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2013

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The Worlds Youth:

Failed, failing or
building the future?

global trends

i n t e r n at i o n a l a f fa i r s
Issue 5

thought leadership

2013

The magazine
really interest
The layout is g
and the list
contributors is te

Henry Sands, Campaigns D

CTF Partners

The Worlds YouTh:

Failed, Failing or
building The FuTure?

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Bill Gates My Mission to eradicate polio now /// NajiB tuN Razak on
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harnessing the power of Muslim youth /// Viscount Linley says
craftsmanship is in crisis /// Helena Smith reports from Greece
on a war between generations /// Rami G Khouri we are witnessing
the real birth of the Modern Arab World /// Ilyasah Al Shabazz The
legacy of my father - Malcolm X

global trends international affairs thought leadership

global trends international affairs thought leadersh

Think., the quarterly

international magazine
from Qatar Foundation,
is dedicated to
exploring global trends,
international affairs and
thought leadership in
every sphere of human
endeavour.
We welcome your
views and opinions
on @Think_QF and on
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global trends international affairs thought leadership

welcome

OPTIMISM IS NOT MISPLACED

oung people today face unprecedented challenges, ranging from a

severe shortage of jobs in many parts of the world, to drastic cuts in
state assistance and the prospects of lower standards of living than
those enjoyed by their parents. Scenes of violence and protest have
become very familiar, and a common reaction is one of pessimism when it is
not one of anger.
Particularly in the developed countries still suffering from the effects of the
Great Recession, there are legitimate questions to be asked about whether
governments that spent freely in the decades of growth have betrayed the
generational compact. Short-term policies may have appeared to bring benefits
at the time, but they have utterly failed to address the long-term effects of
running up colossal and ultimately unsustainable debts.
But there is a positive alternative to the mostly grim narratives of youth.
Countries whose populations include large numbers of young people could
and should be hopeful about the future. In the past such demographics have
brought dividends, for instance in East Asia where, over several decades, lower
dependency ratios and larger work forces were engines of tremendous growth
and creativity. And given that the younger generations are possibly better
educated than any that have preceded them in history, optimism about what
they may achieve should not be misplaced.
In this fifth issue of Think., the quarterly magazine devoted to exploring
global trends, international affairs and thought leadership, we gather experts
and opinion-formers from across the continents to examine these questions.
If there is a consensus, it lies in reaffirming a proposition that should not have
been forgotten that different generations in any society have responsibilities
to each other. As Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Co-Founder and
Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, put it recently: While young people are
the most important element for driving change in our societies, statistical and
objective facts show that society also has a duty to prepare them properly for
effective decision-making and leadership.
Haya bint Khalifa Al Nassr
Director of Communication, Qatar Foundation

april 2013

contents

17
42

22

bulletin

5 Time for a World Environment

Organization
6 The Transformative Power
of Education
8 The Truth in Fiction
41 Correspondence
42 The Think. Debate

think. review

My Fight to End Polio

51 Reclaiming Rhetoric

30

the youth issue

10 Generation Y: Feckless or Failed?

Is the increased dependency of

the young their fault or are they
the victims of decades of deluded,
short-term state policies?

17 State of Despair

A dispatch from Greece, where

prospects for those in their
teens and 20s are so bad that
commentators are now warning of
a war between generations

22 Unlocking the Potential of the Ummah

10

56

By 2030 Muslims will make up

one third of the worlds youth. We
must not miss this generational
opportunity, argues Malaysias
Prime Minister

think. magazine

Often regarded as marks of

insincerity or pomposity, eloquence
and the masterful use of language
are in fact the very pith of human
interaction

27 Seizing the Moment

Far from producing political

instability, the youth bulge in
the Middle East could yield a
remarkable demographic dividend
but only with the right approach

56 A Sound Revolution

51

30 A Generation at the Barricades?

 Unrest and protest have spread

across the continents. Which
historical parallels provide the best
guide 1968 or 1989?

35 The Promise of Hope

Think. profiles five inspirational

men and women under 40 whose
leadership sets an example for young
people (and maybe their elders, too)

april 2013

briefing

46 The Constitutional Moment

The end of autocratic rule in the

Arab Spring countries is producing
a revived citizenship and national
deliberations that represent the
real birth of the modern Arab
world

Period ensembles were originally

dismissed with contempt, but 40
years on they have completely
transformed the way we hear and
perform music

62 Letter from Singapore

Tash Aw ponders how the best

place to be born can also be the
worlds most emotionless city

64 The Ideas Column

Viscount Linley reckons more

people ought to know how to
handle a chisel

contributors

Bill Gates was the Co-Founder of

Microsoft and is the Co-Chairman
of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. With a determined
effort, we can wipe out polio within
six years, he writes. Page 42

bulletin

Dato Sri Mohd Najib Tun Abdul

Razak is Prime Minister of
Malaysia and launched the Global
Movement of Moderates in 2010.
We must help the next generation
be the greatest the Muslim world
has ever seen, he says on page 22

Helena Smith is The Guardians

correspondent in Greece. She
reports from a country facing
a youth exodus and a society
hollowed out by austerity. Page 17

very eve of the opening the

Brazilian organizers, confronted
with a draft Outcome
document which had
escalated in length to almost
200 pages and was positively
bristling with amendments
and brackets, tabled their own
vastly truncated text on what
was basically a take-it-orleave-it basis. As part of this
surgical process, the WEO
option fell by the wayside. It no
longer featured. Not even as a
footnote.

Rami G Khouri is Director of the

Issam Fares Institute for Public
Policy and International Affairs at
the American University of Beirut.
Will the promise of constitutionalism
be fulfilled or turn out to have
been a mirage? he asks on page 46

TIME FOR A WORLD

ENVIRONMENT ORGANIZATION
Maria Misra is a Lecturer in
Modern History at the University
of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble
College. Is youth protest following
the example of 1968 or 1989? she
asks. Page 30

Sir Nicholas Kenyon is Managing

Director of the Barbican Centre,
London, and was Director of the
BBC Proms 1996-2007. A group
of subversives has turned the way
we hear music upside down,
he argues. Page 56

Tash Aw is an acclaimed writer

who won the Whitbread First Novel
Award in 2005 for The Harmony
Silk Factory. His Letter from
Singapore is on page 62

Ilyasah Al Shabazz is an activist

and lecturer and the author of
Growing Up X. We will only have
a global civilized society when all
have access to the best education,
she says on page 6

Qatar Foundation Communication Directorate

Rima Ismail Publications Manager, rismail@qf.org.qa
+974 4454 0960
Ghada Saade Head of Translation & Editorial Unit, gsaade@qf.org.qa
+974 4454 0961
Sayed A Mohamed, samohamed@qf.org.qa +974 4454 1701
Sholto Byrnes Editor, sbyrnes@qf.org.qa
+974 3306 5378
Follow us on:

At Think., we welcome comments from

readers. If you would like to respond
to any of the articles, please contact
the editor at Think@qf.org.qa and
mark your email for publication

facebook.com/thinkinternationalmagazine
twitter.com/Think_QF

Photography: Corbis, Getty and Shutterstock

Illustrations by Sasan and Jawad Mataame
2013. Qatar Foundation. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
without the written permission of Qatar Foundation. The opinions expressed in this magazine
are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of Qatar Foundation. For more
information on Qatar Foundation please visit qf.org.qa

Think. is printed on paper

produced from sustainably
managed forests and is
certified by the Programme
for the Endorsement of Forest
Certification (PEFC)

think. magazine

Stanley Johnson on
saving the world
Ilyasah Al shabazz on
her fathers legacy
sholto byrnes on
novel ideas

by stanley johnson

n December last year,

the thoughts and prayers
of most environmental
enthusiasts were focused
on Doha, Qatar, where
the 18th meeting of the
Conference of the Parties
to the United Nations
Framework Convention on
Climate Change (COP 18)
was taking place. Desperately
painful negotiations at the
very last minute allowed for
agreement to be reached
on extending the Kyoto
Protocol and for continuing
discussions on a broader
climate treaty to be agreed by
2015, with entry into force
april 2013

foreseen by 2020. COP 18

kept the delicate plant alive.
Another failure, such as that
experienced in Copenhagen
in 2010, might have killed it
off altogether.
With all the dramas taking
place in Doha, it is not
surprising that decisions taken
around the same time in New
York at the very end of the UN
General Assemblys SixtySeventh Session received less
than front-page coverage.
Yet, from an environmental
perspective, those decisions
were perhaps as important as
the steps taken in Qatar. For
it could be argued that the
General Assembly in effect
decided to set up a World
Environment Organization

(WEO) with, potentially,

momentous implications for
the way in which humanity
runs its affairs.
In the run-up to the
International Conference on
Sustainable Development
in Rio de Janeiro last June,
the option of creating such
an organization had clearly
been on the table. What was
envisaged was a self-standing
UN specialized agency, such
as UNESCO, FAO or WHO,
with its own independent
governing body. In the
preparatory discussions that
option was upheld by both the
African and European Unions.
In the event, the notion was
not seriously discussed during
the conference itself. On the

Not everyone was happy.

Frances newly-elected
President, Franois Hollande,
declared: I regret the fact
that we didnt achieve the
creation of a specialized
UN environment agency
Multilateralism depends on
it, its the best way of putting
all subjects in the same
organization and dealing with
them at the same time and in
the same place.
In regretting the demise of
the WEO option, President
Hollande was not only
faithfully reflecting the EU
position; he was also reflecting
Frances own long-standing
preferences. Many of those
present in Rio in June 2012
would also have heard the
passionate appeal for a WEO
that Hollandes predecessor,
President Chirac, made to
an earlier UN environmental
summit in Johannesburg 10
years earlier
Realistically, even the most
enthusiastic proponents of the
WEO option knew that there
would be several mountains
to climb before that particular
Nirvana could be attained.
How difficult would it be
to draft a new international

bulletin

You dont have to

be a fully paid-up
member of the
internationalist
brotherhood
to admit that
UNEP has had
some important
environmental
successes

deck-chairs on the Titanic.

These new international
institutional arrangements,
they may say, are not an
adequate response to the
environmental challenges
that confront the world. The
key element here, however,
is not building an entirely
new structure which might
never actually work, but
strengthening that which
already exists: UNEP.

treaty setting up a WEO with a

powerful mandate? Would we
end up with a lowest-commondenominator approach? Would
important countries, such as
the United States, decide not
to sign or to ratify even a feeble
new treaty?
Looking back at Rio,
however, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the ruthless
textual pruning not only
avoided the pitfalls described
above, but actually laid the
ground for the dramatic
positive steps that the General
Assembly was able to take at
the end of last year.
Basically, it decided not
to create a new WEO but
to refashion the existing
structures so as to deliver
the same result in a costeffective and, one hopes,
risk-free manner, by saying
that its existing environmental
body, the United Nations
Environmental Programme
(UNEP), set up 40 years
earlier as a 58-nation body,
should have universal
membership. In other words,
all member nations of the
UN would be members of
UNEP. The General Assembly
also reiterated the need for
UNEP to have secure, stable,
adequate and predictable
financial resources.
Cynics may argue that this
is just a matter of shifting the

You dont have to be a fully

paid-up member of the
internationalist brotherhood
to admit that, over its history,
UNEP and, more widely, the
UN system as a whole, has had
some important environmental
successes. It is thanks to timely
joint action by UNEP and
the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO) that the
world took effective measures
to deal with the threats posed
by ozone-depleting substances
in the atmosphere. UNEP
and WMO together set up the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Although
political action has so far
failed to match up to the
challenges, UNEP has not
ceased to prod and cajole.
UNEP was the guiding light
behind an international
treaty to stop or control the
trade in or dumping of toxic
waste, as well as playing an
important part in negotiating
the Convention on Biological
Diversity and its Protocol on
Biosafety. UNEPs regional
seas conventions are regarded
as outstanding models
for local environmental
collaboration. More recently,
UNEPs emphasis on the
green economy holds out
the prospect of allowing
job-creating growth to
continue without trashing the
environment.

Most importantly, perhaps,

the series of reports that UNEP
has published over the years
have contributed to informed
debate about key environmental
problems, including at the
political level, while UNEPs
work with non-governmental
bodies has helped build a
democratic consensus on the
need for action. And more
recently, it made a sizeable
contribution to the Doha
conference when it published
its carbon Emissions Gap Report
showing just how far they
should and could be reduced.
But there is an urgent need
for still greater leadership
here. The stakes are very
high. UNEP, newly energized

as a result of the decisions in

Rio and New York, should
be well-placed to seize
the initiative in this as in
other vital fields. If it does
so, then de facto, if not
de jure UNEP will have
become a World Environment
Organization: an idea whose
time has come.
Stanley Johnson is a former MEP
and Vice-Chairman of the European
Parliaments Environment Committee.
He is an Ambassador for the United
Nations Convention on Migratory
Species and has been awarded the
Greenpeace Prize for Outstanding
Services to the Environment. His
latest book is UNEP: The First 40
Years A Narrative.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE
POWER OF EDUCATION
by Ilyasah Al Shabazz

ost parents, teachers

and guardians,
whatever their
socioeconomic
status, want the same for their
children to be happy, to be
healthy, to be educated, so
that they are fully prepared to
be the leaders of tomorrow.
If we are to achieve a global
civilized society, then each of
us must focus on ensuring
that every child and every
individual has the opportunity
to be educated regardless of
nationality, religion or gender.
It is our obligation to insist
on quality programs and
to document the truths of
heritage, culture, identity and
religion. In other words, it is
our essential duty to provide
qualitative education for all.
My father, Hajj Malik

Al Shabazz, Malcolm X,
committed to the civil rights
movement as a young man
in his twenties. He was
prepared to assume such
an extraordinary leadership
role by his parents, Earl and
Louise Little, who instilled in
young Malcolm the values of
education, accountability and
responsibility.
My grandmother taught
her children to sing the
alphabet in French and
read to her from a variety of
periodicals. Malcolms mother
kept a dictionary on the
table where her children did
their homework, and if they
mispronounced a word, she
encouraged them to look up
the correct pronunciation
and usage.
Earl Little sowed the seeds
of resilience, perseverance
and conviction into my father.
As a boy, Malcolm watched
think. magazine

Grandfather Earl rebuild

the family home, brick by
brick, after it burned to the
ground, set afire by local
klansmen. Young Malcolm
listened intently as his father
taught the family lessons of
identity, faith, fortitude and
determination. His parents
modeled for him selflessness,
sacrifice and deferring
personal freedom for the
betterment of society.
The teachings and
examples of his parents as
well as his own initiative
would propel Malcolm
to positions of leadership
at every stage of his
development. As a little boy,
Malcolm persuaded his
siblings to do his chores on
the family farm. He would
later become president of his
7th grade class despite being
in a foreign environment,
separated from his family, and
subjected to disparagement
from his teacher. As a
parentless adolescent, because
his father had been brutally
assassinated and his mother
indefinitely hospitalized,
Malcolm would be lured
into life on the streets, yet
he would become the leader
of his cohorts. Although this
lifestyle would eventually
lead to incarceration at the
age of 21, Malcolm would
nevertheless rise to the
distinction of model prisoner.
He would resume his thirst
for knowledge, embark on a
rigorous program of selfeducation, and help other,
often older, inmates to create
positive focus and direction
for their own lives.
Malcolm would utilize
the transformative power
within him to build mosques
and schools throughout the
United States, and would
also become a renowned
april 2013

Education is our passport to

the future, for tomorrow belongs
to those who prepare for it today.
Malik Al Shabazz, Malcolm X

leader in the Civil Rights

movement. Throughout his
adulthood, Malcolm would
continue a life of tireless
service to Allah and to
humanity. Malik Al Shabazz,
Malcolm X, the man who
would rise to iconic stature,
would circle the globe in the
final months of his life in an
almost incomprehensible

commitment to usher in
an era of egalitarianism
and peace.
The lessons from my
fathers lifelong educational
process led him to fashion
an unyielding will and
determination, and his
extraordinary example
remains a source of
inspiration around the

world. US President Barack

Obama recalls finding solace
in Malcolms example as
he searched for his own
identity: His [Malcolms]
repeated acts of self-creation
spoke to me; the blunt
poetry of his words, his
unadorned insistence on
respect, promised a new
and uncompromising order,
martial in its discipline, forged
through sheer force of will.
I believe that if we guide
our children into a greater
understanding of the
transformational power within
each of us, as exemplified by
my father, Malcolm X; and
perhaps even into a greater
understanding of Islam, we
will empower future leaders to
fulfill their lifelong obligation
to become better servants.
If we teach our children
that the study of medicine
is not merely to attain social
status, but to insure that
disadvantaged people have
adequate medical attention;
that the study of law is not
merely to understand the rules
of jurisprudence, but to use
them as a tool for fighting all
forms of injustice; and that the
goal of becoming a teacher or
professor is not simply to gain
social status, but to provide
educational opportunities
for everyone, regardless of
gender or ethnicity; then all
of our children, our boys and
our girls, will be prepared
to ensure a future of justice,
egalitarianism and peace
for all.
Ilyasah Al Shabazz is the author of
Growing Up X and was the Inaugural
Lecturer in Qatar Faculty of Islamic
Studies Center for the Study of
Contemporary Muslim Societies
Distinguished Speaker Series in
December 2012.
qfis.edu.qa

bulletin

THE TRUTH IN FICTION

by Sholto Byrnes

f it is a truism verging
on clich to say that
history is written by
the victors, it is still one
that is constantly borne
out. Alternative narratives
frequently remain untold,
deliberately suppressed, or
sometimes merely misplaced
and then ultimately
forgotten. Coverage last year
of the deal that may lay the
foundations for lasting peace
in the southern Philippines
by formally creating an
autonomous Bangsamoro
land of the Moros, or Moors,
as the Spanish called the
local Muslims when they
began to conquer the islands
in the 16th century was a
case in point.

The long-running conflict

in the restive south was
nearly always referred to
as an insurgency, a word
suggestive of unwarranted
grievances held by
unreasonable troublemakers
given to wholly unnecessary
violence. Never did I hear
mention that this was once
a land of sultanates, that of
Brunei at one point holding
sway from neighboring
Borneo all the way to Manila
Bay, while the title of Sultan
of Sulu still carries sufficient
importance, if not formally,
to be sought by a number
of different claimants; nor
that leaders of the region
considered their Catholic
countrymen to be so alien
after their centuries of
colonization (the Muslim
south was not fully under

Spanish rule until the late

19th century) that in the
1930s a group of them wrote
an official letter to President
Roosevelt pleading to be
a separate entity from the
Philippines as and when
America decided to grant
its accidentally-won colony
independence.
Records of such histories
have been written, but
mostly in tomes perused
by scholars and the all-toooccasional policymaker. It
is not, perhaps, realistic to
expect the general reader
to dip into books with titles
such as The Philippines
Reader: A History of
Colonialism, Neocolonialism,
Dictatorship and Resistance.
But these competing
histories containing truths
that do matter, as they
inform the behavior of state
actors, both domestically and
internationally, across the
world can also be found
in a place that may seem
surprising: fiction.
Novels by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and Mario Vargas
Llosa are tutorials in South
American history; The Siege
by the renowned Albanian
writer Ismail Kadare is a
fascinating snapshot of the
Ottoman conquest of the
Balkans in the 16th century,
as well as providing intricate
and clearly researched details
of the armies the Caliph sent
forth; while anyone seeking
insight into the turmoil in
Indonesia during the last
days of President Sukarno
would do well to pick up
Map of the Invisible World,
by the prize-winning author
Tash Aw (whose Letter from
Singapore is on page 62).
Now, newly translated
into English, comes a novel
that sheds light on the

Arabian Gulf in the early

19th century. The Corsair
by Abdulaziz Al Mahmoud,
from Bloomsbury Qatar
Foundation Publishing,
serves to counter the
impression that British
involvement in the region
was chiefly exemplified
by figures such as TE
Lawrence, Harry St John
(later Abdullah) Philby
and Wilfred Thesiger all,
to a degree, romantics with
a passionate attachment
to the local people and
culture or by courteous
officials offering treaties of
protection that truly were
even-handedly beneficial to
both parties.
Cold commercial
interests, sometimes
accompanied by cruel
actions, soon appear in this
delightful tale centered
around the legendary corsair
(or pirate, to be less kind)
Erhama Bin Jaber. And
set around this are factual
references to the histories of
Nejd, Bahrain, Qatar, Ras Al
Khaimah and Oman, about
which the majority of visitors
to the Gulf would surely
be interested to know but
which are unlikely to appear
in even the most detailed of
guidebooks. If fiction is the
lie through which we tell the
truth, as Albert Camus put
it, then in The Corsair there
are lies that may set the
heart racing but nourish the
mind as well. So put away
the Lonely Planet and pick
up a novel instead. You may
learn more than you expect.
Sholto Byrnes is the Editor of Think.
A former Chief Interviewer of the
Independent, he is a Fellow of
the Royal Society of Arts and a
Contributing Editor of the New
Statesman.
think. magazine

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the youth issue

conundrum of the kidults

GENERATION Y:

FECKLESS

OR FAILED?
Around the world young people are living
longer with their parents and are increasingly
dependent on them. Are they indulged kidults
who cant take responsibility for themselves
or are they victims of state policies that have
produced unsustainable debts, saddling
youth with the prospects of lifelong low-paid
employment and far lower living standards
than their parents enjoyed?

10

ho knows what Alfred Adler

would have made of Chinas
one child policy? The renowned
Austrian psychotherapist
who identified the inferiority
complex, Adler also made a detailed study of
the psychological effects of sibling birth order
in the 1930s. Among his conclusions was the
contention that only children were indulged by
everyone... pampered... used to being the center
of attention and with a higher than normal risk
of becoming maladjusted. Today, China has 90
million of them.
It could be argued that the Middle Kingdoms
experience vindicates his sweeping claims even
if empirical evidence from Western countries
does not because the popular perception
there is that the members of the one child
generation are precisely as he described
them: over-indulged, pampered and, frankly,
a little peculiar.

think. magazine

april 2013

written by Ed Howker

Labeled little emperors in childhood,

Chinas Generation Y have also been dubbed the
ken lao zu literally the tribe who eat the old
in adulthood, portrayed in popular culture as
having low-paid jobs but high-rolling lifestyles
which are subsidized by their parents.
Theres evidence enough for their
cannibalistic tendencies. The Chinese Research
Center on Aging estimates that a third of adult
Chinese remain partly or totally financially
dependent on their parents. A third of young
adults are classified as NEETS Not in
Employment, Education or Training. And the
public policy response to these trends has been
to use the law to discipline a generation that,
many think, has been spoiled rotten.
Two years ago, for example, the Peoples
Congress of Jiangsu passed a provincial

11

the youth issue

conundrum of the kidults

40 percent of young
people in Portugal are
now unemployed, more
than 50 percent in
Spain, and in Greece,
the statistic is just
below 60 percent
How Baby Boomers Can Parent for Peace of Mind,
Foster Responsibility in Their Adult Children, and
Keep Their Hard-Earned Money certainly speaks
for itself. Ms Herman should find a publisher
who will translate it into Mandarin.

The effect of the great recession on young people

Youth (aged 15/16-24) unemployment rates before and after the crisis

The sheer breadth of the problems means that

Adlers ideas dont explain them. But, even so,
there is a new pattern of youth emerging, a story
about Kidults spun with great success. In it,
young adults are increasingly dependent on
their parents because they have been indulged
as children, and lack the sense of personal
responsibility to be independent citizens. It is a
comforting and accessible narrative for sure. It
crosses continents and language barriers; part
psychotherapy, part folk-lore, it has a grip on
our public debates. But it is a story with the
right characters and an improbable plot. For
certain, increasing numbers of young people are
dependent on their parents. But is that really by
choice? Might force of circumstance not play a
role in bearing down on a generation to create a
different and inferior way of life?
Scrutinize the First World young adults in
the most extreme predicament the basket
case economy of Europe, Greece. Set out in the
graph, left, are the youth unemployment rates of
selected OECD countries. Rocked by the 2008
crash and subsequent recessions, 40 percent of
young people in Portugal are now unemployed,
more than 50 percent in Spain, and in Greece
the statistic is just below 60 percent. From the
perspective of the young, there is only one
descriptor for these countries: they are failed
states. With neither assets nor employment
prospects, the young have no foothold. They
have but two options: escape in all three
nations emigration rates among young citizens

60%

Pre-crisis trough
2012, third quarter
50

40

30

20

0
think. magazine

Source: OECD

Greece

Spain

Portugal

Italy

United
States

10
New
Zealand

12

Some may think these the maladroit responses

of one country to subtle social problems. But,
scanning the horizon of the developed world,
it is possible to discern precisely the same
tendencies elsewhere.
Britains young adults share the economic
predicament of their Chinese equivalents; almost
a third aged under 30 live with their parents.
Almost 40 percent of all those unemployed in
the UK are under 30 too. And in Britain, just
as in China, young adults attract an array of
disobliging monikers, such as KIPPERS Kids
In Parents Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings.
There was even a popular TV show specifically
designed to highlight their fecklessness. In the
BBCs Bank of Mum & Dad, grown-ups
concerned about their adult childrens lifestyle
performed the financial equivalent of an addicts
intervention.
Lately, public policy has steadily chipped
away at welfare spending on young adults
cutting housing benefit for the young,
scrapping maintenance payments for those
still in education, forcing the unemployed to
undertake mandatory, menial and unpaid work
experience in profit-making companies. In
effect, the British state is also disciplining its
indulged new generation.
The comparison is also born out in the
US. By their own admission half of young
adult Americans reject the second word in
that description the Clark University Poll
of Emerging Adults found that 51 percent of
18- to 29-year-olds do not feel they have fully
reached adulthood. Similarly, the rate of parents
providing cash to adult children who have left
education stands at around 60 percent; one in

eight are NEETS. And, of course, there

is the same lurking suspicion that all this has
come about because this new generation
lacks character.
As Elizabeth Kolbert memorably wrote in
The NewYorker last year: With the exception
of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty
and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France,
contemporary American kids may represent the
most indulged young people in the history of
the world.
If the kids really are spoiled, the nation
that invented tough love has been doling it
out with gusto. There is now, for example, a
book to help US momsndads through their
unexpectedly extended parenthood. The title of
therapist Linda M Hermans Parents to the End:

S Korea

ordinance conferring the right on elderly parents

to refuse requests for financial support from
their adult children - lest parents themselves had
forgotten that they could say No.
It will help parents who have children in the
NEET group, said Zhao Jianyang, Congress
law director at the time. More tokenistic social
interventions have followed at a national level.
In July a welfare bill designed by Beijing to help
alleviate elderly poverty will be enacted. During
its passage, then President Hu Jintao himself
publicized it. And, tacked on to the end, is a
clause demanding that adult children regularly
visit their elderly parents a reassertion of filial
piety that suggests that if theyre not leeching off
their elders, Chinas young adults are ignoring
them completely.

april 2013

have grown; or a reversion to childhood

when they inevitably become dependent on
their parents.
In reality, the Greek state has spent decades
acting much more irresponsibly than its young
adults, racking up long-term debts to meet
short-term needs as a matter of policy. Its
national debt-to-GDP ratio rose to nearly 100
percent in 1993 the year when some of the
youngest members of its adult generation were
born. They are not to blame.
The graph contains another revealing
detail. Long before the financial crisis hit,
young people in many OECD countries were
already in a much more vulnerable position
than we might expect. Take Italy: even when
its economy was faring reasonably well, youth
unemployment stood at 20 percent not far
from peak national unemployment in the US
during the Great Depression.
In the UK, the number of NEETS young
people falling out of the economy completely rose, not in 2008, but in 2005 at the peak of
the debt-fuelled boom.
With the sole exception of Switzerland, whose
economic circumstances are unusual in every
way, young people in OECD countries share
a singular destiny: they are considerably more
likely to be unemployed than all the older
members of their countries save the retired
usually twice or three times as likely to be locked
out of the labor market. And to be clear, these
figures exclude those in full-time education.
So what is going on? One explanation is
that the Chinese were right all along, and not
just about their own kids. Perhaps, thanks
to an abnormality somehow unrecorded
in the communication age, parents across
the world ceased to be capable of raising
responsible adults around 1980 and high levels
of dependency and unemployment reflect
individual failures by a new generation of
economic refuseniks. But I doubt it, and so does
Assunta Linza, whose forename translates as
the employed one. She is not.
Ms Linza is a 34 year-old graduate made a
member of Italys long-term unemployed after
her job in a Roman call center was relocated to
Albania. She had been interning and temping
for years beforehand, building up a CV which
has not translated into the career she sought.
Ms Linza came to the worlds attention when
interviewed last year by Der Spiegel. As she put it:
My father cant believe how his daughter,

13

the youth issue

conundrum of the kidults

the financial crisis and subsequent recession

have dramatically diminished the labor market
prospects for young people, as many experience
long-term unemployment right from the start
of their labor market entry - a situation that
was never observed during earlier cyclical
downturns.
A recession, in such an environment, has
a snowballing effect if young workers cant
find work early, they cant find it at all because
they are less attractive prospects than those
with experience. The global economy has never
looked so unfavorably on its new members.
Thats why the distinction between Assunta
Linzas experience of entering the labor market
and her fathers is so stark. So too is the prospect
of her exit having decided to become a
railwayman, Giovanni Linza retired aged just 42
on a full public pension which pays him more
per month than his daughter has ever earned.
He uses it to support her.

who got her degree aged 23, is

unemployed, while he, with a fifthgrade education, in 1970 could
choose between becoming
a policeman or working for the
state railway.

14

Her experience echoes around the First

World. Poor prospects are no longer
the fate just of the NEETS but also of
those who worked hard for their qualifications.
Even the predicament of many of Chinas
ken lao zu is derived from their position in a
labor market which, inevitably, has yet another
epithet: the Ant Tribe - a vast army of recent
graduates forced to commute long distances
into cities for low paid work or no paid work,
such as interning. The sheer numbers of the
Ant Tribe ensures that their remuneration
remains low; supply far outstrips demand since
nearly 70 percent of school leavers in China
now go on to higher education.
In Britain, where a comparatively modest (if
historically massive) 43 percent of school leavers
go on to university, many find that qualifications
dont translate into paid work either. Instead,
those from wealthy backgrounds are subsidized
by their parents as they undertake protracted
periods of work experience. The pattern is
repeated in the US and across much of Europe.
For some years now there has been a skillsmismatch between the low quality and scarce
quantity of jobs available to those entering the
labor force in the developed world. It is as if the
employment market takes selective bites from
the new workforce and promptly spits them
back out.
Ms Linzas experiences in Rome, for example,
are made harder to stomach because she and
her father can readily compare their experiences
of work; she cannot find any with fine
qualifications, he could pick a career with very
few. The reason for this is simple. In Italy and

across much of the developed world in 1970,

when her father took his job on the railway,
national economies were steered by government
to provide full employment. In Britain, for
example, a slogan written into Clement Attlees
1945 Labour manifesto, and which dominated
economic thinking for the proceeding three
decades, was jobs for all. In Greece and across
much of Europe, vast debts were run up to pay
for public sector jobs. The whole balance of
Western economies was tilted to try to ensure
the worker found gainful work.
In many ways, however, the grand political
project of the following generation in
government was to dismantle the workeroriented economy. Under the banner of freedom
employment has been controlled, or rather
uncontrolled, by the free market. As a result,
many employers have been forced to prioritize
short-term profits over long-term economic
goods, including training a new generation of
workers. That might be one reason why the UN
International Labour Organization found that

Slowly, the real story

of kidulthood begins to
emerge dependency has
not arisen because the
new generation have been
indulged, but because
they have been ignored
think. magazine

april 2013

Slowly, the real story of kidulthood begins to

emerge dependency has not arisen because
the new generation have been indulged, but
because they have been ignored.
And if thats true in the employment market,
the effects are felt in other areas. In the growth
areas of China, America and the rest of Europe,
housing the fundamental building-block
of independent adult life - has never been so
expensive. Chinese banks and British housebuilders now offer intergenerational mortgages
because a couple, still less a single worker,
cannot afford to buy their own home without
rinsing their families for deposits and monthly
repayments. Meanwhile, much of the wealth
of their parents generation has been based
on the same rapidly rising house prices that
now exclude them. Those without work have
little option but to remain at home, and if
home is nowhere near job opportunities, they
become trapped unwillingly infantilized by a
combination of weak labor and strong housing
markets.
Worse, poor job and housing prospects have
a compound effect for the kidults. Long-term
unemployment at the start of a working life
has a detrimental effect on income that lasts
for decades; unable to begin the rat race on
time, the victims struggle to catch up. Unable
to find stable housing independent of their
parents, they then find it difficult to partner
and procreate. And perhaps worst of all, these
barriers are rising up at the very moment when

15

the youth issue

the youth issue

conundrum of the kidults

Fiscal
irresponsibility
has characterized
much state
activity in the
developed world
over the past
few decades.
Resources have
been squandered

16

developed countries most need the taxes paid

by workers in jobs.
Whatever national debts have been run up
following the financial crisis, they are dwarfed
by the vast and often understated long-term
liabilities that have arisen thanks to increasing
longevity. Giovanni Linzas state pension and
hundreds of millions of others across the globe
will only be paid if the taxes can be found to
meet them. So, too, the rising healthcare costs
and other welfare payments which are implicit
when, to take the British example, the over-75s
are predicted to constitute 15 percent of the
population in 2040, and the ranks of the superold, aged over 90, to increase by 390 per cent.
(I suspect these are not issues addressed in Ms
Hermans $25 parenting manual.)
Those notions of the indulged young
adults veil some uncomfortable truths. Much
easier it surely is to dismiss what must be the
best educated generation in the history of
human society than to examine why so many
economies seem to offer so little for them.
What is to be done?
In the first place, this generation must
learn to be self-starting. They must be
offered support for what little enterprising
spirit remains after they have been so
comprehensively criticized. Perhaps never
before has it been so easy to start a business
all thats required is a laptop. But two
fundamental shifts must occur in politics and
in the economy.
Fiscal irresponsibility has characterized
much state activity in the developed world

case study: greece

over the past few decades. Resources have

been squandered, long-term spending
promises have not been funded. Britains
long-term liabilities run into the trillions.
State liabilities alone in the US are far higher,
and the actuaries I speak to suggest they
have been horribly underestimated. Only by
coming clean with electorates about their true
financial burdens can nations in the developed
world now struggling with their indulged
youth begin to bear them.
Too many nations have left it to the private
economy to meet the challenge of finding
employment for the young and to their parents
to shelter them. This is a recipe for dependency
on the family or the state. The escape route,
found by some other countries, integrates the
long-term needs of the economy into private
business. Germany, for example, has a dual
apprenticeship system widely recognized as
the most effective in the world and used by
60 percent of its young people. Twelve hours
of weekly scholastic learning is teamed with
three days of paid vocational training in the
workplace. It requires state and private business
spending but it works just look at Germanys
youth unemployment rate, at a mere eight
percent, the lowest in Europe. It spends 0.8 per
cent of GDP on active labor market policies
twice as much as the UK, a little more than
Spain. But its much cheaper to pay for training
than for unemployment benefits.
Only when unpaid internship is replaced
by paid long-term apprenticeship and
training, and when union pay-bargaining
doesnt simply concern the pensions of older
members but also of future members, will the
point arrive when the indulged youth are
allowed to learn the dignity of work.
Of course, Alfred Adler might say all this
makes no difference if youre an only child
you must still overcome your obvious
maladjustment. But when not studying
sibling birth order, the Viennese thinker
asserted another fundamental psychological
idea: that gemeinschaftsgefhl, a sense of
social connectedness and a keen interest in
the well-being of others, is a fundamental
characteristic of psychological health. Far too
much of the debate about the new generation
has been unconcerned with their well-being
and has itself been far too unhealthy. None
of us can afford to write them off. They
are the future. l

the author

Ed Howker is the author,

with Shiv Malik, of
Jilted Generation: How
Britain has Bankrupted
its Youth. An Associate
Editor of The Spectator,
he is a board member
of the Intergenerational
Foundation in London.
think. magazine

STATE OF DESPAIR
Few places have been hit harder by the Great Recession and subsequent
austerity measures than Greece, and many of its young people feel that
they are paying a catastrophic price for the profligacy of their elders.
Now leading commentators warn that the countrys future could be
characterized by a civil war between the generations
Graffiti daubed on the walls
of Athens University during
demonstrations against
the then government of
Prime Minister George
Papandreou, October, 2011

april 2013

hey sit in the fading light on

concrete steps. Two girls on the
edge of womanhood, giggling
as they talk, mostly about the
challenges that lie ahead. The
side entrance to one of the buildings of
Thessalonikis Aristotelian University
is behind them. It is here that Anna
Mastroyianni and Eleftheria Rapti
are studying.
And that, says Anna, is just as well. Ive
turned 22 and still feel very insecure about

written by Helena Smith

the future. For starters, there are no jobs,

not even the prospect of a job, which is why
I have decided to stay on and do a masters
in biology because maybe, just maybe, after
that I can go abroad.
In Greece Anna is not alone. Eleftheria,
who is a year younger and in her fourth year
studying to be a vet, is convinced she will
do the same. Im obliged to live with my

17

the youth issue

case study: greece

Greece is expelling her

children, says Angelica
Contini, a fifty-something
mother-of-two. It is not
that her children are
rejecting Greece, she is
rejecting them.
with hundreds of thousands of small- and
medium-sized businesses the lifeblood of
the Greek economy closed and boarded
up, shops shutting at a rate of three a day
in the center of Athens, manufacturers
and other firms moving overseas, and the
public sector, once the biggest employer,
disintegrating, the official unemployment
rate of 26.8 percent is on course to get
much worse. Analysts speak of joblessness
reaching 35 percent by June. At last count,
some four million Greeks, 31 percent of the
total population, were living on or below
the poverty line, according to the national
statistics service, ELSTAT.

18

EXODUS OF THE ELITE

parents like all of us and, yes, Im kind of

frustrated, she says, scowling behind the
big sunglasses she occasionally touches but
never removes. No politician told us the
truth. They waited until the very last minute
to tell us that it wasnt what it seemed, that
Greece wasnt the country we thought we
knew, that basically it was bankrupt. You
could say we are angry and disappointed
and, well, furious.
Greece ended 2012 its worst year
since plunging into its deepest crisis in
modern times edging past Spain to
acquire the unenviable title of Europes
record holder in terms of unemployment.
Thessaloniki, the countrys once-vibrant

northern capital, was sliding down the

route of de-industrialization, joblessness
and poverty before financial Armageddon
struck in the form of gargantuan debt in
late 2009. Its youth for it is a student city
par excellence now negotiate mindboggling
problems: joblessness at over 57 percent,
one in three struggling to make ends meet,
and homelessness at a level not experienced
since their grandparents survived the
depredations of Nazi occupation and civil
war more than 60 years ago.
This year is set to be still more calamitous.
There are around 1.4 million people out
of work in a population of not more than
11.5 million, but all estimates show that

Society, says Theodore Pelagidis, a

Professor of Economics at the University
of Piraeus who was born and raised in
Thessaloniki, is defeated. It has become
extremely segregated. Everyone is looking
out for himself and trying to survive. But
the real disaster, the greatest disaster,
is the number of talented professionals,
researchers, academics, businessmen,
doctors, lawyers, engineers, who are leaving.
You must absolutely write this, because
they are the people who could lift the
country out of this mess and oversee
development and growth. We are not talking
about unskilled workers, peasants, those who
migrated after the civil war in the 1950s and
60s. We are talking about the elite.
No one knows quite how many people
have left. Officials will quietly acknowledge
that it is in the hundreds of thousands,
although anecdotal evidence suggests the
number may well be much higher. At least

Youth protest in central

Athens against budget cuts
which affect transport to
their schools

think. magazine

april 2013

30,000 are thought to have migrated to

Australia alone since the eruption of the
crisis. But what everyone does know is
that it is young Greeks who make up the
backbone of the exodus: the internet-savvy,
multilingual generation with degrees and
promise whose hopes and dreams have
been shattered.
Greece is expelling her children, says
Angelica Contini, a fifty-something motherof-two, throwing her arms up in despair. It
is not that her children are rejecting Greece,
she is rejecting them. I have come to accept
that my own children will go abroad and
probably never come back, or if they do,
only as tourists. Contini was until recently
a teacher at a public sector school in Athens,
before deciding to take early retirement to
concentrate on her family. Education, the
children she has taught and the generations
that will follow them, is what she has spent
a great deal of time thinking about. But she
never thought she would be having this kind
of conversation with me, or anyone else.
How many generations will be lost? she
asks. How many years will it take for the
crisis to begin to wane and the turnaround
to come? How long do we need to really
change our mentality? After World War II,
it took around 10 years for Greece to begin
to come round. I look at kids today and
wonder if it will be the 15-year-olds or the
10-year-olds who, eventually, will be the
ones changing this country.
RELENTLESS AUSTERITY

A society doesnt unravel overnight, but

when it does it happens quickly. This
has been the case in Greece as it has
tried, often under threat of being ejected
from the 17-nation Eurozone, to keep
its insolvent economy afloat. Three years
into experiencing the whip-and-carrot
approach of creditors at the European
Union and International Monetary Fund, it
is clear that away from the calculators and
clipboards, PowerPoint shows and optimistic
prognostications, the number crunching
is having a brutal effect. Relentless rounds
of austerity have hollowed out large tracts
of the country and its people, leaving both
lacklustre versions of their former selves.
And none have been more affected than
those who played no part in bringing the
economy to its knees.

19

the youth issue

case study: greece

20

With the majority of Greeks aged between

18 and 25 unable to find work two out
of three being jobless women there are
few who do not think the young have been
failed. In Greece, today, we are witnessing
an intergenerational struggle rather than the
class struggle that Marxists would have us
believe, says Dimitris Keridis, who teaches
political science at Panteion University in
Athens. Forty years of stability following the
collapse of military rule has come at a price
for the children and grandchildren of those
who oversaw the restoration of democracy
in 1974. It is particularly acute because
the socialism we experienced in the 1980s
was bankrolled not by taxing the rich, but
by borrowing from future generations.
Others, he notes, might describe it as a giant
340-billion-euro debt pile hanging around
the countrys neck.
Keridis is not alone in his assessment.
Such fast-growing youth unemployment is
alarming, says Aliki Mouriki, a sociologist
at the National Centre for Social Research,
also in the Greek capital. Never in Greece
before have such high rates been seen in
peace time, and its not happening in any
other western European country. As a force
its extremely destructive and radicalizing.
Because so many young Greeks were also
long-term jobless, they dont even qualify
for the basic 360-euro monthly jobless
allowance provided for the first year by
the state.
All of us guys, the so-called polytechniou
generation, says the prominent
commentator and newspaper publisher
George Kyrtsos, referring to the 1973
student uprising in Athens that paved the
way for the fall of the Colonels regime,
went on to get jobs for life in the public
sector and all sorts of privileges. It is
our generation that took the money, he
continues, invoking the cronyism and
corruption that was predominant before
bankruptcy loomed, seemingly overnight, in
late 2009. It is they who got the bill. And
you know, they will punish us.
CATASTrOPHIC CONSEQUENCES

Back in Thessaloniki, at the Centre for

Continuous Education on the second floor
of the complex used to hold the citys annual
trade fair, Petroula Batsou talks about youth
anger. Short and stocky with a big wide

smile, she is one of several staff who daily

have to deal with the hundreds who walk
through the door in hope of work. There
are two types of people who come here:
either those who have been forcibly retired
because of all the austerity measures, or
highly qualified 20- to 25-year-olds who are
very frustrated and very aggressive, she
says. Again and again I hear them saying,
We paid our dues. Now the state owes us.
At the very least we should be given the
right to work.
Batsou insists she feels nothing but
compassion for her wards because her

As Greece struggles to get

out of its financial crisis
through spending cuts
and economic reforms,
the European Commission
has promised to launch an
action plan to boost youth
employment

the author
Helena Smith is The
Guardians correspondent
in Greece, Turkey and
Cyprus and has reported
from Athens for more than
20 years.

think. magazine

april 2013

brother Christos, who is 28, has been

unemployed for four years and is suffering
from depression. It has got to the point
where anyone who has work feels lucky,
she says. We give people computer training
and try to hone their job market skills, but
its difficult. A lot of the time they sit there
giving us very hard looks. Batsou, who is
only 31 herself, says even her colleagues
want to leave Greece. Eleni, over here, she
says, pointing across the office, really wants
to go. And nearly everyone who comes
here says they are considering leaving.
What sticks in the throats of us all is that
we barely had the chance to vote, to express
an opinion about the rotten system that our
fathers and forefathers created. Yet we are
the ones who have to pay the consequences.
Predictably, Greeces young have no
interest in keeping the mainstream parties,
held responsible for reducing their country
to this sorry state, in power. Both the oncemighty socialist Pasok and conservative
New Democracy have seen their support
plummet as they conduct the tightrope act
of trying to placate lenders while attempting
to stave off bankruptcy and keep restiveness
at bay. The current government, an uneasy
alliance between both parties and the small
Democratic Left, has fared better than
forecast since elections last June, but few are
betting that it will last its full term or even
beyond the end of the year.
When Greece goes to the polls again,
almost everyone believes that the stridently
anti-austerity far-left Syriza, led by the
telegenic Alexis Tsipras, will emerge
victorious thanks to the appeal the party has
among those under retirement age.
The social dynamic is with Syriza, as well
as with the far-right Golden Dawn party,
says Kyrtsos. I dont think it is too much
to say that the future will be characterized
by civil war between the generations.
Increasingly radicalized on the left and right,
many young Greeks are already advocating
violence, with youngsters linked to an urban
guerrilla gang that has targeted the offices
of officials and journalists and even Athens
biggest shopping mall with improvised
explosive devices.
Back on the concrete steps, down the
road from the training center where Batsou
works, Anna Mastroyianni and Eleftheria
Rapti talk about the different world their

All of us guys
went on to get
jobs for life
in the public
sector and
all sorts of
privileges. It is
our generation
that took the
money. It is they
who got the bill.
And you know,
they will
punish us.
parents inhabited. Thirty or 40 years ago
the situation in Greece was very difficult.
Our peers may complain that things are
terrible now but our parents did have it
hard, and in truth they did try to make it
easier for us, says Anna. A lot of people in
Greece made a lot of money without doing
very much, but there were some like my
father who worked in a supermarket and
really suffered.
Before she finishes her sentence, a middleaged postman arrives to empty the letter
boxes at the top of the steps. He is Antonis
Andreoglou, but prefers to go by the name
of Epicurus, his favorite philosopher. Now
dont let me hear you moaning, he cries.
Enough of all this crisis talk. Young girls
like you should party and be happy, enjoy
life for all that it is worth.
And what do you do? asks Anna. Well,
he says, Ive worked at the [state-owned]
post office for 27 years. Its been a good life,
honest, secure, well-paid. I couldnt have
asked for more. The tragedy of Greeces
young is that they dare not dream of asking
even for far less. l

21

the youth issue

a Demographic dividend?

Unlocking
the potential
of the Ummah
By 2030 Muslims will make up a quarter of the
worlds population but a third of its youth.
Here Malaysias Prime Minister argues that
Islamic countries must harness the power
of the greatest Muslim generation that
has ever lived to ensure a future defined by
opportunity, not dependency

22

ver the past few years, profound

change has come to many Islamic
countries. The causes were many,
but there was one persistent theme:
youth. The revolutions that swept
the Middle East and North Africa home
to one in five of the worlds Muslims were
often started, and led, by young people. This
is no coincidence. Too often, Muslim youth
do not see an economic future for themselves,
and do not feel they have a stake in their
nations future. Such pessimism can quickly

over the
last century,
research
suggests Islam
has been good
for growth

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib

Tun Razak takes photos with his
smartphone at a youth meeting in
the capital, Kuala Lumpur

think. magazine

february
april
2013 2013

written by Najib Tun Razak

lead to disengagement. Unless we understand

the forces shaping their lives, and offer a
compelling vision of economic opportunity,
we risk losing some of our youth to apathy or,
even worse, extremism.
How did this come about? There are many
underlying reasons, but our Islamic faith is
not one of them. Throughout history, Islamic
societies have managed major trade routes
and established vital centers of commerce.
During the Golden Age, between the eighth
and 13th centuries, Muslims established the
Islamic Empire and the Arabic language as
the predominant forces in world trade. The
Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires were
economic titans. And over the last century,
research suggests Islam has been good for
growth: countries such as Turkey
and Indonesia have demonstrated that
development within the framework of 20th
century capitalism is wholly compatible with
Islamic belief.
Indeed, Islamic states are capable not

23

the youth issue

a Demographic dividend?

24

just of economic dynamism, but also of

financial innovation. From forward markets
to microfinance, Islamic societies have long
been at the cutting edge of capitalism. Islam
is not a barrier to economic development; nor
to vibrant democracy. As scholars have noted,
democratic thought runs throughout Islamic
doctrine recognition of the equality of all
believers, development of consultative rule,
protection of private property, establishment
of justice, celebration of learning and
tolerance of other faiths.
Our religion allows for economic and
democratic development, and can sustain
societies of great wealth and considerable
dynamism. Yet many of our young people feel
economically excluded. They are competing
for jobs in a global, connected economy,
with challenges unknown to previous
generations; they face a changing climate,
new demographic trends and emerging
technologies.
As societies, we must make sense of
these changes and offer a clear alternative
to apathy. In so doing, we can harness the
considerable economic and social power of
young, educated and connected Muslims. To
unlock the true potential of the Ummah, I
believe that we must reconsider the nature of
youth and opportunity in Islamic economies.
We must understand what young people in
Muslim societies aspire to, so we can help
them achieve it. That means responding to the
changes affecting their lives.
The first change is demographic, for the
Muslim world is experiencing a significant
youth bulge. In 2010, 60 percent of
Muslims were under 30; in predominantly
non-Muslim Europe and North America,
it is closer to 30 percent. As young people
come to child-bearing age, the trend is set to
accelerate. By 2030, Muslims will make up a
quarter of the worlds population, but closer
to a third of its youth.
What are the implications of this shift? In
economic terms, a younger population brings
greater pressures to bear on the education
system, and creates a bigger labor force, in
turn requiring high investment and capital
to utilize the spare capacity. Young people
who cannot find work erode family spending
power and government finances.
Further down the line, a big demographic
change can warp fiscal policy for decades, as

baby boomer countries are discovering. But

in social terms, the short-term impact can be
even greater. A youth bulge introduces latent
energy into a nations economy and society. If
it is not tapped, it can become a destabilizing
force.
Work brings fulfillment: the feeling
of playing an active part in society and
contributing to the community. It also
develops the personal skills, discipline and
self-esteem that are requisites for success in
a competitive world. But with time on their
hands and no prospects for employment, a

generation of people is growing up without

ever knowing these benefits. In 2010, youth
unemployment in the Middle East was 25
percent; in North Africa, 24 percent.
Unemployment at such levels is
toxic, for when people are economically
disenfranchised, they grow restless.
Dependency robs young people of their
dignity, and with no economic stake in society,
they lose their sense of belonging. That can
spill over into hostility to the state, and even
outright violence: from 1970 to 2000, eight
out of 10 countries experiencing new civil
conflict had populations where 60 percent
were under 30 the same demographic
profile as the Muslim world has today.
How can we give our young people the
economic opportunity they deserve? We must
commit to building open and sustainable
economies that allow them to pursue their
ambitions. But to understand how those
ambitions are framed, we must also respond
to the second great change in young peoples
lives: technology.
Twenty-one years ago, there were no
websites. Today, there are more than half a
billion. In the space of just over two decades,
the internet has gone from being the preserve
of a tiny scientific community into one of
the most potent development tools the world
has ever known. The internet revolution
has opened up opportunities and created
challenges that were previously inconceivable.
The age of information has its own
generation: the digital natives, those who
have only ever known a connected world.
There are children leaving school now who
do not remember life before the internet.
The expectations they have of access to
information and freedom to communicate
are new and different. They do not
understand closed systems, or one-way
government; they expect information to
be free, democracy to be responsive and
communication to be instant and global,
and they want to play an active role in the
digital economy.

Young boys such as

these, pictured after
visiting a mosque in Shah
Alam, Malaysia, must be
presented with a clear
vision of the future

Great leaps in communication technology

often foreshadow democratic developments.
So it has proved with mobile internet and
social media: empowered by technology and
emboldened by example, young people are
able to compare the strengths and weaknesses
of their societies, and articulate their political
think. magazine

april 2013

The internet
revolution
has opened up
opportunities
and created
challenges that
were previously
inconceivable
needs to a global audience. Modern youth,
and modern aspiration, are borderless.
This technological shift has implications for
the economic sphere in which Muslim youth
operate. But its political implications are
greater still. We must understand and respond
to the emergence of a new, cross-border
political consciousness.
These two forces demography and
technology determine the nature of
opportunity for our youth. Socially and
economically, young people in Islamic
societies want freedom. But it is not the
freedom my fathers generation fought for
freedom from colonial oppression. In an age
of self-determination and development, they
want freedom of opportunity. They want a
world-class education and the freedom to
pursue the options it brings. They want to be
active participants in new digital spaces. They
want strong democratic institutions, and open
and accountable government. And they want
to play their part in civil society, to build a
better nation with their own hands.
Our challenge is to stretch ourselves to
deliver those freedoms without sacrificing
tradition, stability or growth. By responding to
the changes they face, we can engage Muslim
youth with a clear vision of their future
and harness their untapped potential for the
benefit of all. It will require both leadership
and reform.
First, we must focus on education. Although
access is improving, young people find
that their qualifications do not match the
opportunities available in the job market.
We need a greater emphasis on vocational
and technical training, and on standards and

25

the youth issue

a Demographic dividend?

26

outcomes, to ensure that learning unlocks

opportunity rather than closes it off.
We must also open up our economies.
Each country in the Muslim world has
its own strengths and challenges, but as
a general principle, we must build more
dynamic private sectors, and boost our
share of world trade. Twenty-three percent
of the worlds population are Muslim, but
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation nations
conduct just 8.3 percent of global trade.
We have the headroom, and we have the
capacity; it is a matter of further liberalizing
our economies. In so doing, we can make our
nations more competitive, bringing higher
value jobs and stronger growth.
We should pursue structural reforms, to
ensure that our economies can compete in
the industries of the future. Here the youth
themselves are our guide: surveys show that
young Muslims identify the digital economy
and green technology as significant indemand sectors where they ought to have a
natural advantage.
We must also respond to technological
change by recalibrating the way we
think about government, and the way we
communicate with young people. Our
starting point must be recognition of the
fundamental principle of the internet its
autonomy. The internet thrives because
it exists outside of the control of any one
state or authority. It should remain that way.
This does not mean zero regulation, but
independence. We should preserve the online
space as one in which the free exchange of
views is encouraged, in the best traditions
of discourse.
We should open our minds to new
opportunities in the digital economy. As
microfinance and mobile banking have
shown, the ability to manage money on the
move helps young people gain financial
independence and start businesses. We
should do more of our business and
banking online, and support our digital
entrepreneurs.
We must also encourage moderation
and the practice of tolerance. Polls show
that young Muslims want a greater role for
religion in public and political life. We should
show that this trust is well deserved, by
offering a vision of Islam that is moderate
and tolerant.

We should pursue
structural reforms, to
ensure that our economies
can compete in the industries
of the future. Here the youth
themselves are our guide
Finally, we must be prepared to invest
in all of our young people including
women, whose unemployment numbers are
consistently 10 percent higher than men. We
must put our confidence in Muslim youth
as full economic participants; as consumers,
employees, and entrepreneurs. And we
must be unafraid to encourage change in
institutions which stifle young peoples
opportunities. That means reforming
public services, supporting appointment by
merit, and remaining ever-vigilant against
corruption.
Together, these changes will help us
capitalize on our greatest resource: our
youth. It is up to us to show leadership, and
build economies that are prepared for the
future. We must be willing to confront old
assumptions and embrace new technologies,
to open up our economies and reform our
politics. Change will not always be easy;
there will be challenges and uncertainties.
But reform is necessary, and history shows
us it is right. The periods of greatest Islamic
influence were the most intellectually open.
To honor our past, as well as our future,
we should see our youth not as a liability,
but as an asset: an untapped resource that
will allow us to develop and modernize.
Managed properly, this resource can lay the
foundations for great success.
By focusing on economic and political
reform, we can present a compelling vision
of a future defined by opportunity, not
dependency. In so doing, we can offer young
people a meaningful stake in society. That
is not only a powerful safeguard against
disenfranchisement and extremism. It is also
our responsibility to the greatest Muslim
generation that has ever lived. l

SEIZING THE MOMENT

Arab Youth and the Window of Opportunity

Unemployed Tunisian
graduates at a demonstration
in Tunis to demand jobs,
September, 2012

the author
Dato Sri Mohd Najib Tun
Abdul Razak is Prime
Minister of Malaysia
and launched the Global
Movement of Moderates
in 2010.
think. magazine

april 2013

or decades now, we have collectively

viewed the growing youth population
in the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) with trepidation. Policymakers,
both locally and in the West, have
struggled with the long-term challenge of how
to create educational opportunities for the
regions young people and to stimulate the
job creation needed to absorb them into the
labor market, while also positioning themselves
to counter a number of perceived security
threats that are fed by the frustrations of
these generations. The media has informed its
coverage of protests and violent attacks with
deeper analysis into the economic plight of the
regions youth, while scholars have underlined
these perspectives with dire predictions
regarding unemployment and analyses linking
demographics to political instability.

written by Tarik M Yousef

There are indeed grave concerns that must

be addressed. Despite extensive investments
in education and regular efforts at reforming
curricula and pedagogical approaches, our
youth are leaving school without the preparation
they need to be competitive in a labor market
shaped by changing demand and increasingly
global forces. The regional youth unemployment
rate is, at 25 percent, nearly twice the
international average. Those who are able to find
jobs are increasingly doing so in the informal
market, where they struggle to build skills and
expand career trajectories. The challenges faced
by young people in transitioning from school
to work over the past two decades reflect deep
structural issues with local labor markets and

27

the youth issue

a Demographic dividend?

28

as the number
of children
born each year
decreases, the
share of the
total population
comprising
those of working
age increases,
while the share
made up of the
economically
dependent goes
down
the institutions that govern education and
employment, and the lack of flexibility
the regions employers have shown.
Moreover, there are strong and
understandable linkages between youth, their
natural idealism, the growing frustrations they
have felt in the context of economic and political
exclusion, and the potential for social upheaval.
There is a large body of analytical work that
draws strong correlations between the rise of
the youth bulge and political violence.Yet it
is the largely peaceful actions of the regions
youth in the context of the Arab Spring that
most dramatically demonstrates their potential
to effect change. And understanding the wider
demographic context provides an inspiring
subtext to the difficult challenges raised by the
youth population, one that offers a distinct
opportunity for economic growth and increased
prosperity in the region as we go forward.
As with other developing regions, the Arab
world has been experiencing a demographic
transition a long-term process of change
in population structures brought on by the
decline in fertility that accompanies economic
development. Importantly, as the number of
children born each year decreases, the share
of the total population comprising those of

working age increases, while the share made

up of the economically dependent goes down.
In turn, at least theoretically, economies
benefit from higher per capita labor inputs,
higher savings rates and increased domestic
investment, resulting in higher rates of growth.
Internationally, an increase in the economically
active population of one percent a year has been
associated holding all else constant with an
increase in GDP per capita of between 1.5-2
percent a year. The power of this potential
demographic gift is perhaps best illustrated
by the experience of the Asian Tiger economies
during the 1980s, when these countries were
able to leverage the growth of their workingage populations to secure exceptional rates
of growth. Over the 1965-1990 period,
during which East Asia and South East Asia
experienced their own youth bulge, GDP per
capita grew by nearly 6.7 percent a year in
East Asia and 3.8 percent a year in Southeast
Asia. If MENA had had the same demographic
structure during this period, its GDP per capita
would have grown by 3.3 percent a year rather
than the 2.3 percent that it did average.

Yemeni construction
workers learn international
safety standards through
the SilaQual initiative,
a Silatech program to
improve productivity and
reduce recruitment costs for
employers

Today, given the progress that it has made

in reducing total fertility rates, the MENA
region is in a far different position than it was
during the latter half of the 20th century. Since
1990, the average fertility rate in the region
has dropped from five children per woman to
nearly 2.6. In turn, the share of the population
made up of working-age individuals (ages 1564) has increased from 53 percent to over 65
percent. As such, the potential demographic
gift for MENA in terms of economic growth
has increased. This places the region in stark
contrast with the developed world and an
increasing number of developing countries
where the share of the working-age population
is declining and dependency ratios are rising
as a greater share of the population reaches
retirement age. Moreover, the demographic
window of opportunity for MENA is
still opening: the share of the working-age
population will continue to increase until about
2035, when it will peak at 68 percent. Until then,
the region has the potential to make significant
economic gains on the basis of its population
structure alone.
Maximizing these potential gains, however,
will require significant advances in job creation,
as well as the creation of new and more diverse
modes of domestic investment. In particular,

the author

Dr Tarik M Yousef is CEO

of Silatech. A Qatar-based
social initiative that works
to create jobs and expand
economic opportunities for
young people throughout
the Arab world, Silatech
was founded in 2008 by
Her Highness Sheikha
Moza bint Nasser, who
is Chair of its Board of
Trustees.
think. magazine

april 2013

efforts to stimulate employment need to be

directed at providing the regions youth with
new outlets designed to draw on their innate
talents and relatively high level of education,
their growing technological aptitude and
their increasing connectedness with the
larger global community. This will require
new approaches on the part of governments,
civil society and the private sector aimed at
bridging existing deficits in the traditional
education and labor market systems. Such
innovative approaches are emerging rapidly
across the region, particularly in regard to
skills training, improved job matching and
job readiness preparation, entrepreneurship
and enterprise development. In this regard,
the core operational challenge is assessing the
experimentation that is ongoing so as to inform
efforts to replicate successful interventions for
youth and to bring them to scale.
As we move forward, it is important to
note that the youth bulge in the region has
largely peaked. The regions 112 million
youth between the ages of 15 and 29 now
make up nearly 29 percent of the population;
however, between now and 2020, net annual
growth among this age cohort will actually
be negative, while over the past decade,
it grew by an average annual 1.5 percent.
While the number of youth and new labor
market entrants will remain significant as we
go forward, the sheer pressures imposed on
the labor market over the past two decades
are diminishing rapidly. As such, while job
creation in and of itself remains a major need,

we can begin to work diligently at improving

linkages between education and employment,
and bolstering job quality overall for youth
as they begin to lay the foundation for their
careers and the regions economic future.
Moreover, we can pay more attention to a
critical gap in the regions ability to deploy
the talents of a large share of its population:
women.
Despite significant gains in educational
attainment, only about 20 percent of the
regions working-age women are engaged
in the labor force (and among these,
unemployment rates are nearly twice those
of economically active men). This figure
compares to the East Asian average of 65
percent and an international average of
51 percent. Moreover, while it has been
suggested that we are experiencing a
generational shift in regard to female labor
force participation, the rate among women
ages 20-29 reaches only 25 percent. While it
is important to respect the wishes of young
women who remain outside of the labor force,
should that be their choice, one must also
realize that this means that the MENA region
is not taking full advantage of the knowledge
and skills of a large share of its potential
work force. If we are to enjoy our potential
demographic gift and to reach a level of
sustainable growth and development, we need
to work intensively at easing the transition of
women into the labor force and engaging the
emerging generation of women as full agents
in our economy. l

29

the youth issue

radical roots

30

31

A GENERATION AT
From Spain to America and india, youth unrest has spread around
the world. Will we see a repeat of the evenements of 1968, or are the
protests of 1989 a better guide? An acclaimed historian analyses
the trends, from the reactionaries to the radicals

he last few years have seen several

striking examples of youth-led
protest. In 2008, the shooting of a
Greek teenager by a police officer
provoked running street battles
which continued for many weeks and left
simmering long-term resentment in their
wake. In the summer of 2011 London was
set ablaze by angry young people, and in the
same year, youth were at the forefront of the
Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings; the Spanish
indignados (the angry ones) and the Occupy

THE BARRICADES?
Protestors shout slogans
against alleged corruption
scandals on the streets of
Madrid, February 3, 2013

written by Maria Misra

15 to 24 year olds rises to nearly 75 million

worldwide, touching 28 percent in parts of
North Africa and the Middle East and over
50 percent in Greece and Spain, could this
so-called lost generation take to the
barricades? To answer this question our gaze
is probably best focused on history books
rather than crystal balls.
Common cause

The world has seen several transnational

youth movements. The classic example
was that of the year 1848 in Europe, when
students, ever-increasing in numbers
but facing diminishing prospects, made
common cause with nationalist liberals and
impoverished artisans in protest against
authoritarian monarchies. 1919, meanwhile,
saw youth driving anti-colonial unrest across

Movement in New Yorks Zuccotti Park and

elsewhere were soon emulating them. The
most recent examples of youth unrest have
been in New Delhi, where last December
demonstrations against government inaction
over a brutal rape brought the Indian capital
to a standstill for over a week.
Are these evenements harbingers of a global
youth revolt? As unemployment among
think. magazine

april 2013

India, the Middle East and China after the

dashed hopes of the Versailles Treaty, which
failed to apply Wilsonian ideals of national
self-determination to those parts of the world
under the sway of the Western powers.
However, it was in 1968 that for the first
time the worlds youth seemed to speak with
a truly global voice. Alongside the campus
unrest in Paris and Berkeley, there were mass
student protests from Tokyo to Buenos Aires,
from Mexico City to Addis Ababa, and, in the
Communist world, from Prague to Beijing. By
the early 1970s similar revolts were erupting
across South and South East Asia.
At first glance then, the youth politics of
the post-2008 crisis might seem a direct
descendant of the post-1968 convulsions.
But such comparisons should be treated
with caution for it is, in fact, very difficult to

the youth issue

radical roots

Often these youthful

protestors sought not so
much to dethrone as to
reform their fathers.
in India, students yielded
willingly to the leadership
of an octogenarian
nationalist veteran and a
72-year-old Gandhian
welfare worker
empire, from the Algerian war in France,
to civil rights in the United States, and to
lingering legacies of fascism in Italy and
Germany.
In the poorer global South, in contrast,
student movements were much less
concerned with questions of overweening
paternalism, individual autonomy and radical
democratization. Rather, they were protesting
at the failures of post-colonial nationalists to
fulfill their promises symbolized, above all,
by the 1955 Bandung Conference of Third
World nationalist leaders which led to the
formation of the Non-Aligned Movement to bring development and modernity to
their countries.
Their anger was directed at the corruption
of authority rather than at authority per
se. Often these youthful protestors sought
not so much to dethrone as to reform their
fathers. And so in India, students yielded
willingly to the leadership of an octogenarian
nationalist veteran, Morarji Desai, and
a 72-year-old Gandhian welfare worker,
Jayaprakash Narayan, in 1977. Three years
earlier in Thailand the king had emerged
as the preferred honest broker between the
students and the Thai government; and even
in Mexico, with its US-style refried Elvis
youth culture, the goal was to make the
president a more caring figure, not to
depose him.
Moreover, far from being uniformly radical,
many student movements were remarkably

32

generalize about 1968. While global in scope,

its various youth movements were far from
uniform in character.
The one thing they most certainly shared
was a context of extraordinary expansion
in universities in many countries during the
1950s and 1960s. This led to overcrowded
lecture halls, overworked lecturers and
outdated syllabi. Complaints about the
standards of teaching and facilities were a
perennial theme in protests across the world.
But there were major differences, the
most important being between richer
and poorer countries. In the wealthy West
(including Japan), and to some extent in
Communist Eastern Europe, a number of
forces were crucial. Principal among them
was the emergence of an international youth
culture, which was in turn dependent on a
new consumerism. For the first time, young
people had enough cash to shape their own

cultural identities, and they became avid

consumers of American-inspired fashion
and music. Alongside this came a passionate
belief in individual self-expression, which
fuelled a fury toward paternalistic authority
and a call for a radical democratization of all
areas of life, including gender and sexuality.
Crystallizing all of this was the Romantic cult
of the young rebel whether it was James
Dean, Elvis Presley or, most ubiquitous of all,
Che Guevara.

Students riot in Paris, May

14, 1968

Refried elvis

The targets of these rebels were numerous:

professors, parents, and police. But the Great
Satan was the government of the United
States, which was waging a bloody war
against a small, peasant nation Vietnam.
The Vietnam issue ignited the protests in the
capitals of many of Americas allies, but the
tinder lay in more local questions of race and
think. magazine

april 2013

reactionary. Among the colleges of Delhi

University, for example, 70 percent of the
student unions were dominated by the youth
wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization.
In Thailand, too, the student movement split
into factions, with humanities degree students
moving into left-wing politics, while their
technical and vocational peers rallied to the
center-right.
So which 1968, the Western or the
Southern, has exerted the greatest influence
since? The Western version has undoubtedly
spawned several heirs, most notably in the
anti-Communist revolts of 1989, which in
many ways can be seen as the Eastern blocs
1968. Many of the demonstrators of the
1980s consciously emulated the absurdist,
non-violent happenings of 1968; in the case
of the Polish underground movement, The
Orange Alternative, that involved dressing
up as elves and dancing around defense
installations and armament stockpiles.
In Czechoslovakia 1989s intellectual
leaders, such as Vaclav Havel, had been heroes
of the 1968 Prague Spring, and were imbued
with the romanticism and individualism of
60s rock-and-roll culture. Havels dissident
organization, Charter 77, was formed partially
in defense of a persecuted rock group, The
Plastic People of the Universe. Rock music
was just as central in the Tiananmen Square
student protests of 1989, where Nothing to
My Name, a song by the cult youth hero
Cui Jian from his provocatively titled album
RocknRoll on the New Long March, became
an unofficial anthem for the demonstrators.
rock and revolution

The parallels between 1968 and 1989 are

not surprising, given their shared economic
and historical contexts: the beginnings of a
consumer culture, political relaxation and
high economic expectations. These conditions
could also be seen in those parts of the postCommunist world that had yet to experience
their own 1989s. The color revolutions against
these elites in the 2000s the Rose (Georgia,
2003), Orange (Ukraine, 2004) and Tulip
(Kyrgyzstan, 2005) - therefore continued
the tradition of the Western 1968, with their
emphasis on non-violence and the important
role of youth culture and rock music.
So which 1968 is most dominant today?
We clearly need to distinguish between a

33

environment vs development
the youth issue
name of feature
young leaders

the youth issue

radical roots

34

recession-hit America, Europe and Middle East,

and the more resilient emerging economies
India, China, Russia and Latin America. As we
would expect, the Western 1968 has not been
evident in the developed world. Economic
confidence is shattered, the future seems grim,
and no longer does youth possess a distinctive
identity since its culture has become ubiquitous,
encompassing every generation from early
childhood to ageing hipsters. Social media usage
does divide the generations, but it seems to be a
force for atomization and passivity as much as
for action and organization.
If anything, the West today is more likely
to emulate the
Southern 1968,
with its angry
attacks on corrupt
elites (the one
percent) and its
lack of ideological
unity. In Europe
today we see sharp
divisions between
the Occupy-cumEco left and a
more striving or
nationalistic right.
And youth will
become even more
divided when we
reach the end
of the post-war
higher education
boom. In Britain
the government
is openly calling
for a reduction in
student numbers, while millions of Americans
struggle under the burden of student debt.
This is likely to polarize the 15-24 year-old
generation between a shrinking degree-holding
elite and a much less privileged majority back
to the situation prevailing before the 1950s
and 1960s.
It is, then, in the emerging South that we
see the conditions for the emergence of a
Western 1968, although it has not happened yet.
These countries have experienced a consumer
revolution over the last two decades, and youth
are able to forge a separate identity from their
parents. Moreover youth unemployment is far
lower than in the West, granting students the
confidence to challenge old social norms and
conservative mores.

The extraordinary Delhi rape protests are

the first significant example of widespread
1960s-type challenges to paternalism and
gender hierarchies in Indian politics. From a
criticism of a specific case of police bungling,
these demonstrations rapidly began to
express the younger generations outrage
at perceived sexism and authoritarianism
among older politicians of all parties.
We see less of such 1960s-type challenges
to gender hierarchies in China, but there
is evidence of a generational conflict in
the cities over censorship and the social
media. The blogosphere reverberates with
indignation at the
dyed and rouged
mandarins of the
older generation,
and the recent
confrontation
between staff at
the Guangzhou
Southern Weekly
newspaper and
the propaganda
authorities is
perhaps a sign of
things to come.
Yet even if
Delhi and Beijing
seem best placed
to become the
Paris and Prague
of 21st century
youth protest, these
societies remain
divided in ways that
generation alone
cannot bridge between urban and rural,
small-town and metropolis, white and blue
collar. The radical students are inevitably a
small minority confined to the larger cities.
We should remember that radical students
were in the minority in 1968 too, but with
all the absurdities of flower-power, it is their
radical vision of gender, race and personal
freedom that has become the mainstream in
the West. And although the medium-term
future looks bleak for the youth of the Western
old world, in the emerging economies of
the South there is a future still to win. We may
not have Woodstocks in Beijing or Summers
of Love in downtown Delhi just yet, but the
future is probably brighter and more orange
than we think. l

THE PROMISE OF HOPE

Often condemned as apathetic when not predicted to face
lives of joblessness young people could be forgiven for feeling
unfairly criticized by their elders, who enjoyed decades of
growth. Here Think. profiles five inspirational men and women
under 40 who are dedicated to working for a better future:
leaders of tomorrow who are setting a shining example

youth no longer
possesses a
distinctive
identity its
culture has
become ubiquitous,
encompassing
every generation
from early
childhood to
ageing hipsters

35

the author
Maria Misra is a Lecturer
in Modern History at the
University of Oxford and
a Fellow of Keble College.
Her latest book is Vishnus
Crowded Temple: India
since the Great Rebellion.
think. magazine

april 2013

the youth issue

young leaders

inhabitants, against Europes 35. For their young

inhabitants, the experience of living with chronic
pollution is heightened by a surprisingly close
connection to the land. Many of those now
living in cities were born in rural areas, and
most urban dwellers still have links to family
in the countryside. The experience of living
in a pristine area before pollution happens is
still very lively in the memory of many of my
contemporaries, says Lo. People can see that
our material wealth is accumulating but there is
a huge price tag attached to it.

written by Rachel Aspden

Marwa Saleh, a fifth-year medical

36

student at Weill Cornell Medical College in

Qatar, is struggling to make herself heard over
the cheerful clamor of a Tanzanian classroom.
Were at a girls boarding school doing health
education, she explains. Ive learned about so
many aspects of global healthcare here, its
been fantastic.
Saleh, who was born and brought up in
Lebanon and moved to Qatar to attend medical
school, is in East Africa under the auspices of
the Global Health Club, a student organization
she founded with two friends in 2009. As firstyear students they had seen Qatars tuberculosis
isolation unit set up to treat migrant workers
suffering from the disease and at the same
time learned about the interconnectedness
of medical treatment from the Global Health
Education Consortium.
We realized there was a need to focus on
the concept of health for all, Saleh explains.
What inspired me was seeing this need for a
more multifaceted approach, and recognizing
we must connect that with social determinants
for health. The friends founded the club on the
principle that a doctors responsibility towards
healthcare is to ensure that it reaches those who
cannot reach it.
Through this student-led health club,
we are able to discuss healthcare and link it
with problems we have in our societies, says
Saleh. As well as its extensive education and
awareness program within the local medical
student community, the club is also committed
to serving the expatriates who make up 85
percent of Qatars population. Students
educate migrant workers about tuberculosis,
collect reading materials for those undergoing
treatment in the isolation unit and are planning
a camp offering general check-ups for cleaners
and construction workers. The club is also
beginning to expand its activities beyond Qatar.
At the minute Im working on an exchange
program with Tanzania, says Saleh. This is
our new understanding of global health: bilateral
exchange and partnership.
Studying in Qatar offers so many opportunities,
she explains, that the challenge is to find how
best to make use of them. Students there have
so much energy, so many ideas about initiatives
they want to pursue through Qatar Foundation.

How do you green a country that is

What inspired me was seeing this need for a more

multifaceted approach, and recognizing we must
connect that with social determinants for health.
Marwa Saleh, 23
Global health activist
Qatar

So one of the things we are struggling with is

trying to pave our own way and be role models
for ourselves, and looking for examples outside
our region that we can learn from and adapt.
A lot of my thinking about what can be done
and what my role in this might be has been
shaped by international global health gurus
and philanthropists, she says, mentioning
epidemiologist Paul Farmer and his biography
Mountains beyond Mountains, and The Blue
Sweater by social entrepreneur Jacqueline
Novogratz. I dont like to dream too much, I
think its better to go day by day and see where
that leads you, says Saleh. But what I hope for
is better global health partnerships within the
Middle East and between the Middle East and
other regions partnerships that would ensure
better quality healthcare and health equity
for everyone.
think. magazine

the worlds biggest energy consumer, with an

economy still growing by eight percent a year?
Thats the challenge faced by Lo Sze Ping, an
environmentalist trying to harness people power
to tackle the ecological crisis precipitated by
Chinas ongoing boom.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Lo is himself
a native of Chinas growing urban sprawl. In
1992, a student trip to the tropical rainforests
of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, ignited
his passion for conservation. I had read about
globalization, I had read about transnational
corporations, he says. But in Sarawak I was
staying with indigenous communities whose
traditional land was threatened by loggers
turning their trees into throwaway chopsticks for
Japanese sushi joints. And that was really mindopening. It was a city boys first experience of
the cost of unfettered development. I saw firsthand that both the people and the forest ecology
are paying the price for the wasteful lifestyle of
so-called modern civilization.
After this revelation Lo threw his energies
into leading the development of Greenpeace
in China, working as campaign director for the
fledgling organization for a decade. During that
time, he tracked the mounting consequences
of his countrys rapid industrialization and
urbanization. Young people in Chinas cities
are growing up in a deteriorating environment.
The quality of the air we breathe, the water we
drink and the food we are eating is going down
sharply, he says.
The scale of the problem is huge: by 2030,
China will have 225 cities with over one million
april 2013

Lo Sze Ping, 39
Environmentalist
China

The key to putting this awareness into action,

Lo believes, lies in the smartphones and social
media that are transforming the lives of Chinas
younger generation. Just as in Europe and
North Africa, as this technology has spread,
people have developed a new aspiration for a
citizen identity that emphasizes individual rights
and the freedom to express their own ideas,
he explains. Theyre ready for a future where
they can play a more important role. Lo cites
Wikipedia as a new model of how knowledge
is shared and used. It shows that the role of
change agents has shifted, he says. Instead
of providing solutions, we need to provide a
platform to collect small intelligent solutions
from the people.
Inspired by these possibilities, in 2012
Lo founded an environmental NGO
called Greenovation Hub. Rather than
the conventional model of disseminating
information from the center, we are
inviting citizens to be active participants in
environmental protection, so they can share
their ideas and experiences, he says. One of
their first tasks is to tackle Chinas drinking
water crisis: according to government statistics,
around 300m of its people are drinking unsafe
water. The only problem is that no one knows
who or where they are. Greenovations simple
home test kit enables citizens to check the
quality of their drinking water and upload the
results for mapping and collation.
Despite the enormous challenges, Lo
is optimistic that the days of Chinas
development first, environment second
approach are limited. The government is
quite pragmatic and rational. If you externalize
the costs of environmental pollution, some
provinces already have negative GDP growth,
he says. So even from an economic point of
view, its clear that we need to have a different
model of development.

37

the youth issue

young leaders

communitys resistance to education for girls.

After I had finished primary school, my father
didnt want me to continue, remembers Bachal.
He said I was only going to get married and
have children. So for three years, Bachals
mother concealed her daughters secret: she
was attending middle school in another part of
Karachi. The experience made Bachal realize
how valuable her opportunity was. In 2003, she
says, it struck me that I could teach friends who
could not go to school. The teenager gathered
old school books and paper from her classmates,
acquired a blackboard and started to instruct a
few local children in her own home.

38

I want to change the way my community looks

at education, and I will continue to do this until
my last breath.
Humaira Bachal and her younger

sister Tahira were the only children in their slum

settlement on the fringes of Karachi to attend
primary school. Their neighbors in Moach
Goth, like Bachals family, were mainly poor
migrants from rural Sindh. These people left
everything behind they could hardly put two
meals on their table each day, let alone educate
their children, says Bachal. But her mother
Zainab Bibi, whose Iranian family had been
educated, persuaded the girls father to allow
them to attend at least basic classes.
Though the family could afford her lessons,
Bachal soon ran up against her conservative

Humaira Bachal, 25
Education activist
Pakistan

In many parts of Pakistan, girls seeking an

education face serious social, cultural and
political obstacles. The countrys overall literacy
rate is only 57 percent, a rate that drops sharply
in poor and rural areas and among women. In
addition to universal underfunding and neglect,
in many parts schools and female pupils face
more violent opposition such as the Talibans
October 2012 attack on a school bus carrying
the 15-year-old education activist Malala
Yousafzai. These are the challenges Bachal
is determined to fight. Education is a basic
need and a fundamental right for every human
being, she says. I want to change the way
my community looks at education, and I will
continue to do this until my last breath.
In Moach Goth, local girls and boys flocked
to Bachals after-school classes. By the time she
was 15, the numbers had grown too large for
her home. With the help of the Rotary Club and
local NGOs, she started the Dream Foundation,
renting a large empty building nearby, which
she slowly equipped with basic furniture,
blackboards and fans. The Dream Model
Street School now teaches over 700 students
in shifts from 7am to 10pm, runs adult literacy
classes, religious education and computer skills
courses. Classes are given by Bachal and a team
of volunteers aged between 13 and 24, who
continue their own studies as they teach.
As the Model Street School grows, Bachal
says incidents such as the Malala Yousafzai
attack will never deter her from her goal of
making education accessible to all boys and
girls. Just the opposite, she says. Now Im not
afraid. It is not just one Malala or one Bachal
who has raised a voice to change this situation.
There are a lot of other girls who are trying to
change things. Even if they kill 100 Humairas,
they wont be able to stop us.
think. magazine

In January 1999, when Juan David

Aristizbal Ospina was nine years old,

a massive earthquake shook the Coffee
Triangle area of central Colombia. Over
2,000 people were killed, many thousands
more injured and an unknown number
disappeared in the chaos that followed.
Aristizbals 17-year-old sister told her
mother that she was volunteering with the
Red Cross, and over the next weeks used
her computer skills to develop a database
locating victims of the quake.
This was when I realized that when you
have a talent you have to use it, remembers
Aristizbal. It was the start of his own career
in social contribution. Over the next years,
the schoolboy gathered over 1,000 young
people who raised money to connect those
in need with organizations that could help
them. Im from the coffee lands, where my
grandfather owned a farm, says Aristizbal.
I grew up playing with the children of the
coffee pickers and wondering why I went to
kindergarten, why I had medicine, and
they didnt.
Now, Aristizbal is the founder and
president of Buena Nota, an organization
that supports social initiatives within
Colombia. Aristizbals system connects
qualified young volunteers with social
entrepreneurs who need support in areas
such as strategy, finance or design. When
you give people the opportunity to create,
to experience other things, maybe they will
decide what they love. And we need people
with passion because only they have the
discipline and force and necessary skills to
create the world that we need. Currently,
Buena Nota has over one million active
participants.
Though Colombia has many chronic social
problems, the projects application stretches
beyond its borders. I think its a worldwide
problem for our generation, how we can
develop our talents, says Aristizbal. First,
education systems in general dont promote
talent. They force students to be good in all
subjects and neglect their particular gifts.
Second, corruption kills talent, and we see
this in Latin America in a big way. Jobs and
contracts are awarded nepotistically, without
fair, open competition. My contemporaries
experienced this again and again. He points
out that this inequality of opportunity is
april 2013

Juan David Aristizbal

Ospina, 23
Social entrepreneur
Colombia

compounded, in third world countries, by

the technology gap and that tapping into
the energy of these young people is the only
way to address the challenges facing their
generation. When you really help from the
best of you, you will see that in the results,
he says. When I die, I want people to
remember me as a man who helped people
to discover their talents and how they can
use them to change the world.

When you give people the opportunity to create,

to experience other things, maybe they will decide
what they love. And we need people with
passion because only they have the discipline
and force and necessary skills to create the world
that we need.
39

the youth issue

young leaders

Correspondence

Where others look at South

40

Africas burgeoning youth population

and see problems chief among them an
unemployment rate of up to 50 percent
Vuyisa Qabaka sees potential. From his roots
in Mdantsane, South Africas second-largest
township, Qabaka has risen to become one
of his countrys top young entrepreneurs.
Now, from his Cape Town base, he works on
a range of projects to develop communities
and pass on his business skills, from fostering
a culture of entrepreneurship to tackling
alcohol dependency in townships.
Qabakas own career began at the
University of Cape Town, where he joined a
group of student friends working on startup
businesses. I experienced the possibility of
being self-motivated, free thinking and having
the ability to create or be part of something
far greater than yourself, he explains. But
profit alone was not enough Qabaka was
keenly aware of the interlinked challenges
facing his generation.
Globally, young people now inhabit a
smaller, more connected world in which
everyone has an opinion. What arises as
a result of that is increased individualism,
a loss of our sense of humanity, he says.
Along with this, his young countrymen
and women have their own set of local
problems. Southern Africa is the birthplace
of humanity. It is uniquely placed to help
the rest of the world. But it is also hugely
challenged, for example in terms of literacy,
access to information and healthcare.
In response to these issues, Qabaka founded
Kasi Economics, an influential blog collating
solutions to development and social issues
in townships, alongside an online platform
that supports and develops new South
African social enterprises. He also advises
social projects including Name Your
Hood, which rebuilds a positive sense of
community identity by renaming streets and
areas in Cape Towns Gugulethu township.
The NYH project addresses massive
infrastructure backlogs in the township,
says Qabaka, but it also deals with the
psychological influence of the apartheid era.
He explains that Gugulethus notorious NY
district naming system derives from the
apartheid-era term native yard. Renaming
these areas allows people to feel proud of
their communities for the first time

they are studying in order to

gain better jobs and social
prestige, but do not have
any interest in the language
for its own sake the key to
learning that defines their
more successful classmates.
Elspeth Black
Cairo, Egypt

DOOMY DESAI

UNEQUAL MEASURES

Vuyisa Qabaka, 32
Entrepreneur and township
development leader
South Africa

the author
Rachel Aspden is a former
Literary Editor of the New
Statesman and Winston
Churchill Memorial Trust
Travelling Fellow. She is
currently writing a book about
the youth of the Arab uprisings.

ironically Gugulethu means our pride in

Xhosa, he says.
Its when he describes his work in the
townships that Qabaka really lights up. Now
youre talking to me! he exclaims. One of
my favorite projects is called HUHO Street
Gyms, he says. HUHO uses recycled paint
tins to create weights priced from US$3, so
for just US$200, new entrepreneurs can buy
or be donated an entire gym set-up they can
run to supplement their household income.
I love this project because it addresses
so many issues not just joblessness and
income generation but encouraging recycling,
a culture of fitness and positive social
interaction, says Qabaka.
With government struggling to tackle
catastrophic unemployment rates, Qabaka
believes it is the growth of internet
connectivity largely via mobile technology
that offers the best hope for South African
youth. The internet has a catalytic impact,
he says. The landscape is changing, and it is
helping entrepreneurial culture find a footing
in all our communities. l
think. magazine

As a resident of Nairobi,
I read Zoe Floods article
(Suffer the Children) with
great interest. In Kenya, a
country in which booming
economic growth tends
to benefit a select few, the
rich live in sequestered
opulence while the poor
scrape together coins to buy
their childrens way to their
fifth birthdays. Yet income
inequality likewise threatens
to tear apart the social
fabric of one of the worlds
most developed countries,
the United States. Some
US cities, such as Topeka,
Kansas, sport the same
inequality index as Nairobi,
whose squalid slums are
separated from gilded estates
by imposing wrought
iron gates.
As in the United States,
the same indifference to
the realization that the lot
of the rich and poor alike
april 2013

chart a nations fate escapes

even the most progressive
elements of Kenyas educated
elite. Speaking of the foul
conditions in Kibera which
Ms Flood notes is one of
Africas largest slums one
local journalist recently
commented that the house
help need somewhere to live,
dont they? Its sobering to
consider that some of the
problems of the developing
and developed worlds may
differ by factors of degree,
but not of essence.
Jay Bahadur,
Nairobi, Kenya

SPEAKING IN TONGUES
The statistics in Rachel
Aspdens analysis (Mind
your Language) presented
a fascinating portrait of
the different approaches to
mastering new languages,
and reinforced my belief
that English appears easier

because learners are able

to have more accessible
language contact through
websites, films and songs.
But the author is right to
point out that learning a
language is not merely
about the grammar and
vocabulary, but also
understanding a particular
way of thinking. I see this
from two angles: I study
Arabic and teach English.
While I desperately attempt
to avoid the minefields
in Arabic formalities, I
notice many of my less able
students lack an awareness
of the English language in
the cultural sense. It seems
to be due to the fact that

write
to us

Lord Desais hatchet job

on the UN and all its works
(A Marginal Institution
Searching for Relevance)
was highly entertaining and
he certainly made his case.
What, however, does he
suggest should fulfil the roles
that the United Nations,
for all its faults, currently
performs?
He would surely agree that
we do need supranational
bodies that can help regulate
our world, rather than just
allowing mighty nations to
impose their will on others.
Yes, reform of the UN may
be a constantly ongoing
process, but it is better to
retain hope and faith in
the organizations ability to
bring countries and peoples
together than to carp from
the sidelines. Not just better
but imperative for there is
simply no alternative.
Joan Walters,
New York, USA

At Think., we welcome comments from readers. If you would like to

respond to any of the articles, email us at:
Think@qf.org.qa
Mark your email for publication. Please do not send attachments
Follow us on:

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41

The think. debate

written by
Bill Gates

A
42

n agreement in 2000 by the

United Nations focused
on eight goals aimed at
improving the lives of the
worlds poorest people. These
Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) were
supported by 189 nations,
and the UN set 2015 as
the deadline for achieving
them. This was the first time
goals that called for specific
percentage improvement
were picked across a set of
crucial areas such as health,
education, and basic income.
As 2015 approaches, the
world is taking a hard look
at how it is doing on the
goals. Although we wont
achieve them all, weve made
amazing progress, and the
goals have become a report
card for how the world is
performing against major
problems affecting the poor.
The MDG target of reducing
extreme poverty by half has
been reached ahead of the
deadline, as has the goal of
halving the proportion of
people who lack access to
safe drinking water. Some
goals, however, were set at
such an ambitious level that
they will be missed.

Were also not on track to

meet one of the most critical
goals reducing the number
of children who die under
the age of five by two-thirds.
Weve made substantial
progress. The number of
children who die has declined
from nearly 12 million in
1990 to 6.9 million in 2011.
While that means 14,000
fewer children around the
world are dying every day
than in 1990, we wont reach
the two-thirds target by 2015.
Mapping
the Vaccinations

MY FIGHT
TO END POLIO

Eradicating a disease that

once paralyzed more than
400,000 children a year is
within reach. Setting targets,
as the Millennium Development
Goals did, really can make
the difference with the right
approach and constant
refinement. So lets rid the
world of polio by 2019
we can do it

Polio eradication is a top

priority for the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation,
a primary focus for me,
and a powerful example of
the importance of accurate
measurement. Starting in
1988, organizations including
the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention,
Rotary International, Unicef,
and the World Health
Organization, along with
many countries, agreed to
the goal of eradicating polio.
Targeting an explicit goal
focused political will and
opened purse strings to pay
for large-scale immunization
campaigns that led to very
rapid progress. By 2000, the
virus had been wiped out of
the Americas, Europe, and
most of Asia.
The number of global polio
cases was less than 250 last
year, but getting rid of the
very last few is the hardest
part. In January 2012, after
think. magazine

years of battling the disease,

India celebrated a full 12
months without a single
case of polio. Most people
expected the country to be
the most difficult place to
eliminate polio because of
its densely crowded cities,
huge rural areas in the north,
poor sanitation, large mobile
populations, and over 27
million children born every
year more than in all of subSaharan Africa that need
to be vaccinated. Stopping
the circulation of the virus
everywhere in the country
was the eradication initiatives
biggest accomplishment in
the past decade.
There are now just three
countries that have never
stopped transmission of
polio: Nigeria, Pakistan
and Afghanistan. I visited
northern Nigeria four years
ago to try to understand why
eradication is so difficult
there. I saw that routine
public health services were
failing: fewer than half the
children were getting vaccines
regularly, and there were no
reliable figures for how many
children lived in each area.
One huge problem the
polio program found was
that many small settlements
in the region were missing
from vaccinators handdrawn maps and lists
documenting the location
of villages and numbers of
children. As a result, children
werent getting vaccinated.
Often villages on the border
between two maps werent
april 2013

The number of
global polio cases
was less than
250 last year, but
getting rid of the
very last few is the
hardest part
assigned to any team. To make
matters worse, the estimated
distance between villages
was sometimes off by miles,
making it impossible for some
vaccinators to do the job they
were assigned.
To fix this, the polio workers
walked through all high-risk
areas in the northern part
of the country. Step by step,
they explored these areas and
spoke with people, adding
3,000 communities to the
immunization campaigns.
The program is also using
high-resolution satellite images
to create even more detailed
maps. And since the new
maps show the true distances
between settlements, managers
can now allocate vaccinators
efficiently by giving them a full
days work but no more.
The government and its
partners will need to keep
working closely to adjust tools
and approaches like these to

measure coverage in northern

Nigeria more accurately. But
progress is definitely being
made, and more children are
being reached.
The insecurity in the
remaining endemic countries
represents another challenge
for the campaign. In
December 2012, nine polio
vaccinators in Pakistan were
murdered and another nine
health workers this January.
In February, nine polio
vaccinators in northern
Nigeria were murdered. It
is unimaginable to me why
health workers, whose only
goal was to improve childrens
health and end polio, were
targeted. In my eyes the
victims are heroes, and the
best way to respect their
memory is to finish the job
they gave their lives for. The
polio program will continue,
with additional efforts to
improve the safety of workers

and to increase the support of

local leaders.
The global polio
community is now finalizing
a detailed plan that I believe
should allow us to finish
the job of polio eradication
within the next six years. The
measurement systems put
in place by the eradication
initiative will be invaluable for
other health care activities,
including routine vaccination
of infants, which means the
legacy of polio eradication
will live beyond stopping a
disease that once paralyzed
more than 400,000 children
every year.
The Way Forward

The lives of the poorest have

improved more rapidly in
the past 15 years than ever
before, yet I am optimistic
that we will do even better in
the next 15. After all, human
knowledge is increasing.
Skeptics point out that we
have a hard time delivering
new tools to the people who
need them. This is where
the innovation of using
measurement is making a big
difference. Setting clear goals,
picking the right approach,
and then measuring results
to get feedback and refine
the approach continually
helps us to deliver tools and
services to everybody who
will benefit. Although I am an
optimist, I am not blind to the
problems we face. There are
challenges we must overcome
to speed up progress in the
next 15 years.

43

briefing
Bill Gates holds a baby during a
visit to Manhica Health Research
Center in Mozambique

44

the kind of goodnews story that

happens one life at a
time doesnt get the
same visibility as a
big setback

Aid is critical. It helps

meet the basic needs of
people in the poorest
countries. It funds
innovation in the creation of
new tools and services and in
their delivery. Unfortunately,
aid generosity is threatened
by big deficits in almost all
rich countries.
My second concern is
whether the world will

align around a clear set of

goals. The United Nations
is starting to map out new
goals for the years following
the 2015 expiration of the
current MDGs. They were
coherent because they
focused on helping the
poorest people in the world.
The groups that needed
to work together on the
MDGs were easy to identify,
and they could be held
accountable for cooperation
and progress.
But I hope everyone who
reads this is excited to see
how much progress the
world has made in helping
the poorest in the past 15
years. It is the kind of goodnews story that happens one
life at a time and so often
doesnt get the same visibility
as a big setback like the
outbreak of a new epidemic.
From time to time we should
step back and celebrate the
achievements that come
with having the right goals
combined with political will,
generous aid, and innovation
in tools and their delivery. It
has certainly deepened my
commitment to this work. l

Constitutionalism is clearly at the heart of the process of real

change that millions of Arab men and women have agitated
and, in some cases, died for in the past two years. p46

45

Bill Gates is the Co-Chairman

of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and the CoFounder of Microsoft. This
essay is exclusively adapted for
Think. from the foundations
annual letter from Mr Gates
@BillGates
think. magazine

april 2013

briefing
after the spring

46

For decades the people of the Arab Spring

countries endured dominance by illegitimate
ruling elites, but the populist demand for change
has produced national deliberations and a new,
revived citizenship for millions. This process, argues
one of regions foremost analysts, represents
the real birth of the modern Arab world

e are living through the

single most significant
moment in the modern
history of the Arab world
since the existing regional
states were created nearly a century ago by a
combination of retreating European colonial
powers and indigenous national movements.
This is because, for the first time ever,
citizens of Arab countries are defining their
governance systems, articulating their national
identity and values, determining the rights
of citizens and the limits of state power, and
shaping official policies that reflect popular
sentiments. The substance of this endeavor
is to put into practice the epic principle of
the consent of the governed. The vehicle
for doing this is the promulgation of new
constitutions that credibly reflect a national
consensus. This constitutional moment
represents the real birth of the modern
Arab world, because it is anchored in a
combination of populist political legitimacy,

47

written by Rami G Khouri

national deliberations and consensus that have

all been missing from the modern history
of our region, which has been largely one of
elite decision-making by a narrow circle of
individuals often working under the shadow
of foreign dominance.
Since December 2010, citizens across the
Arab world have been calling for three broad
things: social justice, citizenship under the
rule of law, and constitutional reforms. Even
in countries that have not had massive street
demonstrations that overthrew regimes, like
Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco, citizens have
demanded changes in the constitutional
systems that would enhance their rights
and equalities. Constitutionalism is clearly
at the heart of the process of real change
that millions of Arab men and women have
agitated and, in some cases, died for in the
past two years.
think. magazine

april 2013

briefing
after the spring

Citizens know in their bones that in the

new Arab world being born, constitutions
matter. Because these documents define us
as citizens of sovereign states, they capture
our values and guarantee our rights and
responsibilities, and they limit the power of
the state. They affirm our humanity, which
is why millions of people have been on
the streets fighting to ensure that this time
around, after three generations of dilapidated
statehood and denied citizenship, these
constitutions will have integrity, and make us
proud to be citizens of sovereign Arab states.

INTENSITY AND UNDERSTANDING

People now
look to these
constitutions
and the
processes that
create them with
great hope

HISTORIC CHANGES

48

This process will take many decades to

stabilize, but it has started in earnest. As
the various uprisings, revolutions and
transformations move into their third year,
we witness a very wide range of situations
in countries whose populations enjoy very
different standards of well-being and whose
ruling power elites and governments are
accorded varying levels of legitimacy. But as
we survey the ongoing events, particularly
in countries like Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain,
Egypt, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Kuwait and
Jordan, we can identify five broad historic
changes that are taking place that shape this
constitutional moment and explain both
its complexity and its erratic movement
forward.
The first is the emergence of new
legitimacies, in terms of governance
structures, leaders and political actors. The
transition from mass public humiliation to
newfound legitimacy in the exercise of power
is a critical foundational change that is taking
place in these Arab national reconfigurations.
The second lies in the range of those
new actors who now participate in the
novel process of contested politics in a
public sphere, and who will shape national
government systems and policies at home
and abroad. Most notable among these
actors are revolutionary and other youth,
individual citizens with the power to choose
and change governments and presidents,
Muslim Brothers and more hard-line Salafist
Islamists (some of whom lead or participate
in coalition governments), tribes (some with
militias), secular-nationalist political parties,
the armed forces that operate in the open or
behind the scenes, the judiciary, civil society
groups, labor unions, and private sector

interests. They represent the important new

reality that very few people are now politically
excluded or marginalized, as was the case
previously when the vast majority of citizens
were shut out from the decision-making
process.
The third is new accountabilities across
society, as power and public decisions now
are more often held to checks and balances
by other legitimate actors and institutions.
This applies across the board, to presidents,
parliaments, ministers, and security-military
officials, as well as the private sector and
foreign powers. This means that most
important decisions have to be validated by
others; no single group in evolving pluralistic
republics like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya can
try to monopolize power and dominate the
state decision-making process.
The fourth is the development of new
rules, primarily in the form of constitutions
that capture the key legitimacy and
accountability imperatives, and transform the
concept of democratic pluralism and citizens
rights into practical applications of the rule
of law. The most advanced cases of extensive
consultations and intensive contestations
to create new constitutions have occurred
in the last two years in Tunisia, Egypt and
Libya, and milder constitutional reforms are
ongoing in Jordan, Morocco and Yemen. This
institutionalization of the rights of citizens,
the limits of state power, and the equal
application of the rule of law to all citizens is
historic (it never happened before seriously)
and historical (it will go on for decades, or, if
France and the United States are examples of
constitutional development, for centuries).

The fifth significant change underway that

is captured in the constitutional process is
the negotiation and definition of a series of
balances in several crucial realms of public
life. These include, most importantly, the
relationship between military and civilian
officials, between religiosity and secularism
in public life, between centralized and more
diffused power, and between private-triballocal and public-national identities.
think. magazine

april 2013

When Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on

fire on December 17, 2010, to protest his lack
of socio-economic and political rights as a
Tunisian citizen, he could not have imagined
that his dramatic act would unleash such an
outpouring of demands for change across the
entire Arab world, one that would finally push
us all into this constitutional moment.
One of the heartening developments across
North Africa has been the spectacle of citizens
who express intense emotions as they debate
constitutional drafts that will shape their
political systems for many years to come. This
has sometimes been accompanied by a tragic
cost in Egypt the constitutional transition has
included street fights and a few deaths but
it has also included boycotts by judges, and
mass demonstrations that forced the elected
president to rescind a decree he had issued
related to the constitutional referendum. A
main reason for this intensity is that citizens
fully understand why their new constitutions
are important to them and to the development
of their countries. Arab constitutions for the
past century in fact, since the first modern
Arab constitution was promulgated in 1861
in Tunisia have all promised a full range
of rights and freedoms that usually were
never fully enforced, leaving it to securityminded governments and narrow ruling
elites to monopolize power in a manner that
deeply disenfranchised most citizens. Things
reached such a degrading stage in recent years
that they sparked the current uprisings and
revolutions.
People now look to these constitutions and
the processes that create them with great hope,
because they capture in a single phenomenon
every important personal and national issue
that matters to the millions of Arab men and
women who have lived in political humiliation
for decades. For starters, these constitutional
events represent the first political processes
in which every citizen has a say and a vote
that truly matters. They understand that the
charters they are drawing up will shape their
national political system and its institutions
way into the future, define the new political
rules, and express the collective national values
of the people, while achieving consensus on
the protection of minorities, the relative powers
of the presidency and parliament, the rights
and roles of men and women, the identity of
the state, and other such critical issues.

49

Review

briefing

Think.

after the spring

tash aw: letter from

singapore

Using artful, persuasive language is now portrayed as a

trick of the insincere politician on the make. But eloquence

and debate, argues a historian of the subject, are the very pith
of human interaction. We need to encourage an active and
unashamed delight in a skill that has been unjustly neglected

PROTECTING THE REVOLUTIONS

50

Nicholas Kenyon on the early

music transformation

Reclaiming Rhetoric

Our revolution was civil,

liberal, and pluralistic,
and so should be the
constitution
Citizens who lived with fake constitutions
that did not deliver on the promise of equal
rights and protection under the law want
these new constitutions to create mechanisms
that will guarantee compliance of all parties.
So the new constitutions are widely seen as
documents that will protect the gains of the
revolutions that overthrew the old regimes
and prevent a recurrence of the former
autocracies that allowed a single group to
monopolize public power. As the impressive
Tunisian scholar, lawyer and constitutional
jurist Yadh Ben Achour, President of Tunisias
Higher Political Reform Commission, which
has overseen constitutional reforms after
the revolution, puts it: citizens see the new
constitutions as founding moments in their
national history, and a point of discontinuity
between the old autocratic political
culture and mentality of paternalism and
authoritarianism, and new democratic values
and practices.
Tunisia and Egypt offer the best
insights into the fine points of writing new
constitutions, along with the public political
activism over key elements of the process,
whether it be the composition of the drafting
bodies, the texts being formulated, the
oversight role of judiciaries, or the ratification
procedures. It is important to note that
beyond Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen,
where life-long autocratic leaders and their
elites are being replaced by more legitimate
elected governments, countries like Jordan,
Morocco and Oman have started tinkering
with their mechanisms of power and rule in
response to populist demands for reform and
more egalitarian and participatory governance
systems. The changes are limited and often
superficial, but they do reflect both the nature
of the populist demands for change and the
reality that long-serving regimes must respond
to those demands in some manner.

Sam Leith on oratory

51

The Tunisian and Egyptian deliberations

are the most advanced, and have provoked
heated debate and some lively demonstrations
on several issues in particular: the Arab and
Islamic identities of state and society (is
Tunisia an Arab/Islamic state or something
broader than that? Is Islam the sole or main
source of law?), and the role and status of
women (are they fully equal to men, are they
a complement or associate of men, and
do they have equal rights in public but play
a different role in private?). Similar debates
in Egypt address the status of Christians
and other minorities, the extent to which the
government can curtail press freedoms to
criticize official conduct, and the structural
benefits or immunities the armed forces enjoy.
As Yadh Ben Achour also said recently:
Our revolution was civil, liberal, and
pluralistic, and so should be the constitution.
The coming years will clarify if this
promise will be achieved or if this
constitutional moment turns out to be merely
a passing mirage. l

the author
Rami G Khouri is director
of the Issam Fares
Institute for Public Policy
and International Affairs
at the American University
of Beirut, a syndicated
political columnist and
book author, a senior
fellow at the Harvard
Kennedy School and sits
on the Joint Advisory
Board of Northwestern
University in Qatar.
qatar.northwestern.edu
think. magazine

april 2013

Think. Review
written by Sam Leith

one book laid

down the law
on how the best
orators might be
expected to wave
their arms

R
52

hetoric, in the second decade of the

21st century, has a bad name. If you
want to dismiss a political opponent,
you demand he drop the rhetoric.
Google empty rhetoric and youll
get more than half a million hits; Google
great rhetoric and youll find a few tens
of thousands. In modern public discourse
rhetoric is most often used as an antonym
to reality: a synonym for all that is shifty,
pompous and insincere. In an academic
context if its thought of at all it will tend
to be as a redundant discipline barnacled with
inkhorn terms in Greek or Latin and associated
with Dead White European Males in togas.
Im here to argue that the term needs
reclaiming. Far from being a redundant
discipline, the study of rhetoric has never been
more relevant. And far from being a bad thing,
it is what makes modern life possible. Above
all, in not teaching rhetoric in schools, were
failing to equip our children with the basic
tools to navigate what is beyond question the
most rhetoric-saturated age in human history.
What do I mean by the most rhetoricsaturated age in human history? Well, as
democracy and the rule of law have spread
around, so too has rhetoric: its at the heart of
both. Democracy is, simply put, the application
of the idea that you run a country by having
an argument rather than by having a fight. The
idea of the criminal trial is that the accused and
his or her accusers should have the chance to
sway a judge or a jury through argument.
But rhetoric doesnt just mean fancy
language or political speechmaking. It doesnt
just mean formal oratory. It is no more, nor
less, than the attempt to influence another
human being in words. Rhetoric is the art of
persuasion: and wherever there is language,
there is rhetoric.
That theres more around us than ever is
beyond doubt. Our ancestors didnt have
widely distributed books, or newspapers,
or radio, or television, let alone the internet.
Every day, every one of us is bombarded by
advertisements and marketing. We are assailed
constantly by political messages in the news.
Every day, every single newspaper carries
dozens of leading articles and comment
columns, seeking to persuade us of a
point of view.

So, yes: we are rhetoric-saturated indeed.

But to say we have more rhetoric around us
now than our ancestors did is not to say that
those forebears have nothing to tell us about
how it works. The study of rhetoric, and the
active and unashamed taking of delight in
its consideration and practice, goes back to
ancient times.
Nor is it the preserve of the so-called
Western tradition: it is to the Arab world, in
fact, that we owe its survival. At a time when
the greatest libraries in Christendom contained
only a few dozen volumes, Baghdads House
of Wisdom was the biggest repository of books
in the world. It was through translation into
Arabic during the ninths and tenth centuries
that many texts by Aristotle and other great
classical authorities came to survive to the
present day.

We in turn use rhetoric ourselves. We make

speeches in pitches for business and in job
interviews, at weddings and retirement parties.
We use rhetoric at work, be it appeasing the
boss, negotiating with a colleague, or motivating
a subordinate. Any parent trying to persuade
his daughter to eat up her greens is using
rhetoric. And the vast explosion of social media
means that anyone who wants to can post a
blog or a tweet, deliver a polemic on YouTube,
or even publish a book to a potential public of
millions. The modern age even has its rhetoric
handbooks. Those myriad volumes in airport
newsagents, promising to teach management or
effective communications, are staking out the
same territory.

Under Caliph Al Mamun, the House of

Wisdom was more than just a collection of
books. It was a hub of academic research. It
was intimately connected with the running
of public affairs, its scholars taking roles in
government. And it was a place in which
rhetoric found a practical as well as a
theoretical home, with the caliph encouraging
and even participating in debates.
The baton was picked up in the West in the
early-Medieval renaissance. If you attended a
school at any time between the medieval period
and the end of the 18th century, you would
have been taught rhetoric. In fact, as one part
of the Trivium grammar, logic and rhetoric
it constituted fully a third of an education.
The ancient authorities prime among
them Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, but
translated, amplified and modified by many
thousands of handbooks and textbooks over
the centuries bequeathed us a comprehensive
body of knowledge and theory on the subject.

Britains war-time Prime

Minister, Winston Churchill,
was famous for his oratory
but had to overcome a
stammer to achieve his
unique delivery

think. magazine

april 2013

It is a body of knowledge that has fallen into

neglect, thanks to the abeyance of the classics
and rhetorics turf being colonized by new
disciplines such as literary criticism, linguistics
and social psychology. But it is one whose basic
principles are as true and as useful as they have
ever been.
Writings on the subject have encompassed a
whole world of material, from how to shape an
argument or smear an opponent; how to tug
the heartstrings or rouse a rabble; how to turn
a memorable phrase; to how most effectively
to modulate your voice or even use the most
appropriate hand-gestures while speaking (an
encyclopaedically scholarly 17th-century work,
John Bulwers Chirologia/Chironomia laid down
the law, complete with illustrations, on how
the best orators might be expected to wave
their arms).
But suggesting that we think harder about
how rhetoric is practised is not necessarily
to insist that schoolchildren spend their days
drily parsing Latin texts. Above all, we learn
through doing. To make public debate, be it
in school assembly or on television, a regular
form of both entertainment and engagement is
to flex the rhetorical muscle. It gives speakers
confidence through practice, and teaches
them to frame arguments, anticipate counterarguments and deliver them with conviction.
Cicero said that rhetoric has three purposes:
movere, docere, delectare. That is: to move, to
educate and to delight. The third of these is
not to be neglected good rhetoric isnt just a
means to an end. It can give pleasure, and in
so doing attains its end. We remember what
we enjoy, and we warm to those who give us
pleasure. Pupils who learn to enjoy debating,
speaking in public or listening to others do so
will learn the skills involved all the better.
And rhetoric is what Aristotle called a techne,
a teachable skill or craft. It may be something
we do naturally, by instinct, from the moment
we can talk, but by understanding how it
works, and by practising, we can improve. To
dip into the ancient body of knowledge about
rhetoric not only equips us to argue better:
it equips us more easily to see the false or
manipulative argument when it is being used
on us.
There are three different appeals that mingle
and overlap in any speech or piece of writing
that seeks to persuade: ethos, pathos and logos.
One way or another, everything comes back
to these. Ethos is the connection a speaker (or

53

Think. Review

if you want to understand

how language works in real
exchanges, you owe
it to yourself to take
an interest in rhetoric

54

writer) makes with an audience. This is the

absolute fundamental. Youre more apt to go
along with someone if they seem to speak the
same language as you, to be sincere in what
theyre saying, and/or to have some expertise,
authority or credibility. If you think a speaker
is a fool, a liar, or has a whole different set of
values to you, you wont give much credit to
his words. When Barack Obama chose to take
his presidential oath on a Bible once owned by
Martin Luther King at his second inauguration
in January, he was making a very powerful and
pointed ethos appeal.
Pathos is the attempt to sway an audiences
emotions. That doesnt just mean sadness
the most common colloquial use of the word
nowadays but anything from anger to pride,
disgust, or even amusement. We like to think
that we make decisions with our heads, but
should never underestimate how important the
heart can be. Theres a reason street beggars
with dogs do better than those without; and
why when a leader is drumming up support for
a war he does so not through dry calculations
of risk and reward, but through windy words
about freedom and honor.

Logos is the actual argument itself, and here

we are most often talking about probabilities.
In deliberative rhetoric (trying to persuade
people of a course of action), you are arguing
about the future, which is unknowable.
Likewise, in court, the argument is based
around reasonable doubt.
On top of this triad of appeals is built the whole
edifice of persuasion. But there is a further
triad to keep in mind, as the overall field of
rhetoric also divides into three parts. Theres
deliberative rhetoric, oriented toward the
future: what shall we do? This is the sort you
find in politics. Theres forensic or judicial
rhetoric, which is concerned with the past:
what happened? Whos to blame? This is the
language of the law courts. And then theres
display rhetoric (also called epideictic), which is
the rhetoric of praise and blame: the best mans
speech at a wedding or the public greeting to a
visiting lecturer. These are known as the Three
Branches of Oratory, and although the borders
between them arent exactly cut-and-dried,
they do articulate real distinctions. As a speaker,
knowing which branch youre in which tense

The first century BCE Roman

statesman Marcus Tullius
Cicero said that rhetoric has
three purposes: movere,
docere, delectare. That is:
to move, to educate and
to delight

the author

QatarDebate, a member
of Qatar Foundation, recently
held its fourth International
Conference on Argumentation,
Rhetoric, Debate and the Pedagogy
of Empowerment at Qatar National
Convention Centre in Doha.
qatardebate.org

think. magazine

Sam Leith is a columnist

and author whose latest
book is You Talkin To Me?
Rhetoric From Aristotle to
Obama.
april 2013

youre concerned with will really help you

direct what you have to say.
Next come the Five Canons of Rhetoric:
Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory and
Delivery. They are, you might say, a stepby-step guide: from the first formation of
an argument in your brain to its (you hope)
rapturous reception by an audience.
Invention: you think up the arguments
that will best support your case. The root of
the word signifies that you come upon or
discover the available arguments, and then
select those most likely to appeal. Here is logos
but also ethos. One term for the set form of an
argument, or a piece of proverbial wisdom,
is the commonplace, which is another
suggestive spatial metaphor: youre looking for
a piece of common ground, and thus agreeable
to your audiences worldview, on which to build
your case.
Arrangement: you put those arguments in the
most effective order: introducing yourself at the
outset, for instance, framing the terms of the
argument, advancing your points, rebutting and
anticipating objections, and summing up.
Style: you find the most effective form
of expression forceful, witty, euphonious,
memorable with which to dress the intellectual
bones of your case. Here is where to delight
may come in to good purpose.
Memory: this may seem an odd one in the
age of autocues and PowerPoint presentations,
but familiarity with what you intend to say is
vital if you are to seem spontaneous and in
command.
Delivery: theres no point in having the
best speech in the world if you cant put it
across in a way that is engaging, charming and
persuasive. Some of the most famous public
speakers in history earned their eminence only
after working hard on their delivery: Cicero
suffered from stage-fright; Winston Churchill
from a stammer.

Finally, what of all those offputtingly abstruse

Latin and Greek terms that I mentioned at the
outset? These are the figures, sometimes
known as the flores rhetoricae, or the flowers of
rhetoric. They may be more familiar than you
may think. The phrase figure of speech, after
all, is known to us all.
Am I talking to myself here? you might
ask in exasperation, using what we term a
rhetorical question just as ably as if youd
known that it is also called erotema. Likewise,
those little groups of three phrases that help
make jingles or sayings stick in the head:
you dont need to know that it is a tricolon to
appreciate the catchiness of Life, Liberty and
the Pursuit of Happiness.
Before we had linguistics, it was rhetoric
that provided us with a vocabulary to talk
about the twists and turns that makes language
distinctive. Among the hundreds of figures
are those that deal with everything from
repetition of words or phrases anaphora at
the beginning of successive clauses; epistrophe
at the end to the putting of one word in
the middle of another (tmesis), as in absoflipping-lutely.
The list of figures supplies names for things
you do in the wide sweep of argument, such
as concessio, where you concede a battle to
win the war (Yes, I maxed out the credit
card; but I did so because I was buying you
a birthday present), and it supplies names
for whether you use lots of conjunctions or
not (and...and...and... is polysyndeton; a list
without conjunctions is asyndeton). Metaphor,
alliteration, antithesis, zeugma all these
familiar and semi-familiar terms belong to the
figures. They are all part of the toolkit, the set
of labels that describe things we all do. Thats
why, if you want to understand how language
works not on the grammarians dissecting
table but where it was intended to work, in real
exchanges with something at stake you owe it
to yourself to take an interest in rhetoric.
Reclaim the word. Its not political lies.
Its not hot air. Its not a dusty academic
specialism. Its the very pith of human
interaction. The more we teach it, learn it
and practise it, the better we will understand
human nature itself. And the better, as
Cicero suggested, human affairs will in turn
be ordered. Eloquence, he wrote, is the
comrade of peace, the ally of leisure, and, in
some sense, the foster-child of a well-ordered
state. Well said. l

55

Think. Review

A SOUND
REVOLUTION

56

Forty years ago, a group of new ensembles began trying to

recreate the music that composers would actually have heard
in centuries past. Their use of period instruments and styles
was greeted initially with amused contempt, and then with
fury by the orchestral establishment. Eventually,
however, their influence led to a radical
shift that has turned the classical
world upside down

Not many revolutions

succeed in changing the
world, but there is one radical
change that has, over the past
four decades, transformed the way
we hear a whole period of music, the
way we play music, and the way we
respond to music. And what started
off as a specialized and rather
esoteric activity can now be seen
to have had an influence on the
whole of our musical life.

n 1973,
snappy acronym
a group of
HIP.
written by Nicholas Kenyon
new ensembles
Many would argue
based in London
that this is musics most
were launched. The
exciting development in
Academy of Ancient Music,
recent decades, and that the
directed by Christopher Hogwood, the
recreation of the past has outpaced the
English Concert under Trevor Pinnock, and
development of contemporary music, too
the Taverner Choir and Players conducted
much of which lost touch with its listeners.
by Andrew Parrott all had the same aim of
The early music movement, however, did
rediscovering the music of the 17th, 18th
not suddenly start in 1973. That may have
and the preceding centuries, bringing it to
been when it began to make a major impact
life again with its own language and its own
on the wider record-buying and concertsounds, and recreating old instruments and
going public, but its origins can be traced
playing techniques of the time to recapture
back to over a century ago. In the 1840s the
the true spirit of the originals. If you have
popular view was memorably expressed by
ever heard Hogwoods recording of Handels
the Musical Examiner: Who ever heard of
Messiah or Pinnocks of the Bach Brandenburg a choir too large for Handel? Not though
Concertos, you have heard something of the
nations should be formed into choirs, and the
period-style performance that is now at the
genius of thunder were to swell the harmony
heart of our musical culture. It is a measure of till it shook the very spheres, would the true
its fashionable success with the public that the votary of Handel cry, Hold, enough. But
favored description of the approach is now
not long after there were those who argued
historically informed performance, with the that the gargantuan forces used for the big

Interior of Pariss 19th century opera house,

Le Palais Garnier, built in the Baroque Revival style

think. magazine

april 2013

57

Think. Review

58

choral performances of Bach and Handel

were anachronistic. The playwright George
Bernard Shaw, who was also an acerbic music
critic, was among them, and was loud in his
denunciations of the insufferable lumbering
which is the curse of English Handelian
singing.
In the late 19th century Sir George Grove,
founder of the famous dictionary of music
that bears his name, wrote a plea to return
to the orchestra formed as Handel had it.
It was a subversive thought, for the whole
approach until then had been that every move
forward in scale of performance and loudness
of instruments should be seized, in line with
Victorian convictions of improvement and
progress. But there was another, historicist
move afoot. Shaw was one of the enthusiasts
when a connoisseur named Arnold Dolmetsch
began to revive the harpsichord, lute and viol,
playing in candle-lit London drawing rooms
in order to recreate the atmosphere of past
ages. Dolmetsch had a nice phrase that music
should be heard clothed in its own fur and
feathers that is, heard on the instruments
for which it was written, with the playing
techniques of the time. He went on to found
a festival in Haslemere, where his family
all performed with varying degrees of skill,
and to make his own instruments, including
recorders, which became famous as learning
instruments in many schools.
Compromise and connoisseurs

This was an age of increasing enthusiasm for

the art of the previous centuries. In France,
Debussy and Saint-Saens worshipped their
predecessors Couperin and Rameau, and
edited their works. Yet it took a surprisingly
long time for early music at this point
roughly defined as that of the Medieval,
Renaissance and Baroque eras up until the
deaths of Bach and Handel in the 1750s to
establish itself in the popular consciousness.
It was regarded, if it was thought of at all, as
a curious sideline and for connoisseurs only.
Some performers broke through to a wider
public, notably the virtuoso harpsichordist
Wanda Landowska, who constantly toured
throughout Europe in the first half of the 20th
century. The great masterpieces of Bach and
Handel began to be heard with smaller forces,
as chamber orchestras became established
after World War I and took up, in particular,
the Brandenburg Concertos. But even in those

performances there was a good deal of

compromise: where Bach wrote for a recorder,
a flute was usually used, where he wrote for
a harpsichord a piano often sounded, and
his high trumpet parts were so demanding a
clarinet was more frequently employed.
It was such solecisms that the historical
performance movement aimed to move
beyond. Once musicologists had researched
the music (this was a time of endless collected
editions of major and minor composers
works), and makers had begun lovingly
and ingeniously to rebuild old instruments,
it was possible to reconstruct these works
in something approaching their original
form. Experiments began, often amateurish
and approximate, but the movement took
root, fuelled by such developments as the
foundation in 1946 of the BBCs Third
Programme (later Radio 3), with its highly
scholarly approach to musical performance.
A famous singer, Alfred Deller, emerged from
Canterbury Cathedral Choir and revived
the counter-tenor (or male falsetto) voice to
the amazement of the composer Sir Michael
Tippett, who said that when he heard Deller,
in that moment, the centuries rolled back.
However, it was in the field of rather
earlier music than Bach and Handel that
the breakthrough to popular success first
came. A dynamic and brilliant young multiinstrumentalist, David Munrow, gathered
around him some of the liveliest people in the
field and founded the Early Music Consort
toward the end of the 1960s. Listeners
still speak with awe of the exuberance and
enthusiasm and, above all, the professionalism
of their first concerts, playing Renaissance
dance music by Susato and others. It set the
musical world alight, and at the University
of Birmingham where Munrow started it
was reported that he had elderly professors
practically dancing on their chairs.
Munrows success with the public and the
record companies, as well as with the sceptical
classical establishment, was down to the fact
that he made music on such a high level that
his concerts could stand comparison with
any others; and that had not always been
the case for early music. This was the time
of the Swinging Sixties, when iconoclasm
in all areas of life was rife, traditions were
being disrupted, and freshness and the
new were prized. Munrow and the early
music boom caught that zeitgeist perfectly.

59
English choral singer Alfred
Deller, 1912-1979

the composer Sir Michael

Tippett said that when he
heard the counter-tenor
alfred Deller, in that
moment, the centuries
rolled back
It was a challenge to the atrophied and often
complacent assumptions of classical music,
with its great orchestras repeating the same
repertory day in, day out, and whose leading
conductors earned huge amounts of money but
often seemed to have little new to offer. Early
music was old, but also new in so many ways,
and it had a lot to say to a young generation.
By 1973, in the wake of Munrows
pioneering professionalism, several of those
who had worked closely with him (Hogwood
played harpsichord in his ensemble) were
ready to take this work forward into the
Baroque and Classical periods, concentrating

think. magazine

april 2013

on 18th century music from Bach to

Mozart. The record companies, anxious for
new product, were wholly supportive, and
broadcasters too relished this work. What
could not have been foreseen was the speed
with which it took off with the public. That
was extraordinary: within a very short time,
period performances of Bach and Handel
were everyones favorites, both with the critics
and with customers buying in the then everexpanding record shops. The advent of the
compact disc in the mid-80s fuelled this even
further, because there was then a need for
exciting new recordings of regular repertory,
and as the period instrument players reached
popular Mozart and then Beethoven, there
was a seemingly endless demand. Beethoven
symphonies cycles conducted by Sir Roger
Norrington, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and
Christopher Hogwood led the way, and the
Academy of Ancient Music was up there in
the Billboard charts with Pavarotti.
Inevitably, there was a reaction. But that
came not from the public after all, most
listeners were not aware of the finer points
of historical interpretation, but were still
entranced by the sound these new orchestras

Think. Review

maestros who
did not actually
work with period
instruments
began to
demonstrate
signs of
development
in their
interpretations

60

made. The backlash came from scholars who

questioned the whole basis of the claim to
historical faithfulness that underpinned the
movement, and argued that these playing
styles were no more than fashionable
inventions. Opinions became polarized,
especially since the old-instrument bands
were increasingly taking work away from
more conventional performers. The New
York Times carried garish headlines such as
Musicians Are At War Over The Right Way
to Play and talked of the battlefield around
performance. A reviewer in the respected
Gramophone magazine wrote that a revival of
period strings was as desirable as a revival of
period dentistry.
There was an inevitable degree of
exaggeration in the historical claims,
because the pioneers had to stake their
claim to originality; and this was not helped
by the record companies one recording
proclaimed: Original version. The famous
Canon as Pachelbel heard it. (As we have
not much idea what the 17th century
composer and organist looked like, let alone
what he heard like, this was ill-advised.) But
the underlying spirit of their endeavor was
praiseworthy, for the players had had to spend
long years mastering their instruments,
often to the amused contempt of colleagues,
and it was also clearly making a huge impact
on the public.
What happened next was something that
could not have been predicted when the

although his Messiah and other

oratorios had been performed
since his lifetime, no Handel
opera was heard on stage
between his death and the 1920s

early music movement began: the insights,

the approach and, in many cases the actual
sounds of what had been created, began
to be taken up by mainstream players and
conductors, and to influence new generations
of music-makers. First those conductors
who were the pioneers began to be invited
to modern orchestras as they struggled to
reinvent themselves and to keep up with the
latest thinking: Norrington and Eliot Gardiner
went to the Vienna Philharmonic, Hogwood
and Pinnock conducted opera in America,
and Sir Simon Rattle took the Orchestra of
the Age of Enlightenment (which had been
formed in 1986) to Glyndebourne for a
historic series of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas.

Violinist Midori Seiler and

members of the Academy
for Ancient Music Berlin
perform during the
4 Elements 4 Seasons
choreographic concert in
Dresden, Germany,
June 5, 2010

the author
Sir Nicholas Kenyon is
Managing Director of the
Barbican Centre, London,
and was Director of the
BBC Proms 1996-2007. He
was editor of Early Music
1983-1992, Controller of
BBC Radio 3 1992-98,
and edited the volume
Authenticity and Early
Music.

transparent textures

Then maestros who did not actually work

with period instruments began to demonstrate
signs of development and difference in their
interpretations: Bernard Haitink with the
Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Claudio
Abbado with his young Orchestra Mozart,
while even conductors of the contemporary
think. magazine

april 2013

repertory like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Daniel

Harding began to adopt the accents of the
early music movement. Music began to sound
different, with more transparent textures,
sharper accents, and a lyricism that did not
rely on heavy, constant vibrato but on lightbreathed phrasing. Even the instruments
began to be mixed, with natural trumpets and
horns appearing with modern bands like the
Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Many secondgeneration period-instrument orchestras were
formed, enabling the entry of a new cohort
of players. Other countries who had their
pioneers in Holland, for instance, there
was Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Bruggen and
Sigiswald Kuijken found their pupils and
colleagues succeeding them. Italy is now a
leading home of period-instrument playing
with Rinaldo Alessandrini, Fabio Biondi and
others, and a continuing project to record
the complete oeuvre of the famously prolific
Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi, including
all his operas, will keep performers in work
for years. Every country has its own story in
this early music revival, which has moved at
different tempi and rhythms, but the end result
has been the same: a radical shift in the sound
of music.
The present situation is, therefore, very
intriguing. To use a notorious simile: the
inmates have taken over the asylum. Sir
Simon Rattle is music director of the Berlin
Philharmonic until 2018. Singers who
previously wanted to shine in Mozart or
Verdi now vie with each other to perform the
great Handel opera roles, and it seems every
mezzo-soprano since Janet Baker has wanted
to record Scherza infida and Dopo notte, the
showstoppers from Ariodante. Handel opera is
a good example of a body of composition that
has entered the repertory really for the first
time: although his Messiah and other oratorios

had been performed since his lifetime, no

Handel opera was heard on stage between
his death and the 1920s. Those early revivals
were weighed down by the lack of castrati and
scores which transposed the music down to
the bass register, but since the discovery of
the counter-tenor voice (not quite a castrato,
fortunately, but as near as we will get) and the
skills of the old-instrument bands, the public
has embraced these works in opera houses
around the world.
profound change

Reflecting on the reasons for this revolution

is a challenge, because it is still so close
to us. Does it show, as some have argued,
a profound sense of insecurity about our
present cultural situation, a lack of confidence
which means that we have to find validation
and authenticity in the past? Or does it show
that there are rich and diverse sources of
inspiration, and we do not always have to
believe that the way we have settled upon
is the best? I incline to the latter view,
because the last century has seen another big
revolution whose implications we have not
quite absorbed: the invention of recording
and broadcasting, which has made all music
available to us in a remarkable way, at the
flick of a switch on the radio and now on
the web. Thus the old tradition, by which
audiences were only able to hear the music
of the relatively recent past performed, has
quite suddenly disappeared. The fact that the
medieval composer Machaut can now mean
as much to us as Mozart, and that Indonesian
gamelan or Gregorian plainsong may inform
our aural experience as much as Wagner or
Brahms, is a profound change. And in that
change, the early music revolution has played
a decisive and invaluable part. The future will
be fascinating. l

61

Think. Review
Every Monday

Letter from

morning, the students

at Singapores Nanyang
Technological University stroll
along lush, tree-lined walkways
on their way to class clutching
folders and laptop bags and
takeaway cups of Kopi-C or
green tea. In the class I teach,
a weekly workshop in creative
writing, the atmosphere is
chatty and polite no one
displays signs of hangovers or
post-weekend party fatigue,
quite unlike Monday morning
lectures I remember from
university days in Britain.
There is, undeniably, a mild
buzz of optimism: all across
the immaculately-tended
grounds and state-of-the-art
buildings on campus, there are
constant reminders that this
is a university which, like the
whole of Singapore, is on
the up.

SINGAPORE
by Tash Aw

62

Optimism,
iPads and pressure
think. magazine

Having been raised just across

the causeway in Malaysia, I
have visited Singapore many
times since I was a child but
still find it difficult to read
the success story of this city
state, even though there is no
outward reason to doubt it.
As I tell my writing students,
its as if the narrative is too
perfectly-drawn for me to
believe that it can continue
driving toward a happy
ending: the reader needs to
be emotionally involved in
your project as well as being
intellectually admiring of
it. The recent Economist
Intelligence Units (EIU)
annual quality of life index
lists Singapore as the sixth
Best Place to be Born in
2013 the highest-ranked
Asian country, bettered only
by such predictable stalwarts
as Switzerland, Norway
and Sweden. As someone
who grew up enjoying the
april 2013

Singapore has become a world

leader in a relatively short space of
time, while its larger, resource-rich
neighbors remain very much in
the developing nation category
brotherly, mostly jocular
rivalry between Malaysia
and Singapore, I find this
list particularly poignant,
given that in the 25 years
since the start of the survey,
Singapore has climbed 30
places (it was tied with East
Germany in 1988), while
Malaysia is still mired almost
exactly where it was, at 36.
In education, social housing,
healthcare, infrastructure all
the elements that make for a
stable and successful society
Singapore has become a
world leader in a relatively
short space of time, while its
larger, resource-rich neighbors
Malaysia and Indonesia
remain very much in the
developing nation category,
beset by corruption and
poverty.
Yet another recent
worldwide survey, gleefully
seized upon by people outside
Singapore, listed the state as
the worlds most emotionless
country for the second year
running. When asked simple
questions such as were you
treated with respect all day
yesterday? and did you smile
or laugh a lot yesterday?,
Singaporeans were the people
least likely to reveal strong
positive or negative emotions,
in sharp contrast to the nearby
Philippines, which topped
the most emotional list (and
which, incidentally, occupied
63rd position in the EIU
index).

As I chat with my students,

who are sharp, witty, wellread and contrary to the
stereotype fully aware of
social issues, I cant help but
wonder what lies in store for
them. They speak and write
powerfully about growing
up in a highly-pressured,
conservative society, where
success is measured strictly by
conventional yardsticks such as
higher education, professional
jobs, luxury apartments and
a healthy (but not too big)
family.
Friends my age with
children in the school system
regularly complain about
the same things they used
to complain about when
they themselves were being
educated: the reliance on rote
learning and the crushing
weight of societal expectation
that children perform
according to strict parameters,
and the huge sense of failure
that befalls anyone who
happens to operate outside
these boundaries. Last week,
a friend recounted a surreal
discussion with her sons
teacher over the answers
he had provided in Cloze
Reading an exercise
widely used in Singaporean
schools to test students use
of vocabulary, in which blank
spaces in a block of text
have to be filled in with an
appropriate word. But rather
than reward students for
inventive use of language, the

exercise demands one, and

only one, correct response.
There is, inevitably, much
talk about leaving Singapore
getting a foreign education,
working and setting down
roots abroad, particularly
among the playwrights, poets
and writers I have met, who
talk enviously about the
absence of censorship rules
in the West. And yet relatively
few do, despite the complaints
about life in Singapore. Unlike
Malaysians, who regularly
leave their country to take
jobs elsewhere (principally
in Singapore, or else Hong
Kong), Singaporeans tend
to return home after a spell
abroad none of those I
knew at university in Britain
remained there, for example,
whereas a large number of
Malaysians did.
It seems that, for the time
being, the balance between
material satisfaction and
emotional fulfillment is just
about right for most people
here, there isnt enough
reason to give up the huge
advantages that Singapore
offers. Fishing out their iPads
from their designer backpacks,
the students I see around me
know exactly what it means
to live in Singapore the
sacrifices that they have had
to make and will continue to
make in order to live in one of
the worlds richest countries.
I dont doubt that in 25 years
time, Singapore will still be one
of the Best Places to be Born;
but I do fear that my students
children will be complaining of
the same pressures that their
parents speak of now. l
Tash Aw is a writer who won the
Whitbread First Novel Award in 2005
for The Harmony Silk Factory. His latest
novel is Five Star Billionaire.

63

The ideas column

written by
David Linley

T
64

he author of numerous
books, Viscount Linley is
Chairman of Christies UK
and also of Linley, the design
business he founded in 1985.
He lectures around the
world at venues including
the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York and the
Smithsonian Institute in
Washington DC

I believe that there are

four kinds of education:
the academic, the sporting, the
musical and, what is largely
ignored, the artistic. This
encompasses everything from
sculptural engineering, to
design and obviously furniture making, but we
are heading toward a skills
shortage in this area because of
the seriously diminishing extent
to which it is being taught. Not
everyone can be or should be
a lawyer or an accountant. If
people are not academic but
they are good with their hands,
at using a hammer or a chisel
or a saw, they should be able
to learn a trade. When I was
leaving school there was the
possibility of an apprenticeship
and it takes seven years if
you want to become a cabinetmaker but there are fewer

day, I want to be as rich as

possible with the least amount
of effort.

and fewer places where you

can do that now. Parents come
into our Linley stores and ask,
Where can our child go to
learn to make something?
In Japan they have craftsmen
who are officially designated
as National Living Treasures.
They are incredibly revered,
and in other places - such
as with the silversmiths in
Morocco - there is still that
kind of culture. But in the West
weve completely lost the ability
to work for a master craftsman
for a very long time for very
few financial benefits. Its not
considered important enough.
After the Second World
War and with the spread
of production lines, there
was less and less need for
people who could carve or
could build a bit of a car,
and this decline was aided
and abetted by the dear old
excuse of health and safety.
Schools that had workshops,
which took up a lot of space,
suddenly started worrying
that Little Johnny might cut

his finger and turned them

into offices or classrooms.
Now its got dangerously out
of balance. Museums spend
an enormous amount of time
restoring works from the past,
which is fantastic. But every
culture needs identity and
things that are created anew,
and that involves a completely
different skill set. And whether
its a musical instrument or
a piece of clothing, anything
that is handmade has a better
resonance with the human eye.
Part of this is about the culture
today. I had a meeting with the
BBC about making, not Pop
Idol, but a program that makes
you think. They were quite keen,
but uncertain about the viewing
figures. We need to reassert the
idea that fame doesnt have
to mean that you can dance
Gangnam style on a reality
show - there are other ways and
means of being successful. But
thats how success is portrayed
on television. Even my dear
daughter said to me the other

What can you do? Give arts

institutions tax breaks, like
Ireland does for writers, offer
start-up grants for small
businesses in rural areas so
that there are opportunities for
skilled workers and craftsmen
to thrive. Support culture in
the way that countries in the
Arabian Gulf are and long
may it continue. We could start
organizing different kinds of
tours; how wonderful if you
could go to Paris, say, and
actually see a Herms bag
being made, seeing cutting,
people tooling leather, work
that has a distinct human feel
to it. But an example has to be
set. When a minister moved
from Culture to Health here
in Britain recently, it was
described as a promotion.
Why shouldnt the
promotion be from Health
to Culture, whats wrong
with that? Im not saying we
should necessarily be like the
market town in France I visited
recently, where there were
three philosophers sharing a
microphone in a public square,
but we do have an attitudinal
problem. During the Second
World War, Winston Churchill
was under pressure to cut
the arts budget in order to
better support the war effort.
Churchills famous reply was,
Then what are we fighting
for?. Even then, he saw the
importance of investing in
cultural development. We need
to revive the crafts and skills on
which our heritage is built so
that we are putting something
back for the next generation. l
think. magazine