The Second World by Parag Khanna
How Emerging Powers Will Redefine Global Competition This Century
Oct 2, 2009
One simple way to critique this opus – it has the feel of doctoral thesis gone awry – would be to take one page, any page, at random and find fault with it. There is plenty of scope.
Not that Parag Khanna cannot write. He can and on several occasions he mints a good on-liner. The problem is with the argument, such as it is, which he advances.
Khanna's Thesis: The American Decline Leads to Competition With China and the European Union
The basic thesis is that America’s decline will usher in a world of tripartite competition between a still powerful but no longer uniquely so United States, a European Union building itself in a reformist political bloc of some clout and a China that will be the world’s economic superpower.
These three will then struggle to achieve dominance through a collection of forty or so countries which are not committed to any bloc. These are the Second World which give the book its title and are basically the global swing states of this century. Khanna does suggest in the conclusion at the end which is more of an analysis of America’s weaknesses than an actually summing up of ideas that the Big Three might profit from more and closer diplomacy.
What troubles, no what pains the thoughtful and aware reader is not that thesis, flawed though it is but how he gets there and how he reports it. Where to begin with this one?
Biggest Howler is Omitting India
The biggest howler might be what he leaves out as opposed to what he says. It seems bizarre, absolutely bizarre to leave India out of any analysis of the twenty-first century. “India is big but not yet important,” he opines at one point. Well forty years ago they said the same of China.
And there are others. Two of the better ones are the idea other Middle Eastern states will dismember Iraq and Myanmar (Burma) “has all but become a Chinese province.” Try telling that to the generals in Yangon. And for a man who acknowledges that geopolitical struggles in the future will be about oil and water it seems strange beyond belief to omit a serious analysis of both Nigeria and South Africa.
Then there is the style. Occasionally there are flights of rhetoric verging on the embarrassing. The description of Lebanon – a small country somehow deemed important – verges on the sort of nonsense that travel writers use and the book is riddled with flights of fancy.
Still in these lie its redeeming features. It has them, not as many as it needs in order to be endorsed, but it is not totally without merit. For example he does outline possible solutions to the Palestinian question – another small non-state deemed important – which sadly don’t get elaborated. One of the few times the reader is likely to wish for more rather than less.
The Second World by Parag Khanna published by Penguin. ISBN 978-0-141-02778-4
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