The Erudite Professor Scott Thompson looks back at 2010

December 29, 2010

http://www.nst.com.my

The Year of Living Learningly

W. Scott Thompson*

LOOKING back over this past year and what I wrote about at these weekly intervals, I’m struck by one principal thing. It hasn’t been a year of dramatic developments but one in which a great deal was done about big problems. I would start by saying that the single most important current is the new centrality of the “20”, whose meeting in South Korea was no doubt the prompting of North Korea‘s shelling of one of Seoul’s islands. For decades, the rich countries have given lip service and crumbs from the table to poor countries, but now the successful of the latter are at the table itself, and one can literally feel a consciousness-shifting throughout the diplomatic and economic worlds. 

And while we’re on the economic front, consider that what seemed so disquieting at the time — mobs in Greece, Spain, even London — have faded from noise to grunts of losers, who have had to accept that there is no free lunch. That some of the French may have to work until 62 rather than 60 is not something garnering any sympathy in this part of the world. The fact is that the French government just went ahead and implemented the new policy. There will be more cost-cutting to come.

I’m personally struck how systematic and perceptible have been the American implementation of new financial regulations. And the recovery has been astonishing, if you remember how dire the predictions of doom in late 2008 were. I personally endured a 65 per cent drop in equity-based pensions, and now the “loss” is down to 15 per cent. But that’s against a high-water mark that, as we saw, couldn’t be sustained. But it remains to be seen if Professor-President Barack Obama can get deficit reduction really going next year, in the face of his re-election plans.

And while we are on Obama, recall I wrote that it might be unwise to write him off when everything seemed to be crashing for him. We Americans got a Christmas bonus of the new Start treaty with Moscow, and an end to gay discrimination in the military. Both of these have much more symbolic import than procedural, but that’s what’s so important. Obama delivered on his pledge. He can’t work with the Congress? Show me.

If you want proof of real progress in the world, look at what’s going on right now in Cote d’Ivoire. The leading regional organisation, ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), has determined to use force if necessary to push the pretender president, Laurent Gbagbo, to step down in favour of election winner Alassane Ouatarra, a former IMF economist.

And today, a delegation of leaders is in Abidjan to demand that he vacate the palace. The thought that a sitting president would let a few percentage points against himself drive him from power was almost non-existent a few years ago. This will have bearing on the imminent transfer of power in Sudan, when the southern region votes next week to — inevitably — secede.

The paradigm in Ivory Coast is something the whole continent has to work against. An Ivorian physician named Houphouet Boigny was a minister in the French cabinet in the early 1950s, became the obvious president at independence in 1960, made his country an economic bulwark for 20 years, rigged every election and then engaged in such massive follies of self-indulgence that the economy cracked and with it the ethnic balancing that prosperity made possible.

Elections had almost always been a joke across the continent. A French professor observed that these results were “extremely predictable”. Gbagbo would never have permitted the elections if he had the slightest doubt that he’d lose his lush presidential palace. Well, the French know about African elections. They rigged them for several decades in the francophone area, and that’s part of the heritage to be unlearned as well.

I know I’ve sounded like a Luddite this past year railing against the Internet, gadgets and everything else that seems to absorb us in the IT world. Yet we are just beginning to feel the real benefits of a hooked-up world. Think not of iPhones but medicine. Most hospitals don’t even have a complete database on individual patients that can go from doctor to doctor — much less anywhere in the world.

Patients are notoriously forgetful of significant details in their medical history that would bear on future diagnoses. But we need every hospital in the world — and every patient — hooked up. It matters less now that computers can multiply their power every 18 months. It matters that they are hooked up together. We can’t even standardise power pins for cell phones. We have a long way to go.

As we approach New Year we begin to make our resolutions. I decided better to make these positive, in new things to do, learn, enjoy, rather than on the usually futile attempt to give up bad habits. Queen Elizabeth gave her Christmas message on sports. I’ve decided after a lifetime of avoiding sports (other than running marathons) to start enjoying them.

Watching Malaysia whack Indonesia on Sunday night was just great for a start. There was some bad feeling here on the losing side. But look how much such games do to bring people together. That’s overall — despite al-Qaeda, Robert Mugabe, suicide bombers and North Korea — what 2010 was about. Getting peoples and states together to make things better.

Finally, can I nominate a worst-book-of-the-year? George W. Bush’s memoirs. I laughed at the observation in a brilliant London review: Bush was “outraged” by the suggestion somewhere that he didn’t “care about black people”. He’d had Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in his cabinet. The reviewer said, well, he got it half right. He didn’t care about people.

We’re doing a lot better now.

*W. Scott Thompson is emeritus professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in the United States