Parag Khanna’s Second World

Parag Khanna’s The Second World – de rigeur lengthy subtitle beginning with How, Why or gerund: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century – caught my eye because I had met Khanna briefly at Davos when he was twenty-three and because its index contains twenty-eight references to Arnold Toynbee, excluding those in endnotes. He is now thirty-one.

The book is far better than Chris Patten’s recent What Next?, Surviving the Twenty-First Century. Why mention Patten? Because I happened to try to read him. It is better because it has a theme. Patten’s book is long and lazy, as unfocussed as its title. Khanna’s is not lazy, but it is hasty. It has a very clear point. There are three power blocs: the US, Europe and China, and a large and increasingly confident and influential “second world”, including major energy suppliers, which picks and chooses its partners in a complicated “geopolitical marketplace”. Khanna’s aim is “to bring the fluid dynamics of the contemporary world to life [...] on a planetary scale” and to examine the relationships.

He visited about fifty countries in order to write the book and has visited nearly 100 in his life. The narrative moves from country to country.

Khanna has had a few negative reviews, but he is curious, writes well when he takes the trouble, is interested in history and is free of intellectual arrogance. The book is broad-brush. There’s a certain amount of “‘Our choices are not easy,’ a newspaper editor pondered while smoking a nargeela” – but American blockbuster readers want that.

The New York Times called parts of the book “Arthur Frommer”. I thought “Lonely Planet” and didn’t think it patronisingly. Then I heard Khanna say in a discussion with Harry Kreisler at Berkeley in a series called Conversations with History (I’m listening to it while I type this) that he had been inspired in part by Lonely Planet TV. He found it superficial and wanted to do it better. A good aim. I am all for tours d’horizon. Hence this blog.

We’re beginning to see what the reviewers objected to. In the Kreisler interview, Khanna tells us that in his travels he could understand some countries in “a week”, while in others he had to stay “well over a month”.

Why all the Toynbee? He even mentions him in the Kreisler conversation. He refers constantly to two books. One is an important collection of essays (if you want to understand Toynbee) called Civilization on Trial. Another is a travel book called East to West. Khanna and I must be the only two people who have published quotations from East to West in the past fifty years. Khanna seems to have travelled with it. It is the record of Toynbee’s journey round the world between February 1956 and August 1957. It contains articles he sent to the Observer Foreign News Service. Many people would call it superficial, but it has the weight of Toynbee’s experience behind it. It is written in a light-hearted mood. He had completed the main ten volumes of A Study of History and had just retired from Chatham House. Many of the articles read like a print equivalent of Pathé newsreels. But who doesn’t enjoy Pathé newsreels? I wonder whether Khanna discovered these two books in his grandfather’s library.

Khanna has an open-hearted response to Toynbee, as to much else. He brings no third-hand or recycled baggage of Toynbee denigration with him. He belongs to a generation that (I hope) will rediscover Toynbee’s work.

On the other hand, Toynbee is merely one name in a swill of authorities whose names appear in the book, especially in the notes at the end. (There is no clear principle which decides what goes into one of Khanna’s footnotes and what goes into the endnotes.) Kant, Toynbee, Huntington, Morgenthau, Hopkirk, Thesiger, TE Lawrence, Galbraith, Hume, Carr, Rousseau, Keynes. They all bob up and down.

There is a great deal of “As Edward Luttwak wrote …”. Whether or not Edward Luttwak is worth quoting, the grammatical construction, if over-used, suggests half-assimilated sources. It’s too reminiscent of the style of a college essay.

Large as Toynbee looms as an authority, there is no evidence that Khanna has looked very closely at A Study of History, though he mentions it in his bibliography. The only explicit reference is to something in the eleventh volume which does not appear in the eleventh volume.

Decimation means reducing by a tenth, not to a tenth. But everybody gets that wrong. The Amazon reviews of Khanna give a fairly long list of historical howlers. Let me look in addition at what he says about Brazil, an easy subject. In the main chapter Khanna writes: “It has taken three revolutions for Brazil to become Latin America’s great power. The end of the Old Republic monarchy in the late nineteenth century yielded to provincial clan rule over key commodities such as sugar and coffee, but plummeting prices prompted greater centralization in 1930.”

Leaving aside a philosophical problem (yielding is an action, so how can an end yield?), is that one revolution or two? The rest of the paragraph doesn’t make it clear. What is an “Old Republic monarchy”? The monarchy ended in 1889. The Old Republic is what followed it, and ended with Vargas in 1930.

In an endnote to this, we have: “It was America’s independence that inspired Brazil to break the chains that bound it to Portugal, and the Parisian mobs of the French Revolution provided tactical guidance for Brazil’s revolutionaries. Two centuries ago, Brazil considered slavery a social ill that could be replaced by excess laborers and European immigrants.”

But slavery was the underpinning of the Brazilian economy for nearly all of the nineteenth century! Brazil was the last country in the world – or at least in the western hemisphere – to abolish slavery. It happened not two centuries ago, but in 1888. And in the almost bloodless revolution which separated Brazil from Portugal, the liberal ideas of France, transmitted through Portugal and no doubt though other South American leaders (Brazil had no Bolivar), were influential, but the “Parisian mob”? That really needs to be justified.

Khanna has one thing that Toynbee had: the travel bug. Khanna says that his travels were preceded by “bookwork”. Of course. His book took two years to write. But Toynbee’s East to West was written after a lifetime of work. When he wrote his first big book he was, as it happens, younger than Khanna. But the bookwork was the main preparation, and he was a classically-trained scholar. Toynbee had travelled only in Europe by then, including the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire. That travel had included nearly 3,000 miles on foot, most of it in Greece. His country-hopping à la Khanna happened later, but he was a pioneer in this.

Toynbee’s early big book was his intricate Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915. It is a piece of geopolitical writing, like Khanna’s, and has value after nearly a century, though of course it is about European frontiers. In trying, as he says, to “reproduce sympathetically the different nations’ conflicting points of view”, his purpose was not so different from Khanna’s.

Some more quibbles. Khanna writes on page 144 that Toynbee “sailed” to Cartagena de Indias. He didn’t. He went by road. The book Khanna was carrying with him says so. On page xxii he refers to something Toynbee “wrote in 1950”, but it is in a book which he published in 1948.

In an endnote referring to his Introduction, the mistakes become much more serious. Khanna writes: “The absorption of Greece into Rome; the contacts among Arab, Persian, and Indian civilizations; the late-medieval renaissance of Hellenism in Italy – these are all examples of what Toynbee called the process of ‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’ between dying civilizations and their infant successors.”

Not one of these, in Toynbee, in any combination, is an example of what Khanna claims. Affiliation and apparentation may be questionable terms, but they are precise. These are not “all” examples of anything at all. And it is to misunderstand Toynbee’s system absolutely fundamentally to think that he believes that there was a Roman civilisation affiliated to a Greek.

Khanna’s book has sweep and élan and it contains many insights. Khanna is going to be interesting for a long time. Here’s his remarkable cv.