The Future Is Now

• Share

The trouble with writing a book about the future is that the future can arrive very quickly. Since Chris Patten's What Next?: Surviving the Twenty-First Century went to the printers, Russia has sent troops into Georgia and the global financial system has cracked so badly that some are pontificating about the end of capitalism. Yet Patten's ambitious book is so good that this inevitable flaw doesn't matter.

Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University and Britain's last Governor of Hong Kong, sets out to explore how nation states can "do more together rather than less." Through entertaining and wide-ranging discussions of terrorism, the threat of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, migration, drug-trafficking, diseases, energy and climate change, Patten sees enough opportunities for cooperation to remain an optimist. The former European Commissioner for External Relations is an unashamed liberal internationalist, happy to call antiglobalization activists hypocrites. But he also recognizes the severe damage American adventurism has done to Washington's image over the past few years and warns against exaggerating the impact of globalization on billions of poor people. The world, he says, is not "entirely flat."

The book benefits from Patten's sure familiarity with the places he's writing about, and his asides — the "weak handshake" of a Sri Lankan rebel leader, the taste he shares with Helmut Kohl for the products of Chinese brewer Qingdao —set it apart from more academic works. Part history, part opinionated guidebook, What Next? should hold up for a few years yet.