RSS

May 1, 2010

Simon Bauer

Difficult question.

I'd say Robert Kagan has to be among the top thinkers, even though he is a neo-con and was wrong on Iraq. His thesis that Europeans are from Venus and Americans from Mars has been incredibly influential in shaping the way Americans and Europeans think about each other.

May 2, 2010

Olga Kolesnichenko, freelance journalist, Silver Contributor (62)

In my point of view during recent years the World Top-10 and two Grand Prize are:
Grand Prize for ages. Michael Jackson - for Peace and People Unity Mission and Alexander Pushkin - for glorify Russian language in Civilization History.
1st place. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen - for fresh view on NATO and Renaissance of the Euro-Atlantic Security agenda and improving the relationship with Russia.
2nd place. USA President Barack Obama - for entirely new and open image of America.
3rd place. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom James Gordon Brown - for British initiative to prevent a repeat of the global financial crisis.
4th place. French President Nicolas Sarkozy - for most brightness of leadership in EU.
5th place. Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaelle Jean, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada - for the most kind smile on the most kind and great Olympic Games in Vancouver.
6th place. Chairman of Russian Council of Federation (Senate) Sergey Mironov - for courage, principles and development of EU-Russian parliamentary ties.
7th place. Her Majesty The Queen of State of the United Kingdom Elizabeth II and Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and President of India Pratibha Patil - for consolidation of women role in policy.
8th place. Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma and Head of the State Duma delegation to NATO Parliamentary Assembly Lyubov Sliska - for reconstruction of parliamentary NATO-Russian ties.
9th place. President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso - for creation of parliamentary diplomacy, innovation European Strategy-2020 and strong interest to Russia.
10th place. President of Libya Muammar al-Qaddafi - for proposal to set up of UN World Parliament with equal rights for all countries instead of five-veto system.

May 2, 2010

Martin Scott Milinski, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, Silver Contributor (27)

The poll names the most influential people. So I take that to mean individuals whose actions have affected, or will affect, the course of events.

In this regard, I would have to put the head of a technology corporation close to the top as I see technology being a major influence on the direction that the world takes.
So I will say,
1)Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as representations of this trend.

In the US, the Tea Party Movement represents the stirrings of a political force which could prove to be the rejoinder to "Yes We Can". Therefore, I have to agree with the inclusion of 2)Jenny Beth Martin or Glen Beck.

I feel certain that issues, in and out of, Iran will prove to be ever more significant.
So I would have put the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei somewhere on the list but I think an individual whose role has proven to be even more influential recently is,
3) Hossein Mousavi

The importance of the global economy has been become obvious, in this respect I must say that two well-known individuals who wield a great deal of influence are,
4) Ben Bernake and Dominique Strauss-Kahn or perhaps Zhou Xiaochaun of the People's Bank of China.

Finally I will have to say that while much remain to be seen, one of this year's most influential people must be,
5) Barak Obama

...and I find Michael Yon to be an exceptional journalist.

That being said, I'm sure there are just scores and scores of very influential people across the world which we never hear of.

May 2, 2010

Member deleted

Dr. Stefanie Babst, NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy.
For defending the idea of greater women presence at every level in NATO

Hillary Clinton, Vice President of the USA
For initiating the greater pesence of women in the US Foreign Offices

Note: In chronological order

May 2, 2010

Florian Kuhne, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Gold Contributor (116)

TIME's ranking makes absolutely no sense to me: Twitter and Facebook as index for influence? In sum I'd like to critizise rankings like this. I think measuring influence or power is very difficult and subjectively.
The most important point in my view is the selectivity with which "our" media spreads news and facts. The big German Newspapers for example did not even mention the Alternative Climate Summit in Bolivia, where more than 15000 activists debated strategies for a better environment and sustainability. Here in AC the Summit wasn't recognized also.
So, who has the real power to change things or keep the status quo? Media. And as long as "our" media is selective like this, we cannot tell what is real influence. One new law in China affects more than a Billion people. Is that influential?

May 3, 2010

Martin Scott Milinski, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, Silver Contributor (27)

I can agree with your points Florian, these media polls are always a bit suspect.
By the way Mustafa, the current Vice President of the US is actually Joe Biden. I'm sure you meant Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. But lets not forget Condoleeza Rice who filled the role before her. :)

May 3, 2010

Jennifer Margaret Anne Morrison, Company: Myformation, Silver Contributor (27)

@Florian

I think the point you make is really interesting. I agree that media has a huge influence. In fact after reading the TIME lists I did some internet searches as I was curious to find out more about the people on the list whom I felt I didn't know so much about. Now as a result of knowing more about them I'll be more aware of what those people do, and perhaps I'll view their activities as more ''influential'' simply because I'm more aware of them and what they do.... and yet of course I'm only more aware of them due to their exposure on the TIME lists! TIME has chosen their most influential people because it regards them as such and also, by giving them this exposure, because it wants them to retain that status!

May 3, 2010

Member deleted

@Martin

Please accept my apologies for confusing the title of the position held by Ms. Hilary Clinton. Absolutely no offense was intended to anyone in any way.

It is just that I have such a poor memory in general for private names & titles that I sometimes get puzzled over how I got through all those Chemistry courses myself . I suppose my quantitative memory must have compensated for this weakness.

Shame on me!!!

Best regards,

Mustafa CELIK

May 3, 2010

Ann H. Sontz, EuropaSurvey, Silver Contributor (26)

One of the more interesting facets of Time's "most influential in transatlantic relations" list is that it relegates a US President like Barack Obama to a relatively modest position. Politicians, in general, tend to be displaced by heads of major international corporations,commentators, and analysts who, although expert in their own right, occupy no representative,appointive, or elective position, in their own political societies.

Could this displacement be a function of economic globalization, which has given so much influence to decision-making on the part of international companies and their business, labor, and trade strategies? If so, this list of influential individuals and organiations may have to be modified in the years to come.

There seems a definite reaction to globalization in the rising need of citizens to have more control within national and regional political settings. Evolving attempts to bring further coherence to bloc-wide governance in the European Union is an example. Another, however, is a growing populist sentiment within the borders of the EU member states. These sentiments,now being expressed in voting patterns, signal a return to ethnicism and insularity rather than a trend towards influencing the future of transatlantic ties.

May 3, 2010

Ting Shiang Lee, , Gold Contributor (147)

Editorial team and management of this Atlantic-Community Organization, who seek real talented people with earnest, but not as a charity or alms in any way. That's highly respectable.

May 3, 2010

Joerg Wolf, Atlantic Community, Editor

@ Ting Shiang Lee,

Thank you very much for your compliment! Your kindness is very much appreciated.


@ All

Thank you very much for your suggestions regarding the most influential leaders and thinkers in transatlantic relations.

I think your thoughtful suggestions are much more relevant than the TIME Magazine list. Please keep them coming.

We got already quite a few politicians. I would add Phil Gordon, Ivo Daalder and Richard Holbrooke.

It would be great if you could suggest a few more transatlantic thinkers.

So far we got Robert Kagan. And a friend of mine suggested Tony Judt of the Remarque Institute at New York University because his book "Postwar" is the standard on European history after 1945:
http://atlanticreview.org/archives/1391-Who-Are-the-Major-Players-i...

Who are the best analysts on transatlantic relations?
Here are a few names to discuss:

Constanze Stelzenmüller
Jackson Janes
Gideon Rachman
Anne Applebaum
Bruce Stokes
Jan Techau
Josef Joffe
Wolfgang Ischinger
Helmut Schmidt

No particular order. Just a spontaneous list. I am sure I forgot many important thinkers. Please add your suggestions. Thank you.

May 4, 2010

Jennifer Margaret Anne Morrison, Company: Myformation, Silver Contributor (27)

I find a lot of what George Monbiot writes interesting, I don't always completely agree with everything he says and his focus is often on environmental issues and British politics but he is certainly influential in that what he says generates debate.

http://www.monbiot.com/

May 4, 2010

Martin Scott Milinski, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, Silver Contributor (27)

While I'm certainly not familiar enough with the each's entire body of work to say who is more influential, I can say that Helmut Schmidt and Wolfgang Ischinger certainly have had impressive careers in Transatlantic relations. Considering the scope of their work, its hard to compare their overall influence to that of academics and writers. Personally I enjoy reading Bruce Stokes' work. I just find his no-nonsense-matter-of-fact approach appealing.
To add, I am eager to find a copy of "Decentering America" by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht.
If anyone has read it I'd like to get their feedback.

May 4, 2010

Joerg Wolf, Atlantic Community, Editor

@ Martin

Thank you for your comment.

I think Helmut Schmidt's and Wolfgang Ischinger's careers are not over. I believe the former chancellor is still extremely influential in shaping public opinion on transatlantic issues from Afghanistan to the financial crisis and Russia. Not sure, if he makes headlines outside of Germany.

Ambassador Ischinger is influential as chairman of the http://www.securityconference.de/

And he is also speaking his mind: "Towards a New Grand Bargain With Russia"
http://www.securityconference.de/Monthly-Mind-Detail-View.67+M5fdbdf2167c.0.html?&L=1

Oh, and of course, we can't have a on transatlantic leaders and thinkers without Henry Kissinger. Another influential consultant who is also chairing NATO's expert group for the New Strategic Concept is Madeleine Albright.

May 5, 2010

Mara L.L. van der Meer, University of Groningen, (6)

I think Susan Strange should be added to the list. In her book 'the retreat of the state' she analyzes the power of states compared to economic actors. She has started the debate of the power of politicians in times of economic globalization. The power of states will not disappear, but it is changing. Politicians have less variety of tasks these days, and thus become less popular (and influential).

Strange's book perfectly explains why TIME has put many non-politicians high on the list, and why Acer PC maker and Lady Gaga have taken in the position of European heads of state.

May 5, 2010

Aviv Lubell, Tel Aviv University , (10)

I would like to see Canada take a more active and influential role in transatlantic relations, and I believe Polar Politics may be the perfect vehicle to thrust Canada more prominently onto the international stage. As was mentioned in Ann H. Sontz’s opinion piece “Public Portraits: The Northern Frontier Revisited”, the Northern frontier will be of paramount importance as the ice caps recede, and in my opinion, Canada will be perfectly positioned to take an active and leading role in helping to establish a set of coherent cross-border artic policies. Among nations such as Russia, the U.S., Denmark and Norway, Canada can spearhead a multi-national collaborative process based on a shared commitment to international law. A nation like Canada, with so much at stake, should not blend into the diplomatic background. That’s being said, in the very near future, I would very much like to see the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, or any subsequent PM, on the list of influential leaders.

AL

May 5, 2010

Samir Orfali , Uni - Hagen, University of Jordan, Platinum Contributor (280)

"The United States has discovered the European Parliament - and the experience is not particularly pleasant." - March 1, Gideon Rachman, FT

No other thinker and writer on transatlantic policies and foreign affairs brings our political fault lines into a nutshell, such a sentence ... on a weekly basis.

Zebniev Brezizinsky, talks straight and wise ... the Washington Scholl Latour...

Henry Kissinger, The third world pledges him guilty, truly they hate him, but we are rich...

Jackson Janes, the Maker

May 5, 2010

Samir Orfali , Uni - Hagen, University of Jordan, Platinum Contributor (280)

President Barrack Hussein Obama, they told him the world is going to be multi-polar, he let it happen, soon we gonna find ourself in the oval office asking him to dictate our policies... this is pure modern psychology on how to raise adolescent children ;-)

We soon will notice through him how bold soft skills and soft power approaches affect policy and behavior soon...

May 5, 2010

Askar Mambetaliev

I would suggest that the idea of fallibility of human thinking and necessity of open society for national development has contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. One of the greater promoters of this idea is George Soros. Its to early to evaluate the President Barack Obama's impact, but his popularity was quite high during his election campaign. However, a star sparkling too light tends go off too fast.

May 5, 2010

Tiziana Stella, The Streit Council, (5)

There are so many that influence the transatlantic relationship, especially with the evolving state of the EU. Here are just a few:
EU: Jose Manuel Barroso - President of the European Commission - obviously because he is
extremely important in negotiating legislature for the EU
Baroness Ashton - High Representative of EU Foreign Policy - newly created position that
has the potential to become the equivalent of the US Sec. of State, the
face of EU transatlantic relations
Herman Von Rumpuy - President of the European Union

Leaders: Obama- US President
Angel Merkel - Chancellor of Germany, in the face of the Greek financial bailout has
flexed major muscle
Nicolas Sarkozy- President of France

Rising Stars: incoming British PM- especially if it's a Tory-lead coalition, who are notoriously wary
of the EU and of close ties with the US

Institutions: European External Action Service (EEAS) - the new branch of the EU which will be
run by Baroness Ashton and be basically in control of all
foreign policy decided by the EU.
Atlantic Council, Brookings Institute, Center for Transatlantic Relations

Technology: YOU! Social media, twitter, facebook -- all these influence the perceptions of the leaders and force them to react on a extremely fast basis to the public, as well as increase the ease with which transatlantic conversations can take place.

May 6, 2010

ann an, jyvaskyla university, (4)

There are so many influential leaders, but I think Obama must be one of them for not only what he has done but also what he has brought to the political world. i think we should not consider him simply as a leader of U.S.A, but more importantly a symbol of democracy. And moreover, he has done a lot to promote the peace in Iraq and to save the economy of U.S.A. so I think he should be one of the most influential leaders.

And I think we should not ignore the power of technology as well. Twitter and Facebook are inevitably becoming more and more popular. There are 400M Facebook users and countless followers on Twitter. People can find whatever they want on those social networks. moreover, the development of technology forces the global leaders to react faster to what happened in the world because the news is spreading very quickly online. So I think the technology development is very influential as well, and the most influential social networks are Twitter and Facebook.

May 6, 2010

Helen TC Whall, -, (3)

It seems that most influential leaders have some soft of political might, presence or attraction in their own way. Ofcourse, how certain individuals are selected depends very much on the criteria in which is being used to measure. Therefore, no matter how well the intentions are, even statistics can be misleading.

As with 'Thinkers'- designers, architects, actors, they influence in what they create, make and envisage.

Lady Gaga has had a surprisingly unintended effect. By that I mean, she has graced concert halls to find fans that may have never existed in the first place. So start a trend and people will follow! How does influential differentiate with popular?

Obama most certainly comes to the forefront. One may need to only look at the European leadership to question whether there is much representation of the minorities living on certain European countries. Upcoming UK elections results will be telling....

May 6, 2010

Elizabeth Grenier

TIME Magazine's "Influence Index" based on social media offers an overview of popular trends in politics and entertainment, but obviously gives us little information on the most important transatlantic analysts... And wasn't meant to, either. This is why the names brought up here are a great way to learn about people who do not try to fit their thought in a 140-character Twitter-slot.

Since I'm from Montreal, I would name an influential woman from my country who's now president of the International Crisis Group, Louise Arbour. She would also agree with Aviv Lubell's comment, as she denounces Canada's relative absence on the international scene.

Or as she put it:
“Is Canada punching below its weight?” she says. “Is it punching at all?”
See: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/800584--louise-arbour-can...

That being said, I hope voices more engaging than Stephen Harper's will arise to do so.

May 8, 2010

Pat Patterson, Republican, Bronze Contributor (16)

I suggested over at Atlantic Review that one of the longest lasting and also the thinker with the greatest impact on transatlantic relations and practices is the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The whole idea of forward projection of power not being tied to colonial holdings is part and parcel of US policy since Theodore Roosevelt.

Many of the new powers, supposedly in tune with the ideas of soft power, are also anxiously trying to build or acquire the capability to enforce their influence as an ideal while at the very least securing freedom of economic movement. And this, witness the failure of power projection in the sea lanes off the coast of East Africa, as an achievable reality.

I 'm not to sure what a call for more Canadian involvement in world affairs means unless that its current policy is simply disagreeable to many and thus "wasted." I doubt that the Red Devils in Afghanistan would see themselves as "...punching below [their] weight."

May 9, 2010

Nathalie Selleslags

I agree with many people who said that technology and the media are huge influences in our current society. We don't realize how much of an influence media has on our lives and the singularity of what we are exposed to. I recently returned from 6 months abroad in Germany and found that the advertisements, TV, movies, etc....were a lot broader than the media shown in the US. What we are shown in the US is much more cloistered, and to be honest, biased, than in other parts of the world. One really has to make an effort to get information from the rest of the world: compare having yahoo as your start up home page with Al Jazeera, there is a huge leap of events that are covered. With that said, I feel like many of the influential people named have been solely on economic and political levels. I must admit that I am fairly ingnorant in these fields, but I would like to suggest people in other fields such as, Deepak Chopra, Don Miguel Ruiz, Alice Walker, Alicia Keys, and Brian Greene as influential people in our world today.

It seems like we get caught up in the technical and monetary; when there are many more aspects of life and our society to examine and many more ways in which we are influenced. We seem to be stuck in a redundant cycle of economics, politics, materialism, and the purely concrete, creating small world views of experience, when there is tons of evidence suggesting that our world experiences do no solely revolve around money. If we look back only several decades, we would probably list people such as Martin Luther King, John Lenon, Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks as influential people. Yes, many of these people were involved politically; however, they targeted the masses, the everyday people; they related to them and got them involved on a world scale. They influences worldwide.

This is why technology and the media have such power now, in good and not so good ways, they shape what we are exposed to, yet they also priovide easy access a plethora of information. We lterally have the world at our fingertips. I would do well to study about the people listed previously, but I also wanted to add my list to give a broader view of how we have been influenced in all aspects of our lives.

May 9, 2010

RHSchumann

Media polls are not worth the paper on which they are written.

May 13, 2010

ula p

The most influential thinkers are not necessary (and usually are not) the most famous ones. Time's ranking lacks two, very crucial names:

-Noam Chomsky: incredibly important opinion in the Israeli policy and American involvement in Middle East conflict discussion. Very clear and consequent point of view.
- Slavoj Zizek: eccentric philosopher with an increasing influence especially among left wing thinker.