In a world without statesmen

It is our misfortune to be living in historically arid times. A world uncertain about the future, nations unable to ascertain the destinies they would like to shape for themselves, governments caught in a bind over issues overwhelming them are the reality.

In frank terms, we inhabit an age in which emptiness happens to be where statesmen ought to have been. It is one of those times when Nelson Mandela is missed. Since his passing more than eleven years ago, statesmanship has been conspicuous by its absence. Why do we speak of Mandela? Because he had a soul which took in an entire world. His life was focused on building a rainbow nation in South Africa. And yet it was a life which spoke for all humanity.

Mandela related to people bearing the burden of injustice everywhere. Integrity, always a part of statesmanship, was in him in plenty. When he passed on, our world was left bereft of the idealism which gives meaning to life around the globe. When he was freed from prison twenty-seven years after he was thrown into incarceration by his country's apartheid regime, many were the people who expected to see the return of a man armed with bitterness and anger, an individual ready to go for retribution against those who had made him suffer.

Mandela proved them wrong. In freedom, an old man whose youth had long ago been lost in the rigours of prison, Mandela claimed the world for himself. He outshone every other politician, every other head of government and state by the magisterial attitude he brought to politics. He dwarfed his contemporaries. There was the lofty about him, along with the integrity that marked his leadership. But, of course, those who are possessed of integrity have that characteristic of the lofty about them. Mandela had both. He was unwilling to turn away from those who had upheld his people's cause, which is why he publicly acknowledged his debt to Muammar Gaddafi.

In an era when statesmen do not walk the corridors of power in Europe or Asia or Africa or the Americas, we are all weighed down by feelings of insecurity and collective loneliness. When Willy Brandt was around, when he inaugurated his policy of Ostpolitik, the world had a first glimpse of the statesman emerging from within him. The image of Brandt kneeling, in contrition for the atrocities committed by the Nazis, in Warsaw in 1970 was a moment of expiation of sin felt by men and women of conscience everywhere. Brandt's vision was of an extraordinary kind. He knew that the post-war division of Germany would end someday, but until that happened, he needed to make his contributions to humanity through the Socialist International and the Brandt Commission. He did that with finesse.

Brandt's tenure as Chancellor of what was at the time West Germany was brief, a mere five years. But in that short space of time he was able to lay the foundations of a new world order that would eventually take deeper roots. Brandt's statesmanship was a precursor to an eventual reshaping of American foreign policy under Richard Nixon, who took the monumental step of reaching out to China in 1972. Decades after his death, Nixon requires a reappraisal in terms of his foreign policy, especially where the policy was aimed at a rapprochement with Beijing and détente with Moscow. Both Brandt and Nixon were statesmen who made a difference to our ancient planet.

Statesmen do make a difference to lives. Else they are not statesmen. The old cliché of politicians looking to the next election and statesmen focusing on the next generation yet holds. When Anwar Sadat gambled with his own future by travelling to Jerusalem on a November night in 1977, he was more interested in the idea of the Middle East abjuring the past and imagining a future bringing the restive region to a platform of peaceful co-existence between nations. Having spent his adult life on the frontline of war with Israel, Sadat knew of the limits of crises on a military level between states. Hardened by war, tested in bellicosity, the Egyptian leader realised the need for a new course in the politics of his region. It was more than a hand he extended to Menachem Begin. His heart came with his hand.

That age of great men, of statesmen seeing beyond the sunset, indeed peering into the future and intent on making the world safer for generations, is now memory. There is no Zhou En-lai to offer the world a combination of uncompromising nationalism and sophisticated diplomacy today. It is a forest of mediocre politicians we are burdened with in our times. In Singapore there once was the well-meaning Lee Kwan Yew, for whom respect based on self-esteem for his people rather than copycat western democracy underscored his statesmanship. Zhou reached out to the world in all the magic of millennia-old Chinese civilizational existence; and Lee convinced the world that a city could be a country, could be the envy of powerful nations.

Why do we grieve at the absence of statesmen? The reason is out there, on our doorsteps. No political leader, no Prime Minister or President has the boldness today to call out those who have killed the tens of thousands in Gaza. The war goes on in Ukraine and no one cares about its ramifications on the future. In Sudan people die for reasons they are not aware of. Government leaders spout the language of communal violence, fuelling the embers of fratricide. Presidents pursue policies that impede freedom of speech in democratic spaces. Societies collapse on the watch of men whose comprehension of politics runs counter to the higher expectations of people.

Statesmen strive for the creation of happiness for nations whose fortunes they preside over. In them there is that element of decency, that moral fibre, which inspires people into placing their trust in their hands. Charles de Gaulle had a simple goal, the restoration of French grandeur. In the Second World War and in the years of his presidency, he turned France into a force to be reckoned with. His wisdom sparkled, as when he told a visiting President Richard Nixon, 'In the Second World War, all the nations of Europe lost. Two were defeated.'

Statesmen do not pluck the stars from the heavens for their people. But they do enlighten their people on a definitive truth: that nations which venture out in search of the future in the light of the stars hold in their hands the promise of scaling the heights to reach the top of the mountain. 

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