Martin Jacques > Quotes

“The end of colonialism, however, was a precondition for what we are now witnessing, the growth of multiple modernities and a world in which the new modernities are likely to prove at some point decisive. With hindsight, the defeat of colonialism between 1945 and the mid 1960s, the significance of which has been greatly underestimated in the West for obvious reasons, must rate as one of the great landmarks of the last century, perhaps the greatest.”
― Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

“The Western world order has – in its post-1945 idiom – placed a high premium on democracy within nation-states while attaching zero importance to democracy at the global level. As a global order, it has been anti-democratic and highly authoritarian. The emergence of China as the globally dominant nation is very unlikely to usher in a new kind of democratic global governance, but the rise of developing nations like India, Brazil and Russia, along with China, will bring, in a rough and ready way, a far more democratic global economy.”
― Martin Jacques, When China Rules The World

“[HK protests have been] mob demonstrations...[T]hey were conducted in a way which most societies would consider unacceptable because they involved attacking property, attacking the police, and of course occupying the airport.

The Western media have been hypocritical.”
― Martin Jacques

“At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.”
― Martin Jacques

“The biggest danger facing the world is that the United States will at some point adopt an aggressive stance that treats China as the enemy and seeks to isolate it.”
― Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World (2009)

“Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states.”
― Martin Jacques

“The starting point for understanding the deterioration in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia lies in Washington rather than Moscow. After 1989, Russia was a defeated power. Despite the fine words and some limited gestures, the Americans have treated it like one. Their policy has been one of encirclement.”
― Martin Jacques

“We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.”
― Martin Jacques

“Globalisation has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it.”
― Martin Jacques

“Neo-conservatism in all its pomp conceived - in the Project for a New American Century - that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world could be remade in the American image, that the previous bipolar world could be replaced by a unipolar one in which the U.S. was the dominant arbiter of global and regional affairs.”
― Martin Jacques

“The move towards neo-liberalism in Britain was intimately bound up with the embrace of the U.S. as the country to be aped and copied.”
― Martin Jacques

“One of the major problems facing the reformers was that modernization became intimately associated with the West at a time when the latter was colonizing and humiliating the country: far from being seen as patriots, they were regarded as tainted by the West or, worse, as traitors. As a result, the growing hostility amongst the Chinese towards the West was to work against the process of reform.”
― Martin Jacques, When China Rules The World