Enlightened Despots

Chris Bertram proposes: "The Emir of Qatar may be a despot, but for Al Jazeera alone he could be winning a Frederick the Great prize as the most enlightened one of recent decades."

An interesting idea. I'm heading to a meeting with the program director for Al Jazeera English a bit later this morning and it certainly seems to me that for all the Twitter/Facebook hype, the key information technology intervention here has been Al Jazeera and the rise of an Arab public sphere. Marc Lynch's Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today was way ahead of the curve on this, but the publisher seems to be asking an extortionate price to read the book.

I think the idea of a Frederick The Great Prize has a lot of promise. Give it out maybe once a decade? Previous winners could include Lee Kwan Yew for his visionary implementation of congestion pricing and perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev.