| Messrs Wren & Martin would have shrunk from describing something as "weakly perfect" or "strongly perfect". Yet these mangled phrases are standard economics descriptions of markets. |
| We could similarly classify nations on the basis of attitude to free speech. Some nations are "weakly free"; it is only permissible to say something that gels with accepted doctrine. Other nations are "medium-free": it is all right to disagree with mainstream opinion so long as it doesn't cause public unrest. A few nations offer strong rights to free speech. You can say almost anything you like""while libel or slander laws exist, the state itself will not move to suppress an opinion. |
| China is "weakly free" along with most Middle Eastern nations, Singapore, Malaysia and some of the former Soviet republics. India is "medium-free"""the right to free speech is not absolute but it goes a fairly long way. |
| EU members, other Scandinavian countries, the US, Canada, Australia, etc, are "strongly free", with some key exceptions. For example, it is a crime in Australia or Canada to relate Sardarji-type jokes that could be construed as ethnic or racial slurs. In Germany, Nazism is a non-no. |
| Nations can move with startling rapidity from being weakly to medium or even strongly free. After the breakup of the USSR, or the dismantling of apartheid, many countries moved from being weakly free to medium-free in a day. Latin Americans have fluctuated between weakly free and strongly free, depending on the inclinations of the regime in power. |
| The 21st century is more likely to be defined by ideological clashes between weakly free regimes and strongly free regimes than by Huntingdon's theories of Christianity versus Islam or the emergence of Chindia. |
| Weakly free nations don't understand why strongly free nations would voluntarily abrogate the power to muzzle individuals. Strongly free nations don't understand what the fuss is about when weakly free nations protest the expression of individual opinion. |
| Weakly free and strongly free regimes have been at loggerheads over two issues in the past six months. Microsoft recently complied with a Chinese demand to muzzle "An Ti", a dissident blogger, whose blog was hosted on the Chinese subsidiary of MSN Spaces. |
| Yahoo! also complied with a Chinese request to reveal the identity of a dissident who used its "anonymous" e-mail service. Google's China-specific search engine blocks searches on words like "Tiananmen" and "democracy". These three MNCs all say that they must comply with local laws to do business in China. In each case, there has been outrage in the US where these three are headquartered. |
| Bill Gates has said that MS will comply with censorship requests. But it would replace censored content in weakly free nations with an explicit notice stating that it was complying with local censorship laws. And, MS would host the censored content on servers located in strongly free nations. |
| The other huge free speech issue involves the 12 cartoons of Prophet Mohammad, published in September 2005 in a Danish newspaper. These have caused a massive ruckus and been reproduced in various French, Italian, Spanish and German publications. |
| Superficially, this seems like grist to Huntingdon's thesis: here are predominantly Christian nations, accused of racism and religious insensitivity by Islamic regimes. There are certainly elements of racism and religious insensitivity involved. |
| But it's really a clash between weakly free and strongly free points of view. The cultural ethos of the EU (and Eastern Europe) is steeped in satirical and heretical views of Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths. The Da Vinci Code or Madonna's Like a Prayer are just as blasphemous to a believing Catholic as the cartoons are to devout Muslims. |
| The "strongly free" EU ideology includes the right to blaspheme and lampoon religious belief. In strongly free nations, the state cannot regulate the expression of individual opinion. There is no point in pressurising a strongly free state to muzzle the opinions of individual citizens. Until weakly free regimes understand this, the clash of civilisations will continue. |
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
