SARASOTA — The United States’ abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s multinational trade agreement in November appeared to confirm what many political forecasters have been saying for years, that the 21st century will belong to China. But Martin Walker begs to differ.
“India is the country to watch,” emails Martin Walker, senior fellow of the Business Policy Council, senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars, and best-selling detective novelist. “Under (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi, it has a strong, nationalist and militant Hindu leader, an economy that is growing faster than any other major economy, a fast-modernizing military, and the healthiest demographic profile in Asia.”
Furthermore: “India has a fast-growing middle class with a vibrant free press and a robust democratic tradition, resilient enough to cope with the challenges of the future, while China has yet to demonstrate that it can continue to impose Party autocracy upon an increasingly restive middle class. China depends on the convoys of oil tankers coming from the Persian Gulf — under the guns of the Indian navy.”
For 47 years, the Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning (SILL) has been bringing foreign and national affairs experts to town during snowbird season, which begins its three-month run on Tuesday. As usual, the schedule is packed: 24 speakers, 72 lectures, venues in Sarasota, Venice and Lakewood Ranch, not to mention a lineup of featured musicians on Mondays. By the time the series wraps up and the end of March, its attendance numbers are expected to exceed 45,000, due largely to its lecture price of $10 per.
This year’s rotation includes the usual array of heavy hitters, such as Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served under presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, former U.S. Drug Czar Peter Besinger, Pulitzer Prize-winning erstwhile New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, and ex-CIA officer/former Korean ambassador Donald Gregg. But none have appeared in the SILL rotation more than audience favorite Walker, a former UPI reporter whose perspectives have aired on the BBC, NPR, CNN and PBS.
SILL President Jorie Lueloff says Walker’s command of complex issues, combined with entertaining and accessible presentations, makes his speeches a popular perennial draw. Certainly the native Brit knows how to tell a story. The former Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian and Editor Emeritus for UPI may be better known in fiction circles as the author of a detective series based on a small French village constable named Benoit “Bruno” Courreges, whose off-the-clock passions involve culinary arts.
Walker attributes his yearly SILL appearances to John O’Neill, a Sarasota resident who impressed him 30 years ago during a lecture at Oberlin College on Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. O’Neill originally put the SILL bug in his ear.
Walker calls SILL “a terrific institution,” and “to my great pleasure they keep on asking me back.” He adds, “John keeps offering me his hospitality, his friendship, his conversation and his good Scotch whisky.”
In choosing his SILL topic — “Europe: A Near Death Experience” — Walker has his work cut out in unraveling that Gordian knot of an alliance in transition. Between growing Russian and Turkish belligerence, proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Europe’s Middle Eastern refugee crisis and President Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, the big picture is as cloudy as it’s ever been.
“If Trump expects Europe to start standing on its own two feet, he may learn that after Brexit, it is in poor shape to do so,” Walker contends. “Within Europe, the populist surge is not over; it may not even have peaked. Germany is neither willing nor able to take a firm leadership role since Angela Merkel cannot even form a stable government.
“Spain’s crisis with Catalonia continues to fester. Poland, Hungary and other eastern European states are resisting the nanny-state tendencies of Brussels. Italy’s election this year is likely to bring Euroskeptics parties into an unstable coalition government. There is no European consensus on what people want Europe to be — except that most seem very dubious about a federal United States of Europe.”
Within the U.S., there are growing doubts about the future of democracy itself. Between Russian cyberhacking, expanding opacity in government affairs, monopoly-party politics, and blurred lines between fact and fiction, critics and home and abroad are wondering loudly if America has lost its way. Walker says that depends on the degree to which Americans cherish their institutions.
“The only people who can really undermine faith in democracy is — if we fail to vote, fail to take an interest in our own systems of government, fail to remember the age-old principles of a free press, separation of powers, rule of law, educated voters and a sturdy conviction that democracy is too important to be left to the politicians — or to Facebook, Google and Twitter,” he states.
“Bruno (the French detective) tells me it is important to remember that some of the most dramatic social changes of our time — the Civil Rights movement; the feminist revolution and its current convulsions over sexual abuse; the gay rights movement; the environmental case, have all be launched and driven by ordinary people — not by politicians and not by corporations. That’s what ‘We the people’ is all about.”