International Studies

Forget the cliché about a week being a long time in politics. Two decades in this super-speed, globalised age is more than enough time, it seems, for even the ‘best’ political system to go pear-shaped.

A growing number of books in recent times have focused on the current travails of Western-style liberal democracy. Its litany of dysfunctions includes corrosive money politics, policy gridlock, and growing citizen uninterest. But it is Francis Fukuyama’s new book that best symbolises the current Zeitgeist of dashed hopes concerning the resilience of the West’s political system.

North Korea always gets media attention for negative reasons: a border skirmish with its southern neighbour; a missile trial launch or nuclear test; vitriolic propaganda attacks on South Korea, Japan, or the United States; or the appalling findings of some human rights group like Michael Kirby’s recent UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s human rights abuses. The picture that emerges is one of unrelenting misery within North Korea and unreasoned aggressiveness towards its enemies – a dangerous and unpredictable country which, if it cannot be reformed, is best either shunned or guarded against.

Coinciding with the World War I anniversaries, Malcolm Fraser’s book will polarise Australian opinion on a fundamental issue. It has never been raised in this way, for Australian leaders have not discussed decisions to go to war in public, nor sought popular approval of Australia’s alliances. Yet successive generations of young Australians have fought in British and American wars to support our allies and to ensure that they would defend us. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the enemy were people who did not threaten Australia. But, as Fraser is not the first to observe, cowed countries do as great powers demand, while in return great powers do what suits their own interests.

Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld published a partial biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, 2011), which outraged public opinion in India and served as a vehicle for the self-promotion of leading politicians who railed against the supposed contents. Although the book was not yet available on the subcontinent, and so had not been read by the politicians, populist calls for its banning came thick and fast. The controversy could be traced back to a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal by an admirer of Gandhi’s nemesis Winston Churchill. The reviewer claimed that Lelyveld’s book allowed the reader to conclude that Gandhi ‘was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist’, not to mention a homosexual and a racist, something that the book itself did not say.