Leadership in the eye of the beholder
By Ian Williams
There was an old song, "There are more questions than answers," that comes to
mind while looking at the results of the worldpublicopinion.org poll of global
opinion of national leaders on the global stage released on Monday.
While some elements are fairly predictable, and almost welcome from a liberal,
social democratic point of view, like United States President Barack Obama's
star rating and the dire overall ratings for Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the poll, which
interrogated almost 20,000 people across the globe from April 4 to June 12
about which world leaders they trusted, raises some questions with no clear
answers. The selection of world leaders about whom respondents were asked
reveals some bias.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, Putin, Obama, French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel and Ahmadinejad have certain logic. But where were Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazilian President
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African President Jacob Zuma, Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh and other Third World luminaries?
Japan provided neither candidates nor voters it seemed. Such shortcomings
notwithstanding, the poll was interesting. To no one's surprise except for the
deluded few in the US who believed their own lies, Obama's support is much
higher than George W Bush's was.
But the results also call into question some Western media assumptions. Yes, it
is possible to be repressive and popular at the same time, at home and abroad.
In Russia and China, respondents supported not only their own leaders, but also
each other's, and indeed did not trust those who challenged them, with Sarkozy
in particular paying the price in declining support in China.
While the Chinese were happy with Obama, in Russia the American president is
mistrusted, although whether that was in his own right or as representative of
the nation whose advisors and economists did so much damage to Russia, is not
clear.
Obama's high global ratings, 61%, came after his speeches in Turkey, but before
he made his most definitive pitch for Muslim support in Cairo. Despite his high
global ratings, there were reservations about him in Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and
the Palestinian territories, doubtless reflecting skepticism about the US role
in the region and his sincerity in changing that role. On the other hand, India
gave him an 80% rating, which marched strangely with the 40% for Ahmadinejad.
The mainland Chinese gave him a higher rating than the Taiwanese gave Hu.
Most intriguingly of all, Hu, hardly the most charismatic leader on the bloc,
came in big in, of all places, Taiwan, and even in South Korea. He had 60%
confidence in Taiwan and over 90% in Hong Kong and Macau matching his 94% in
the mainland. How does that reconcile with the concerns about civil liberties
in those places, and the definite reluctance of Taiwanese to let Hu run their
affairs?
Was this because, or despite, the squeeze on civil liberties in China? Or was
it pride in the local boy whose economy was the only one left growing as all
the erstwhile colonial big boys took a haircut that looked like a scalping? But
then, Hu's 80% support in Pakistan was balanced by 50% in India with the latter
being interestingly high in view of the traditional rivalry. His negative
ratings in the US, Germany and France (70%) almost certainly reflect concern
over human-rights issues in China - along with what one suspects as some
apprehension about the rising power in the East.
Almost the biggest surprise was that United Nations secretary general Ban
Ki-moon came second. No one would suspect from the in-house gossip, Western
media coverage and reportage from the UN, that Ban was so well regarded.
One suspects that part of all of this is name recognition. No other world
politician got more than a 40% confidence rating and that was Ban, who has
certainly been globe-trotting, and more likely to be known internationally than
heads of the also-ran states in what is still a US dominated world. He was
mistrusted in Turkey, Egypt, Palestine - and the US, very likely because the
former see him as pro, and the latter see him as anti-Israel. Overall, the
result reflects greater support for, and attention to, the UN in most of the
world, which makes him much more visible in his efforts than in the US media.
Of course, the UN has had a perennial beating in the US media, but Obama even
got 70% support from US respondents for his handling of world affairs - which
includes a call to support the UN. And while Putin and Hu rely on their home
base for the big cheers, Obama's overseas cheerleaders overtake his domestic
support. When they like him they like him very seriously, like 92% of the
British. But then Brown is much more popular (64) in the US than he is the UK
(46).
However, reading the Western media on color revolutions in all their rainbow
hues, who would suspect that Putin, a low scorer outside Russia where he gets
an almost Stalinist 85% support would be twice as popular in Ukraine (57%) as
Obama (35%)? While India has had a long love affair with Moscow, his 65% rating
there is almost as surprising as his support in China (64%), taking us way back
before Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev started calling each other names.
And if the spirit of non-alignment is so high in India to give Ahmadinejad his
only non-Muslim country star status (42% positive, 30% negative) in India, then
how come the country has just elected and allegedly pro-Western free economy
government whose vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency was
instrumental in getting Iran on the Security Council agenda? Indeed, maybe this
is the basis for peace talks between the two sub-continental giants since 75%
of Pakistanis were also rooting for the Iranian leader - as were,
understandably, the Palestinians, whose friendlessness could easily lead them
to embrace any oasis in a desert.
So are there conclusions? A poll like this deals in broad-brush strokes. One
can support the foreign policy stand of a leader without endorsing domestic
policies, so for example, Taiwanese partiality to Hu may reflect a recent lack
of bellicosity from China and the improvement in cross-strait relationships. In
the Muslim world, perceived attitudes to the Israel-Palestinian problem are
clearly the big issue - Sarkozy and Brown for example, are punished for their
support for Israel. Obama certainly knows that and is acting on it.
In China and Russia, national pride is a big factor, which is why, whatever you
think of his principles, Sarkozy has blown it with the Chinese, between meeting
the Dalai Lama and the boycott threat to the Olympics. In contrast, India wants
it all ways and seems to have taken sentimental alignment with all as the
logical extension of its non-aligned history.
The numbers do suggest a hard core of mistrust for the US, and indeed the West,
in major parts of the world. It is clear that in many places democracy and
human rights are not as big an issue either in country or in assessing other
countries’ leaders as Western politicians and policy makers would assume.
That is not just the neo-conservatives but genuine human-rights advocates and
so the figures would tend to support Obama's neo-realist foreign policy of
negotiating with regimes that he would otherwise deplore. World public opinion
seems to support those who do not threaten with missiles, which is, as they
say, hardly rocket science. But it is a lesson that seems to bear constant
repetition in some quarters.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military
Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
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