Book
Review: Dispatches from a Borderless World
By Satya Das
Newest Press, 211 pages, $22.95
Reviewed by David Kilgour, Secretary of
State (Latin America & Africa)
Review Published in bout de papier, Vol.
16, No. 4, p. 45
The author
is an eloquent voice for the international
community, which today comprises much of
Canada. He lived in India until adolescence,
when his family relocated to Western Canada,
and now reports on foreign affairs for the
Edmonton Journal.
Following
a decade of writing news and editorials
at the newspaper, in 1987 Das won a Nuffield
Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge
University. There he encountered the Thatcher
revolution in full flood and was clearly
not impressed.
As he puts
it, "Some of the by-products of the
global economy – tribalism, racial
tension, displacement, joblessness, a gap
between rich and poor – were not particularly
evident so long as the global boom of the
1990s came along." Yet in East end
of London, he saw much that distressed him,
including bigotry and race riots.
He points
in contrast to the London office of Soloman
Brothers, the stockbrokers, which after
itself making a $4 billion profit in 1993
opted to pay a bonus of one million American
dollars to a thousand of its branch employees.
At the other end, the number of British
children living in "extreme" poverty
or homeless, for example, was far too high;
health and education problems also, to Das,
shrieked for more public investment.
The book
argues that the Asian collapse in 1998 occurred
in large measure because of Western ignorance
about how Asian societies function culturally.
In the case of Russia, he thinks no one
stopped to consider how difficult it is
for a population to move from 72 years of
totalitarianism to individualism without
many being left "cold and hungry in
the snow."
In the author’s
view, Canada provides an excellent model
of cooperation and social responsibility
for all peoples wishing to live in peace.
We are, for Das, the only Western country
that makes Asians – and presumably
everyone else, although the book only implies
it – feel truly comfortable because
Canadians treat others with respect.
On the domestic
front, Dispatches sensibly rails against
the labelling of a large number of Canadians
– up to a third of the populations
of Toronto and Vancouver – as "visible
minorities." Why, the book asks, insult
such communities by terming them officially
as different from other Canadians. Why not
a rainbow nation as in post-1994 South Africa?
If equality
of opportunity for all is really important
to Ottawa, moreover, why asks the author
does our private sector continue to do much
better in employment equity? Why do most
federal government offices remain more monochrome
than rainbow? Das clearly believes that
showing real leadership internationally
requires "walking one’s talk at
home."
The author’s
Canadianism includes Quebec so strongly
that he’s probably one of the only
journalists for an English paper in Western
Canada whose voice mail includes a greeting
in French. Claude Ryan, the former leader
of the Quebec Liberal party, both endorses
Dispatches enthusiastically and notes in
doing so that our national squbbles are
"somewhat minor when seen in the larger
context of a rapidly emerging borderless
world." Das notes with regret that
the 1995 referendum experience appears to
have induced indifference among many non-Quebecers.
He’d like a magical way of introducing
the land and residents of Alberta to Quebecers
– and Quebecers to Alberta.
Another subject
he explores closely is Indonesia, which
he visited at various intervals as the deeply
corrupt regime of President Suharto was
finally yielding to democracy. He also provides
good analyses of Japan, Singapore, Malaysia,
China and Taiwan in Asia. He focusses on
France, Britain and Ukraine in Europe. His
article on the late Mother Theresa is one
of the most compelling in the entire book.
Overall,
it is an excellent work which I’d recommend
to foreign service officers serving anywhere.
Indeed, one might well give out copies as
gifts in many of our missions abroad.
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