nzpundit had a pointer to a very good piece, a transcript of a talk given by Owen Harries, Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Victor Davis Hanson, Paul Kelly at the Big Ideas Forum in Melbourne, 11 August 2003: "The Fracturing of the West" .
A lot of ground is covered, and the whole thing is a read it all, but towards the end there's this little bit from Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Foreign Editor of the Hindustan Times in New Delhi:
I think more or less for both the Chinese and the Indians, Europe doesn't really matter. Before I left, I'd met a member of the Indian cabinet and we were discussing the world in general, and at one point I asked him about the EU. He just said, 'The EU is a frigate without guns, why should we waste any time with it? We are trying to build a battleship here.' So for China and India, there is really no doubt they are looking to America as a model. It is true that India is a Westminster system, following the British tradition very strongly. In the end when you look at our economic policy, we are really looking at the US as the model. I'm not saying we are going to replicate the US in every possible manner, but look at the continental European countries: Germany has been in recession and stagnant forever, unemployment rates are fixed and double income rates, technology is dead. A simple example is the outflow of Indians and Chinese. When they go overseas, they avoid continental Europe like the plague. Germany a few years ago, in an attempt to get Indian software programmers, offered 20,000 visas and they got 500 applicants. Nobody was interested. Even the ones who went over said it was the dredges, they couldn't get a job anyway, including in India. I have some young cousins who are programmers and I ask them if they are interested in going to Germany. They ask if I'm mad because if they have Germany on their CV, they will never get a job. It is even stronger in China. They are really not interested in talking about the EU at all, they just don't see it as a model. America in terms of its foreign policy, in terms of its power politics, it technological growth, in terms of almost anything you care to mention… in Asia the whole paradigm is American driven. About two months ago, the National Deputy Security Advisor of Taiwan came into India and came to talk about the future of Asia and again someone raised Europe. And he responded, 'Why are you wasting your time asking about Europe, why don't you ask about Greenland, it's an irrelevance to us.' Dominic Moisi, one of France's international relations thinkers said, on foreign policy and on security, that India must never use Europe as its model. Perhaps in civil society it might want to look at Europe at some point in the future.
And there it is, in black and white. Europe just doesn't really matter anymore. The 21st century will be about the nations of the Pacific and Indian oceans. And our rivals definitely see it as nationalism continued. I think we're going to need to keep the military topped up.
They can't catch Bin Laden, they can't catch Saddam, they can't catch the anthrax jobber, they can't keep the Islamofascists out of Guantanamo, but boy they sure caught this guy (after several weeks of the "dangerous articles" being in place, and several emails), by gum, and he's gonna PAY!
Faugh. They ought to tell this guy to go forth and sin no more, and fire the top three layers at TSA and the Justice Department. A greater demonstration of institutional incompetence coupled with arrogance is not often seen.
Have they been taking lessons from the RIAA?