What next?

The Chancellor of Oxford University, Chris Patten, spoke to Warwick students about the challenges facing the West in a rapidly changing world.

Nigel Thrift, Warwick’s vice-chancellor, joked that Lord Patten’s latest book, titled What Next? Surviving the 21st Century, addresses “every important development since the Renaissance”. It preceded a lecture that ranged across an array of historical change.

Globalisation is undermining the sovereignty of nation states, said Lord Patten, who served as Hong Kong’s last British governor.

While nation states are still “the principal building blocks of the international system”, many of them struggle “to deal with an increasingly fluid world”.

He cited the example of Congo, where decades of war have been fuelled by “armaments going in and war booty coming out”.

Quite contrary to the traditional view of a world composed of sovereign nation states, “some nation states can no longer exercise sovereignty at all”.

In this globalised world, the West must contend with the rise of Asia (“a Western construct,” Lord Patten pointed out).

However, this is really a re-emergence of sorts. Until 1820, China and India were “large economic players”, with over half of the world’s output between them.

And power will have to shift amid a financial crisis. Lord Patten decried the “fantasy wealth” created by cheap credit in America.

The present boom has created a budget deficit in the US, and a surplus in the rest of the world, the mirror image of the world’s fiscal balance during the Great Depression. So the key to a stable world economy, according to Lord Patten, is “to get Americans to save more and the Chinese to spend more”.

International institutions such as the IMF must now reflect this shift in power, he said.

It is also time for governments “to join up the dots” between domestic and foreign policy.

He called for a tougher line on drugs which he said had made 280,000 people dependent on their use in Britain and many more for their livelihood abroad.

Lord Patten said many of these problems have only emerged from more serious ones solved already. Yet, his optimism did not lie.

“If it’s dark outside, you’ve got to have some people to turn the lights on.”