Vol. 15 No. 9 · 13 May 1993
pages 8-9 | 2930 words
False Alarm
Geoffrey Hawthorn
- Preparing for the 21st Century by Paul Kennedy
HarperCollins, 428 pp, £20.00, March 1993, ISBN 0 00 215705 5
In The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which touched the anxieties of conservatives as well as liberals at the end of Reagan’s expensive two terms in the White House, Paul Kennedy suggested that like other great powers before it, the United States was dissipating the resources that had made it great. It was in ‘imperial overstretch’. And its political system, like that of Britain earlier in the century, would make the decline more difficult to stop. But Rise and Fall, a critic said to Kennedy at the Brookings Institution in Washington in 1988, was too conventional a book. It mistakenly supposed that the problems we faced were the problems of states, and that the solution to them, if solutions there were, were political.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 11 · 10 June 1993
From Peter Walker
Reading Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the 21st Century on a small Pacific island is obviously more stimulating than reading it in Cambridge. In commenting on Kennedy, Geoffrey Hawthorn (LRB, 13 May) makes no reference to the islands of Polynesia or Melanesia, presumably because their populations are so small. Yet these fragile island communities are some of the first to suffer the effects of rapid population growth. The population of the two towns in Vanuatu is doubling every ten years, that of the country every twenty-five years. It is certainly not the case that ‘more hands mean more output’, as Hawthorn puts it. You are more likely to hear the phrase ‘Wan more mouth blong feedim.’ One ni-Vanuatu friend in town with a job supports at least 15 people from his home island, all of them living on a small piece of land. When his sister had her third child, none of them particularly wanted and each one with a different father, he cut a mark on a mango tree and said, ‘One more, one more and I’ll hang you from that tree.’ So far it has proved an effective method of family planning.
Not one though that we recommend in our community theatre group, which tackles a number of reproductive health issues. Whilst ‘capital flight’ and increasing inequities in the international system are undeniable realities, they are not things which people at village level can do much about. They see lagoons silted up with waste or the one main street in Port Vila needing policemen to direct the expanding volume of traffic at, don’t laugh, rush hour, Pacific style. Or they see increasing numbers of young people in towns with no work in a country which has no chance of having a manufacturing base.
I do not pretend that everybody is motivated to do something about it but none of our plays provokes such lively discussion as our family planning piece. There is a new willingness to discuss many previously taboo topics. As the actors display various methods of contraception by the light of a hurricane lamp, grandmothers crossly hush the titters of the teenagers, ‘Yu lisen gud. Smating ia nao yu should save.’ With good reason, for it is the grandmothers who often have to bring up the ‘accidents’ of young couples in town, and they’re getting tired of it. From the viewpoint of Cambridge the priority might be to harangue developed nations but from here that seems like waiting until ‘team we fowl i gat tooth.’ For the grandmother developed nations don’t enter into it. It’s a matter of decreasing ‘graon’ and increasing ‘picannini blong rod’ – children of the road.
Lastly, without wishing to dampen Mr Hawthorn’s enthusiasm for the generosity of Japan’s and South-East Asia’s aid, is he aware of the speed with which they are destroying the Melanesian rain forests?
Peter Walker
Vanuatu
