Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Religions in America compete not only with one another but with the state and the private sector, providing a profound continuing impulse for a progressive agenda of change. This dynamic was clearly seen throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with the abolition movement, the suffragist movement, the entirety of the Progressive Era’s agenda for positive social change (e.g., labor conditions, government corruption, social welfare of impoverished women and children, medical care and sanitation, universal education, care of the environment), and the temperance movement. It should come as no surprise to us that highly evangelical forms of Islam excel best in similar socioeconomic conditions across the Gap today by providing many of these same social services, or that they’re perceived by secular autocrats as constituting a political threat by pointing out the inadequacy of existing government services. Nor should we be surprised to see evangelical forms of all faiths succeed in spreading their gospel throughout rising New Core economies such as Brazil or China. By definition, such emerging markets logically supply the world’s most zealous missionaries (the frontier, as always, provides the best Bible-thumpers), not only to developing economies but to developed ones as well. A good New Core country to track in this regard is South Korea, arguably the most dynamic force—on a per capita basis—in international missionary work. In today’s world, the flow of missionaries reverses that of the colonialist age: now moving from East to West and increasingly from the Gap to the Core.

  As our era features globalization’s rapid and unprecedented advance, it will logically also feature the greatest single religious awakening the world has ever seen. Religion will become eminently more important because economic conditions will change more dramatically in coming years and decades than at any other time in human history. Hardly the clash of civilizations, this upsurge will reflect the efforts of societies to adapt themselves to an era of widespread abundance. Many regimes undergoing rapid growth trajectories will seek to wrap themselves in the mantle of nationalism, which provides some coherence with regard to the outside world but unfortunately does little to temper rising internal demand for progressive social and political change. Indeed, nationalism tends to increase such demand by encouraging the public to—in effect—call the government’s bluff by saying, “If our country is as powerful internationally as you claim, then we deserve better service at home!” Already we see this social impulse growing dramatically in China, as the Communist Party’s proud promotion of the nation’s impending superpower status is generating more calls for responsive government (especially on the environment), not to mention more religious freedom and regional autonomy. Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympic games were a textbook example in this regard, as was the preceding Sichuan earthquake. You may spot only the government’s response (repression) and decry it, but I note its rising requirements and welcome the struggle.

  But again, this is why I don’t advocate an aggressive targeting by the West of such emerging powers regarding their political evolution. I say, let their own ambitions, along with their rising spiritualism, drive this process. By trying to substitute what should be an internal, demand-pull function (“We want more rights!”) with an external, supply-push function (“We demand you give your people more rights!”), we’re triggering a fear-threat reaction at a time of rising nationalism—a counterproductive approach that promotes downstream military confrontation and/or rivalry. As always, American grand strategy should exploit globalization’s momentum in any country and not seek to stem its powerful tides. Rather than quell the natural rise in nationalism, America should meet popular demands by shaping international opportunities for such emerging powers to succeed in positive (meaning, connecting) international interventions—both military and financial. While I’m not interested in encouraging any emerging powers to move in the direction of a Leviathan-like capacity, our “give” in this instance is to promote China’s many successes in the SysAdmin function, accepting the notion that our successful grand strategy in this era requires not only a division of labor but a division of credit. My definition of success in next-generation warfare is to make our allies desire our collective victory more than we do; thus they must receive more immediate benefit than we do.

  To this end, America should push China to model its state-building inside the Gap on its own current development trajectory at home: increasing privatization, decreasing the reach of state power, and an increase in transnational connections, including nongovernmental organizations. Because of China’s fixation on achieving secure access to raw materials and energy, it prefers to deal with, and support, authoritarian regimes that possess firm control over their natural resources. The irony here is rich: What China actually pursues at home is the state-building model in favor right now, or one that favors the spread of globalization and—commensurately—religious awakening/radicalism. While America favors the spread of globalization, it tries, with great futility, to stop the accompanying spread of religious radicalism. On that score, China and the United States are one in their penchant for relying on secular autocrats, even though such leaders typically increase their populations’ demand for religious/political radicalism, which, over time, often gets exported in the Core’s direction.

  Now we begin to see the outlines of our sequencing challenge: Economic connectivity, done well, triggers movement toward abundance; that secularizing dynamic naturally triggers religious awakening and even radicalism, as well as rising nationalism; to exploit the progressive political impulses of that awakening, a religious marketplace must be encouraged but not demanded, because asking for tolerance of other faiths amid all this change is a risky business, but until it’s achieved, all progress toward democracy is more likely to result in illiberal outcomes rather than true political pluralism. So if economic globalization drives the onset of this sequence (arguably too fast for comfort), and political pluralism is the desired long-term outcome, then the question becomes, How to navigate the highly charged middle sequence?

  Based on the American experience, there seem to be two answers: (1) encourage nondenominationalism among the major sects of a country’s dominant religion or among the competing religions; or (2) allow the religion in question to maintain its social model of separatism while subjugating itself to the secular state. The first example pertains to the evolution of Protestantism in America, while the latter speaks more to the effective nonevolution of Catholicism in America and the relatively recent emergence of socially conservative evangelical Protestantism. In both cases, believers accept the “two kingdoms” thesis, meaning both heaven and hell can wait on life here on Earth. In the latter situations, believers likewise accept the fact that there is a significant chasm between God’s law, which governs their personal behavior, and man’s law, which allows society more latitude in behavior. The continuing controversy over abortion is a good example. In this hybrid, a certain fundamentalism is internalized, allowing the believer to pursue life on his or her own terms within a wider, more secular world.

  As French Islamic expert Olivier Roy argues, Islam faces very similar challenges, both in the West and within globalization as a whole. A Muslim female, for example, who lives in the West may well feel the need to signal her spiritual distance by wearing a burkha or merely a veil, not unlike a Christian wearing a cross. In a strictly secular society, such religious displays in the public sphere can be interpreted as a challenge to social cohesion and national identity (in “competitive” America, it can be more easily dismissed as religious pride or even spiritual advertising). For the firmly secular society, the question then becomes, Is it better to pursue multiculturalism and risk separatism or is it necessary to pursue assimilation, accepting the friction that may ensue? In a traditional country, or one whose identity is coincident with nationality (e.g., a Germany based on Germans, a France based on the French), there’s no easy answer to that one, because multiculturalism equates to postculturalism. So when it gets hard to be a Frenchman in France, what exactly has France become? Plus, the more mult
icultural your society becomes, the more religious it’s likely to become, because in the absence of shared cultural identity, people will cling more closely to religious identity. Elevate this dynamic up to the level of nation-states operating within globalization and the same logic holds.

  In many ways, multiculturalism is simply globalization inverted (or with “training wheels,” I’m tempted to add), meaning imported inside a country. That’s why immigrant-based countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand feature more abstract definitions of national character—less who you are than how you act. Religious identity flourishes in such environments because it speaks to the how you act paradigm (“I am a Catholic because I act this way. My ethnic background is irrelevant”). Again, America represents the leading edge of the globalization experience in this regard, because of its highly competitive marketplace for religion, marked by the fact that many Americans switch religions with ease across their lifetimes (confession: I have twice, my wife has three times, and only one of our kids has kept the same faith his entire life—to date). The kind of religiosity prevalent in America today speaks to this “greatest awakening” that the planet as a whole now experiences with globalization’s advance. According to Roy, it is (1) highly individualistic, featuring a very direct connection to God; (2) highly mobile, meaning conversions are common; (3) weakly institutional, so low trust in churches per se; (4) anti-intellectual, so theologians are typically ignored; and (5) highly communitarian by choice instead of heritage. In short, it is a connecting mechanism by which individuals, challenged by complexity, seek out those of their own kind, meaning people who want to live by the same rule sets or code—the walled garden as refuge.

  So again we see that globalization is defined fundamentally by the spread of rules—across networks, throughout markets, and even spiritually among individuals. National governments remain the main purveyors and codifiers of these rules, but they face many competitors, thanks to globalization—religions chief among them. The competition we see emerging among world religions does not constitute a clash of civilizations, because religions, including Islam, by globalizing themselves, detached from cultural moorings a long time ago. Much like major urban areas have long played the role of laboratories on global warming, so too did America—as globalization’s original superstate start-up—on the subject of religious competition. I’m not saying that America was the first great battlefield of competing religions. That sort of conflict had existed for many centuries before we showed up. I’m saying that America has forged a unique success story in fostering religious competition within a multinational union structure—in effect, previewing all the dynamics we witness today in globalization. As always, it’s not the individual rules that make America unique, but the combination of rules and our capacity over time to popularize them globally.

  This is why Americans should not fear this global era of rising religiosity; we should neither regret our unprecedented success in extending our American System-cum-globalization around the planet nor recoil from our innate sense of continuing responsibility for this, our ideological progeny. We have not opened Pandora’s Box here. In our typically revolutionary manner, we’ve enabled the rest of humanity to subjugate religion to its own purposes. No longer merely a refuge from deprivation and suffering, thanks to globalization, religion now serves primarily as an escape from too much freedom. A central tenet of American grand strategy must involve our owning up to this unique political heritage and understanding its importance for the world today. If we cannot explain this concept of religious freedom to the world, then we do not know who we are. Worse, we will not be able to forge the essential compromises that must come next.

  THE INESCAPABLE REALIGNMENT: RESURRECTING THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA

  Despite Americans’ current angst about globalization and the challenges it presents, what we face over the next couple of generations are problems of more success—not failure. By introducing, codifying, and protecting our international liberal trade order across the decades of the Cold War, America not only set in motion Europe’s recovery from its disastrous great-power wars (WWI, WWII), but also expanded the global economy to encompass effectively more than four-fifths of the world’s population. By doing so, America has made possible the global correction of the so-called Great Divergence that began in 1800, an unprecedented historical period in which the West’s income grew twelvefold over two centuries while the rest of the planet’s income dropped by half. The Great Convergence of income and consumption that this century will witness will change everything in global affairs yet again. The projected twelvefold increase in income for the New Core and Gap will effectively eclipse the have/have-not divide by generating globalization’s first truly dominant middle class—for the first time in human history.

  This is America’s gift to the world: the chance for a global middle class to finally escape the sort of Malthusian growth limits that the advanced West left behind in the nineteenth century. Our success in spreading our international liberal trade order is without parallel in human history. At its height, the European colonial world order encompassed a mere third of the earth’s surface; our globalization model encompasses virtually all of it. What that means is this: Long before the end of this century we will see the bulk of the planet move into the same sort of middle-class lifestyle (not to be automatically confused with consumption) that America has known over the past half-century-plus. The European colonial-era globalization simply does not compare with what America has achieved in the past several decades. The European colonial order created no widespread wealth and no global middle class, and came nowhere near encompassing the bulk of the planet’s geography or population. If globalization signifies America’s “empire,” then it’s the first empire in history ever to enrich those integrated.

  But here’s the trick: As long as man stayed Malthusian in his economic orientation, meaning population growth worked against income growth in a zero-sum struggle, anything that decreased population was a “virtue,” as economist Gregory Clark argues in his 2007 book A Farewell to Alms. So for the world in general prior to 1800, war was good, violence was good, and so were bad sanitation, infanticide, income inequality, epidemics, and harvest failures. All these “virtues” made the surviving population richer. That all changed with the Industrial Revolution, whereupon man’s wealth and income growth were no longer tethered to the organic world but instead were vastly expanded by his growing mastery over the inorganic world. At that point, for the advancing West at least, past “virtues” were slowly but surely turned into vices. With abundance came the extension of life and the ability for wealthier people to have more children and leave them with more resources upon death, extending their demographic dominance further. That meant some (i.e., the West) got to “go forth and prosper” and still enjoy the added benefits of raised income. Over time, the ancient impulse to propagate dissipated in the ever wealthier West, so fewer people got to enjoy more wealth while the rest of the planet stayed largely stuck in the planet’s Malthusian past.

  Here is where America’s still revolutionary impact upon the world is clearly seen: By expanding the liberal international trade order of our American System-cum-globalization, we now elevate—over the next several decades—the vast bulk of the rest of the world’s population out of the Malthusian resource equation and into a planetary age of abundance. By 2020, the global middle class should expand from just under one-third of the world’s population to just over half, with much of that increase found in China (the world’s biggest middle class by 2025) and India (a tenfold increase in a generation’s time). The problem is that, culturally speaking, much of this newly and soon-to-be-elevated chunk of world population remains wedded to the “virtues” of their not-so-distant Malthusian past. A good example? The West’s world of security now tries to incorporate New Core powers (e.g., Russia, India, China) with decidedly nineteenth-century views of great-power politics, along with a Gap whose style of mass violence rem
ains as primordial as ever—with great local pride in the obvious (to them at least) “virtue.” Thus, numerous profound social shifts will occur as we successfully extend globalization around the planet, consolidating vast levels of new connectivity and suddenly elevating entire societies from sustenance to abundance, often turning their definitions of vice and virtue on their heads.

  It’s therefore important for us to recognize this long list of historical “inversions,” where something long held to be “white” is, in the course of integration with the global economy, now held to be “black” (“Hey, buddy! I’m just growing poppies here like we always have. What you do with it is your business!”). It’s important because it helps us understand our continuing revolutionary impact on global society while tempering our demand—on top of all this tumultuous change—for near-instant political adjustment toward a form of democracy we recognize as familiar. This great consolidation of globalization in coming decades will yield a global society likely to resemble America’s own at the end of the nineteenth century, featuring a dominant middle-class ideology that regards the “hardworking” folk that make this planet work as virtuous, and regards the “special interests,” both rich and poor, that exist on the margins as full of vice to be corrected. It will also yield the equivalent of a global progressive era (meaning new rules galore) that will necessarily outpace the version the West experienced, with serious leapfrogging not merely in technology choices but likewise in social norms (which will struggle to keep pace with all the technological advances—especially in biology).