Bert Vierstra
Yesterday there was an interview with Kishore Mahbubani on Dutch TV.http://images.vpro.nl/img.db?39967543+s(400)[/img]'as a frequent traveller to Western intellectual gatherings, I often come away from them astonished, that at a time when Western minds should be opening themselves to completely new realities, they are actually becoming more closed. I often despair when I read the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times and the Financial Times. These newspapers filled with an incestuous discourse among minds who believe that 12% of the world's population who live in the West, can continue to dominate the remaining 88% who live outside the West.[/quote]You can read the (English) transcript of the interview here:[url="http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/39880046/items/39955988/"]http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht ... /39955988/[/url]Homepage of Kishore Mahbubani :[url="http://www.mahbubani.net/"]http://www.mahbubani.net/[/url]Wiki page about Kishore Mahbubani :[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishore_Mahbubani"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishore_Mahbubani[/url]I have ordered his book "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East" , hope I ever take the time to read it....
SG
I'd also recommend the superb [url=http://www.amazon.com/After-Tamerlane-Global-History-Empire/dp/1596913932]After Tamberlane[/url] by John Darwin which deals with the east-west clashes, and the rise and fall of Empires. Written just a few years back it's gained new resonance in the past year with the rise of China and, now, Russia and the lessening of US influence all of which it predicts.it notes too that essentially that Europe (in that America is an extension of Europe) is still facing the same Russian and Chinese empires created by Peter The Great and the Q'ing and the folly of empire is reliance on military muscle and dominance. And reiterates that history is a Eurasian discourse, not the European monologue about the advance of European ideas of modernity that has dominated.
