He told me that the West would be saved by offering services to the rest of the world. Any challenge of this solution would be as anacronistic as that of the craftsmen machine stormers at the early stages of industrialization.

The answer to him and the rest of his ideology and arrogance dominated profession is to demand that it answers the following simple questions:

1) What services can employ a large part of the population in activities earning foreign currency?

2) What can ensure that the profit end of the activities remain taxable by national or supernatural authorities?

3) What services cannot be performed far more effectively in Monbai?

Looking at three important areas: transport services (including shipping), internet based services and financial services at least one of the questions must be answered negatively.

The economist blamed the politicians for the current crisis, absolving his profession from giving narrow-minded and therefore hugely damaging advice.

I do not know where they will end up in Dante’s Hell.

The same irrelevance applies to the other Western development with roots in chivalry: internationally accepted rules limiting the suffering of war. ‘The Art of War‘ recommends to act in any – even the most vile, brutal and dirty – way that enhances the chances of easy and quick victory.

Thus the future is likely to be one, where laws of conflict behavious developed during the last 150 years by Western idealists, jurists and diplomats must be considered irrelevant. Good to know in the Haag.

What the West is offered is the option always open when conflict is threatening: that of accepting defeat without trying to defend, hoping that the optimistic picture of the future outlined by Flemming Ytzen – and his many historical predecessor optimists – will come true, now in spite of the pressure from climate changes and ever more limited resources.

I am old enough to remember the Cold War pictures of the Soviet Union as a fundamentally peaceful and far more just society than the West, spread as late as the early 1980s. Later I worked in the former Soviet area for a decade and realised that in reality it had been dominated by a combination of contempt of the individual, corruption, lies to protect power and clientism rather than social justice.

I suspect that the present and future China is and will be rather similar in most respects, as was Chiang Kai-shek’s variety according to Jonathan Fenby.

If nothing is done to correct and balance the development, the ‘new silk road‘ will be a one-way street with all power and wealth in the eastern end. To assume – as Ytzen does in his rosy vision – that the unlimited weath and power will be harnessed by civilization and altruism is to put it mildly rather naïve and ahistorical.

The main weakness of Ytzen’s comment, however, is that it does not try to face and analyse what will happen in the Western socies as the wealth is drained. Is it because he thinks that with its history of colonialism it deserves what comes to it?

This ends the discussion about China as it is rather secondary to the discussion of the likely sequense of events in the West.

As Henry Kissinger points out in his brilliant book ’On China’, Beijing eventually emerged as the strategic winner in the final outcome of the Third Indochina War, which ended with the Cambodian peace settlement in 1992-93. Furthermore, Kissinger makes some interesting descriptions on the future nature of the Sino-US relationship and on the political and cultural differences between the two giants: Each country has a sense of manifest destiny, but American exceptionalism is missionary and holds that the US has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism, in contrast is cultural: China does not proselytize or claim that its institutions are relevant outside China, yet it tends to grade all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms.

Regarding the possible ‘ahistorical’ positive evaluations of China’s international behaviour, allow me the following points:

Compare the ‘neighbour-policy’ during 200 years of the United States towards Mexico, Central America and other Latin American countries with China’s tributary attitude towards its East Asian neighbours during a millennium: Japan has been the only the real rival and for good reasons. The unique situation on the Korean Peninsula has since the end of the Cold War been accommodated to serve both American and Chinese foreign policy interests. Former rivals and enemies in Asia such as Vietnam have been approached constructively through ASEAN and APEC. Dialogue with the key adversary to the South, India, is taking place on multiple levels, although Beijing and New Delhi agree to disagree on the question of Aksai Chai and Arunachal Pradesh. The Himalayas serve as a natural border to prevent war.

China would never do as America with its futile war in Indochina 1965-75 or the war effort in Iraq 2003-201?. One should take note of the old sayings of Sun Tzu, which still holds value in China: Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

China’s financing of American Treasury bonds can be seen in Sun Tzu’s perspective, but the interdependence of America and China, sometimes labelled as G2, is arguably the most important factor that prevents the development of military conflict between the world’s two most important countries. Call it the financial balance of terror.

As for China’s domestic polices, it needs to clarified that today’s pro-globalist and corporatist-authoritarian China is as different from Maoist ideological tyranny as can be imagined. Hu Jintao’s People’s Republic is the exact antidote to Maoism and for good reason: the present leadership generation and their mentors suffered seriously during the so called Cultural Revolution and has implemented the reform policies to prevent a repetition of past policies.

What resembles today’s People’s Republic with its elitist and corporatist political model is ironically The Republic of China led by Mao’s archrival Chiang Kai-shek 1949-75. Chiang was definitely not a role-model liberal democrat, but he lifted his island from being a third-world backwater to becoming one of the leading industrialized nations of East Asia and made democratization all the more easy when the successor elite decided for just that in 1987-88.

Do not expect the People’s Republic to copy what Chiang’s son Ching-kuo did shortly before his death in 1988, but we Europeans still need patiently to push for a more liberal, open and tolerant China even while it maintains it’s party-state structure.

And let us not forget that the life prospects for the Chinese youth are far brighter than that of the young generations in Russia, the Arab world, larger parts of Africa, not to mention Greece, Italy, Spain…

Europe’s future prosperity lies in connecting with the future Silk Road: two ancient civilisations connecting via railroad tracks across Euroasia and by ship going north of Russia.

However, I beg to differ, when it comes to the negative descriptions of China so commenly entertained in the west. In the following comments I have taken heavy inspiration from the British writer Martin Jacques and his excellent book ‘When China Rules The World’:

We choose to see China in a context according to Western values: what preoccupies us is the absence of a Western-style democracy, a poor state of human rights, the plight of the Tibetans, and the country’s terrible environmental record.

But China is profoundly different from the West. The most fundamental defining features of China today, and which give the Chinese their sense of identity, emanate not from the last century when China has called itself a nation-state but from the previous two millennia when it can be best described as a civilization-state: the relationship between the state and society, a very distinctive notion of the family, ancestral worship, Confucian values, the network of personal relationships and the Chinese language with its unusual relationship between the written and spoken form.

The implications are profound: In China, on the contrary, the sense of identity has primarily been shaped by the country’s history as a civilization-state. China, as a civilization-state, has two main characteristics. Firstly, there is its exceptional longevity, dating back to even before the break-up of the Roman Empire. Secondly, the scale of China means that it embraces a huge diversity. Because China is so vast and embraces such diversity, as a matter of necessity it must be flexible: ‘one civilization, many systems’, i.e. Hongkong is ruled differently than Tibet, Xinjiang and China proper (the eastern and most populous part)

The idea of China as a civilization-state is a fundamental building block for understanding China in its own terms. The reason why the Chinese state enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese has nothing to do with democracy but can be found in the relationship between the state and Chinese civilization. The state is seen as the embodiment, guardian and defender of Chinese civilization. Maintaining the unity, cohesion and integrity of Chinese civilization is perceived as the highest political priority and is seen as the sacrosanct task of the Chinese state.

China is now playing the core role of what we have commonly mislabelled globalization (forgetting that Africa is largely left out of this integrational process). For decades we discusssed the North-South divide in developmental politics and we spent billions of tax payer’s money in aid programs, with many of them being misused or disappearing. In recent years we have seen both China and India rising fast economically and socially without use of western-induced development aid. Should we blame them?

China becoming the world’s largest economy is just a return to the normal order known from the 17 centuries that followed the birth of Jesus Christ. There is no reason to be surprised. But we certainly need to adjust.

The only development that might give the West time to adjust would be the collapse of China into social-political turmoil as a result of the arrogance and corruption of the leadership in combination with the population’s access to information from outside, rising ressource and food prices and falling exports resulting from the slide of the Western economies.

The feeling of panic is quickly deepening, generating automatic rejection of logic plus fancy advice built on hope rather than cool analysis even from the brightest. In New York Times Thomas L. Friedman warns us against taking any clear steps against China in spite of information that country is increasing pressure to on Western companies to move their latest technology production to within its borders. He underlines that any such steps would lead to a destructive trade war like in 1930.

Instead of an anacronistic and vain hope to reestablish production, Friendman insists that the collapsing U.S.middle class should be rebuit to be live off continued creation of new innovative products and getting income from intellectual property rights. The rest of over 300 millions of Americans should earn their living from the increasing Chinese tourism to America.

Friedman’s incantatory solution ignores both that even if the West and especially the U.S. retained its advantage in the innovation field and the producers went on paying, the number of people in that middle class would be tiny. A quickly increasing millions of people would fall outside the economy making it most unlikely that the union, state and local government structures could be supported. The income of the companies producing outside the country cannot be taxed and the income will be concentrated even more than it is today, where the public protest is increasing. A likely result is the collapse of the Union, or democracy, or both.

His premise is that the innovative advantage can be sustained is, however, fundamentally unrealistic. It is built on franctic hope rather than logic. Even if mainland China fails in creating “Silicon Valleys” because of heavy handed treatment of intellectuals and systemic corruption, there is no reason to believe that Taiwan, India, Indonesia and Brazilia cannot do what first Japan and then South Korea surprised the West by doing in the last three decades of 20th Century.

There is no good solution for the West, only the choice between doing something difficult, extremely painful, contrary to established ideology and common reading of history and passively rotting away for the garbage dump of history.

While much of above is right, what we are witnessing may not be the terminal decline of the West but our temporary stagnation combined with ”the rise of the rest”.

China’s success is not all that brilliant. After squandering decades and murdering tens of millions the regime indeed has harnessed a fifth or so of its hapless citizens to industrial production relevant for party members and foreign investors. The GDP’ed worth of their effort may in a few years reach that of the U.S., still only a third of that per capita. In China property rights are restricted to party members and foreign investors, and ”banks” and state enterprises are used as instruments of redistribution and social control. While the Chinese technocrats are doing well, their success is in part fortuitous and reflects that catching up is easy. As recent Chinese history has shown, Lord Acton’s pithy point that ”power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” easily translates into Mandarin, and so does Churchill’s insight that ”democracy is the worst form of government except all the others”: China’s regime may keep rampant corruption, economic, social and political instability at bay and avoid imperial overreach for some time but not for ever, and then there may be no balancing mechanism. Its lack of legitimacy will catch up with the regime, at best through democratic evolution at worst through conquest, war, pestilence and famine.

What makes China appear brilliant and dangerous is the combination of ineffectiveness and self-doubt of the West. While I cannot subscribe to a Spenglerian ”Untergang des Abendlandes”, and find that the ”Yellow Peril” is but a variant of the formerly totalitarian ”Red Peril”, I share and enjoy much of your criticism: Shallow Ecomonists (spelling intended, pronounce ‘E-commonists’) confound our states, wreck banks, and make a mockery of universities. ”Ecomonics” is a perversion of the venerable academic discipline of Economics. Classical economists seek to understand economic history and to seek out regularities, at times conjuring up wee models for the fun of it. For the ecomonists, the megalomanic cousins og economists, history is irrelevant, models purified truth, and their forecasts the future. Without culture and history Man is “Economic Man”, management is linear rationalism (“New Public Management”), measurement is all and experience nothing. Preaching purity and clarity where there is none these Ecomonists have risen to power and harmed banks, businesses, and the public sector. Their model totems, their “visions, missions and values” and linear pseudo-rationality have reduced politicians to ticket-selling process managers thus de-politicising politics, and reduced professionals to self-serving employees, and citizens to consumers. This is what causes our current stagnation and feeds the century-old self-doubt of the West.

Alas!; soon this wave of silliness will wash away, and for a time citizenship, politics, and professionalism will return (until another fad drives us into another ditch). With the pens sharpened, let us make their end near and not ours. Aux armes, historiens!

Both the politicians and their economic advisors are like navigators on a liner cruising in iceberg infested waters. The ship has been damaged by several minor iceberg hits and the mixed group on the bridge is arguing how they are going to get past the next such obstacles without totally loosing control. Late October 2011 the German major share-owner forced the rest to lay a course past the closest large iceberg and to accept plans for new rules for cooperation – only to be sabotaged in the former by Italian and Greek. However, all ignore that some time back they deliberately blew away all seacocks and bilge pumps of the western economies to let the sea flow freely in – and out (ignoring that gravity would make this rather unlikely).

Some politicians may be in the early phases of panic about the accelerating out-flow of jobs, but the immediate crisis demand their full attention and their economic advisors – that brain-washed themselves of the soundness of the theory two decades back – tell them to concentrate on the immediate problems. When the situation becomes all too obviously critical no later than in a few years, the advisors most likely wash their hands and blame the politicians for lack of timely decisive action.

A background combination of former long term defence planner and 20th century historian brings with it a willingness to face an obvious challenge and voice concern.

2) What about the emerging economic problems of China with over-heating, labour bottleneck resulting from the ‘one child policy’ and rising pay level in the coastal zone?

No matter what problems China faces, there is no realistic chance that the relative competiveness of the West will improve enough early enough to ‘suck‘ the wealth back ‘into the hull‘ or even reduce the outflow. The only likely result would be that the money goes to other developing low-cost production areas rather than China.

3) Could this root crisis have been avoided?

With the internal reform and development in China, India and Brazil, the narrowing of the wealth gap was inevitable and strongly desirable. However, it should have been managed by the West in co-operation in a way that ensured fair dealing rather than by blowing away the sea valves in ideological intoxication. And it might even have been accompanied by a tough and realistic appreciation in Western states and co-operating groups of states to guide adaptation to the more difficult and competitive future in a way that avoided the present approach of lemmings approaching the cliff.

4) Can anything be done in Europe?

The first and essential step is to acknowledge and accept the situation and that it is completely idiotic to aim policy at renewed growth. We must immediately take the hard decision to drop acting like the affluent societies we used to be. We are living on borrowed time and money. The challenge is to avoid a total collapse of the economy and most likely as a result of the societies that makes the democratic systems possible.

We must do everything to gain time and regain competiveness, as China refuses to revalue its currency, the euro and those linked must be devalued deeply to mirror the decreasing productivity and low competiveness of the economies. The containment of the resulting dramatic stress on the weakest will be the main state and EU responsibility in the years it will take to rebuilt a new and competive production within the constrains of future limited resources.

Further loss of innovative intellectual property must be stopped as must must free migration of capital. Unfair dumping must thereafter be met by trade defence. The West did not start the trade war with a state subsidised offensive. We were exposed to one and failed to see it thanks to naïve ideology.

China should not be invited to finance part of our debth. It should be convinced by trade barriers and the reduction in production costs to invest in production in the West in the same way as Japan did when it established car factories in the U.S. and Europe.

If all this does not happen very soon, Europe will be reduced to a mixture of a badly maintained museum and a North American Indian reservation as it was a century back – and then it deserves this fate.

5) Is it not totally hopeless? Capital movement cannot be controlled.

A common fatalistic reaction based on a lack of knowledge of the past so common in the present public discourse. It ignores that the passive attitude to the free move of capital is a new situation, established because of the unthinking ideological assumption that it was to the benefit of all. A combination of political will in the West to cooperate to meet the challenge in state and union legislation and adaptation of some of the monitoring tools developed for the “War on Terror” would be logical.

Mit 7. Bud ville være at enhver organisation skal opbygge, bevare og udnytte spidsfaglig kompetence inden for områder som kan karrakteriseres som kerneområder for den pågældende organisation.

Til daglig arbejder jeg som ekstern “freelance” IT-konsulent særlig for den statslige forvaltning og som sådan har et lille indblik fra siden ind i staten. Det er mit klare indtryk at fuldstændig mangel på, eller rettere det bevidste fravalg af eksisterende, teknisk-faglig indsigt i f.eks. administrative IT-løsninger, som er mit område (men det kunne såmen også være, didaktiv pædagogik i skoler og gymnasier, forskning, krig osv. for de respektive ministerier, styrelser og direktorater ) i selv store statslige institutioner og i særlig grad blandt de realle beslutningstagere, danner baggrund for de betragtelige fiaskoer og ikke optimale (kostbare, eller simpelthen ikke-funktionelle) løsninger som en række store private leverandører har lavet en ganske god forretning på – til tvivlsom glæde for skatteyderne.

Det der gang på gang sker er at en eller flere DJØF’er på leder niveau (gerne statskundskab: den eneste faggruppe der slår læger og min egen, civil ingeniører, i diciplinen “Det ved jeg alt om”) sætter et projekt igang, jeg antager at hovedmotivationen er at fremme egen karriere. En anden motiverende faktor ser udtil at være en iboende tendens i enhver stat til at tiltage sig mere og mere magt (I statens tilfælde tiltager man sig magt over andre statsinstitutioner) hvor om alting er allierer man sig med en stor (privat) spiller på market, Mckinsey, Cowi, Accenture, KMD, CSC osv.
Og indtil videre er det jo fint nok – problemet opstår ved at de nævnte firmaer “konsulenter” eller ” rådgivere” ikke rådgiver om den optimale løsning eller den nødvendige løsning, Nej, de rådgiver om det de mener at de kan sælge, og hvis det ikke drejer sig om et produkt i almindelig forstand rådgiver de om den løsning/politik som de gætter at kunden ønsker.

Og her opstår problemet, ikke at lejesvendene er upålidelige, men at den teknisk-faglige indsigt der kræves til at vurdere “rådet” mangler i staten ELLER befinder sig på et tilstrækkeligt lavt niveau til at man ikke hører efter deres,ofte saglige, vurdering. Den faglige ekspertise findes jo ofte; i skolerne, i gymnasierne, på universiteterne, i officerskorpset, i IT-afdelingerne – men det er jo bare teknikkerne – dem gider man ikke at høre på.

Projektchefen skal have et ansvar overfor den kerneproduktion som projektet skal være en del af efter implementeringen.
Han skal ikke kun tænke i kunden, men også kundens kunde (eller modstander i dette tilfælde).

Som du muligvis ved, havde jeg 10½ år i Baltikum med stærkt meningsfuldt arbejde – først med lokalt at lede etableringen af støtten, og derefter som chef for opstilling og udvikling af det baltiske forsvarsakademi i 6½ år, min egen baby. Det meningsfulde liv bidrog til det chok, det blev at møde den institution, jeg havde forladt i 1994.

Jeg er ikke uenig i meget af det, du skriver, men mener ikke, at man skal opgive. Vi har en af de absolut bedste ministre, Forsvaret har haft i mine mere end 40 år i Forsvaret, og vi har nu en gruppe meget, meget dygtige yngre officerer og andre befalingsmænd, der kunne blive katalysator i reformerne. Deres læremestre har dels været erfaringen fra Kosovo, Irak og Afghanisten, dels de franske og britiske hære, de har arbejdet tæt sammen med.

Jeg havde i 6 år et tæt samarbejde med det franske og specielt britiske militær. Af de ca. 15 landes officerer, jeg havde under min kommando (herunder også tyske og amerikanske), var briterne og franskmændene de klart bedste – selv om mine absolut ikke var ‘gulddrengene’.

Da det britiske forsvar reduceredes efter den kolde krig, blev der skåret hårdt i officererskorpset. Man beholdt de bedste. Vi reducerede mere, men beholdt alle …

Din

Michael