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The Fragility of a Flat World
Joseph S Nye is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government and author, most recently, of The Power Game: A
Washington Novel. His previous post on Webdiary was Should Iran be attacked?.
by Joseph S Nye
The world is flat! So says the columnist Thomas Friedman, who chose that provocative title for his bestselling book to awaken people to the dramatic effects that technology is having on the world economy. Distance is shrinking. Geographical barriers no longer provide easy protection. Manufacturing workers and high-tech professionals alike in Europe and America are being challenged by global competition. Western consumers who call a local company are likely to speak to someone in India.
Skeptics have pointed to the limits of Friedman’s metaphor. As one put it, the world is not flat, but "spiky." A contour map of economic activity in the world would show mountains of prosperity and many ravines of deprivation. Moreover, distance is far from dead. Even neighbors with low tariff barriers, like Canada and the United States, trade more internally than across borders. Seattle and Vancouver are close geographically, but Vancouver trades more with distant Toronto than with nearby Seattle.
Such criticism notwithstanding, Friedman makes an important point. Globalization, which can be defined as interdependence at inter-continental distances, is as old as human history. Witness the migration of peoples and religions, or trade along the ancient silk route that connected medieval Europe and Asia. But globalization today is different, because it is becoming quicker and thicker.
After the first trans-Atlantic cable in 1868, Europe and America could communicate in a minute. In 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes described the possibility of an Englishman in London using a telephone to order goods from around the world to be delivered to his house by the afternoon. But Keynes’s Englishman was wealthy and thus exceptional. Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world have access to global goods in their local supermarkets.
Similarly, as recently as two decades ago, instantaneous global communication existed, but was economically out of reach for most people. Now, virtually anyone can enter an Internet café and enjoy a capability that was once available only to governments, multinational corporations, and a few individuals or organizations with large budgets. Tremendous declines in computing, communication, and transport costs have democratized technology.
Only a decade ago, two-thirds of all Internet users were in the US. Today, less than a quarter are located there. Knowledge is power, and more people have access to information today than at any time in human history. Non-state actors now have capabilities that were once limited to governments. The nation-state is not about to be replaced as the dominant institution of world politics, but it will have to share the stage with more actors, including organizations like Oxfam, celebrities like Bono, and transnational terrorist networks like Al Qaeda.
But flattening is reversible. It has happened before. The world economy was highly integrated in 1914, but economic interdependence declined during the next three decades. The global economy did not recover that same level of integration until 1970, and even then it remained divided by the Iron Curtain.
World War I was the trigger that set off the reversal, with economic globalization declining while military globalization increased, as witnessed by two world wars and a global cold war. This reflected deeper problems of domestic inequality created by nineteenth-century economic progress. Politics did not keep pace, and the result was the rise of pathological ideologies – fascism and communism – that divided nations and the world. The creation of the welfare state in Western countries after World War II helped to create a safety net for people disadvantaged by economic change, thereby encouraging them to accept the return of international economic interdependence.
Some analysts see China playing a role today similar to Germany’s role in the twentieth century. A rising power, beset with internal inequality, turns to nationalism and challenges the dominant power, provoking a war that turns back the progress of economic globalization. While the American and Chinese economies are highly interdependent today, so, too, were Germany and Britain before 1914.
But the analogy is imperfect. Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial production by 1900. Even at its current high rates of growth, China’s economy is unlikely to equal that of the US for at least two more decades.
The greater threat to a flat world is likely to come from the non-state and transnational forces that have been unleashed by the diffusion of technology. On September 11, 2001, a non-state network killed more Americans in a surprise attack than the government of Japan did at Pearl Harbor in 1941. I have called this the privatization of war. If such actors obtain nuclear and biological materials, the world will look very different. Borders will become harder to cross for both people and goods. And if such actors disrupt the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, home to two-thirds of the world’s reserves, a global depression like that of the 1930’s could strengthen protectionism further.
Globalization has two driving forces: technology and policy. Thus far, policy has reinforced the flattening effects of technology. As the world’s largest economy, the US has taken the lead in promoting policies that reduce barriers. But the events described above could reverse such policies.
Some critics of globalization might welcome such an outcome. But the result, as we saw after 1914, would be the worst of both worlds – reversal of the economic globalization that spreads technology and power, but reinforcement of negative dimensions of military and ecological globalization, such as war, terror, climate change, and the spread of infectious diseases. In that case, the flat world could become a desert.
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Scholars for 9/11 Proof
Chris thank you for your link to the "Scholars for 9/11 Proof" website which asserts that on the basis that there is no physical evidence as to the identity of the four aircraft that crashed on 9/11, determined by reference to specific traceable parts of those planes, that they were in fact four commercial jets that had been hijacked from various airports on that day and invites us, in the name of the "precautionary principle", which he does not understand, not to conclude that they had done so. It is a testament to human silliness and I am sure that only the most gullible would give it any credence. Its author George Nelson Colonel, USAF (ret.) is truly barking mad and a whacko of the first order, which probably explains why he has the letters (ret) at the end of his title.
His argument about traceable parts is based upon his claim that the United States government has not released information to the public about specific parts of the planes which, if recovered from the crash site, would identify the specific plane that crashed. Even if true, as each of the crashes is the subject of a criminal investigation the US government is under no obligation to release the information he seeks to satisfy the retired colonel's curiosity.
Against that the retired colonel wants us to believe that the aircraft did not crash. He does so in the face of air traffic control tapes indicating that the planes had been hijacked, radar records that showed their flight paths, recordings of telephone conversations by passengers on the hijacked jets indicating that the planes that they were on had been hijacked, eyewitness accounts, photographs and video recordings of the two of the planes actually crashing into the World Trade Centre towers and of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the recovered flight recorder of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
The poor retired colonel should have the letters (cert) for certifiable added to his title.
Chris Shaw,
Chris Shaw, "Truth.......”
Whose?
Chris Shaw, “....is a great antiseptic, but truth has to be smuggled in under the present embargo.........’
Chris, i prefer the concepts of ideas and information to “truth”, and if they need to be smuggled in it merely reflects the low value citizens place on them. Otherwise we would be demanding access and exposure to them.
Chris Shaw, “If we simply build a mechanism to restore the unrestricted flow of information to the people, the country might self-resuscitate”.
I think John Ralston Saul was right in referring to “The Unconscious Civilisation”. And I don’t think any amount of information will make a difference when motivation/interest is lacking due to the “hypnosis of social conditioning”.
Privatisation
There's a nagging worry about the part transnationals may play in aid and development. As Nye wrote, a transnational may behave like Oxfam, or Al Qaeda. The Gates Foundation will operate at one end of the spectrum, but will come under the influence of less benign forces, like pharmaceutical companies.
In We have the opportunity to do a lot of good Michael Liffman asked:
In Catholic Online, Billionaire Buffett’s gift criticized by pro-life groups
Other churches interfere, too. From The influence of hidden prophets
Rupert Murdoch's latest acquisition in Poland gives him a 25% share in Catholic TV Puls:
Is that the man who oversaw the introduction of nudity as a feature of a major daily newspaper?
Jeff Taylor, in The Sandy Foundation of the White House: a Bible-Believing Christian's View of Bush:
Rupert Murdoch interferes flagrantly in government policies - Murdoch turns up the heat on changes to media laws. He received an award for being 'the most influential Australian', to the applause of the national Treasurer seated at one of the top tables.
Murdoch is quiet clear about his intentions to influence elections of governments. From Lance Price: Rupert Murdoch is effectively a member of Blair's cabinet
The mass media are supposed to have a code that requires objectivity and impartiality. If the public cannot trust the media to present the facts, then how do we find out what is happening?
Finally, from Frank Rich, in 'Can't Win the War? Bomb the Press!' (pay-for-view at New York Times; may become freely available elsewhere):
Australia's foreign relations will be increasingly focused on Papua, PNG and Timor Leste. Scott Burchill writes about Papua ('Turning our backs on people in need') to expose the limitations that arise when public policy is corrupted by politics:
We would do well to watch carefully, as our aid money is employed for the advancement of our near neighbours and remote communities, via transnational organisations. Just do not expect the media to do the job for us.
Chris...
Chris, what about the successful prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui?
And when you argue that there is no link between OBL and 9-11 are you forgetting that the guy admitted to being involved? Maybe it is not on the website of the FBI but this is fairly common knowledge, wouldn't you say?
"Politics did not keep
"Politics did not keep pace, and the result was the rise of pathological ideologies – fascism and communism...."
I think that by any measure, our own sacred free-market system answers to the description of a pathological ideology. Having no competition, a system with only one goal (profit) is bound to develop according to the rules of cancer. We are already feeling intuitively that Australian society and the economy are mortally ill, are we not? Is there a treatment?
Truth is a great antiseptic, but truth has to be smuggled in under the present embargo. If we simply build a mechanism to restore the unrestricted flow of information to the people, the country might self-resuscitate.
Back to Nye: "The greater threat to a flat world is likely to come from the non-state and transnational forces that have been unleashed by the diffusion of technology. On September 11, 2001, a non-state network killed more Americans in a surprise attack than the government of Japan did at Pearl Harbor in 1941. I have called this the privatization of war."
Since 9-11 was such a "catalysing event" in the promotion of these transnational forces, it might help to study the means, motive and method of the perpetrators. But who are the perpetrators? Let's look at progress to date.
1. After 9-11, there has been NOT ONE legitimate prosecution of a terrorist in the US, despite having allocated $10.6 billion in 2002 alone to Homeland Security.
2. Take a look at the FBI's own website . What do you NOT see? Any connection between OBL and 9-11, because there ain't any proof.
3. The four planes involved in 9-11 have not been forensically identified. It's official. Here's how it should have been done.
Now, if you are like me, wouldn't you be wanting a little more proof before embarking on the War on Terror? How is it possible to have a dialogue about an enemy who is so ill-defined? What kind of world are we creating that permits war on such flimsy pretexts?
Nye gives a clue: "....the worst of both worlds – reversal of the economic globalization that spreads technology and power, but reinforcement of negative dimensions of military and ecological globalization...”
Means, method and motive....
Should've just quoted Friedman
Nye makes some interesting points but they have already been made in Friedman's book.
To quote Friedman:
(Italics are Friedman's; bolding is mine. 2006 Penguin updated and revised edition, pp.460-461)
Nye doesn't really offer us anything new here.