April 2000

Marx has a phrase to the effect of “Give me the windmill and I’ll give you the Middle Ages.” We could paraphrase him to add: “Give me the steam engine and I’ll give you the age of industry.” Or, in relation to our present epoch: “Give me the computer, and I’ll give you globalisation.”
This may be a bit deterministic but the basic notion is useful. At any historical turning point, a key invention appears on the scene - never by accident - and it transforms the status quo, and points society in a new (...)

The Clinton-Assad meeting in Geneva on 26 March confirmed the complexity of the Arab-Israeli negotiations. Peace looks uncertain, just as the Middle East faces a perilous transition from one generation to the next: new leaders have taken over in Jordan and Saudi Arabia; next it will be the turn of Syria and Palestine. Once unstoppable, political Islam is suddenly marking time as people question whether it has the answers to the complex problems of today’s societies. Meanwhile rising through its ranks, its younger voices are demanding a more modern outlook of the oldest and most powerful of the Islamist organisations, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Young men dressed in their traditional long white robes and sitting in cybercafés, cellphone to hand; women students shrouded in black, but more numerous than their male counterparts; companies that have grown in the shadow of the state and are now being privatised: as it begins to feel the pressures of globalisation Saudi Arabia is wondering about its future and its values. Crown Prince Abdullah is determined the economy should change but the forces of conservatism are powerful and vested interests innumerable.

By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of the world to the other, globalisation and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial market. Indeed the engine of capitalist expansion is now oiled by the profits of serious crime. From time to time something is done to give the impression of waging war on the rapidly expanding banking and tax havens. If governments really wanted to, they could right this overnight. But though there are calls for zero tolerance of petty crime and unemployment, nothing is being done about the big money crimes.

From Gerhard Schröder to Massimo D’Alema, via Tony Blair and the apostles of the Third Way, Europe’s politicians go on and on about less government and the weak state. In the same vein, many scholars argue that the nation state is a thing of the past. But these myths do not stand up to analysis. Worse still, they conceal the new configuration of power in the international system and lend legitimacy to the antisocial policies accompanying globalisation.

A new chapter has opened in the history of Taiwan. After 50 years in power, the Kuomintang collapsed at the presidential elections on 18 March, with its candidate Lien Chan collecting only 23% of the votes, far behind the winner Chen Shui-bian (39%). This affirmation of democracy on the island is a challenge to Beijing, which is seeing the prospect of reunification, under the conditions the Chinese Communist Party wants, fade ever further into the distance. The threats the party is making against Taiwan highlight mounting tensions among its leaders. And a dangerous escalation between the two Chinas cannot be entirely ruled out.

Seven years after they parted company both Czechs and Slovaks are in economic, social and political crisis. In Slovakia, the period of grace accorded to Vladimir Meciar’s successors is already ending in rejection of the shaky coalition’s austerity programme. In the Czech Republic, renewed support for the Communist Party reflects growing opposition to the economic transition now jointly managed by social democrats and conservatives.

On 12 March the Spanish right, led by José Maria Aznar, won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections. The socialists and communists suffered their worst defeat since democracy was restored to Spain. How did the People’s Party, with its historic links with dictatorship and the direct heir of Franco’s socio-economics, manage this landslide win? Analysis of the films of Pedro Almodóvar, who has just collected an Oscar in Hollywood, helps provide an answer.

The Christian Democrats meet for their party congress in Essen on 10 April. Their aim is to put the Kohl scandal behind them and resume their attacks on the coalition led by Gerhard Schröder, fighting for the “centre” of German political life. The election of Angelika Merkel, now the only candidate for party leadership, will be particularly symbolic. If the CDU can overcome the growing contradictions between its traditional values and liberal commitments, it will survive the damage of the Kohl affair.

When UN forces withdrew in March 1995 the outside world forgot about Somalia. But this fragmented country has survived. It has not sunk into the further anarchy some predicted, but has gradually recreated itself from an original blueprint that bears no resemblance to the international community’s clumsy attempts to “invent” a government for Somalia in the 1990s. But the south of the country is still at war, and a peace conference of representatives of the Somali clans is due to begin in Djibouti on 20 April.

The world’s bigger universities are now developing distance education through the internet, on the basis of its effectiveness as a learning tool. But correspondence instruction, already discredited at the start of the 20th century, is also a lucrative business.