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Imbalance of Power
Robert Skidelsky
Washington
| Wednesday, March 17, 2004
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor created the Grand Alliance against fascism, just as the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon created the global coalition against terrorism. The leaders of the Grand Alliance were the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, with China a somewhat distant fourth. Today’s chessboard has not changed that much.[] With his historical debt to the 19th century Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has talked [] about a new “concert of great powers” to keep the peace in the new century.
The parallel can be taken []further.[]. In each case it was an attack on the United States that brought the global coalition into
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The Origins and Consequences of the First World War
Robert Skidelsky
Brighton College Lecture
| Tuesday, November 25, 2003
I once attended a lecture by AJP Taylor on Origins of 1st World War.
He ran through various possible causes, rejecting each one. After exactly one hour, he said: ‘Well, there’s one last thing. The chauffeur of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand did take the wrong turning in Sarajevo. Had he not, the Archduke would not have been killed. Had he not been killed, there would have been no war in August 1914’. With that he sat down.
This was not just Taylor being clever or paradoxical. He was giving us a profound lesson in historical thinking.
You may think: ‘But if not in 1914, the war –some war –would have started in 1915 or 1920. With all the explosive material lying around, a war was inevitable’. Spot the fallacy: True, one might have had
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Democracy and Globalisation
Robert Skidelsky
Golytsino Graduate Seminar
| Tuesday, July 29, 2003
1. In Russia there is no tradition of democracy. The rule of the tsars was autocratic.This was followed by seventy years of communism. Democracy, as we understand it, only started with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Yeltsin was the first freely elected ruler of Russia. This was less than 10 years ago. In no other European country has democracy come so late.
2. Today it seems almost inconceivable that the clock will be turned back all the way. At the same time, there has not been enough time for democracy to strike deep roots. According to opinion surveys produced by Richard Pipes at the seminar last week, 50% of Russians thought multiparty elections were a waste of time. Only 8% said they would actively fight a Bolshevik coup, and 50% said
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International Relations after Iraq
Robert Skidelsky
World Political Forum, Turin
| Monday, May 19, 2003
The system of international relations we have known since the second world war has broken down. The reasons given for the Anglo-American attack on Iraq were largely fraudulent. It is now reasonably clear that Saddam Hussein didn’t possess any weapons of mass destruction. It is straining at a gnat to argue that UNSCR 678, passed in 1990, made legal an invasion undertaken in 2003. However, it is also true that the people of Iraq will be much better off without Saddam Hussein; and there is at least a chance that the Middle East will be reshaped for the better.So the balance sheet of the war is not yet clear.
Nevertheless, the way the Iraqi war came about has disorganised the relations between the world's great powers and frightened the
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Exchange Rate Choices for ‘Mature’ Economies
Robert Skidelsky
International Monetary Convention
| Sunday, May 11, 2003
The purpose of this paper is to question the near-unanimous view of economists that floating is the best policy for mature economies.
It is true that European Single Currency was established on the belief that fixing is best.
But the European fixers share one important premise with the Anglo-American floaters. That is that fixing has to be irrevocable if it is to be credible. Since irrevocable fixing on a world-scale is unfeasable, the conclusion is that the major currencies (including the European Single Currency) have to float against each other.
I have long felt there was something paradoxical in this sequence of reasoning. Most floaters admit stable exchange rates between the major currencies would be to the world advantage,
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