Letter from the Editors
The Tokyo Olympics is not the only example of plans gone awry – whether unpredictably or in ways that should have been foreseen.
Welcome to the August 2021 issue of The Diplomat Magazine!
When Tokyo celebrated its winning bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics back in 2013, no one could have predicted what would ensure: a pandemic, the first-ever postponed Olympics, and a massive groundswell of public opposition. Yet the Tokyo Olympics is not the only example of plans gone awry – whether unpredictably or in ways that should have been foreseen. Our issue this month looks at the ever-present phenomenon of unintended consequences: of Olympics, elections, and policy decisions.
Tokyo 1964, Sapporo 1972, Nagano 1998, Tokyo 2020 (well, 2021). Japan’s involvement with the Olympic Movement, writes Robin Kietlinski in our cover story, stretches over a century, with Japan the first Asian country to have a member serve on the International Olympic Committee back in 1909. The current Games, postponed from 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic and accompanied by considerable controversy even as they moved ahead, underscore the deep significance of the Olympics for Japan. Kietlinski, an associate professor of history at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York, unpacks why Japan has been so fixated on the Olympic Movement since its inception.
Amid the pandemic headlines, one major story didn’t receive the attention it deserved: The collapse of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). While the immediate trigger was a schism over the election of the PIF’s secretary general, Steven Ratuva explains how old rifts made the current crisis “almost inevitable.” Ratuva, director of the Macmillan Brown Center for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, outlines the faultlines in the Pacific islands, based on competing state interests, great power politics, and even the arbitrary racial divisions dreamed up by an 19th century Frenchman.
Malaysia’s New Economic Policy (NEP) is credited with creating the country’s middle class. But as the NEP marks its 50th anniversary this summer, that very middle class is vanishing under the haze of political and pandemic economic strain. Amrita Malhi, a research fellow at the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, recounts the creation of the NEP and its successes. Now inequality, on the back of widening social fractures, is reversing those gains and threatening worse days to come as Malaysia exits its third national emergency into uncharted seas boiling with political turmoil.
In 2019, the Rajapaksa family regained the presidency in Sri Lanka. Subsequent Parliamentary elections in August 2020 saw their power increase. But, as Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu writes, the return of the Rajapaksas has been a decidedly difficult time for Sri Lanka. Saravanamuttu, the founder and executive director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) in Sri Lanka, writes that in addition to economic crises, the knock-on geopolitical effects of cozying up to China, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rajapaksas’ dynastic politics is fomenting a succession struggle. With elections ahead, most critically a presidential vote in 2024, Sri Lanka’s democracy is on the line.
We hope you enjoy these stories, and the many more in the following pages.