India
Against Foodie Diplomacy
Exports as Metropolitan Economic Development
Three years into the National Export Initiative, and just as Brookings is primed to further scale up its Metro Exports Initiative (MEI) to meet rising demand, there appears to be growing skepticism in some circles about the prospect of embracing and promoting exports in the face of a potential global economic slowdown. The media, regional leaders, and other interested parties--all are questioning whether the European debt crisis, a slowdown in China, and the overall weakness of the economic recovery make this a poor time to prioritize and pursue exports. Does it make sense for U.S.
What Happened to Europe?
ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, in 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre complained about the state of Europe. “Europe is springing leaks everywhere,” he wrote. He went on to remark that “it simply is that in the past we made history and now history is being made of us.” Sartre was undoubtedly too pessimistic.
Metro Areas Vary Amid Slowing Global Growth
Earlier this week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lowered its growth forecast for the global economy for this year and next. It seems that both developed and developing countries are going to expand more slowly than expected earlier this year. In a pattern also seen in 2011, the United States is experiencing a loss of momentum and the Eurozone countries are still stuck in a sovereign debt quagmire.
The Other Liberal Light
Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire By C. A. Bayly (Cambridge University Press, 383 pp., $29.99) Democracy and Its Institutions By André Béteille (Oxford University Press India, 228 pp., £27.50) I. THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA is the most reckless political experiment in human history. Never before was a single nation constructed out of so many diverse and disparate parts. Partitioned at birth on the basis of religion, India now has almost as many Muslims as the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.
Jubilee Girl
ONE YOUNG Englishman was exhilarated by the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, as he had been ten years earlier when the Golden Jubilee had celebrated her first half-century on the throne. Then twelve years old, he had written to his mother: “P.S. Remember the Jubilee,” followed by a series of letters begging to be taken to see the great event. They were signed, “Your loving son Winny.” That Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, in the summer of 1887, had seen European royalty gather in Westminster Abbey, while across the land, bonfires were lit. In A.E.
The Need to Lead
Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global PowerBy Zbigniew Brzezinski (Basic Books, 208 pp., $26) When it comes to offering a vision to guide American foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s latest book, unlike so much other literature of this type, refuses to lament or exaggerate the alleged decline in American power and influence. Instead Strategic Vision offers a kind of blueprint—a path that Washington must take, in Brzezinski’s view, to ensure a secure international order, in which free markets and democratic principles can thrive.
Around 8 a.m. on February 22, Syrian security forces attempting to prop up the Bashar al Assad regime shelled a makeshift media center in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, killing the American war reporter Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik. Four other journalists who survived the blast, including Colvin’s Irish photographer, Paul Conroy, and French Le Figaro journalist Edith Bouvier, were transported to a nearby hospital and treated for serious shrapnel wounds.
According to documents taken from his compound and obtained by the Washington Post, Osama bin Laden “commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.” The documents indicate that bin Laden had a specific person in mind for the job: Pakistani terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri. According to administration officials, the plan never got very far. But who was Ilyas Kashmiri? A March 2011 report on Sunni militancy in India gives some perspective.
Form and Fortune
Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 627 pp., $35) I. In 2010, Der Spiegel published a glowing profile of Steve Jobs, then at the helm of Apple. Jobs’s products are venerated in Germany, especially by young bohemian types. Recently, the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg presented an exhibition of Apple’s products, with the grandiloquent subtitle “On Electro-Design that Makes History”—a good indication of the country’s infatuation with the company.
