Sideshow

"This is the book that my generation, interested in Indo-China, grew up on. It is an astonishing story of one small country’s attempt to move itself from an absolute kingship system of government to a more democratic constitutional monarchy. It was aborted because it got sucked into the Indo-Chinese war because the North Vietnamese military were using it as a means to infiltrate South Vietnam. It was subjected to a brutal bombing campaign by the U.S., which caused many casualties. One of which was a more pluralistic future for Cambodia. This essentially got bombed out of the political culture and the country became highly radicalised under the Khmer Rouge, so to me it was a book which pointed the way to the vital importance of democracy as a way of building some kind of middle road between Maoism and an absolute monarchy or military dictatorship, which seemed the two extreme choices. I see globalisation as having come from two interlinked phenomena: one the rise of national democracy, and on the heels of that market liberalism became the preferred economic doctrine. These two together have had unintended consequences, which were that they facilitated the rise of globalisation. Liberal market economics particularly was a vehicle for global integration. Protectionism was reduced and the state share of the economy brought down as well. Having helped father globalisation, national democracy has been threatened by its own offspring. Because so many issues have migrated from a national level to a global level, you need a global democracy not a national democracy to provide some kind of accountability. U.S. policy has always been a mixture of altruism and self-interest. The altruism goes back to a Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson strain of emerging international engagement, which is around a value-based view of these things, where democracy and capitalism are seen by Americans as their two most important exports. Democracy because it provides freedom, and capitalism because it is seen by Americans as the best way to create prosperity and economic opportunity. But behind that altruism is a much more self-interested opportunistic commercial strain, which is American companies enjoying access to global markets through globalisation and often on terms and conditions that America as the dominant power has set. That mixture of altruism and self-interest is very similar to what fuelled the British Empire and pretty much every other system of economic global relations that we have seen over the centuries."

"It’s a wonderful indictment of the tail-end of the Cold War and the madness of the Americans trying to impose their will onto that part of the world- and away they went in a sort of paroxysm of destruction in Cambodia. Shawcross’s book was written in the mid seventies but it stands up extremely well. Yes, also Nixon’s belief that Cambodia was somehow the key to the problem, it was just completely mad. Cambodia was not the key to anything. It doesn’t have any leverage on any other country. Nixon just poured all this money and guns into this small ill-trained country and wrecked everything. Of course he did postpone it being taken over by the Vietnamese, the invasion of 79 would probably have happened in 75 if the Americans hadn’t unleashed the horrors that they did."