In these days of multiple crises ingrained assumptions loom large as obstacles to be overcome. This goes for international relations as much as for the tottering financial system that has been absorbing most political attention in recent months. I just stumbled upon a number of interrelated misguided and, in mainstream discussion, rarely examined assumptions on my laptop. They appeared in an article published a year ago by John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs entitled: The Rise of China and the Future of the West – can the Liberal System Survive? A quite appropriate read on my one but last day in Beijing, after having had an opportunity to look at Chinese life up close here and in Kunming and other places in Yunnan (a spectacularly beautiful province, by the way). Now, I like to read Ikenberry. I think that in earlier writing he has made important points about the example of liberal governance and ideals of emancipation upheld by the United States and Europe after World War II. The example by itself brought much positive change in many parts of the world during that last third of the twentieth century that saw the consolidation of a relatively peaceful and stable world...

Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times asked a couple of days ago whether Barack Obama’s presidency has already failed. He concedes that in normal times, such a question would be ludicrous. But by now most politically thoughtful people have concluded that these are times, as Wolf puts it, “of great danger”. “Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it.” Wolf, along with many other economists not mired in ideological or Republican Party received opinion, is afraid that Obama will do too little to stave off a worsening of the economic crisis. Norm Schreiber in The New Republic warns against hasty conclusions on this score, and goes into the manner in which the political maneuverer Obama appears to manage potential opponents very well, also in this case. He does not bring it up, but Obama’s history in Chicago is witness to that as well. There are few American places in which the political wheeler-dealing is more vicious and corrupt than in that city. But in that...

The credit crisis and what follows, dominating economic discussions for some five months now, have prompted such a variety of explanations of causes and remedies, that I keep thinking of the famous Hindu and Indian Buddhist parable of the six blind men and the elephant. One feels a leg, another the trunk, and yet another its tail, and they all come with stories challenging each other’s truth. It would be hard to find a better recent instance of what the fable depicts. I have just re-read some contrasting explanations: from Clintonian regulations perverting private incentives, to Greenspan’s supporting the kind of activity and deregulation schemes that eventually made the crisis possible. Too much regulation, too much de-regulation, the housing market gone wild, and technical change, are among the essences brought forward by the explicators. Their explanations can roughly be grouped under headings of pure theory, historical analogy, empirically informed speculation, and, not to forget, a lot of self-interest. These categories overlap with two main cross-sectional divisions. It would seem that the most popular explanations among the culprits and their colleagues inside the financial institutions have revolved around deteriorated morals: excessive greed, bad apples, and so on. The advantage of this...

As evidence continues to pile up about the damage done to national economies and the international financial system through policies inspired by ideological excess, the European Union is beginning to loom large as yet another victim of the same thing. The ample evidence of its being in trouble may not as yet have prompted the mainstream commentariat to see the connection, but it is there even so. In short: the neoliberal legacy, sometimes known as market fundamentalism or market worship, has been the major hurdle that halted an earlier gradual process of integration. It mostly blinded Europe’s political elites to the necessity that integration of economic institutions would, in the longer term, require the development of Union-level political institutions to deal with policy demands and problems following from such integration. Looking further back to a contributing cause of this blindness, we can of course see that the illusion of separate economic and political realms, fundamental to the dominant school of economics, had much to do with it. Without the fiction that these are self-contained areas of human experience, neoliberalism no longer has an intellectual leg to stand on. Mrs. Thatcher in particular saw the creation or strengthening of European-level political...

the column this jotting refers to New crises inevitably dim older ones. Bits of the past that a nation was half-digesting intellectually may then remain undigested for a long time, perhaps forever. The current financial crisis has pushed the moral crises caused by warcrimes committed by a part of what since World War II proudly called itself “the free world” well down the memory holes in several countries. We should remember that the state of things resulting directly from the American government’s response to the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September 2001, led to lingering moral and intellectual crises on both sides of the Atlantic. Probably none of the Westpoint cadets who flung their caps into the air, after listening to their president announcing his right to attack any country that he decided was an enemy, could have imagined one of the grisly outcomes of what he had said; that perhaps several among them and certainly many soldiers serving under them would kill themselves within two, three, four or five years. One calculation arrived at in 2005 indicated that some 120 veterans would did so every week at the time. Advanced medical technology allows fifteen wounded to survive against...

I just heard that Newsweek will no longer have a bureau with correspondents in Tokyo, and that the Los Angeles Times has begun to cover Japan out of Seoul, Korea. When the Newsweek bureau chief goes, Tokyo loses one of its most thoughtful foreign correspondents. These are merely the latest developments in the gradual marginalization of Japan as a source of news and stories about how things might be done differently in different civilizations; in other words: of Japan as a source of knowledge. TV, the main source of information for the vast majority in most places, lost interest in Japan some years ago. It illustrates the unfortunate fact that our sources of knowledge and the way we go about gathering this knowledge are quite heavily dependent on fashion. Not so long ago it was believed that if you wanted to know our contemporary world you could not do without knowledge of Japan, especially if you wanted to do business. Most of that kind of attention reserved for Japan, as reflected by books, articles, and general discussion, has been switched to China. This is not difficult to understand. Editors do not find Japan sexy enough anymore, nothing much appears to...