From a Dartmouth parade ground to a Belfast youth club, a Moscow kitchen table and a Tibetan lake, Peter Emerson traces the chance encounters that turned an ex-submariner into a lifelong critic of yes-or-no voting. He also asks what ancient Asia might teach us about deciding things together.
In 1988, a Moscow paper called Nagorno-Karabakh “our Northern Ireland.” In Part III, Peter Emerson asks why “this or that?” questions divide us, from Belfast to the Balkans, and makes the case for multi-option, preferential voting instead.
At 82, on a folding Brompton, Peter Emerson cycles through rural Yúnnán and Guǎngxī to see how Chinese villages make decisions. There’s báijiǔ with farmers, a granny’s 70th birthday lunch, and a stop short of Tibet. He finds that China, like almost everyone else, swears by majority rule, though it held a three-option vote back in 1197.
