October 29, 2012
The world is coming together with a reconfiguration of power that the West should accommodate, according to this optimistic but unfocused overview of international relations. Mahbubani (The New Asian Hemisphere), Singapore’s former U.N. ambassador, surveys hopeful statistics on global peace and prosperity, showing that wars are growing less frequent while poverty worldwide is declining and trade, education, tourism, and the middle class are swelling. That “new global civilization,” he contends, creates new problems: global warming; alienation in the Muslim world; anxieties over China’s influence; most of all, the West’s continuing disproportionate power over international institutions and failure to adjust self-interested policies—he’s especially critical of American food aid and monetary policy—to global needs. The author’s calls for a “Theory of One World” and a “global ethic” are nebulous (we need a treaty on the atmosphere, he argues, because “without oxygen we are doomed”); his specific proposals are rather U.N.-centered, including calls to hike Western funding of U.N. programs and open the Security Council to rising powers in the developing world. Mahbubani’s interpretation of shifting global realities is canny and cogent, though hardly original, but his ideas for reform are too vague or small-bore to have much impact. Agent: Janklow & Nesbit.
December 1, 2012
A manifesto for multilateralism, one-worldism, social justice and all the other things that haunt tea party nightmares. The nation-state, writes Singaporean scholar/diplomat Mahbubani (Beyond the Age of Innocence, 2005), is an artifact of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Most of us may think of it as the natural order, but he argues, "it is hard to believe that a human construct invented more than three hundred fifty years ago can serve humanity when everything has changed so totally." Indeed: Think of what has changed in just the last couple of decades, with China poised to become the world's largest economy within this decade and the United States turned from the world's sole superpower to a declining polity crumbling from economic weakness and imperial overreach. For all the "clash of civilizations" that defines the modern era, Mahbubani urges, things aren't necessarily all that bad out there; Saudi Arabia may repress women, but it's also built "the world's newest and largest scientific university." China has risen as a power in part because of American generosity but also because America "was so supremely self-confident that it would always remain number one." The trick now, writes the author, is to shed ideas of supremacy. There are some obvious platitudes attendant in such a rosy view, among them this: "The whole world would be better off if the 7 billion citizens of planet earth became more and more aware of the global impact of their activities." Well, yes, but for all the fuzziness, Mahbubani offers practical steps, including a recomposition of the U.N. Security Council to encourage one-worldism. Just the thing to give your black helicopter-fearing uncle--or maybe not. An interesting exercise in geopolitical wonkiness.
COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.