What Next?: Surviving the Twenty-first Century - Hardcover

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Chris Patten is currently co-Chair of the International Crisis Group and of the Anglo-Indian Round Table, and is Chancellor of Oxford and Newcastle Universities. As a British MP 1979-92 he served as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for the Environment and Chairman of the Conservative Party, being described afterwards as 'the best Tory Prime Minister we never had' (Observer). In 1998-99 he chaired the Independent Commission for Policing in Northern Ireland, and from 1999-2004 was European Commissioner for External Relations. He is probably best known for being the last Governor of Hong Kong 1992-97, about which he wrote in East and West (1998). Both that and his most recent book, Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs (2005), were No 1 international best-sellers. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998 and a life peer in 2005.

Aus dem Klappentext

'As Margaret Thatcher famously observed at her last cabinet meeting "It's a funny old world." She might have added that it seems to get funnier by the year, to be sliding out of order. Gone are the day before yesterday's certainties, when the assurance of mutual destruction yoked together in a brittle truce what we called the Free World and its Communist adversary. Gone too apparently is what followed those perilous decades: the acclaimed triumph of liberal economic and political values with the modernisation of the world in America and Europe's image, and nothing much to worry about. So what is it - blind but blogging - that slouches on stage instead? What on earth is happening to us?'

What Next? tackles the big questions about our global condition and our collective future with a verve and authority no other current commentator or political figure, on either side of the Atlantic or the Channel, could match. Energy, food, water, international crime, weapons proliferation, drug trafficking, climate change, epidemic disease, migration - the challenges facing our world are themselves proliferating rapidly. On each of them, Chris Patten digests vast amounts of information from many different sources and analyses them for the reader using his experience at the highest levels of international politics. Very little in the world, he says, has turned out as we might have expected twenty years ago. But for reasons he explains, he remains an optimist in the face of this formidable agenda.

'Looking at one problem after another the answers are usually pretty clear. The puzzle is not - what is to be done? But rather - who is to do it and how? The issues are mostly matters of will. We know why action on this or that is needed. We know, usually, how to act, what to do. The capacity to act is the problem, not the comprehension of what we should be doing. Given our ability down the millennia to muddle through, I find that mildly reassuring.'

Readers of Patten's previous books will know what a penetrating analyst and engaging writer he is. What Next? is his most ambitious and impressive book yet.