Nitpicking with "The Economist" Sir, I noticed that the letter that you kindly published under my name ("Present at the creation", Jul 27th 2002 ) differs significantly from the one that I sent you, which is reproduced below. Beside mercifully improving my wobbly English, you eliminated two sentences (delimited by * below) which I do not regard as superfluos or irrelevant. I understand that "bona fide" editing of readers' letters is legitimate, but in order to set things straight I have posted my original message together with these remarks at my website (http://www.weirdtech.com/corr/eco.txt). Sincerely, Italo Vecchi Sir, In his survey ( "Present at the creation", June 29th) Bill Emmott fails to address the most glaring flaw in the "new world order" spearheaded by the United States, i.e. its lack of democratic legitimacy. Where a globalised economy induces global social dynamics, it calls for global political leadership. The United States are indeed providing such leadership, but on the basis of a democratic consensus that represents about 5% of the world's population. The US refusal to endorse solutions to global problems that may limit its power, from the Kyoto Protocol to a World Court of Justice, is indeed an obvious instance of American unwillingness to subordinate its national interests to a common consensus. *[Actually the intrinsecally anti-global and obsolete nation state has become either a fortress of the rich or a jail for the poor. Nation states in the "developing" world are currenltly little more than bantustans, the vote of, say, a Nigerian carrying less weight on global matters than the yawn of a New Yorker.]* An "internally" democratic oligarchy exerting power on a far larger community is nothing new in history, but whether apartheid's South Africa provides a viable model for the world's political future remains to be seen. Italo Vecchi Vicolo del Leoncorno 5 Ferrara Italy