The New Silk Roads: The New Asia and the Remaking of the World Order - Softcover

Frankopan, Peter

 
9780525566700: The New Silk Roads: The New Asia and the Remaking of the World Order
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0525566708 ISBN 13: 9780525566700
Verlag: Vintage, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of The Silk Roads comes an updated, timely, and visionary book about the dramatic and profound changes our world is undergoing right now&;as seen from the perspective of the rising powers of the East.  

"All roads used to lead to Rome. Today they lead to Beijing." So argues Peter Frankopan in this revelatory new book.

In the age of Brexit and Trump, the West is buffeted by the tides of isolationism and fragmentation. Yet to the East, this is a moment of optimism as a new network of relationships takes shape along the ancient trade routes. In The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan takes us on an eye-opening journey through the region, from China's breathtaking infrastructure investments to the flood of trade deals among Central Asian republics to the growing rapprochement between Turkey and Russia. This important book asks us to put aside our preconceptions and see the world from a new&;and ultimately hopeful&;perspective.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PETER FRANKOPAN is professor of global history at Oxford University. He is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. He lives in Oxford.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Roads to the East
 
Twenty-five years ago, when I was about to leave university, the world seemed a different place. The Cold War was over, leading to hopes for peace and prosperity. &;The heroic deeds of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian people&; had steered Russia onto a course of reform and democracy, said President Bill Clinton at a meeting with the Russian president in Vancouver in 1993. The prospect of a &;newly productive and prosperous Russia&; was good for everyone, he noted.

Hopeful times lay ahead too in South Africa, where fraught negotiations to end apartheid had advanced sufficiently for the Nobel committee to award the Peace Prize for 1993 to F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela for &;their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the founda­tions for a new democratic South Africa.&; The award of the prestigious prize was a moment of hope for South Africa, for Africa and for the world&;even if it later emerged that many of Mandela&;s closest confidants urged him not to accept the prize if it meant having to share it with a man they referred to as &;his oppressor.&; Mandela insisted, however, that forgiveness was a vital part of reconciliation.

Things looked promising in the Korean peninsula, where, in an echo of the discussions that took place in 2018, an out­line agreement was reached between the US and North Korea to great fanfare about the peaceful reunification of Korea and about a pathway for denuclearisation that was welcomed as a significant step forward for non-proliferation and also for a safer region and for a safer world.

In 1993, an important agreement was also reached between China and India that established the framework for dealing with disputed border issues that had been a source of rivalry and bitterness for three decades&;while both sides also agreed to reduce troop levels along the frontier and work together towards a conclusion that was mutually acceptable. This was important for both countries at a time when economic expan­sion and liberalisation was at the forefront for their respective political leaders. In China, Deng Xiaoping had recently under­taken a tour of the southern provinces to press for faster social, political and financial reforms, and to deal with hardliners who opposed the liberalisation of markets that had seen the stock exchange open in communist China in Shanghai in 1990.

South Korea&;s transformation was already well under way. In the 1960s, the country had been one of the poorest in the world, with no natural resources and an unpromising location at the eastern extremity of Asia. Its transformation into an eco­nomic superpower that is home to companies like Samsung, Hyundai Motor and Hanwha Corporation&;each of which has more than $100bn in assets&;has led some commentators to talk of South Korea as &;the most successful country in the world.&;

In India, as elsewhere, there was a push for growth in the early 1990s&;although few expected much from a small software company that struggled to list its stock in Mumbai in Febru­ary 1993. Despite its size and potential, India was an economic minnow and the technology sector was tiny and untested. Those who were brave and bought shares in Infosys Technologies did well if they held on to their stock. The company reported an operating profit for the year ended 31 March 2018 of over $2.6bn. Shares were worth turnover of more than $10bn. Shares were worth 4,000 times more than they had been twenty-five years earlier.

The foundation of a new airline in a small Gulf State seemed like a long shot, too. Founded in November 1993, Qatar Air­ways began operating two months later in what many assumed would be a modest operation that handled a few local routes, for which demand would be minimal. Today, the airline has a fleet of over 200 aircraft, more than 40,000 staff and flies to over 150 destinations&;winning armfuls of accolades that few would have thought possible two and a half decades ago. In April 2018, it agreed to buy 25 per cent of the shares of Moscow&;s Vnukovo International Airport&;the third largest in Russia.

Of course, good news did not abound everywhere in 1993, as a truck bomb at the World Trade Center in New York and a coordinated series of bombings in Mumbai that killed more than 250 people showed. Sarajevo, a city already famous for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the road to war in 1914 endured a siege by Bosnian Serb forces that lasted longer than the Battle of Stalingrad during the Second World War. Scenes of snipers shooting at civilians as they crossed the streets became commonplace, as did terrible images of the devastation caused by mortars being fired into the city from the neighbouring hills. The reappearance of concentration camps in Europe, and of genocide at Srebrenica and Gorazde in the mid-1990s, provided a brutal reminder that even the most horrifying lessons from the past can be easily forgotten.

Some of the troubles of the early 1990s were more familiar. In Britain, for example, political discourse was shaped by poi­sonous debates about membership in the European Union and calls for a referendum. These almost brought down the govern­ment, and led to the prime minister, John Major, referring to members of his own cabinet as &;bastards.&;

*

These events are all in the recent past. And yet they now feel distant and seem to evoke a different age. I listened to an album called Pablo Honey by a promising new band called Radiohead as I prepared for my final exams in the summer of 1993. Little did I know that the most prophetic song of the year was not &;Creep&;&;which has gone on to have been streamed more than a quarter of a billion times on Spotify&;but one that won at the Oscars that year. &;A whole new world,&; Aladdin promised Jasmine, &;a new fantastic point of view.&; Indeed, she agreed. &;A whole new world, a dazzling place I never knew.&; A song based on a story from and set along the past of the Silk Roads foretold its future.

That whole new world can be seen nowhere more clearly than by comparing the game of football in England in 1993 and today. A week before finals started in Cambridge, I watched a replay of the FA Cup final between Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday, which was almost as dull and dour as the drawn first match. Of the players who featured in the match (including sub­stitutes), all but three came from the British Isles. Twenty-five years later, the final between Chelsea and Manchester United was an equally underwhelming occasion&;but the composition of the teams was radically different: just six of the twenty-seven who played at Wembley were born in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The others came from all over the world, including Spain, France, Nigeria and Ecuador.

If that tells a story about the pace of globalisation in the course of a generation, then perhaps even more striking is the dramatic change in the ownership of English football clubs over the same period. Not long ago, the idea that leading teams would have foreign owners would have been dismissed as the stuff of fantasy&;at a time when even a foreign accent in the boardroom would have had club directors spluttering into their tea and choking on their pork pies at half-time. But today, many of the most famous names in English and European football have owners from abroad. And many come from the lands of the Silk Roads.

In some ways, that is not surprising. After all, although the game was codified in London in 1863, football was not invented in England. According to FIFA, the international body that gov­erns the sport, football was first...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525566708
ISBN 13 
9780525566700
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
308
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781526607423: The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1526607425 ISBN 13:  9781526607423
Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018
Hardcover