America’s, and particularly Europe’s, current lack of leadership augurs very badly for the future, argues Rob Marchant.
Think for a moment, if you can, beyond the riots. Beyond the slow-burning flames engulfing parts of the Murdoch empire. Beyond the British cuts and the British growth problem, to that delicate balancing of immense forces which is global geopolitics.
Last week, along with the domestic news, we saw some truly momentous international events. Some momentous in themselves, others merely telling indicators signifying how far we’ve come incrementally along a historical road.
In 1988, I was in Shanghai, on a trip having just finished university. In 2004, sixteen years on, I was there again. The second time, the view across the Huangpu River from the beautiful Art Deco Peace Hotel was a bit different; there was now a wealth of skyscrapers where there had been shanty town.
During those sixteen years, Shanghai grew into a city of 17 million souls, and China went well on its way to becoming the world’s largest economy, a feat which most observers reckon it will achieve before 2015. I tell this story simply because I believe that actually visiting Shanghai – or somewhere which has experienced similar growth, like the Shenzhen enterprise zone a little north of Hong Kong – is about the only way you can fully grasp the enormity of the change which has taken place in the world over the last two decades. The other thing that I remember clearly is that everything I bought cost roughly one-tenth of the price back home. It doesn’t take a genius to see why everything is seemingly made in China nowadays, and what a massively disruptive effect that that must perforce have on the economies of Europe and the US.
Last week, we saw three events. The first was the onslaught of the markets against Spanish and Italian debt, only days after EU agreement of a band-aid package to save Greece, punishing European leaders for their lack of will to back a longer-term solution. The second was the last-minute breaking of the dollar debt deadlock on Capitol Hill,, apparently down to the capitulation of President Obama, which lead to the first-ever downgrade of dollar debt. The leadership vacuum in both cases was palpable, as Progress’s own John McTernan points out. And the third, most strikingly of all, was China’s unprecedented reprimand to the US over the debt issue.
Extraordinary. China was telling off the world’s only remaining superpower, as if it were a naughty child. I am a big stakeholder in your country, it was saying. I am reminding you that I have arrived and that you need to pay attention.
With two immense trading blocs unable to resolve their problems in a satisfactory way, a third looks on expectantly. China knows that shortly it is to become more powerful – economically, at least – than both the US and the EU. It is irritated with one party because it thought it wasn’t pulling its weight, and probably merely mystified by the machinations of the other, the Europeans, who are seemingly doomed to be entangled in silly regional disputes about languages and sovereignties, while others quietly take control of the world. Not to mention their inherent laziness, all those long holidays and short working hours: how are they ever truly going to be competitive?
I don’t mean to condone it, but you can imagine how that might be the view from Beijing.
The US on its knees. Europe in disarray. How a firm, authoritarian hand might help those silly old democracies, they must be musing. (And, by the way, how much longer before that country, currently on a mission to significantly build up its military capacity, makes a move on Taiwan which, unlike the little dance it led the US on in 1998, in the end succeeds?)
For those who truly believe that Britain has a future in a Europe only as a loose trading bloc, think again. Europe is likely, in my lifetime, either to achieve some kind of workable political convergence, which is definitively not a super-state, or to have accepted forever a role as a minor-league player next to the US, China and, perhaps, even a renascent Russia in world affairs. An inward-looking Europe, unloved and not consulted on the great matters of late 21st century geopolitics.
True Europeanism is not for those who dream of a massive statist bureaucracy, as the Tories would have you believe. True Europeanism is simply wanting to fight for European values to endure in a world where the other players will be much bigger than the relatively small individual countries we will by then have become. A world where such smaller countries will struggle to be heard.
Or the alternative future: a Europe which didn’t take the opportunity to speak with one voice because it was obsessed with questions of sovereignty and voting. A Europe that ended up having no voice at all. Just like Merkel and Sarkozy have a carve-up meeting before a Euro-summit, one day it will be Obama and Hu, or their respective successors, having a cosy dinner before they tell everyone else what’s been agreed.
As Tony Blair put it in A Journey: ‘Possibly we have not yet internalised the true significance of China’s rise … If Europe wants to be strong, capable of partnering the US, China and others, and also attractive as a partner, it has to focus on certain fundamental decisions.’
But we are not focusing. We are running away from those decisions, as Merkel and Sarkozy showed over Greece. To get to that alternative future, where we are not a bit-part actor, Europe will have to be a player. And, whether we like it or not, that means that we need to settle our differences with those neighbours with whom, after all, we really have an awful lot in common.
We are at a crossroads, where the choice for our leaders lies between statesmanship and a legacy of dithering and missed opportunities.
The clock is ticking.
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Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left
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Having been in BeJing and Shanghai in May this year, I have some observations, Bejing I found it hard to believe that it was China with shops and shopping malls smartly dressed people.
You see wealth as well as poor really poor people some sitting out in the heat of the day begging outside smart icream parlours and shops.
We found Subway, Pizza Hut, McDonalds Tesco, Marks and Spencer… all the fashion shops that are in the States.
Both Shanghai have this vast expanse of modern buildings ,.
What they are amazed at were my blue and greywhite hair
I do have pictures to show. It was expensive in some ways cheaper in other… it made me see how much I love England…. I can put on an exhibition with my diary and our pictures
Anne Diamond
Yes, one of the interesting issues which in Britain we can find it difficult to get our heads around is the phenomenon of the burgeoning Chinese middle class and China as a market, as opposed to a giant production facility.
Given that China is 1.3bn people, if only 5%, say, of those were to be judged as comfortably-off middle class, that would still be 65m people, more than the population of the UK. So Western companies are now lining up, not just to produce their products there, but to sell to the Chinese.
“Europe unloved” (para 11) Oh dear! “Not consulted on the great matters of geopolitics” – what are these in Rob’s argument? Plainly not sovereignty or democracy, since these are self-indulgent sideshows (para 13), though simpler souls might regard them as important if not vital values which are not only European….Are the Chinese people and government not concerned with their hard-won sovereignty? Is democracy not important to them?
So what ARE the fundamental decisions Rob would have the British state influencing solely through Brussels(13, 15)? What ARE the starring roles besides which the bit-part actors (15) are so contemptible? All we get is the rhetoric ‘voice’, ‘statesmanship’ ‘opportunities’ and ‘European values’… This seems light-years away from concentrating on selling goods and services to the growing markets of China (not to mention India, Brazil etc etc). THAT is not glamorous enough to permit grandstanding on the ‘world stage’ which seems to be at the bottom of Rob’s pleas. Brussels is as bad a stage as the UN for the miserable attempt to recreate the British Empire on the new multilateral basis which has been all the rage since the mid-90’s. The best one can say is that they are not QUITE as ruinous as the fatuous preservation of NATO – since 1991 as patent a criminal conspiracy as you could find on Tottenham High Rd) as a means of ‘punching above our weight’. (The ONLY substantive political issue Rob mentions is his fear that Taiwan might be re-united with the mainland of the PRC – an issue in respect of which Beijing has shown immense patience and tolerance by the standards of the USA 1861-5, let alone foreign policy proper – sorry, sovereignty keeps creeping back in). Here we have the nub: anything to create a foreign policy ‘opportunity’ to grandstand on the ‘world stage’ hopefully arising out of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ aka the opportunity to waste British blood and treasure in areas where the British people have no direct interest at stake – and so won’t offer serious opposition or criticism.
By comparison with the prospect of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, the prospect of a bit-part, domestic sovereignty and democracy start to look very appealing indeed. Rob, you have convinced me!
@Rupert: where to start on your wrong-headedness? It’s tricky.
1. “Is democracy not important to them [the Chinese]?” Well, clearly not. That’s why they’re not a democracy. And the point about sovereignty is getting obsessed about any power ceded to Brussels.
2. The “fatuous preservation of NATO” – oh, you mean the organisation which kept the West together through the Cold War and continues to bind in former Eastern bloc states. NATO needs reform, not dumping unless there is something to replace it (which there currently is not).
3. You seem to accept as a given the correctness of the case for “reuniting” China with Taiwan (i.e. annexation). Without actually thinking about the will of the Taiwanese people, which is entirely against! Astonishing. Any other annexations you’d like to back?
I am not really sure if your politics are hard left or hard right, but they are clearly not letting logic or consistency get in the way of your argument.