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The magazine Foreign Policy has ranked Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt as the world’s 95:th most important thinkers “for telling Europe what it doesn't want to hear”.

Here’s the motivation:

“You might say the media-savvy, conference-hopping Swedish foreign minister imagines a unified Europe modeled after his own personality: dynamic at developing ideas, intent on charming new friends, and unafraid of daunting challenges.

"It's not a vision that has endeared Carl Bildt to the continent's many cautious leaders, and might have been the reason he was passed over for the top EU foreign-policy job this year.

"Against the French and Germans, he insists that Europe needs to allow Turkish accession. Where Britain wants to focus on the war on terror, Bildt thinks the continent should earn its foreign-policy stripes by addressing the problems in the Balkans. And against the continent's many social democrats, he says that Europe must commit to economic reform at home and free trade abroad.

"It boils down to whether Europe in the decades ahead will be seen as a model for the future," he warned in the Guardian, "or as a museum of the past."

Billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who teamed up to prove that even in tough times great new ideas can emerge, were together ranked as number one “for stepping up as the world's states falter”.

When historians look back to the moment when the post-Cold War reign of American power ended, they may well settle on 2010 as a crucial year, the magazine points out. Everywhere, it seemed, there were signs that the long-predicted "rise of the rest" had finally occurred, whether in the newfound assertiveness of fast-growing China or the impatient diplomacy of new powers like Brazil and Turkey. Foreign Policy's second annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers fully reflects that new world, it said.