Ethical foreign policies....
WorldPublicOpinion.org has had the imagination to come up with a more interesting than usual survey, this time polling the world, or rather parts of it, as to the morality or otherwise of the foreign policy of sundry nations:
Clicking should render the graphic a tad more visible, but for those who can't be bothered, Jordan gives itself top marks - 44% of Jordanians think it is light unto the nations and so forth. 40% of Indians feel the same way about sweet home Bharat Ganarajya (There's a really bad pun about Bharat Homes to be had there), and 39% of Azeris are pretty impressed with themselves. Shush, don't mention Armenia.
Meanwhile a certain country you would bump into if you rowed due south from the south coast of England gives itself the highest mark for hitting the golden mean - 66% of Gauls think its foreign policy is just as moral as the average. I am *not* making this up. Elsewhere, there is breast beating in Mexico, where 54% of Mexicans think its foreign policy is morally under par. Can't say any horrors of Mexican diplomacy leap out at me. The (South) Koreans might have been reading the daily denunciations from Pyongyang, as 42% think they are lacking an ethical foreign policy.
As to dear old Blighty, 17% of us think we are above average, 49% average and 23% below average. But what does the world think of us?
Our best friends are Kenya (memo to Obama...) with 53% thinking us ahead of the curve, and 31% of Nigerians think the same. It can't just be a question of hosing them down with aid / falling for 419 fraud etc, as the Taiwanese (44%) and South Koreans (39%) seem to like us too, lack of diplomatic relations with the former notwithstanding. And where should we send Miliband senior on a charm offensive? The PA Territories, where 57% give us an 'F', as do 36% of Jordanians.
Lots more of this sort of thing here.
Labels: foreign policy, surveys
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on Friday, January 23, 2009 at 10:58 am.
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