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By Anu Saksena, For The Straits Times

THE current global economic crisis has set leaders and intellectuals around the world scrambling to look for solutions.

Economists have questioned the fundamentals of their models. Newsweek recently declared that ‘We Are All Socialist’ now. And questions have been asked once again about the relevance of ideology, understood as a coherent set of ideas about the existing socio-economic order and offering a blueprint of the future.

We have been told on two occasions over the last 50 years that the age of ideology has come to an end. In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell argued in his seminal work End Of Ideology that ideology was dead, at least in the advanced, industrialised societies of the West. He noted that politics in these countries after World War II had been characterised by a broad agreement among the major political parties. ‘Basic agreement on political values had been achieved. Politics was more about peripheral pragmatic adjustments,’ the sociologist Seymour Lipset wrote.

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The Next 100 Years

By George Friedman

OVERTURE
An Introduction to the American Age

Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible—and if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning—because global financial markets couldn’t withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world.

Imagine yourself now in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an agonizing war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires were gone and millions had died in a war that lasted for years. The war ended when an American army of a million men intervened—an army that came and then just as quickly left. Communism dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United States and Japan, suddenly emerged as great powers. But one thing was certain—the peace treaty that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not soon reemerge.

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Asia’s role in the international security environment

LET ME start by saying how I see the world.

How does Singapore survive and prosper? Only if there’s international order, there’s peace and stability in the region and there’s growth instead of wars and conflicts. Why has the region grown in the last 50 years? Because there was an American umbrella that provided security.

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Singapore needs to find a better balance so that social inequality does not become entrenched
By Lydia Lim

ONE of my friends was shaken to the core when he realised recently what his daughter thought of poor people.

They were stupid, obviously, she told him.

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By Michael Richardson

ICE that burns? It sounds like a magician’s trick. So do some of the exotic names given to gas hydrate – ‘flammable sorbet’, ‘crystal gas’ and ‘burning ice’. But recent scientific surveys and test drilling in Asia and elsewhere have proven that this substance exists in massive, potentially recoverable quantities and that it could be an important commercial energy source for the future.

Indeed, some of the world’s biggest economies and energy users – including the United States, Japan, China, India, South Korea and Canada – are racing to develop production techniques and equipment to tap gas hydrate and bring it to market within the next decade. For all of them, except energy self-sufficient Canada, the ability to tap new domestic sources of natural gas offers the prospect of substantially reducing dependence on expensive gas imports.

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