Acknowledging Afrikaans
3rd May 2004
Thank you for Rachel Holmes's excellent review (May) of Dan Sleigh's Islands. It is rare for the Afrikaans language to be considered in the context of its multi-ethnic history, rather than simply branded the language of oppression. And it is good to see the debunking of the myth that South African fiction has lost its vigour in the new era.
Jan van Niekerk
Cambridge
The EU's next big idea
11th May 2004
Following Robert Cottrell (May), if the EU needs a big idea, surely it must be negotiating a productive relationship with the Islamic world, both internationally and among the EU's own citizens. Now that the successor states to Austria-Hungary are full members, the next challenge is not only to admit the European successor states to the Ottoman empire (including Turkey), but also to work out a relationship with the neighbouring Islamic states that encourages mutual respect, co-operation and prosperity and discourages the postcolonial resentments that lead to terrorism. That may be asking a lot of the "old EU," but it is both comprehensible to the disenchanted Euro-voter and a challenge to Euro-politicians. The point of the European movement was not so much to make peace with friends, but make friends and partners of old enemies.
Patrick Wallace
London E14
Gandhi vs Bin Laden
5th May 2004
Your choice of a comparison between the militant philosophies of Gandhi and Bin Laden (April) is too comfortable for those of us in the American bloc of countries. We would naturally prefer that those who resist our attentions do so gently. It might have been more interesting to consider Nelson Mandela: "A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left with no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor... One can only fight fire with fire."
We should not be surprised that those who oppose us mirror the use of force that is integral to our own power. In our opponents we should see ourselves: human beings fighting a corner, introspective and selfish, violent and loving, all at once. And as both Gandhi's and Bin Laden's oppressor, we should be aware that the moral high ground is not obviously ours.
Matthew Page
Lewes, East Sussex
Deliberative democracy 1
4th May 2004
Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin (May) make a strong case for a deliberation day in the run up to a referendum on the EU constitution. They draw lessons from Deliberative Polling, a form of decision-making where people's views on specific issues are assessed after discussion. But the Channel 4 example cited by Fishkin and Ackerman was in 1994, and few such polls have been used since. More experimentation is required. The IPPR and the department of politics at Oxford University have recently held "deliberative workshops," assessing attitudes towards inheritance tax. These are not quite the same as deliberative polls. But we discovered what appears to be a mild progressive shift in attitudes (albeit from a very unprogressive starting point). Perhaps more importantly, given Ackerman and Fishkin's D-day proposals, the discussions had a vibrancy which would rarely be witnessed in a think-tank seminar room. The chance to deliberate would be welcomed by many. The trick is translating this to a national scale.
Will Paxton and Stuart White
IPPR and Oxford University
Deliberative democracy 2
9th May 2004
Surely Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin have missed the point. Three quarters of the British public, they say, don't know that we have an unwritten constitution - as if this was a sign of ignorance. Rather, it shows British obliviousness to constitutional structures. If we did have a constitution, you can bet that three quarters of the population would know it. This is also why the British will reject an EU constitution, not because they hate it but because it has no place in how they think.
David Lascelles
Aylesbury, Bucks
Constitutional reform
16th May 2004
Debates on House of Lords reform (May) put the cart before the horse by focusing on how a new house would be chosen before thinking about what it should do. I propose the following. The upper house (Senate) would not be able to veto legislation, but, before being referred to it, a certificate from the speaker would be required declaring that each clause had been considered in detail. Amendments agreed in the Senate would be advisory, but the government would have to set out its reasons for not accepting them. The other functions of the Senate would be: to monitor legislation so as to avoid fiascos resulting from kneejerk reactions such as the Dangerous Dogs Act; to keep an eye on secondary legislation; and to seek to ensure that enactments that have become obsolete are repealed. It would set up select committees with power to call and examine evidence (including from ministers). It would provide the main source of appointments to royal commissions and other such bodies. Members would have the right to put down questions to ministers, who would attend its proceedings to answer them.
Harvey Cole
Winchester
Liberalism and strangers
9th May 2004
Paul Seabright (May) argues that liberalism was born 10,000 years ago when men for the first time became farmers and began to trade with strangers. Before then, outsiders were not trusted and trade as distinct from sharing among kin was virtually nonexistent. Seabright's conception of hunters and gatherers seems to be based on accounts of pygmies. A more useful model for reconstructing the world before agriculture is provided by the native people of Australia, who lived there for 60,000 years without a farmer in sight. Two well known facts about the Australians deserve Seabright's attention. One is that they extended their relationship terms (brother, sister, son, daughter) very widely to include non-relatives as "honorary kin." The other is that formal trading relationships linked individuals and communities throughout the continent. So trust and trading are a lot older than Seabright thinks. Les Hiatt
London NW11
Is there an imam problem?
13th May 2004
Jytte Klausen (May) raises points that have long been debated within Britain's Muslim community. It is correct that the majority of mosque users are from a rural background and would feel uncomfortable with an imam who was not. In the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent this usually means someone who is an adherent of the Hanafi school, to which the vast majority of the mosque's congregants belong. Thus sectarianism is hardly an issue; moreover, there is a strong ecumenical movement in Islam.
Religion in Britain was the first nationalised industry. But what happened to Christianity in the 16th century happened to Islam in the 20th, when secular governments in the Islamic world, intolerant of dissent, nationalised the mosques, converting the imams into civil servants. In some countries the Friday sermon is printed and distributed in advance, with informers placed in congregations to report any deviation. The French pursued a similar policy in Algeria, with the result that people stopped going to the mosque and flocked to Sufi zawiyas instead. So one solution which Klausen appears to advocate - a bigger role for the state in the life of the mosque - could only aggravate a problem.
Ghayasuddin Siddiqui
The Muslim Parliament
Power lines and health
11th May 2004
Dick Taverne (April) states: "Before the safety of mobile phones was questioned, there had been a number of alarms about microwave ovens and VDUs. But much more important was a protracted dispute in the US, from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, over whether electro-magnetic fields (EMF) from overhead power lines were a cause of leukaemia in children. Despite exhaustive studies, no evidence that this was so was ever found."
Powerline magnetic fields were first linked to childhood leukaemia in a 1979 Denver study. Further studies were inconclusive, the problem being that childhood leukaemia is - thankfully - rare, limiting the statistics available. However, in 1998 the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) concluded that magnetic fields were a possible carcinogen. In 2000, two major pooled analyses of international studies confirmed a doubling of childhood leukaemia risk associated with magnetic fields above 0.4 microtesla. The finding has been acknowledged by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, 2001), the UK National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB, 2001) and the California health department EMF report (2002). The latter also cites increased risk of adult brain cancer and miscarriage with magnetic field exposures. This March, the NRPB stated that people living under high voltage power lines could be exposed to fields as high as 40 microtesla.
Childhood leukaemia incidence in Britain increased steadily last century for reasons which are largely unknown, although magnetic fields seem a minor factor. Today the risk is about one in 1,400, so a doubling of risk is one in 700. Some countries took action years ago to limit public exposure to magnetic fields from new electricity installations. Such action is warranted here and is under consideration by government.
Denis L Henshaw
University of Bristol
Yellow peril
10th May 2004
Eamonn Fingleton's piece on Japan-China relations (May) was bizarrely polemical, manipulative of the facts and misleading. The moment any author asserts that an on-going secret alliance exists between the governments of China and Japan aimed at undermining the "hegemony" of the United States, we are no longer engaged in genuine social science.
Where to start? History creates huge tensions in the relationship and cannot be so easily papered over. Japan's
military leaders committed gross human rights violations in China in the 1930-40s, including the Nanjing Massacre in 1937-38 in which some 300,000 Chinese died, the use of sex slaves (euphemistically referred to as "comfort women"), vivisection, biological warfare, and so on. The government in Tokyo, in the views of many Chinese, has never fully apologised—a point which Beijing's leadership neither chooses nor is able to ignore. Add to that regular spats over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands and concern over repeated Chinese incursions into Japan's territorial waters (sharply increased in recent years). There is much Japanese irritation at what has often been viewed as China57;s political opportunism in playing the "history card" in an effort to extract political concessions from Tokyo. It is simply not credible to argue that these have been disingenuously exaggerated to conceal from naive Western observers the depth of Sino-Japanese covert co-operation.
History is now complicated by China's present economic rise. True, there are some in the Japanese business community who see investment in and trade with China as their salvation. And true, economic links are strong. However, fear, especially amongst Japanese public opinion, of what a resurgent China might do threatens to overwhelm all these considerations. Japan's strong economic links are based upon necessity and the same logic that drives closer China-United States relations. The aim is to help China prosper and become intertwined in a global economic system in which she has a stake. That improves the chances of peaceful democratic reform and decreases the chances of military confrontation in Asia.
As for Japan's generous development assistance to China, conservative opinion in Japan, rightly or wrongly, has taken umbrage at what they claim is the Chinese leadership's refusal to acknowledge Japan's generosity. And since the mid 1990s, the Gaimusho, Japan's foreign ministry, has been explicit in stressing that Japan's aid has a self-consciously strategic dimension. Mr Fingleton claims that "Japan does virtually nothing to alleviate immediate poverty in China. Instead, it has mostly worked with the Beijing government to fund 'muscle-building' projects that are clearly intended to speed China's emergence as an economic superpower"; it would be helpful if he could document some of these projects. He seems to have completely overlooked the Japanese preoccupation with the downstream pollution effects of Chinese economic development and Japan's consequent desire to tie aid to environmental reforms. Japan and China compete intensely in Asia for influence, most recently in forming trade agreements. Plans for an "Asian IMF" were torpedoed not only by Washington's opposition, but also by rivalry between Beijing and Tokyo over leadership in the region. Japan's plans for theatre missile defence are driven not only by the immediate North Korean security challenge, but also by a fear of possible future conflict with China. Japan's energy strategists worry about their reliance on Middle East oil and compete with their Chinese counterparts in seeking to secure access to Siberian energy reserves.
Turning to Japan's relations with the United States. Mr Fingleton claims that while Japan's relations with the US and
Europe "have hit rock bottom" it has switched to a policy of "building up China." One problem with this view is that it implies a simplistic, Manichaen choice between two strategic options. However, closer economic ties with China are not necessarily inconsistent with a strong security and political stance that can at times conflict with Beijing's own security ambitions. Post 9/11, the Bush administration appears to understand this point. Remarkably, Mr Fingleton overlooks the steady evolution of closer US-Japan security co-operation since the late 1970s. To cite just a few examples: the 1978 US-Japan Security Guidelines; Ohira's articulation of Comprehensive Security (Sogo Anzen Hosho) and the willingness to provide development assistance to front-line strategic states such as Turkey and the ROK; the 1981 commitment by PM Suzuki to expand Japan's defence commitment to a 1,000 nautical mile boundary beyond its shoreline; the 1983 US-Japan Technology sharing agreement; Nakasone's frequent references in the 1980s to the indivisibility of Western and Japanese security interests; the FSX US-Japan fighter co-development agreement; the Japanese Defence Agency's explicit identification, from 1995, of China as a potential military and political rival and the consequent need to strengthen ties and alliance coordination with Washington; the revised US-Japan Security Guidelines of 1997. And then there is the fact that Japanese troops are on the ground in Iraq.
The claim that shared "Confucian values" are a basis for an alliance against America, is, frankly, nonsensical. This sort of writing is "Yellow Peril" stuff at its worst and eerily reminiscent of racist 1930s novels and films such as Fu Manchu. Even Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations did not stoop so low to presume a cultural equivalence, let alone a global cultural conspiracy, between China and Japan. That "equivalence" did not stop conflict less than seventy years ago in Asia, or in Europe. And how does Mr Fingleton square their supposed cultural hatred of "the US economic model" with the deregulation and market reforms favoured by Messrs. Koizumi and Takenaka or by the wide-ranging liberalisation that has taken place in China?
We are not suggesting that Japan and China do not have good reasons and opportunities to work together. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is happening in a number of important areas. But this does not amount to evidence that Japanese policy is driven by a covert pro-Chinese bias. We accept that polemical writing can provoke debate, but it should also inform, as well as engaging meaningfully and responsibly with the widely available evidence. We could go on at much greater length, but trust that our letter provides enough evidence that Mr Fingleton's essay did not meet this standard.
Stephen Green (and others)
Chatham House
