On 1 September 2008, Professor Walden Bello, an internationally-renowned public intellectual and leading veteran of the global justice movement, presented the Inaugural Ted Wheelwright Memorial Lecture.



Professor Bello, who has published widely on the impact of the growth of global finance, models for development in the emerging economies of South-East Asia and the role of military interventions by Western powers, explored the impact on the Asia-Pacific of what he argues is the 'crisis of hegemony' enveloping the United States.

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While many critics of US foreign policy at the turn of the twentieth century have highlighted the risk of military overreach in the Middle East, Professor Bello noted that the failures to extend capital market liberalisation in the Asia-Pacific and to create a free-trade APEC have further contributed to a decline in US power in the region.

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Professor Bello outlined his views on the path that the US should follow as it cedes supremacy to China, as well as the role of the peoples of the Asia Pacific, developing country governments and global civil society can play in ensuring that China 'desists from following the destructive imperial path followed by Europe and the United States in its rise to global prominence'.

 

A revised version of Professor Bello's lecture can be read here
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​A podcast of Walden's lecture may be doanloaded here