Fifty years ago, the scene in Busan, South Korea, would have been a familiar image of international aid: sacks of grain stacked precariously on a crumbling dockside. The backdrop would have been a country emerging from war and dependent on outside assistance to meet the most basic needs. But when national and development leaders gather in Busan this week to discuss the future of aid, they will see a very different place: the fifth-busiest commercial port in the world, transporting advanced technologies around the globe. This, writ small, is the Korean miracle — the transformation of a country from aid-dependent to aid donor.

The international goal...]]> Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600 (Note: The following was excerpted from Blair's keynote speech at Monterrey Tecnológico University in Mexico on Tuesday. The full text of the speech can be found here.)

A new type of debate is taking shape. It can centre around immigration or protectionism but it is above all, about issues to do with culture and integration and it is altogether more vigorous and potentially more explosive. In the Middle East, it is about whether the West fundamentally respects or does not the religion of Islam; and the Israel-Palestine dispute is...]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500