Three more books arrived today. I shouldn’t let this get me down. Obviously, in many ways it’s a very nice aspect of my job that I keep being sent interesting new books - for free. But the pile of unread tomes on my desk is a bit lowering.

One of the British Sunday papers has a quiz that includes the question “what percentage of the books on your shelves have you actually read?” My answer has always been - “about 50%” - and even that is probably charitable. But with new books arriving all the time, my hit rate is going down fast.

The three that arrived today are “Fidel Castro, My Life” (Penguin) by - well - Fidel Castro; “The Powers to Lead”  (Oxford) by Joseph Nye - he of “soft power” fame. And “In Sickness and in Power” (Methuen) - a tome by David Owen, a former British foreign secretary and doctor, about people who fell ill when in power. I have put all three on the pile and I look at them occasionally - and they look back at me, reproachfully. (more…)

In Winston Churchill’s memoirs, he records a meeting with Stalin in October 1944: “The moment was apt for business, so I said ‘Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans… So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 per cent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 per cent of the say in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?’ While this was being translated, I wrote out the percentages on a half-sheet of paper. I pushed this across to Stalin… There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.”

I was in Georgia – Stalin’s birthplace – last week. The country regained its independence in 1991. But its leaders fear that they may yet be subject to a modern version of the Churchill-Stalin percentages deal – in which the west casually assigns Georgia into Moscow’s “sphere of influence”.

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I am delighted by this comment from “Paskalis” (a relative newcomer to the blog). So much so that I am lifting it out of the comments section on the Georgia post and giving it its very own entry.

I feel it would serve as an excellent epitaph for me. If there is not enough room on my tombstone for the entire comment, then I would accept just the second sentence:

“Your comments and insights are thoughtful, insightful and intelligent and have as much weight as a ripe banana on this planet of the apes.

“You have turned geopolitics into a parlour game for the enfeebled while the men are in another room smoking their cigars.”

Boris Johnson is not an easy man to confront. On the eve of London’s mayoral elections we met in the coffee shop of a Marriott Hotel, just along the corridor from his campaign headquarters in County Hall. Johnson bustled in and ordered a cup of tea. He was his usual disarming, dishevelled self. But it was my task to ignore all that – and to tell him that many of his friends greet the idea of Mayor Johnson with a mixture of hilarity and horror. “They all like you,” I said wheedlingly, “but they all kind of laugh at the idea of you as mayor … They say you are incredibly disorganised.”

Johnson looked a little pained at this, and took the only line open to him – stout denial. “I think I’m extremely well organised and always have been – and achieve a fantastic amount. I work harder than almost anybody else I know. And I take these criticisms in the loving spirit with which I’m sure they’re meant.”

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I am just back from Tbilisi in Georgia, where I received this unorthodox welcome from a Tbilisi-based academic. “You have heard of the end of the earth. Well this is it. We are the last outpost of western civilisation.” This is not the normal Georgian line. The usual spin is that Georgia is a central part of the west - and always has been - apart from unfortunate periods on invasion by Mongol hordes (Tamburlaine passed through on numerous occasions) - or incorporation into various incarnations of the Russian empire.

There is certainly no denying Georgia’s ancient Christian culture and its historic links to Europe. The question for the Georgians is whether all this history will help them achieve their dearest political and strategic wish - membership of Nato. Right now they are feeling a bit let down because they failed to get a “Membership Action Plan” at the recent Nato summit in Bucharest, although they did get a promise that they will be Nato members - some day. The Georgians think things are a bit more urgent than that, since the Russians are (according to them) rapidly consolidating their grip in the break-away Georgian territory of Abkhazia. (more…)

If you had to define “globalisation” with an image, what would it be? A container ship from China stuffed with toys and T-shirts? A programmer tapping at a keyboard in Bangalore? A plane circling gloomily over Heathrow airport?

Most people’s pictures of globalisation are to do with economics, technology and business. But before markets, modems and manufacturers could do their work, political changes had to take place. The foundations of the globalised business world are political – and so are the biggest threats to the system.

The challenge to the globalisation consensus comes from below. Political elites in the US, Asia and Europe are struggling to convince citizens that globalisation is not just a game that benefits the rich. If the argument is lost in any of the major world economies, the political consensus that underpins globalisation could unravel.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

In some ways I can sympathise with Thabo Mbeki’s reluctance to throw South Africa’s weight behind a campaign to shove Robert Mugabe out of power in Zimbabwe. The South Africans sometimes complain that the world should understand that Zimbabwe is not a colony of South Africa - which is true enough. Its also true - unfortunately - that there is considerable sympathy for Mugabe among black South Africans. Any South African politician has to take that into account.

But the South Africans should realise that they have a lot at stake in Zimbabwe - and I’m not just talking about the threat of refugee flows and chaos on their borders. Gordon Brown was probably too polite to put it this way when he met President Mbeki, but many people wonder whether - when they look at Zimbabwe - they are looking at a vision of South Africa in 30 years time. Zimbabwe looks like a vindication of every white racist prediction made at the time of independence, that African self-government would end in disaster. It is urgently in South Africa’s interests to help turn the country round.

That is all the more the case when South Africa’s own problems look like they are mounting. The prospect of President Jacob Zuma is not going down well overseas. Crime is still terrible. White flight continues. And now there are daily electricity cuts. One government source has even suggested that foreign investors delay investing for a few years, since the country could not handle the extra power demand new investment would create. As a frustrated South African puts it: “That is shooting a gift horse in the head.”

If Mbeki could help to get Mugabe out, he would be doing his country a favour in more ways than one.

It was predictably depressing to see Robert Mugabe’s first televised reactions to the Zimbabwean election. We don’t cheat, he said - flapping his hands in a weirdly disjointed, faintly camp movement. But, as for the opposition, he shook his head sorrowfully, “lots of irregularities”.

I often wonder, on such occasions, what is really going on inside the head of a dictator like Mugabe. This, after all, is the man who has terrorised opposition politicians and merrily rigged elections for years. Is he just utterly cynical; or does he, at some level, believe what he is saying?

If he were purely cynical, I suppose his internal voice would be saying something like:  “Sure, I used to be a freedom fighter. But now I’m rich and powerful, and I have way too much to lose by stepping down from power. So I’ll do whatever it takes - including murder - to stay in power. And who cares what happens to the country, it’s all about me now.”

That, actually, is what I think it does basically come down to: personal enrichment, personal survival, personal pride - and screw the country. (more…)

Bertie Ahern, who has just resigned as Irish prime minister, is a Dubliner with the common touch. Taxi drivers in Dublin liked to point out his relatively modest house and the suburban pub in which he allegedly drank. Bertie’s outward modesty contrasted with the high-living of his political mentor, former pm, Charlie Haughey. But the apparent end of his political career is very reminiscent of Haughey. Both men were ultimately laid low by official tribunals investigating their finances and unexplained payments they had recieved.  Ahern must now wince at Haughey’s (admiring) description of him as “the most devious, the most cunning of them all.”

All of that makes Ahern sound like a very traditional Irish politician and prime minister. But watching Bertie operate in Europe over the past decade, it struck me that he represented a new Ireland. He was prime minister during the period in which Irish GDP-per-capita overtook that of Britain. And he dealt with the British and with other European leaders with complete confidence in who he was - and in the country he represented. That enabled him to form an excellent working relationship with Tony Blair - which was crucial in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. Ahern’s experience and patience as a negotiator was then used to good effect in Europe - where he successfully concluded negotiations on the European Union constitution: an achievement that had eluded Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.

After the successful Brussels negotiations on the constitution - chaired by Ahern - a lot of the Brussels press corps piled into the local Irish pub, “Kitty O’Shea’s”. The assumption was that Ahern - the typical Irishman, after all - would inevitably celebrate his achievements with a pint of Guinness at the nearest pub. But Bertie never showed up. It later transpired that he had instead spent the evening drinking champagne at Brussels’s poshest hotel. That’s the new Ireland for you.

The Olympic torch’s journey to the Beijing Olympics is threatening to turn from triumphal progress into marathon humiliation. Protesters are rushing like moths to the Olympic flame.

The lighting of the torch in Athens was awkward enough. It took arrests and heavy-handed policing to keep pro-Tibet demonstrators at bay. Things could get worse this weekend, when the torch will reach London to be greeted by a combustible mix of police, demonstrators and patriotic Chinese students. Other potential trouble spots on the route to the Olympic opening ceremony in August include San Francisco and New Delhi. Then there is the trip across Tibet itself. The one spot on the Olympic torch’s progress where we can be guaranteed that there will be no public demonstrations is Pyongyang.

Is the Chinese government beginning to regret its triumph in securing the Olympics for Beijing? The games were meant to be a coming-out party for modern China – playing a similar role to that of the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and the Seoul Olympics of 1988.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.