The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order | Parag Khanna

The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order | Parag Khanna | Tour de force tour of the second world.

books:

The Second World: ...

	The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order Parag Khanna Random House, 2008 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Grand explanations of how to understand the complex twenty-first-century world have all fallen short?until now. In The Second World, the brilliant young scholar Parag Khanna takes readers on a thrilling global tour, one that shows how America?s dominant moment has been suddenly replaced by a geopolitical marketplace wherein the European Union and China compete with the United States to shape world order on their own terms.

This contest is hottest and most decisive in the Second World: pivotal regions in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia. Khanna explores the evolution of geopolitics through the recent histories of such underreported, fascinating, and complicated countries as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Libya, Vietnam, and Malaysia?nations whose resources will ultimately determine the fate of the three superpowers, but whose futures are perennially uncertain as they struggle to rise into the first world or avoid falling into the third.

Informed, witty, and armed with a traveler?s intuition for blending into diverse cultures, Khanna mixes copious research with deep reportage to remake the map of the world. He depicts second-world societies from the inside out, observing how globalization divides them into winners and losers along political, economic, and cultural lines?and shows how China, Europe, and America use their unique imperial gravities to pull the second-world countries into their orbits. Along the way, Khanna also explains how Arabism and Islamism compete for the Arab soul, reveals how Iran and Saudi Arabia play the superpowers against one another, unmasks Singapore?s inspirational role in East Asia, and psychoanalyzes the second-world leaders whose decisions are reshaping the balance of power. He captures the most elusive formula in international affairs: how to think like a country.

In the twenty-first century, globalization is the main battlefield of geopolitics, and America itself runs the risk of descending into the second world if it does not renew itself and redefine its role in the world.

Comparable in scope and boldness to Francis Fukuyama?s The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel P. Huntington?s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Parag Khanna?s The Second World will be the definitive guide to world politics for years to come.

?A savvy, streetwise primer on dozens of individual countries that adds up to a coherent theory of global politics.?
?Robert D. Kaplan, author of Eastward to Tartary and Warrior Politics

?A panoramic overview that boldly addresses the dilemmas of the world that our next president will confront.?
?Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor

"Parag Khanna's fascinating book takes us on an epic journey around the multipolar world, elegantly combining historical analysis, political theory, and eye-witness reports to shed light on the battle for primacy between the world's new empires."
?Mark Leonard, Executive Director, European Council on Foreign Relations

"Khanna, a widely recognized expert on global politics, offers an study of the 21st century's emerging "geopolitical marketplace" dominated by three "first world" superpowers, the U.S., Europe and China... The final pages of his book warn eloquently of the risks of imperial overstretch combined with declining economic dominance and deteriorating quality of life. By themselves those pages are worth the price of a book that from beginning to end inspires reflection."
?Publishers Weekly

for more information click here

Best reading for several years!

This book has an amazing amount of information about the second world countries and written with excellent form.

Tour de force tour of the second world.

Why are the United States and Europe so invested in the outcome of the hostilities between Russia and Georgia? Khanna's lucid tour of "second world" countries, including Georgia and a few dozen others across the globe, provides context for that conflict and identifies other potential hotspots where the major powers are jostling for influence.

I have some familiarity with global politics primarily informed by the New York Times, but I have no particular professional or personal expertise in this area. I would struggle to differentiate Turkmenistan from Uzbekistan (or several other "stans" for that matter). Nevertheless, I found this book very accessible. Khanna's survey approach provides enough depth to give insight into each of these nations and where they fit in the world order, while not creating tedium by devoting too much time to any one of them. The quality of the writing is excellent.

My only criticism of this book is its overreliance on antedotes and on-the-ground reporting. Khanna clearly has traveled the world, but he seems too eager to give authenticity to some of his arguments by quoting (almost always unnamed) locals. Given the sheer number of countries covered by this book, it strains credulity for Khanna to give the sense that on-the-ground reporting greatly informed his impressions of all of these nations, when at least some of them he probably only briefly touched down in. But this minor frustration is greatly outweighed by this book's many merits, and I would highly recommend this book.

for more information click here

Excellent Overview

This is an excellent overview of the current world situation and look at what is developing. Political forecasters take note, this is one-stop shopping.

Author does a good job juggling a mountain of information and making a coherent whole out of the disparate world at large.

One is the Loneliest Number

One is the Loneliest Number

RAJESH C. OZA, Aug 16, 2008

In The Second World, foreign relations think-tank analyst Parag Khanna gives a whirlwind tour of "tipping-point" countries "where geopolitics and globalization clash and merge." These nations are a rather disparate group including Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union, Argentina and Brazil in South America, Iran and Iraq in the Middle East, and Malaysia and Indonesia in Asia. According to the author's bio-blurb, "Khanna has traveled in close to 100 countries and is a member of the Explorer's Club." But this book is much more than a trip around the world in 466 pages. While a majority of these pages read like a Fodor's Travel Guide to many of the places stamped in Khanna's passport (with footnotes for policy wonks), the focus is on three superpowers, as illuminated by the book's subtitle: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

In the half-century after World War II, America ascended to hegemonic status. While many of these years were witness to the bipolar struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, American hard and soft power was seemingly unrivaled after the Cold War. Leader after leader in Washington D.C. consistently denied imperial intentions during this period of supremacy, but each president after Truman has sought to extend America's global reach militarily, economically, and/or culturally.

Khanna shares none of the queasiness of anti-imperialists. With a cool rationalism that pervades his thought-provoking book, he proclaims that "for thousands of years, empires have been the world's most powerful political entities, their imperial yoke restraining subjugated nations from fighting one another and thereby fulfilling people's eternal desire for order." Perhaps because of America's inability to be the world's sole superpower, or more likely because power is always contested, two powers have filled the vacuum created by the Soviet Union's demise, and joined the United States at the core of what Immanuel Wallerstein described as a world-system's hierarchy.

Khanna is at his finest in analyzing the three superpowers of the new millennium: the United States, China, and the European Union. A Machiavellian calculus of fear and love inform this analysis: "America is decreasingly loved and increasingly feared, Europe is increasingly loved and decreasingly feared, and China is increasingly both loved and feared." Derived from a robust academic background and from interviews with policy-makers and ordinary citizens across the world, Khanna's thesis is that America is in decline, China is ascendant, and the E.U. is the third leg of a three-legged global leadership stool.

Although Khanna favors the European model of interdependence, he is convinced of China's primacy in the 21st century. He believes that as second world and third world countries are confronted by the challenge and opportunity of being simultaneously Americanized, Sinicized, and Europeanized, China's consultative model, which is far less confrontational than the American coalition-building and more efficient than the European consensus-building, is the most likely to be embraced. In Khanna's new world order, the United States will have a more constrained role focused on the Americas, North and South; wealthy European Union countries will integrate poorer neighbors to their South and East; and China will extend its second Great Leap Forward geographically throughout East Asia and economically through a global manufacturing supply chain that increasingly has China at its center.

For Americans, Indian-Americans, and Indophiles, Khanna raises two important questions. The first is directly asked ("Could America, long the first-world icon, slip into the second world?") and addressed ("America's imperial overstretch is occurring in lockstep with its declining economic dominance, undermining the very foundation of its global leadership."). As an advisor to a Barack Obama presidency, Khanna would advance a European-style bridge-building foreign policy for America, which in the past eight years has isolated itself with a "you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" braggadocio. In support of his policy, Khanna encourages an unconventional political understanding of Darwin, who wrote that "it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

The second question is more elusive because India is inexplicably absent from The Second World. The country of Khanna's birth is perhaps discounted because of the author's emphasis on order and India's precarious balancing of chaos and order. Or maybe it is because Khanna considers India to be part of the "third-world Western subsystem of the China-centered Asian order." Regardless of rationale, to leave India out of any serious discussion of influence in the new global order--while dedicating chapters to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tibet--is an egregious omission.

Khanna's ambitious effort is much inspired by Toynbee's 12-volume A Study of History. Indeed, Khanna opens his book acknowledging his indebtedness, suggesting that "no one knew the world like Arnold Toynbee ... [whose] narrative was my most insightful guide as I set out around the world." As such, it is even more surprising that Khanna has not taken heed of Toynbee's famous mid-20th century prediction that "in the 21st century India will conquer her conquerors." Reasonable people can choose to disagree with that assessment of India's importance; it is, however, unreasonable to ignore India altogether.

Like Parag Khanna, Fareed Zakaria also looks back to Arnold Toynbee while looking to the future. Those seeking a balanced understanding of our world may want to consider reading both Khanna's The Second World and Zakaria's The Post-American World, which will be reviewed in the September issue of India Currents.

From: India Currents

After a long run in the corporate world, Rajesh C. Oza now balances his life between family and friends, organizational alignment and consulting, reading and writing, India and America. He has published fiction and nonfiction and is presently writing a memoir about his childhood in India, Canada, and the United States. Raj can be reached at raj_oza@hotmail.com

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

products you might be interested in