MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

SHAKESPEARE

by Kevin Carey

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Last weekend, reading and acting a number of roles in the course of a non-stop rendition of all of Shakespeare's 37 plays, I was privileged to be asked - as compensation no doubt for reading the greater part of Pericles and Cymbeline back-to-back between midnight and 5 a.m. - to play the Fool in King Lear. I particularly valued this request as I had acted the Duke of Albany, just at the time when Yugoslavia was showing the first signs of disintegration.

The play begins, you will recall, with Lear dividing his kingdom between his two rather nasty daughters (Cordelia, true to herself, is disinherited) who immediately begin to struggle for sole possession. The dramatic conventions of the time required some sort of tying together of loose ends but what is striking in the play is the language of disintegration. So it was, eight years on, that I read the play with the empires of Russia and Indonesia both in peril. Russia, after the fashion of Byzantium, has lost a great deal in the hope of saving its core; Indonesia, on the other hand, does not have the least idea that it is disintegrating, thinking East Timor to be a little local difficulty.

We should learn from what we know of empires. They are founded as acquisitive enterprises by nations which, for reasons we do not yet understand, have so much energy that it cannot be confined within their own borders. A multi-racial hierarchy is then established which survives on a mixture of mutual self interest and coercion during which the conquered elites are assimilated into the ruling clique. The energy slowly ebbs, regardless of external threats, and the network gives way to old racial myths and new races. These phenomena are wholly recognisable in Tsarist Russia, the USSR and now the new Russia of the mafia. In Indonesia the signs are less clear because the empire builder handed over its conquest to a new elite, the sad and brutal succession of Soekarno and Suharto. The short reign of Habibie is simply a stop-gap in the succession; do not be deceived by the winning smiles of Megawati who fatally combines military strength and mental weakness, so her reaction to recent troubles will be irresolute and brutal. The volcanic archipelago, the product of Dutch maritime empire building, is peculiarly unsuited to the exercise of repression by an army which, no matter how well equipped with aircraft and helicopters, will exact a massive price in human blood before it ultimately fails to impose Jakarta's will. If there are any doubts, a language map is an invariably reliable source of reference. There are vast distances between islands but in the larger volcanic territories such as Borneo and Irian Jaya, jungles and impassable mountain ranges have kept alive numerous languages - and feuds - which occupy tiny geographical spaces.

What, then, of the other two great empires, of the United States and China? Strictly speaking the USA is not an empire in that through a small amount of slaughter and a large amount of imported disease it wiped out the peoples that it conquered rather than assimilating them; and although it imported slaves through coercion, the vast majority of its population is there, or is descended from people who came there, by choice; a blessed state of self-sustaining cohesion. If it could only bring itself to pay its debts, acknowledged but unredeemed, to the descendants of those who were brought from Africa to till its fields, then it would indeed be a happy state or, rather, Union of States. In the long term what governance loosens economic self-interest will probably tighten but there is no fundamental de-stabilising force in the system other than the prospect of a hegemonic coalition of big business and a Republican Party which has the Presidency and a majority in Congress; but, even then, the libertarian ethic will withstand the horrible oppression of greed.

China, on the other hand, has always survived as an empire on the basis of centralised power, military dictatorship and networked surveillance, its coherence threatened most often by court intrigue. What threatens it most is its headlong economic growth. Ronald Reagan and Mrs Margaret Thatcher both believed, wrongly, as do the rulers of China and North Korea, that you can have economic liberalism in tandem with political oppression. You can't, the dichotomy is too schizophrenic; it is not tenable to ask somebody to think like an entrepreneur whilst at work but to accept totally centralist, driven, monopolistic politics. Even in a country such as Japan, where there is a politically democratic constitution, the socio-political sclerosis is beginning to have an effect on the economy; hard-working people can export cars but unquestioning elites are going to be severely handicapped in the knowledge economy.

In these circumstances, the United States, the most powerful country on earth, is right to leave troublesome but not dangerous Europe to its own squabbling devices and to concentrate on the fate of Asia's two great empires (India, in global terms, is an interesting but only marginal case) and Japan, each of which may contribute to global instability: a sluggish, unimaginative Japanese economy is already having a detrimental effect on the whole of Asia; the slow but inevitable implosion of Indonesia will create a vast amount of impotent rage with unpredictable fall-out; and the management of economically dynamic China will make the stupid imposition of market capitalism in Russia look like a politicians' picnic. It is to be hoped, then, that the high officials in Washington are not only fluent in Shakespeare but also in Mommsen, Gibbons and Michelet.

KEVIN CAREY is a writer, broadcaster and social entrepreneur. His interests range from the relationship between information technology and social exclusion and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. He is the director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a politcal theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet.

Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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