Whatever comes next, humanity can survive

It is difficult not to feel for a writer who, having spent a long time working on a book called What Next? Surviving the Twenty First Century, finds he is publishing in the middle of the slow-motion collapse of the financial markets and banking system, which incontestably inaugurates a new era in world history.

It is not quite as miserable as launching an architectural study of the Twin Towers on September 12 but it's close, for this crisis - barely hinted at in What Next? - changes quite a lot of what Chris Patten's interesting book covers. No doubt he is hard at work on a new chapter for the paperback and adding sections to the chapter on globalisation, terrorism, oil, water, poverty and the future.

I do wish that he had written this sentence, which actually comes from George Soros's new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: "There was a symbiotic relationship between the United States, which was happy to consume more than it produced, and China and other Asian exporters, which were happy to produce more than they consumed."

In those 33 words you have a very large chunk of the story of the transference of economic power from West to East, an explanation for what happened in the high-spending, risk-taking economies of the West as well as some kind of projection for the 21st century. 

Patten asserts, “The puzzle is not ‘What is to be done?’ but rather ‘Who is to do it and how?’” He does not head for the hills in survivalist camouflageActually Patten is very good on China, as you would expect, but a book like this should have some sense of the chasm opening up in the road ahead. George Soros had been saying it for a long time. I heard him myself talking about sub-prime lending over dinner two-and-a-half years ago but then failed to take his advice to sell my house and bank the money in Switzerland.

That all said, What Next? is a fascinating tour d'horizons, which few people have the confidence or knowledge to undertake. Occasionally you feel as though you are locked in one huge session of the annual Davos Forum, or chained to a high table in a dimly lit Oxford college dining hall but it's difficult not to admire Patten's reach and grasp. 

As a devoted fact collector, I found myself compulsively noting down bits of his research. If you take oil out of the figures, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States export less than five million Finns. At the end of the Cold War, Czechoslovakia possessed 500,000 small arms for a military that numbered less than 50,000. Of the million Chinese students who go abroad to study, 700,000 do not return. In 1960 China's per capita GDP was roughly a third of Congo's; now it is roughly sixteen times Congo's. The world's most deprived regions are coterminous with those areas where malaria is widespread. And so on.

I wish that Tony Blair had understood that “If you want to promote democratic values abroad, you must begin by practising them at home”You arrive at Patten's last two chapters, which are about democracy and the future, entertained, exhausted and a little depressed - this last because the great arc of his story seems to be about human folly. Yet the two final chapters are really quite optimistic, which of course is the right philosophical basis - even now - for any reasonable person to look at the world's difficulties. The history of the past 250 years tells us that our ability to screw up is more than adequately compensated for by our ingenuity and problem solving analysis. 

Patten asserts, "The puzzle is not 'What is to be done?' but rather 'Who is to do it and how?'" He does not head for the hills in survivalist camouflage but persists with a belief in freedom and democracy.

I wish more Republicans and more members of Britain's New Labour Government, which finds any excuse to reduce liberty and degrade institutions, would declare, as he does, "We should still have faith in our strength and the sources of our strength, in our democracies, in our free markets, in our free institutions, in our civil societies, in the rule of law and the functioning of impartial justice." 

I particularly wish that Tony Blair, so gifted but so shallow and self-important, had understood that "If you want to promote democratic values, pluralism and the rule of law abroad, you must begin by clearly practising them at home. You do not condone torture or split hairs about what it means. You abide by the international agreements you have made. You do not circumvent due process. You do not incarcerate people in no man's land beyond the reach of law."  

Whatever the problems of the 21st century, these values will carry us through, and it is pleasing to see Chris Patten state them so clearly. What Next? is the work of a convinced and clever democrat; it is a good book and worth reading, crunch or no crunch. ·