Know talking to the person in question when he passes by mentioning that he had warned the British Prime Minister about the corona pandemic.
“Before the pandemic, I was asked to brief at Downing Street 10 …” says the historian Peter Frankopan before hitting the next topic.
My interview with Frankopan has been postponed for months.
Frankopan is quite certainly the world’s best-known expert on Central Asian history. When Afghanistan collapsed on August 15, he has been torn apart in various places even more.
Well, how is the big question about the collapse of Afghanistan right?
“From a politician’s perspective, problems that are no longer his problems will disappear quickly,” Frankopan says.
“But the United States barely realized how big of a matter it was [Afganistanista vetäytymisessä] is symbolically: only eight months after The U.S. Congress was rushed in. In Asia and Africa, for example, it looked bad. ”
Afghanistan’s reputation as the cemetery of empires was well known. Why did the West once again misunderstand Afghanistan?
“The West understands quite a lot of things,” Frankopan replies.
“We misunderstood the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, climate change. What do Western countries really understand? ”
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“We didn’t ask what the Afghans want.”
Frankopan has gotten to the point of his favorite thought. The Western sense of superiority blinds us – and we now ignore how already the concept of “Western countries” is superior.
A terrorist went to Afghanistan to chase Osama bin Laden. After that, they stayed there … to do what?
There were great guns and armies but few thoughts.
“We thought we were going to make Afghanistan a European state. No thought was given to how that would be achieved. We did not ask what the Afghans want. And especially there was no proper plan to get out. ”
The ultimate problem is education, Frankopan says. He does not now mean the problems of the Afghan school, but our own.
“How many people in Finland speak Pashto? If I walk to high school in Helsinki, quite a few can tell Adolf of Hitler. Maybe even Of Henry VIII, of the English king who died almost 500 years ago. But do they know anything about Afghanistan or Central Asia? ”
Frankopan, 50, is director of the Byzantine Research Center at the University of Oxford. Among other things, he has studied crusades.
Frankopan’s breakthrough work The Silk Roads (2015) has now been published in Finnish Silk Roads – A New World History (Athens, Finnish. Jaana Iso-Markku).
The title of the book speaks of the Silk in the plural because there has never been a single “Silk Road”. Instead, Central Asia has cruised for thousands of years a network that has transported wealth, thoughts, ideas, violence and epidemics from east to west and back.
According to Frankopan, the Western world has underestimated the importance of these connections and therefore does not understand itself very well. As many as 1.5 million books have been sold.
Question from question to question, the interview goes worse in the direction of failure. I find myself asking astronomer questions mainly about the future or about the past about three months ago.
Frankopan is eager to respond to them as well, for actually his next book The New Silk Roads (2018, not translated) deals with the future.
The message of the book is that the focus of the world will inevitably shift toward the East and China. First economically, then politically.
The best-known example is China’s “New Silk Road”. It means a mastodontic infrastructure plan known as the Belt & Road. Roughly speaking, it is a matter of building bridges, ports and railways around the world for at least EUR 1 trillion.
Read more: Ville Similä wrote extensive articles on China’s growing influence as HS Silk Road correspondent
Bridge at the moment, though, it looks like Belt & Road is coughing.
Investment is on the decline, and China’s aggressive diplomacy has forced the Czech Republic and Lithuania to jump off the sled.
“It’s true that cash flow was at its peak perhaps even before my book was published in 2018. But if you think about the Belt & Road plan more broadly, it’s not slowing down,” Frankopan says.
According to him, more important is a change in thinking. China’s gaze has turned outward, permanently.
“The intensity has continued to rise sharply. China is putting a lot of energy and money abroad. ”
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“It’s easy for us in the West to criticize others but much harder to open our wallets.”
China has quickly become a bad cry in Europe, Australia and of course the United States.
“But if you ask in Malaysia or Pakistan, perceptions of China are at least ambivalent, if not positive,” Frankopan says.
China has acquired enemies from Europe through clumsy diplomacy. Then the whole may be interpreted too optimistically.
Europe may not be a very important part of China’s plans. “China can say in Africa that we have never enslaved you or plundered your natural resources. And now we want to trade with you. ”
Of course, China’s actions do not lack colonial features. On the other hand, in Africa, for example, there are not many options. If African countries do not seize on Chinese investment, they will have no choice.
“It’s easy for us in the West to criticize others but much harder to open our wallets.”
The United States and Europe have put China harder in recent years – in speech. At the same time, trade is only growing, even in the United States.
“We say one thing, we do another.”
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