March 23, 2007
Outward-looking Washington, insular London
We are all familiar with the clichés about American insularity: the number of Congressmen who don’t have a passport, the number of Americans who have never left the US – and so on.
But, as I come to the end of a week in Washington, my overwhelming impression is how incredibly outward-looking intellectual life is in this city compared with London – despite the fact that London flatters itself that it is now the world’s most international city.
On Monday I went to a speaker-meeting at the New American Foundation – one of the plethora of DC-based think tanks, dealing with world affairs. The subject was the future of Pakistan and the speaker was a prominent Pakistani journalist. The room was packed. By contrast, I remember going to a speaker-meeting in London about a year ago with a much more obviously star-studded cast – Bill Kristol, a key neoconservative thinker; Tariq Ramadan, a central figure in the debate about Europe and Islam; and Phil Gordon, one of the leading experts on US foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The meeting attracted maybe 30 people. You could get more people than that to turn up and listen to the deputy head of the OSCE, in Washington. Nor is this American interest in the outside world an entirely Washington-based phenomenon. There is a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and a Los Angeles World Affairs Council; I haven’t noticed their equivalents in Birmingham or Edinburgh. .
Or take book sales: Edward Luce, the FT’s Washington bureau chief, recently published a much-acclaimed book on India. You might expect it to do best in Britain - given that Luce is a Brit and given the historical connections between India and the UK. Not at all – “In Spite of the Gods” has sold about 5,000 copies in Britain and almost 30,000 in the US. Britain is interested in India all right – but the interest is essentially backward looking and nostalgic. I’m sure if Ed had written a book about how his granny shot tigers while riding an elephant through Jaipur, it would have been a huge hit in Britain. But if you want to find a large audience that is genuinely interested in what is happening in modern India, you are more likely to find it in the United States than in Britain. Perhaps that is because Britain used to be an imperial power – while America is still enjoying its imperial moment.
The decision making process that used to be the purview of the state department and its exclusive clubs have been politicized and hence popularized by 9/11, the Iraq war and the policies of the Bush administration. Globalization has created opportunities in places like India and China so people who control or influence investments seek to learn more about those places. Such factors have created a very intense debate over foreign policy and ones place in the world in the US; by comparison the European’s you’d expect to care about the subject matter either concern themselves more with intraeuropean affairs, don’t seem to be all too well informed and/or think they already know. There is a troublingly large deficit in the number of people that care about and seek to participate in formulating foreign policy in Europe. There’s no such deficit in the US.
By the way, why do you use the term Imperial for the US? The term is nondescriptive and filled with very negative historical connotations. The only reason I can think of is that you’re catering to peers on your left so they won’t consider you too completely gullible.
Another illustration of your point is tha t Hirsi Ali’s new book is #15 on amazon.com’s sales rank while reaching #93 on amazon.co.uk
Posted by: Felix Drost, Amsterdam | March 23rd, 2007 at 7:35 pm | Report this commentI have no quibble with what you say regarding Washington’s intellectual liveliness. But could your observation on the geographical range of this interest perhaps be partly explained by the media environment?
I’m not aware of any newspaper quite like the FT or The Economist in the US. Nor do the major news channels quite have the outward focus of the BBC.
Perhaps the debate occurs in different places?
Posted by: kenny | March 24th, 2007 at 4:24 am | Report this commentTHE OTHER WORLD CITY
As New York and London wage their battle for the title of number one city on the planet (my hedge funds are bigger than your hedge funds, etc, etc) the FT’s Gideon Rachman re-charges his batteries on a trip to
Posted by: Clive Davis | March 24th, 2007 at 10:26 am | Report this commentI am reading Luce’s book In Spite of the Gods and can attest that almost every city in the USA of over a million people has its own World Affairs Council. I spoke at WACs in San Francisco and Pittsburgh to big audiences. It seems that there are hordes of ex-pat Brits here in South Florida seeking a broader perspective.
To say the BBC is outward looking is a joke, given that its prism is so leftist that only one perspective ever gets through.
Time and Newsweek are pitched to mass-circulation, while the Economist and FT are for an elite audience, like the WSJ and NYT.
Posted by: daveinboca | March 24th, 2007 at 4:47 pm | Report this commentKenny,
The Economist finds 54% of its readers in North America, only 14% in the UK and only 19% in the rest of Europe. While the economist is based in London and hence a paper foreign to the US the Economist’s circulation there actually does perfectly illustrate Gideon’s point.
http://printmediakit.economist.com/Circulation.10.0.html
The FT is similar to the WSJ, BBC news 24 was created after CNN and Sky News established a presence in the UK and hence was only the third channel in the UK to be dedicated to news; both News Corp and Aol Time Warner are US corporations. The focus of CNN International also is fully and exclusively international since they alternate between different studios around the globe depending on the timezone.
Posted by: Felix Drost, Amsterdam NL | March 24th, 2007 at 4:54 pm | Report this commentContrary to European perceptions, the educated US elite is cultured, well travelled and interested in world affairs and I would rather have my children educated in the US than in the EU (this is a French speaking). Your story is actually good news for the US and the world: there is a good chance that once this inept administration is removed from power the quality of US foreign policy will improve because there are better qualified people than the current crew (OK this is not saying much) available to take over.
Posted by: Dominique | March 26th, 2007 at 2:38 am | Report this commentWhile I believe the US is a force for good etc. etc. etc.
Posted by: Edmond | March 27th, 2007 at 6:16 am | Report this commentI think we’re missing the point here–the US is 6X bigger than Britain. Of course, we have “more”subscribers to the Economist. But not proportionally. Furthermore–given that America’s role in world leadership we should expect far more worldliness. But we do not. Let’s be honest about our deficiencies.
I would put it this way. The American elite and her intellectual life is unparalleled in cosmopolitanism and intellectual pursuits.
Part of it is American preeminence, part of it is that the US is unified with a couple of cultural centers in DC, NY and Boston.
But the simple folk in the heartland are, I think, much more naive and ignorant about world affairs. I wouldn’t say that it’s true because of the stereotype though. The average Kansan has much fewer reasons to know about foreign events than the average Belgian.
Posted by: Nick Kaufman | March 27th, 2007 at 10:28 am | Report this commentWhile it’s true that the average Kansan has much fewer reasons to know about foreign affairs, he is probably too busy putting bread on your table.
I learned to speak Russian and Ukrainian not in New York or Washington or Boston, but in Kansas.
By the way, I don’t consider myself naive or ignorant.
Posted by: Adrian Erlinger | March 27th, 2007 at 2:21 pm | Report this commentthe population of the us is approx six times that of the uk. Therefore the fact that six times as many books were sold means that almost exactly the same number were bought proportional to population. This is also relevant to sales of the economist
Posted by: Anonymous | March 27th, 2007 at 8:38 pm | Report this commentThe European form of government is based on closed and centralised disciplined political parties and hierarchical bureaucracies. The American form of government is based on open-agenda issue-based politics, where every politicians needs to have their own issue-based view on the AMT, the rise of Chindia, the effects of the minimum wage rise on small businesses, whether to pay UN dues and so forth. So there’s a more widespread and decentralised demand for expertise on these matters, and thus for exchanging views between those experts and others, in the way that in Europe would take place over a lunch in Whitehall (or Under den Linden etc). So it’s the US form of government that creates this sort of audience.
Of course, much of this intellectual exuberance is just interest group line-peddling, since the fact that everyone is looking for their next job means they don’t have the independence to criticise Israeli settlers, the funders of Brookings or AEI, bipartisan sacred cows of all sorts etc etc. Indeed the very nakedness of interest group activism in Washington compared to Whitehall or Berlin means that the intellectual exuberance is mostly froth without any impact on the underlying decision-making. But it makes for a fun place to hang out.
Posted by: otto | March 27th, 2007 at 11:55 pm | Report this comment“I would put it this way. The American elite and her intellectual life is unparalleled in cosmopolitanism and intellectual pursuits.”
I don’t know any evidence for this. The actual decision-makers are home-state pork-barrel-types who are deeply unintellectual and uncosmopolitan. The top bureaucrats are at times more impressive - Summers for example - but that is in large part because they are relatively powerless compared to European bureaucrats. Gordon Brown makes UK tax policy, Larry Summers watched it being made.
“Part of it is American preeminence, part of it is that the US is unified with a couple of cultural centers in DC, NY and Boston.”
There are no outstanding universities in DC, and the intellectual life is extremely mixed. A lot of book launches does not Athens make. NY and Boston both have several very good universities: the overwhelming difference between them and UK universities is largely (but not completely) funding, not intellectual ambition, and this is not unrelated to the dominance of these institutions by the wealthy in the US, and by the dead hand of the state in the UK. It’s true however that in some subjects, particularly social sciences, the US is arguably further ahead than mere resources would explain.
Posted by: otto | March 28th, 2007 at 12:03 am | Report this commentOf course there are proportionally more UK than US readers; The Economist is a UK paper, always has a large UK section and historically has its subscriber base in the city of London. The point illustrated by the statistics is not that there are proportionally more American readers but that the economist is extremely successful in N America for a foreign paper because of its quality content that appeals to an elite interested in international issues. Time has a circulation of some 300.000 in Europe on a worldwide circulation 5.6 million while its content is (arguably) of equivalent quality and appeals to the same kind of elite demographic.
Otto, you misrepresent the situation in the US; the Dalai Lama has met with the current President Bush and the US labeled the mass killings in Darfur genocide, why would a born again Christian President give such high honours to a Buddist priest or seek to protect millions of Black Muslims from extinction if it wasn’t to please powerful American interest groups?
Posted by: Felix Drost, Amsterdam NL | March 28th, 2007 at 7:05 pm | Report this comment“There are no outstanding universities in DC”
Johns Hopkins University is an outstanding school in foreign affairs, medicine, social sciences…
Be careful throwing around absolute sentences.
As an American who has lived abroad in Asia and Europe, I’m thrilled to see a greater intellectual curiousity exhibited by a portion of the US population. Could it be that individual Americans are trying to understand the world in ways that our political elite seems to miss so often?
Posted by: Smith | April 6th, 2007 at 9:26 pm | Report this commentI can’t speak for the rarefied intellectual atmosphere in Washington/US but using Ed Luce’s book sales figures to illustrate the point seems a bit daft, particularly coming from a (presumably) numerate FT corr. The US has six or seven times the population of the UK and Ed has sold…wait for it…six times the number of copies in the US. Which proves precisely nothing.
PS..the book is excellent.
Posted by: Peter Foster | June 19th, 2007 at 6:14 am | Report this comment