Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  THE UNDENIABLE TRAJECTORY: SUPEREMPOWER ME!

  Americans, who are problem-solvers at heart, want answers regarding this clear ambiguity: Is globalization stabilizing or destabilizing? Is it integrating or disintegrating? Does it homogenize or fracture? Is it good or bad? Will we win or lose?

  Of course, depending on where you sit, all answers are correct. If you’re located in the Core, globalization tends—on average—to stabilize, integrate, and homogenize somewhat. If you’re stuck in the Gap, globalization appears to be, at first blush, clearly more destabilizing, disintegrating, and fractious. As for winners and losers, it isn’t easy to summarize except to say that globalization superempowers those able to choose their families and locations and networks, while it disempowers those who insist that such interpersonal connectivity is a given and not subject to change. If you can leave your community, marry outside your culture or faith, and choose your profession and your home with great flexibility, globalization is a clear good, because it facilitates such individual-level freedom. But if you cannot do any of those things, because they’re beyond your imagination, or transgress your taboos or the code of your tribe, then globalization can hardly seem anything but frightening and revolutionary. So saying yes to globalization is very much like saying yes to emigrating to America: If your reinvention is possible, then your options are many, as are your paths to happiness. Every nation’s average citizen does better in America than back home. That’s why, of all nations on this planet, America should be least frightened by superempowered individuals (Thomas Friedman’s famous term), for we represent their most natural home.

  That’s another reason I don’t worry about the accurate perception that globalization’s rapid spread outpaces that of political pluralism—in other words, economic liberty presaging political liberty. As long as any nation allows for increasing economic and network connectivity between its citizenry and the outside world, the long-term effects will always expose the lie that man’s path to happiness can be singularly defined. All politics begins with this question: Are man’s paths to happiness singular or infinite? If singular, then such order can be imposed from above by an elite. If infinite, then such order can only be granted from below by masses who—through constant negotiation—collectively agree on today’s definition of the Golden Rule. Superempowered individuals, by definition, are able to go their own way. For now, the reality is that globalization creates too many superempowered individuals, too many “unreasonable men,” and too many Teddy Roosevelts trapped inside too many “stationary states.”

  What’s so scary about globalization today is that it’s triggering a global consciousness regarding the possibilities of individual liberty, and in doing so, it places a lot of elites in nondemocratic societies in a tough place. In tandem, they must justify their rule by exploiting globalization’s connectivity to raise individual incomes while resisting globalization’s cultural “pollution” (i.e., all those dangerous ideas of individual freedom), which only raises individual expectations. In other words, their sell on regime legitimacy becomes, “I’m making this connectivity happen in a way that enriches our nation while protecting all of you from content that will threaten our collective identity.” I’m not saying the same isn’t true for leaders in democratic nations, just that it’s a whole lot easier for them, because, by and large, popular expectations are easier to meet in our type of democracy.

  Why? American-style democracies tend to come with a substantial middle class, whose ideology is one of self-improvement through self-empowerment, meaning these people look to the government primarily for its role in keeping the playing field reasonably level. The rich, in contrast, look to the government primarily to protect them (and their wealth) from the demands of the poor, while the poor look to the government for protection from their very circumstances. What we’re missing right now in globalization is that sense of a worldwide middle-class ideology that says, “We’re the hardworking members of this global community and this is what we think would be a fair deal.” Invariably, too many experts today describe the world as a superelite sitting high above the bottom billion, reducing everything to the extremes of haves versus have-nots. We have no global leaders of note speaking to the global middle right now, just narrow-minded populist leaders echoing the hopes and fears of their own “middle” back home, typically promising them refuge from the storm when they should be linking those hopes and fears to what Jeffrey Sachs dubs globalization’s emerging “common wealth” overwhelmingly found in the global middle class.

  So in relatively open democracies, globalization tends to trigger the self-examining question “What does it mean to be an [American]?” more than “Who gets to be an [American]?” By and large, democracies assume the individual’s right to choose his family/networks/citizenship, so questions about globalization are less nationalistic in tenor and more individualistic—less “How is globalization changing [America]?” and more “How’s it working out for you?”

  The short answer for anybody, whether in a democracy or not, depends primarily on the freedom to network with others. Globalization’s mix of stable behemoths surrounded by innovative tykes is clearly reflected on the level of individual workers. More people work in small firms than in big ones, and an increasing share of workers assume the role of free agents within the economy, either formally or informally. At first, it seemed like only those who worked for larger firms were in danger of having their jobs outsourced, but increasingly free agents realize they’re in much the same boat, especially since free markets, in their capacity for innovation, tend to outsource most jobs “to the past,” as international business consultant David Rothkopf observes. So the real shift in risk here seems to be from the collective (whether it’s a country, a culture, or a company) to the individual in the sense that globalization takes what was once a given, your occupation (often inherited from your parent), and says in effect, “You don’t own it, because virtually everybody else on this planet can do it, and anybody can add new technologies or services that consign it to the dustbin of economic history.” So even among the freest agents in this world, there’s no success unless you’re willing to regularly adapt to changing circumstances. Globalization is all about networks, and networks allow for workarounds. Workarounds are the essence of resilience—rerendering rules on the fly. So being good at globalization means being able to adjust your rules (as a person, company, military, country) in response to environmental change. Simply put, globalization demands we all evolve faster.

  I work for a start-up technology/consulting firm based in . . . uh, pockets spread all over the planet. My boss is based in Philadelphia and I live in Indianapolis. Our third top executive hails from Florida. Our technology center is located in Pennsylvania but our operations center is in northern Virginia. We create a new local office wherever in the world our partnerships take us (so far, Kurdish Iraq, Dubai, and Turkey). I work full-time for the company, but I also write weekly for a newspaper chain based in Ohio and periodically for a magazine based in New York while serving as a visiting scholar for a think tank in Tennessee. The guy who edits my books lives in Manhattan, but my book agent is based in Massachusetts. The lady who manages my speaking career lives in New Jersey, and the fellow who designs all my PowerPoint presentations is located in South Carolina, not too far from my blog’s webmaster. I talk to all these people quite regularly, but meet most of them face-to-face quite rarely. Depending on what I’m doing at any one time, I can call myself a senior managing director, blogger, author, journalist, columnist, public speaker, business developer, consultant, visiting scholar, military analyst, or grand strategist. I’m both self-employed and work for a formal company (actually, a cluster of them, all related to one another). I was born and reared in Wisconsin but went to Massachusetts for grad school. My wife was born in Indiana and grew up in Ohio. I was raised Catholic and she was the daughter of a Congregational minister. We’ve lived together in nine homes spread across five states, with two kids bo
rn in Virginia, one in Rhode Island, and the most recent “insourced” from China. I have no idea what I’ll be doing ten years from now or where I’ll be doing it or with whom. I’m just certain that I’ll be forced to adapt my career and home life to new circumstances beyond my control. I feel at once superempowered by American-style capitalism and its progeny—modern globalization—and constantly put at risk by its stunningly rapid evolutions. After all, I began my professional life, in 1990, as a Soviet expert, only to see that job immediately outsourced to history. When my kids ask me if they can grow up to be just like me, I tell them, “I have no idea if that will be possible, but you can come work for me, assuming you can transform yourself into whatever I’m doing at that time.”

  If that’s my constantly-on-the-make life as an entrepreneur in the most competitive economy in the world, then you have to believe globalization is a stunningly revolutionary force across the rest of the planet, where, quite frankly, the vast majority of cultures simply aren’t built for that speed of change. In most places in this world, rules are not only not made to be broken, they’re not made to be changed, either. But rules do change in response to network growth, because networks empower individuals. In globalization, networks are the equivalent of Luther’s reformation: They take a distant, mediated relationship and make it a direct connection, empowering each individual node. If you have a question to ask “God” today, you just get him on your phone’s Web browser and ping Google or Wikipedia.

  This individual-empowerment-through-networks takes many forms.

  Regions that were “media-dark” ten years ago now feature networks that connect potential consumers to producers the world over. But that connectivity empowers in both directions: Big firms access the bottom of the pyramid, but those lowly consumers can—and will—turn into vigilantes against those same firms if their expectations are not met. And no, that’s not just a matter of poor people in developing markets bringing big old multinationals to their knees. Sometimes it’s angry American consumers becoming a revolutionary force within “Communist” China, forcing levels of transparency and product liability that the ruling party elite had no intention of granting as part of this transaction. Another time it’s a rogue trader who ends up costing his French employer, one of the world’s largest and most respected banks, roughly $7 billion in bogus investments, triggering much the same demands from angry shareholders.

  Twenty years ago, official development aid represented the biggest financial flow to developing markets from developed ones. Across the 1990s, it was rapidly overtaken by foreign direct investment flows, which in turn seem to have been rapidly overtaken, thanks to a stunning uptick in global people migrations, by remittances sent home by guest workers and recent emigrants. Just across my short professional career, globalization has gone from having governments controlling the biggest Core-to-Gap financial flows, to having corporations trigger more, to having individuals send roughly as much as the other two combined! Befitting the frontier nature of this age, the American firm Western Union, which began life extending the reach of telegraphs across our Western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century, recently reinvented itself as the world’s number-one network handler of remittance payments, controlling roughly one-seventh of the flow.

  As a kid who came of age in the early 1970s, I found it was revolutionary enough to see the president of the United States brought down by the reporting of the Washington Post. Nowadays, powerful leaders are dislodged—seemingly overnight—by packs of bloggers who can uncover the truth with a speed that’s almost godlike. This same blogosphere, and the “Net-roots” political communities it nurtures, can likewise increasingly propel candidates into office, help newcomer politicians smash all previous records for political fundraising (typically tapping large armies of ordinary citizens for small donations over the Web), and then police these same politicians with a vehemence bordering on an angry mob once they take office and—God forbid!—somehow do not measure up to expectations.

  And these dynamics are hardly limited to open societies. Globalization’s many communication networks are helping to shine a light on human rights abuses the world over. Yes, there are still plenty of places where abuses go unchallenged but almost no places where they go unnoticed.

  A good example of this struggle can be found in China, where the so-called Great Firewall, created and monitored by the government, keeps more than 200 million Internet users under a form of “mouse arrest.” Unless these users go to the effort of using proxy servers or encrypting their traffic through virtual private networks, they’re essentially experiencing a walled-in-garden version of the Internet—a virtual Matrix. The purpose of such a control system is not to prevent any or all leakage, so it’s not that hard to get around. The real goal, as journalist James Fallows argues, is simply to make such workarounds so difficult and/or so costly that your average Chinese simply gives up and thus remains satisfied with his Matrix-like version of the Internet, fundamentally ignorant of how these virtual walls separate his online experience from that of the real world out there. In effect, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do the same thing in cyberspace that it’s long done on broadcast networks: insulate its people from any significant criticism of its ruling brand.

  But here’s why that doesn’t work over the long haul: The walled-in approach is just fine for much of your first generation of users of any new technology—consider the rise and fall of America Online. At first, most people don’t want maximum freedom, just easy access, so they accept packages that are relatively restrictive. The problem that emerges over time is threefold: (1) as people get used to the service, and their sense of entitlement grows, they tend to get mad when they bump up against artificial limits; (2) as people use the service more and more in a business sense, they want maximum capacity to grow their client base as well as protect it, so the early restrictions that were tolerable when the associated business services represented only a small portion of the company’s earnings become unbearable when that share grows; and (3) as soon as your first generation of users grows up wholly in that environment, expect them to start pushing your boundaries simply because their baseline expectations are so much higher than those of the initial generation of users. The Chinese Communist Party’s problem with the Internet is a microcosm of every authoritarian government’s problem with globalization: Once you let it in, you face an independent source of rising expectations that you can only control by disconnecting it all together. In a peer-to-peer world, there’s nothing more powerful than peer pressure. Globalization is thus a virtual Helsinki Accords for everyone who logs on—especially celebrities (God love ’em) with a cause.

  Harry Emerson Fosdick, the early-twentieth-century American clergy-man, once said, “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” The American System- cum-globalization is based on the same premise: The sum creativity of all these ordinary people vastly outweighs the dangers posed by all this shared vulnerability. To live in a modern world is to rely on the trustworthiness of strangers to a stunning degree, and much of that faith comes in knowing that people are empowered to do what’s necessary and right. What the Old Core West finds so scary about globalization is not superempowerment per se but the potential bad effects of its uneven distribution.

  Collectively, the West is a high-trust networked commonwealth. Compared with the rest of the global economy, it remains a somewhat walled-in garden, but one that’s recently found itself abutting a huge chunk of humanity encased in relatively low-trust environments—rising New Core pillars and the frighteningly untrustworthy Gap regions of the world. In the case of many authoritarian regimes, neither these governments nor the United States trusts these newly superempowered individuals to do the right thing, as each might define it. So we’re both basically bumping into the walls of this Matrix, shocked to discover what’s going on beyond what we’ve long assumed were the absolute limits of our trusted universe. We’re stunned to
discover the lack of safety regulations and human rights outside, over there, and the average Chinese or Iranian is stunned to discover the lack of information restrictions outside, over here, including our seemingly limitless supply of pornography.

  To be superempowered is to be superconnected, and to be superconnected is often to be superstunned at how others get by in this world, especially since new forms of connectivity have been exploited, throughout recorded history, first and foremost by nefarious elements.

  THE AMERICAN SYSTEM PERTURBED: THE RISE OF GLOBAL GUERRILLAS

  The American System began as a continental network, then became hemispheric around the start of the twentieth century, then made its true bid to globalize after WWII, becoming—in effect—transoceanic. After the Cold War’s collapse we began to recognize this American-inspired globalization as truly global in scope, if not yet universal in its enforcement of rules: The Core’s increasingly dense networks function all right, but the Gap’s more brittle networks are still characterized by great uncertainty regarding the lack of transparent rules and the persistence of mass violence. In short, you know what to expect across the Core, but you’re never quite sure inside the Gap. Even breakdowns inside the Core have their own protocols, but inside the Gap, situations can unravel to the point where networks crumble and simply disappear for long stretches, maybe never to return. That’s why China’s investment in African infrastructure is so stunning: Often it resurrects roads and railroads and networks that nobody has used in decades, basically since the colonial powers left. The same can be said of America’s security efforts there through AFRICOM: old colonial forts rebuilt because the networks they protect are being revived.