Hindu hardliner Lal Krishan Advani has gone back to his old job as president of the fading Bharatiya Janata Party after stunning election defeats. (AFP File Photo)

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose in the late 1980s because L.K. Advani struck a chord with the poor. He did not do so with an economic agenda, but a religious one. He took the Ram temple construction movement into the villages, where the party had insufficient presence, and to women, whom the party had never wooed.
The strength of an emotional upsurge can at best be limited and much of the steam exhausted itself with the destruction of the Babri mosque. But Advani had something else to offer his party: a rational analysis of weaknesses and strengths when opportunity presented itself at the end of the 1990s.
The BJP leadership took the unsentimental view that if it wanted power in Delhi then it could only be through partnerships. This meant that it would have to cede space in parliamentary calculus, and withdraw from the confrontational heart of its ideological compulsions.
This was not without internal pain, for there were always the Murli Manohar Joshis to push the envelope at inconvenient moments. However, it was implicit that both concessions were temporary. Neither did the party have any qualms about exploiting crass communalism, as for instance in Gujarat.
One faction, offered shelter in the Vajpayee wing, did begin to believe after 1999 that power would diffuse the original ideology, but it was a minority.
Very adroitly, Atal Behari Vajpayee used Pakistan, an antithesis of the BJP, to redefine the thesis of his years in power. It was not another political game. He genuinely believed in peace with Pakistan.
When push came to shove, as in Gujarat, the Atalites had to retreat. Power, however, provided this faction with sufficient cover, and the prospect of continued power made it complacent. Defeat has marginalised the Atalites to the point where the Maharashtra election campaign scheduled only one Vajpayee meeting.
Belligerent in victory
Nor is Vajpayee the only "traitor" to the hardliners. Narendra Modi has greeted Advani's return as party president with deafening silence. It is pertinent to note that Advani is a sitting MP from the capital of Gujarat. Equations have changed in Modi's calculations. Two years ago, he needed Advani. Today, he believes that Advani needs him.
There is little doubt that Modi sees himself as the future of his party. He has positioned himself as the incorruptible soul of Hindutva. He believes that he does not have to wait for more than a couple of years before the call comes.
Advani has an obvious immediate challenge: how to energise the base that keeps slithering away. The Bharatiya Janata Party is still Bharatiya, and still a Party, but the Janata has disappeared.
Politics is never static. If you do not grow, you slide; you do not remain stagnant. The base has two dimensions, the party and the electorate, and to an extent they are interdependent.
It is obvious though that a party depends more on the voter than the voter does on a party. The Modis may not believe it, but the voter is not going to return through the brutal mechanism of communal riots. The spirit of democracy dies each time a Modi thrives.
Venkaiah Naidu concentrated on building castles, at least some of them in the air. Lal Krishna Advani needs to find those subjects.
ASIANAGE.COM

Football hooliganism and nationalism create a witch's brew that, until lately, has rarely been sipped in Asia. That changed at the recent Asian Football Cup. Wherever Japan's players went, they were met by hostile crowds. This built up to the championship match with China before a huge--and hugely hostile--crowd in Beijing. This is especially worrisome because, unlike elsewhere in the world, official manipulation helps fan the flames of nationalism in China.
Young Chinese have been thoroughly indoctrinated with anti-Japanese sentiments. China's former president Jiang Zemin systematically and relentlessly pursued a 'Resistance and Victory-over-Japan Campaign' throughout the 1990s--a sinister device used to divert popular grievances and to legitimise continuing Communist rule by making the Party appear to be the defender of Chinese honour.
At the same time, the ancient sense of cultural superiority that runs in Chinese veins makes feelings of inferiority hard to bear. With China's growing sense of itself as a superpower, resentment about the country being poorer and less admired than some other nations has become intolerable.
Now the young people who make up the vanguard of China's economic modernisation are also nationalist-minded football hooligans. Instead of providing an early showcase of decent spectator manners for the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the Asian Cup provided a glimpse at the rage that seethes beneath China's economic boom--and exposed the government's inability to control its increasingly restless people.
Of course, the bitterness of Sino-Japanese relations since the end of WWII helps set the stage for such nationalist outbursts, but the roots of China's rage went deeper. Even as China grows richer and more powerful, memories of its past suffering and humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan remain alive--particularly because the Communist Party finds such memories so useful. China's modern view of foreigners and their intentions are necessarily refracted through the prism of such history.
So how should Japan respond? Should Japan fight fire with fire?
Part of the problem lies in Japan's educational system. Owing to a curriculum controlled by the powerful Japan Teachers' Union, since the end of WWII many Japanese youth have viewed the Japan-China relationship with a consciousness of the need for atonement for the Sino-Japanese War. Today, however, calls are growing to promote a more accurate and balanced historical education that focuses on modern history after the Meiji Restoration and WWII, and that reflects the reality of the Sino-Japanese relationship free from an obsession with "atonement".
But the issue goes beyond education. Coerced into feeling the need to atone to China, Japan passively tolerated recent episodes of worrying Chinese behaviour. With a revision of Japan's National Defence Programme expected by yearend, the prime minister's Council on Security and Defecse Capabilities has indicated a need to respond to China's military expansion, particularly its buildup of armed forces. "China is now in the stage of surging nationalism, and the trend is expected to continue in the future," the Council warned in its interim report, concluding that, "Japan must take appropriate actions in response to each incident" in which China attempts to "gradually advance its defence line [ocean-ward]".
Japan seems to be departing from its conventional low-profile diplomacy towards China, and readying itself to construct a comprehensive long-term national and regional security strategy. The military core of such a strategy must include appropriate maritime tactics to respond to China's assertiveness. But, ultimately, the effectiveness--and hence the success--of such a strategy will depend on how Japan positions itself in the region, especially in its relationship with China.
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

For a generation or more, it has been an article of faith, at least in Europe, that the nation state is in profound decline. The rise of globalisation, growing economic interdependence, the spread of new international organisations and the power of multinationals, not to mention the European Union itself, suggested that the future lay in new forms of global and regional governance. This was a delusion. The opposite is happening. Nation states will be the decisive players in global affairs over the next few decades.
So much is already clear with the United States. During the cold war, it behaved as a superpower constrained by its allies. Since 9/11 it has acted as Prometheus unbound, a nation state answerable to nobody but itself.
The weakness of Europe as a global player is also a reminder of the efficacy of the nation state. Economically, the EU remains a formidable force, rivaling the American economy. As a political player, though, it pales into insignificance in comparison. Unable to act with any decision even in the Balkans, its impotence has been all too transparent over Iraq, where the EU has essentially been reduced to its component parts, most graphically illustrated by the divergent roles of Britain and France.
Over the next half-century, the world is likely to assume a rather different shape. For the first time in the modern era, the world's two most populous countries (by a huge margin) will become major global players in their own right. It will mark the biggest watershed in global affairs since the birth of the modern nation state system.
China and India, with well over a third of the world's population, will become major arbiters of all our futures. Compare that with the late 19th century, when Germany, France and Britain were the dominant powers, while accounting for only around 7% of the world's population (excluding their colonies, of course): or the US and the Soviet Union, which, by the end of the cold war, contained slightly over 10% of the world's population. The emergence of China and India as global powers will, in contrast to any previous period in modern history, introduce a rough and ready democracy to global affairs: the west, still the overwhelmingly dominant power in the world, represents only 17% of humanity, even on the most generous definition of the term.
The arrival of China and India on the world scene will reinforce the importance of the nation state. They will dominate East Asia and South Asia respectively, which between them have well over half the world's population. India and China are, and will be, very different kinds of nation states from those that we are familiar with in the west. Not only are they far more populous--a novelty in its own right--they are also products of very different histories, cultures and races.
As Jared Diamond puts it in Guns, Germs and Steel: while five of the world's six most populous countries are creations of the past 200 years or so, China, is more than 2,000 years old. This is a nation state possessed of an extraordinary centripetal unity, its cohesion born of history and ethnicity. The fact that its population is almost twice that of North America and the EU combined provides an insight into its novelty as a nation state.
The arrival of China as a superpower, and probably India a little further down the historical road, will only reinforce the underlying importance of the nation state. Nation states, not multilateral institutions, will be the decisive players of the 21st century.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Gamal Mubarak

After a month-long steady stream of statements coupled with vague but catchy slogans such as "new thinking and the priority of reform," the unimpressive three-day conference of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) recently took place. It left almost every one--politically engaged intellectuals, academics, opposition parties, or ordinary citizens--with a bitter taste from the pantomime of misleading nonsense that passed for "political reform."
Beyond economics, the NDP's unwillingness to take the plunge, its failure even to project a comprehensive vision of reform or to set a time frame for discussing what had been labeled by one incisive political analyst as the "three no's," spoke volumes. The first "no" was to constitutional change. The second was to a free and competitive presidential election in 2005 between multiple candidates. The third "no" was to the lifting of the emergency law.
While finding fault with the government might be routine for the opposition, the last NDP conference had raised expectations that restrictions on liberties would be alleviated, if not entirely removed. However, the party's failure to allow even temporary political decompression extended the target of criticism to include the issue of President Hosni Mubarak's succession, widened the range of dissenters beyond the government's usual critics and extended the ways in which opposition is expressed.
In this respect, Islamists, Nasserites, Arab nationalists, liberals, leftists, and independents have been brought together by their demand for constitutional change as a preliminary step for essential reform.
Among those who expressed their most vociferous criticism were individuals seeking to establish new political parties. During its 23-year existence, the governmental Parties Committee has systematically refused all requests submitted to it (except one) to legalize parties. All other legalized parties since 1990 owe their existence to the State Council, which though bounded by a restrictive law, has tended to interpret it more broadly than the Parties Committee, which remains a mere puppet in the hands of the executive branch.
The debate over democratic reform should have focused instead on the structural obstacles to democratic development within the political system, such as the absence of checks on executive power, the weakness of representative assemblies and the dependent nature of the judiciary.
It should also focus critically on the extent to which external parameters of policy-making in Egypt constrain democracy: for example, the ways in which globalization has eroded national sovereignty so that crucial policy areas are no longer the subjects of domestic political decisions. In fact the economic policy prescriptions of international financial institutions have tended to pre-empt and preclude domestic political debate over economic and social issues.
In other words, by opting for a soft-edged approach to prompting reform, without any recognition of the crucial political steps that are needed to launch a genuine process of political reform and to broaden the process of political inclusion, the NDP has ended up with an initiative that is hollow at the core.
To have a real effect on the fundamentally non-democratic and "obstructed" nature of the system, the NDP should have had the courage to tackle these issues and not limit itself to worthy but essentially secondary issues, such as future legislation concerning education, agriculture, taxes, monopolies, and personal status laws - all of which are executive matters and need not have required an annual conference to be discussed. Confining opposition forces to the margins of political life is certainly not conducive to setting in motion a fruitful dialogue.
The government risks realizing too late that it has squandered a golden opportunity to open up the political field and to undertake serious political reform. This will eventually prevent their "reformist" efforts from bearing fruit.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB

What do a Pathan tribesman in Pakistan, a factory hand in Shanghai, a grape picker in Chile, and a Canadian autoworker have in common?
Their lives are all shaped by decisions made by the White House, the closest thing we have today to world government.
It's unfair the whole world cannot somehow vote in the upcoming U.S. elections since they affect all mankind. Maybe the rest of the world could vote and count as one U.S. state, Internationalia. However, if this happened, the result would be a landslide for John Kerry.
The vision of a re-elected George W. Bush ruling the world does not sit well. Few non-Americans know anything about Kerry, but that hardly matters. He is popular everywhere abroad simply because he looks civilized and is the un-Bush.
My eagle-eyed friend, Countess Pamela de Maigret, brought my attention to an interesting Internet site, BetaVote.com. This site tabulates straw votes for Bush and Kerry from around the world. Though unscientific, and distorted in its U.S. section by Bush unlovers, it provides a good sample of world thinking about the election.
Among 42,721 global respondents, Kerry leads Bush by 88% to 11%. In Brazil, Kerry leads by 91%; by 79% in Italy; 91% in France; 71% in India; 77% in Japan; 11% in Kuwait; 89% in Germany; 81% in Britain; 17% in Israel; 61% in Nigeria.
Only in the African state of Niger does Bush lead, by 71%. Bush and Kerry are tied, oddly, in Libya, North Korea, Christmas Island and Niue, wherever that is.
What deeply alarms many non-Americans is the prospect of a second Bush term dominated by a coalition of evangelical Christians, Christian "Rapturists," American partisans of Israel's PM Ariel Sharon, and rural voters from the Deep South who reject evolution and think French is the native language of Satan.
These groups tend to share a loathing of Europe, the UN, the Pope, Muslims in general, Arabs in particular, intellectuals, anything international, and believe themselves God's chosen people. Some born-again Christians see Bush as a kind of messiah.
There is deep concern abroad that American politics is falling increasingly under the influence of extreme religious groups at a time when secularism is accepted across Europe and non-Muslim Asia.
Many Catholics will vote against Kerry on their bishops' orders. Many American supporters of Greater Israel, who shape U.S. foreign policy these days, believe they are fulfilling God's commands. The 41% of Americans calling themselves born-again Christians are being whipped into a pro-Bush frenzy by many of their preachers. So much for separation of church and state.
Eric Margolis
CANOE.CA