Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  A century ago, the United States was grappling with many of the same problems that currently confront China: rapid deforestation in the midwestern states, water scarcity in the west, soil erosion and dust storms in the nation’s heartland, and loss of fish and wildlife. These challenges sparked a number of grand-scale public and private initiatives to conserve the land, water and forest resources, as well as the biodiversity of the country.

  The big difference with China today, as Economy notes, is the scale of environmental degradation, for China’s trying to pull off a trajectory like late-nineteenth-century America but with a current population that’s more than ten times larger than ours was back then. Trying to make that growth happen for roughly one out of every five humans concentrated on a landmass roughly the same size as our own is unimaginably hard. But that’s one of the many reasons why I don’t see China picking fights with the United States. It will simply need our help—meaning our investments and our technology—too much in coming decades. As it is, the Chinese Communist Party is running an “enormous gamble,” in Economy’s words, by encouraging the rise of grassroots nongovernmental organizations (still often government-sponsored) focused on protecting the environment. By making protection of the environment a social cause, the Party exposes itself to outside judgment, from both its people and the world, in the same way that the Soviet Union exposed itself during détente on the subject of human rights—the Helsinki Accords. In many ways, Economy’s analysis suggests that the United States and the rest of the West should engage China in an OSCE-like, Northern Hemispheric dialogue on shared environmental concerns, so as to further encourage both Beijing’s use of domestic environmental NGOs and its importation of Western environmental technologies. In general, Economy finds, China responds well to such multilateral forums so long as access to new technology is facilitated.

  Our grand strategic goal here should be to create as many avenues of dialogue between China and the outside world as possible so that when the environmental disasters do start piling up, as I believe they will, China won’t respond in a knee-jerk, authoritarian fashion out of the fear that anything less aggressive will make it seem weak in the eyes of the outside world. We all want China to move in the direction of political pluralism. The question is, what is the best route, meaning one that the Chinese Communist Party finds both acceptable (i.e., regime-enhancing) and necessary (i.e., regime-protecting)? Lead with political autonomy for Tibet or Xinjiang’s Uighers and Beijing will throw up as many walls as necessary to protect itself from outside pressure, thus curtailing its integration into the global economy. Lead with environmental issues that speak to China’s continued political stability and growing competitiveness in the global economy, and we’ll plant the seeds for political liberty not only for such minorities but for the Chinese people as a whole. Fast enough for Tibet’s supporters in the West? Probably not. But our grand strategy cannot be simply a summation of the desires of our domestic pressure groups, as Henry Kissinger has frequently lamented.

  Already, we can see a serious “green awakening” throughout much of China, from the grassroots NGOs right up to the seniormost leadership. This awakening will only push Beijing harder in its quest to cannibalize its high-polluting state-run sector in the direction of its far less corrupt and less polluting private sector, meaning it will incentivize China to speed up its transformation from a centrally planned economy to a market-based one more in the mold of the United States. Again, for those strategists intent on finding a path for increased conflict between the United States and China over resources, the future is not bright. As a recent World Bank study pointed out, the fastest-growing cities in China are those that feature the best climate for foreign investment, the lowest pollution, the lowest quotient of state-run enterprises, and the least amount of corruption. China is progressively remaking itself in much the same manner as America did during its own Progressive Era, turning Mao’s revolutionary war strategy on its head: The “golden cities” are expanding and thus attracting the rural poor in an unprecedented internal migration.

  None of these arguments are designed to make light of the incredible challenges humanity faces in the decades ahead. Instead, my goal here was simply to suggest how we might collectively untie some of the Gordian knots often cited by the doom-and-gloom crowd. The fact that the American System-cum-globalization is only beginning to tackle the challenge of continued economic growth in a resource-constrained environment—meaning we’re now asking the bulk of humanity to grow in a far more intensive manner than we Westerners did in the past—doesn’t mean we’ve crossed the Rubicon into some premillennialist nightmare of never-ending global crisis. A good example? When the first oil shocks struck in the 1970s, the world responded by depressing and holding steady its total oil use for roughly a decade: In 1979 the world used approximately 65 million barrels of oil a day, and that amount was not surpassed until 1989. Meanwhile, the global economy grew dramatically across the decade—the beginning of the “long boom” that continued until 2008. Think we can’t wring out more efficiencies today, given all the computing power we’ve amassed in the past three decades? Or all the advances in material sciences and nanotechnology and biotech? Experts will tell you that more than two-thirds of all energy used in the world today is wasted, meaning lost when fuels are burned and heat escapes or when electricity is transmitted along wires. Lovins himself likes to point out that less than one percent of the fuel energy consumed in today’s automobiles actually ends up moving the car’s occupants forward. None of these inefficiencies require “god machines” for their reduction, just the same sort of innovation that got humanity to this point in the first place.

  And the best news is, now we’ve got 3 billion new brains all working the same puzzles.

  THE GLOBAL ACCELERANT: THE GREATEST AWAKENING

  While America’s recent premillennialist bent has unfortunately mirror-imaged that of our radical Islamic enemies, the rest of the planet—outside of Europe—has hit a spiritual inflection point of a different sort, one that should seem distantly familiar to us. Per our postmillennialist expectations (“We won the Cold War, didn’t we?”), this global religious awakening can seem quite intimidating (“Doesn’t the ‘end of history’ now put us all past this irrational stuff?”), as if Sisyphus needs to start pushing that boulder up the hill again. But in reality, it’s time to start chasing that rock as it rolls down the far side. This sort of religious awakening does not represent sheer resistance, or friction in response to globalization’s rapid advance. Rather, it reflects a blossoming coping mechanism: people reaching for spiritual handholds amid all this tremendous social and economic change.

  What it portends is this: People want an independent code of behavior to help them navigate all this new connectivity and the individual opportunities it affords. As they scale up from mere sustenance to serious consumption, they’re looking for guidelines for a life well led. Religion is the natural supplier here, but if left to its own devices, especially under conditions of political authoritarianism, it can just as easily justify alternative forms of dictatorship—for example, theocracy (religious law substituted for civil code). As soon as people glom onto religion as an all-purpose guide to the good life, it gets really hard to recognize alternative paths to happiness, thus short-circuiting the possibility of political pluralism. Accepting alternative political viewpoints is easy in a society where God’s law is separated from man’s law, but where God’s law is held supreme, extending reciprocity (“Your view should be considered equally to my own”) gets stunningly hard, because applying the Golden Rule within a religion is far easier than applying it among religions. In the latter case, asking those from another faith to respect your right to worship God as you see fit because you’re willing to offer the same to them can still be interpreted as an abject rejection of their faith. Worse, they may not be able to distinguish between their spiritual logic of “one path to happiness” and the desirability of many paths in the political realm. For
some people, heaven can’t wait, as there’s simply no spiritual corollary to economic credit. It’s cash-and-carry all the time.

  All of the world’s major religions were formed during the Malthusian era of human economics, or basically before the Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth century permeated societies, freeing people from a just-getting-by paradigm to the question “How do I deal with abundance?” When it’s all about survival, the code tends to be very strict, but when the possibility of abundance rears its attractive head, then people are given a choice: “Do I adapt the ancient code to this economic trajectory or do I reject its premise as evil—a force of improper liberation?” In general, the rising wealth is easy enough to justify in spiritual terms: “God wants me to live long and prosper.” It’s just that once the demographic logic is disrupted (“Go forth and multiply”), then long-held strictures regarding marriage, family, sex, homosexuality, and so on are suddenly put in jeopardy. Almost like the foreign aid or oil curse, the abundance curse provides individuals with their own source of funding, independent from the collective: “I simply don’t need the family to build and retain wealth, so such bonds matter to me less.” Worse, abundance allows for “chosen families,” replacing the previous iron logic of “given families.” Unhappy with your family circumstances? Then upgrade just the way you switch jobs.

  This is where globalization’s economic connectivity becomes immediately revolutionary in the social realm, unleashing a sense of personal freedom that is stunning—even perverse by historical standards. The upside, of course, is the commensurate unleashing of personal creativity. Genius isn’t made, it’s allowed. Progress thrives off such genius, thus creating the virtuous cycle by which more freedom is granted and made reciprocal throughout society (the Golden Rule) because the collective sees the utility: a rising standard of living. Once society enters this realm, the logic of unfolding political pluralism is easily obtained: “We need to lock in these personal freedoms and continuously upgrade them to maximize the resulting economic progress”—a logic arguably first cracked by the Dutch in the early 1600s. At that point, God’s law has nearly lost all control of the situation. It is clearly outperformed by man’s law, so the only choice left is postmillennialism—as in, “We must continue perfecting this progress to the point of achieving heaven here on earth.” At that point, the technocrats take over and science declares God dead (see the Netherlands today, where churches are abandoned by the hundreds).

  Of course, as society divides between economic winners and losers, the temptation for the latter is the exact opposite: premillennialism that rationalizes their subpar performance and promises their deliverance from these unacceptable circumstances. Pursued in a peaceful, fundamentalist manner, this presents no problem: For example, the Amish carve out separate lives and their collective desire is accommodated within conditions of political pluralism. But on a global scale, such as that presented by globalization’s rapid advance, the fundamentalist impulse is often conflated with the logic of political liberation: “I seek such protection at the level of a state.” And if the state standing in the way of this desire can be accused of spiritual infidelity, either because it encourages decadence through modernizing economic connectivity (either widely or just among the hypocritical elite) or suppresses the same while simultaneously repressing God’s law (i.e., the secular autocrat), then it is logically tarred as the “local devil” backed up by the “distant devil” of modernizing globalization. That globalization flows naturally from the American System model, and is frequently defended by that nation’s military force. By this logic, the ultimate root of all evil/destabilizing liberation is the United States itself, whose orgy of individualism stands as a frightening harbinger of mongrelized evolution to come unless righteous resistance is mounted.

  Under conditions of great disconnectedness (my definition of the Gap), economic losers do tend to outnumber greatly the economic winners, so the choices faced by people seeking out a firm rule set for such a not-so-good life are these: (1) live with the status quo of relative deprivation (hard in a world of connecting mass media, because you can see how the other half lives) that often features either uncaring autocrats or failed governments; (2) seek connectivity and try to catch up (i.e., deal with the “devil,” since alternative routes have all been discredited), accepting that, on an individual basis, this may require temporary or complete emigration from the homeland; or (3) seek firm disconnectedness in order to achieve the spiritual ideal, which requires clear rejection of this evil connectivity and its barren promises. Once the last route is chosen, it’s typically “in for a penny, in for a pound,” because the only way to ensure the proper and lasting level of insulation from a decadent outside world is to enforce it throughout the country in question, or, in the case of the radical Salafis, throughout the entirety of the Islamic world.

  So this is why we live in such revolutionary times, even though, in an economic sense, history really has “ended.” It is precisely because there’s little debate over the utility of connecting to the global economy that so much social tumult is being created right now. That tumult, whether positive (i.e., increasing abundance) or negative (those left behind), fuels the instinctive reach for more spirituality. Abundance can trigger either accepting evangelical responses (“I’ve found God, and you must too!”) or rejectionist/rationalizing fundamentalism (“This is evil and we must distance ourselves from it!”), whereas deprivation tends to promote fundamentalism in general, because a stricter moral code is required for survival in hard times and its separatist message dovetails nicely with the already poor or narrow connectivity with the outside world. Both types of responses are easily located in all major religions, so any one religion per se (e.g., Islam) is hardly the problem. Rather, it’s either the lack of abundance-providing connectivity or the inability of that society, when experiencing new abundance through rising connectivity, to sequence itself from its Malthusian mindset (“This is how we survive”) to what comes next (“How do we handle prosperity?”).

  What I’m trying to get across here is that religion will always be the most important bridge in this transition, either sabotaging it completely or facilitating it and thus suffering separation from society’s public sphere, which becomes increasingly filled with economic relationships that, over time, generate a superstructure of political institutions designed to protect and further nurture that economic activity. Religion, then, retreats into the private sphere. In certain societies, like Europe, this retreat signals the pervasive secularization of the public sphere. But in highly entrepreneurial societies, like our own, it’s possible and even highly desirable to see strong competition develop in that private sphere among a multiplicity of religious faiths. Religion, at its core, has always been a demand function, meaning it has been adapted to the needs of the people in their time. In the precapitalist Malthusian era of survivalist economics, such adaptation was glacial because the conditions—and thus the needs of the people—were largely unchanging (i.e., the same religious rule set worked for centuries on end). But once the Industrial Revolution ushered in the age of abundance, people’s conditions and thus spiritual needs changed with stunning speed. The bourgeoisie needed a bourgeois God.

  Again, these United States provide the historical example for what must come next, or—indeed—what is already unfolding: What we perceive to be a clash of civilizations today is merely the recognition among religions of the new competitive spiritual landscape afforded by globalization (to succeed as a religion today, you must globalize your faith, thus purging its local cultural content), as well as continuing violent competition within and among major religions inside the Gap (a blast from the Core’s all-too-bloody past). None of this should come as a surprise to us, especially the reality that the most violently competitive wings within Islam represent its most rejectionist strains. After all, our continent was initially settled by such rejectionist-minded Puritans, or those seeking a “purer” expression of faith, and it was their re
ligious awakening, the first such “great awakening” in our history in the mid-eighteenth century, that animated our revolutionary push for independence from our more corrupt European brethren. That such thinking constituted a very thin veneer covering issues of economic freedom is equally unsurprising, because remember the argument here: Religion is a coping mechanism whose importance rises during periods of economic change (upward or down) because it justifies the new rule sets required for success or survival.

  America’s Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the nineteenth century provides further clues to religion’s utility in frontier integration, because it “burned hottest on the southern and western frontiers,” according to religious historian Stephen Prothero. As a result, he notes, “by the end of the 1830s America’s religious landscape had assumed its current shape. The population had been rapidly Christianized, but Christianity itself had become extraordinarily diverse. Evangelicalism had supplanted Puritanism as the dominant religious impulse, thanks in no small measure to the willingness of evangelicals to mix the ways and means of revivalism with those of republicanism.”

  By that, Prothero means that evangelical brands of Christianity (e.g., Methodists, Baptists) exploited the era’s trend toward disestablishing state religions (prominent in New England) and the rise of public, or “common,” schooling (a fear-threat reaction to the rising influx of the Roman Catholic Irish). As such, nondenominational Protestantism became the reigning religious impulse, an expansive trend that, over time, has left Americans both highly religious and religiously illiterate, meaning we have a lot of faith but we’re increasingly fuzzy on the details (both historical and in terms of rules). This is the essential compromise religion makes in the post-Malthusian era of economic abundance: more adherence to less specificity, or a rationalizing function that allows us to navigate an increasingly complex world while retaining a spiritual bond with a God that is, itself, subject to a division of labor—namely, the triune deity that is simultaneously immanent, distant, and transcendent (or, in my Catholic faith: the Holy Spirit, God the Father, and Jesus the Messiah, respectively). In this quintessential American adaptation, Christianity was made a full-service faith for a diverse society undergoing rapid economic development. No matter what brand you required, the suddenly competitive marketplace of religion could meet your needs—witness the megachurch phenomenon headlined by spiritual superstars Rick Warren and Joel Osteen. In this sense, Prothero argues, a nation of immigrants logically begets a “nation of religions,” with our First Amendment forcing such competition by denying any faith supremacy and granting all freedom of operation.