of making decisions against players from the Indian subcontinent
Most extraordinary scenes surrounded the test match between Pakistan and England yesterday. The Australian umpire Darrell Hair declared that the Pakistanis had tampered with the ball, a grave accusation, and proceeded to award England five runs and then allowed their batsmen to choose a new ball. The Pakistanis understandably were deeply aggrieved. The umpires failed to consult the Pakistan captain prior to their decision nor offer any kind of explanation for their decision. This is not an isolated incident as far as Darrell Hair is concerned. He has a history of making decisions against not only Pakistan players, but also those from India and Sri Lanka.
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Corruption results from the transformed cultural and economic position that these global events have come to occupy
The summer, of course, is the high noon of sport. The World Cup, the European Athletics Championships, Wimbledon, the Tour de France and the British Open are among the highlights. Over the last 10 years, the prominence that sport occupies in global culture has been transformed. It has become one of the key components of the global entertainment industry: great sporting occasions can be accessed by the press of a button in our living rooms, television sports rights have become hugely valuable, sports stars are global icons and role models, commanding millions in both income and sponsorship deals.
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Israel’s long-term future lies in connecting with its Arab neighbours, not a western superpower thousands of miles away
This has been a war that did not happen by accident. The kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah was merely the pretext, long since forgotten in the absurdly disproportionate response by the Israelis, and the death and destruction that their country has wrought on Lebanon. Israel has, throughout its short existence, lived by the sword, safe in the knowledge that its military power, as an honorary western nation, is far superior to that of its enemies. Israel has managed to justify this behaviour, in the eyes of the world (or at least the west), by two means: first, the insistence that its very survival always hangs by a thin thread; and second, the remorse felt by the west over the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust.
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As developing countries acquire a powerful voice, the US shuns multilateral trade deals because it can no longer get its own way
The freer movement of trade and capital has been a fundamental characteristic of the past 25 years of globalisation. The Doha round, initiated in 2001, was the latest attempt to keep the process rolling. It now looks doomed. The deadlock between the US, the EU, Japan and the developing countries seems final. And with the fast-track powers of the US president – which enable trade agreements to bypass Congress – scheduled to come to an end in 2007, any agreement later than this year will be subject to the unpredictability and delay of Capitol Hill. In other words, it is now or never, and it looks more and more like never.
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The World Cup is a marvel of global representation. So why is it getting whiter?
This World Cup, therefore, should not be confined to the quality of the football (surely a disappointment, with a truly great team failing to emerge) but also deal with its broader cultural meaning. In this respect it has been an even bigger disappointment. With this World Cup, global football has taken a step backwards.
The importance of football has grown in direct proportion to its ability to become genuinely global and not primarily European. Unlike virtually The World Cup is not just a great global sporting event, it is also inscribed with much deeper cultural and political importance. Any evaluation of every other human activity – from politics and economics to universities and the military – football has managed to give a growing place in the sun to those who are normally marginalised and unrepresented. The growing importance of Africa and Asia in football are testimony to this.
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China will emerge over the next half-century as the world’s leading power. But how will Chinese hegemony be expressed, and how will the west deal with its displacement and sense of loss?
Over the past two centuries, there have been two globally dominant powers: Britain between 1850 and 1914, and the United States from 1945 to the present. But even in the case of the United States, whose influence is far greater than that of any other nation in history, such overweening power has never been without constraint. The concept of hegemony elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci entails the complex interaction of coercion and consent, force and leadership, and, though it was originally advanced to explain the nature of power within societies, it is also relevant to international relations. Far from hegemony being set in concrete, it is constantly contested and redefined, the balance of power never static, always in motion.
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China will be the next superpower: already it’s in competition with the US for the hearts and minds of the developing world
At the time of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the US stood supreme with barely a challenge visible on any meaningful time horizon. Almost five years on, we can clearly see both the inadequacies in the then-prevailing common sense, and the fallacies intrinsic to the neoconservative view of the world. There are, of course, always limits to power, even if they are not visible. The last five years have made the limits of American power plainly visible.
It is Iraq that has exposed those limits. The idea of US omnipotence always depended on its overwhelming military power, and the neoconservatives saw the latter as the key to a new era of American ascendancy. Iraq has demonstrated the limits of military power when it comes to subduing and governing a society. This failure has curbed the desire to intervene elsewhere: even if military action is contemplated in Iran, which now seems less likely, there will be no Iraq-style invasion and occupation. The idea that Iraq would be a precursor to a new kind of American empire – as advocated by Niall Ferguson, for example, in his book The Colossus – is dead in the water.
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Eleven years before the epochal events in Germany, a seismic change was taking place in China
It is, of course, common sense that 1989 was the defining moment of the last quarter of the 20th century. Who could possibly disagree? It closed a chapter of history that had been ushered in by the October revolution in 1917. It brought to an end the systemic challenge that communism had posed to capitalism, the belief that there was, indeed, an alternative. It allowed the United States to emerge as the undisputed superpower of a new century. It gave globalisation access to the former Soviet bloc from which it had been excluded: henceforth, globalisation could live up to its name.
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China’s opposition to action against Iran shows how it is increasingly at odds with the United States. It is a shame Washington hasn’t noticed.
There is a fascinating difference between the international diplomacy on Iran as compared with that on Iraq prior to the invasion. The opposition to the Anglo-American action was led by France, with somewhat muted support from Russian and China. Indeed, China remained as quiet as could possibly be. Nearly four years later we are in very different waters. The opposition in the United Nations is being led by Russia and China with France on the opposite side.
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