[Pro-Tibet protestors swarmed the Olympic torch in Paris this past week, not far from where Reid Hall correspondant Greg Keilin has been spending his semester. He makes sense of the recent fracas, which made headlines around the world].

I have to admit I barely even noticed when the Olympic Torch came to town this week.  Apart from a few flashing, blaring squad cars that sped past me in the street, I never saw any sign of the commotion that filled the papers the next day.

Kate, on the other hand, was at home when the procession passed by Notre Dame, which we can see from our window.  She never got a good look at the torch—it was obscured by the crowd of protestors and police—but she was an eyewitness to some heavy-handed law enforcement.

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[Not much opinion in this one, but this was one of the more eye-opening lectures I've attended this year (and because Bwog and Spec news missed it, this is a COMMENTARIAT EXCLUSIVE). By the way, yesterday's speaker is the dude in the Dumbledore-like purple robe. The one on the left is Indian PM and Oxford alum Manmohan Singh.] 

On paper, Oxford’s chancellor is a living fossil. His full title is “The Right Honorable Baron Patten of Barnes.” He was a long-time Conservative MP from the shimmering restoration time-warp of Bath. And until relatively recently, he was an honest-to-God colonial governor, as the imperial ruler of the British crown colony of Hong Kong. His historical philosophy is a markedly Burkian, while he spoke longingly of Woodrow Wilson and the old European Common Market. His accent and background are down-country aristocratic–as proof, he’s a peer in the currently-ceremonial House of Lords, the most upper-class of upper-class British institutions.

But during his talk on the 15th floor of the IAB last night, Lord Patten spoke unsparingly of the challenges facing a world that’s left imperialism and old-time aristocracy behind. Although Patten was officially speaking on China’s impact on trans-Atlantic relations, he was clear that most of the world’s problems (global warming, inequality, political autocracy, Russia, terrorism…am I missing any?) were oriented around the trans-Atlantic powers’ crippling incoherency in confronting them.

A symptom of this was the widespread belief that China and the U.S. were veying for “world-superpower status,” a belief that ignored China’s various weaknesses while downplaying or even abrogating America’s responsibility in shaping the global order (since it views us a “competitor” rather than a potential partner). Patten argued strenuously that China does not present a threat to global order or American hegemony–that Chinese prosperity isn’t something that the western world should fear, and that we fear it at the risk of our own security, and about 1.3 billion Chinese lives and livelihoods.

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