The World: A Brief Introduction

by Richard Haass

  Part III

  THE GLOBAL ERA

  Each era of history is defined by its principal forces, powers, and challenges and how people and governments fare in the face of these issues. Usually this puts great powers, be it their rivalry or rule, at the center of the narrative. This has been true for the preceding eras of history, and may yet be true of the current or next one, especially if either was to become defined by the growing competition between the United States and China. But it is by no means certain that the United States and China will find themselves in a new or second cold war. And even if they do, it is not certain that their relationship will come to define the era.

  Another possibility is that globalization will define this era. Globalization is about the flows, often vast in scale and fast in speed, of just about anything you can think of, from people and emails to viruses and carbon dioxide, across the world and across borders. In some cases, governments are not aware of all that is entering and leaving their territory; in other cases, they are but they either choose not to regulate it or cannot do so even if they want to.

  Borders have always been crossed. What is different about contemporary globalization is the scale and variety of the phenomenon and its importance and potential impact. Globalization has the potential to dramatically change human life as we know it.

  It is important to underscore what globalization is not. It is not—with few exceptions—a policy preference. Globalization is a reality. It is both good and bad, benign and malign. In some realms, globalization is something countries will want to embrace or steer. In others, they can choose to resist or even opt out in whole or in part. In other realms, there is little or no choice.

  The initial chapter in this section is devoted to globalization itself. Subsequent chapters are devoted to various manifestations of globalization, namely terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, migration, cyberspace, health, international trade, monetary and currency issues, and development.

  Each chapter describes the specifics of one particular form of globalization, looks at its causes and consequences, and discusses the options available to countries and the world as a whole for contending with it. Success or the lack thereof in dealing with any of these manifestations of globalization could matter as much as anything else when it comes to giving this era of history its character.

  Globalization

  Globalization—the emergence of an increasingly interconnected world marked by greater flows across borders of workers, tourists, ideas, emails, oil and gas, television and radio signals, data, prescription and illicit drugs, terrorists, migrants and refugees, weapons, viruses (computer and biological), carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to climate change, manufactured goods, food, dollars and other currencies, tweets, and a good deal else—is one of the defining realities of modern existence.

  To be clear, globalization is not entirely new. People and goods have always moved around the world, be it over the ancient Silk Road in Asia or on the high seas. But what is new is the scale, velocity, and range of what crosses borders today. There are more than 1.5 billion departures per year for international tourists, up from 600 million just twenty-five years ago. There are also between twenty-five and thirty million refugees. Foreign direct investment flows top $1 trillion a year. Trade in goods is valued at some $20 trillion: seven times what it was thirty years ago and nearly one hundred times what it was fifty years ago.

  The flows are not just vast but often fast. Some things move at or near the speed of light, which allows someone in New York to video chat with someone in Japan, or someone in London to transfer money to an account in Hong Kong, almost instantaneously. Other flows, such as long-distance travel, may take hours or days. Either way, the speed combined with the scale is such that it is often impossible for governments to monitor, much less control, everyone and everything that crosses their borders.

  THE SPEED OF COMMUNICATION

  How globalization has changed how fast we can communicate

  1 Month

  3,546 miles

  10 Hours

  3,669 miles

  0.2 Seconds

  3,787 miles

  Instantaneously

  All across the world

  1776

  News of the Declaration of Independence reaches London via mail.

  1858

  President James Buchanan responds to Queen Victoria in the first transatlantic telegram exchange.

  1928

  President Calvin Coolidge places the first telephone call to a European leader—King Alfonso XIII of Spain.

  2015

  President Barack Obama praises Pope Francis in the first U.S. presidential tweet to a foreign leader.

  Sources: The London Gazette; The New York Times; Smithsonian.com.

  What has led to this phenomenon? In no small part it is technology. The internet, jet planes, mobile phones, shipping containers, and satellites have all played a significant role. But so, too, have policies that have facilitated trade and access to markets. Such policies are the reason why an American company can manufacture its products in China or open stores of its own in China.

  Geopolitics, the competition among countries for power and influence, also has played a role, but in contradictory ways. Stability and the absence of large-scale war on the scale of the world wars of the twentieth century have made it possible to trade, invest, and move around with considerable ease. On the other hand, local instability and problems have created pressures for individuals to move, something that accounts for the significant number of refugees.

  Globalization is also reinforced by business decisions. The United States, for example, is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s people. Trade is essential for American firms to gain access to the other 95 percent of the world’s population. Other sorts of businesses, from illegal drugs to guns to human trafficking, have also sought markets outside their own borders. This, too, is globalization.

  At the core of globalization is the notion of interconnectedness, which refers to webs and networks of ties of every sort. A similar concept is that of interdependence, the reality that every country and person is affected to some extent by what takes place everywhere else and by what others do. There is increasingly one global market for many manufactured and agricultural goods, for oil, for investment, and even for some services such as technical support for computers and cell phones. Such interconnectedness means that what happens in one place can affect conditions in another place. What begins at the local level can quickly become global. This is true of infectious disease (the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis), financial contagion (the effects of the U.S. financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting Great Recession that rippled around the globe), or a video that goes viral. Interdependence of any kind can be mutually beneficial, or it can bring vulnerability.

  Some of the consequences of globalization are simultaneously good and bad. Trade is an example. The ability to export can provide jobs for the workers involved, and the ability to import can be a source of goods not made domestically or not otherwise available to domestic consumers at a lower price but of comparable (or even better) quality. But imports can also eliminate jobs, be it because of differences in the cost of labor or production or because of government subsidies and currency manipulation.

  Similarly, there will be those who view the broad flow of information and ideas as a wonderful thing. But others will take offense at some of the content, and some governments can and do oppose the spread of information that they believe threatens domestic political stability and their continued rule.

  Oceans, deserts, and walls cannot isolate a country from the consequ
ences of globalization. But governments do have a range of options when it comes to how to respond to various dimensions of globalization. If governments are inclined to try to slow down globalization or reduce their country’s involvement, they can choose to take a number of steps.

  Governments can and often do erect tariffs—which cause price increases that must be paid by their own citizens on imported goods—and other barriers to make it more difficult for others to export to them. This is classic protectionism. They can also install provisions that make it more difficult for outsiders to invest in their country and to make it more difficult for those funds that do come in to exit. Walls can be built and guards stationed to keep people out. Coastlines can similarly be guarded by ships and airspace by planes and missiles. Those entering legally through airports can be limited in number or in how long they can stay. People can be screened for high fevers and denied entry on the possibility they are carrying an infectious disease. Packages and shipping containers and luggage and trucks can be searched, although in reality this can be done only a tiny percentage of the time lest business and tourism grind to a halt. Broadcast signals can be jammed; the internet can be closed off.

  But to say that governments and peoples have options vis-à-vis globalization is not to suggest any country is able to opt out of globalization entirely. Climate change, for example, respects no borders. The same can be said of the spread of radiological material from a nuclear incident. An economic slowdown or financial crisis that begins in one country can quickly spread to another; the term “contagion” is used for good reason. Connection to the internet confers vulnerabilities as well as advantages. Ideas often have a way of entering even closed societies. Any visitor could carry disease. No economy possesses or produces everything it needs or can sell everything it makes at home.

  Moreover, being closed to the outside is not without its costs. North Korea is by most measures one of the most closed countries in the world. It is also one of the poorest. Cutting off imports denies residents access to consumer goods and can generate retaliation in kind, making it more difficult to export, in the process sacrificing jobs and growth. Cutting off flows of people translates into an absence of tourism and little business or investment.

  The result is that nearly all governments choose to both go along with and resist elements of globalization. Another way to say this is that governments try to promote what they judge to be positive and resist what they see as negative or threatening. Managing globalization is a challenge for every government, because they are often held accountable for the effects of globalization, be it immigration or climate change or disease outbreaks, even if they are not able to control them.

  Another way governments contend with globalization is through collective rather than national responses. This is the essence of multilateralism. No country on its own can shield itself from all the downsides of globalization or harvest solely the positive aspects; what has emerged as a result is a set of global arrangements—legal, political, and commercial—for dealing with everything from health, trade, the internet, and climate change to trafficking in nuclear materials, persons, and drugs. There is no global government, but there is a degree of global governance to help deal with virtually every domain of globalization. The political reality, though, is that there is little consensus over how various manifestations of globalization should be seen and, as a result, little consensus over whether and how globalization should be governed or regulated.

  Globalization is controversial. One reason has already been noted, which is job loss. Foreign competition (and imports) are often blamed for the disappearance of jobs. Sometimes this is the case, but more often than not the real cause is technological innovation that has made it possible to produce a given product or service more cheaply, of higher quality, or both. Still, globalization is often viewed with suspicion. One reason is that the benefits are widely spread but more incremental in nature, while the downsides can be highly concentrated and more deeply felt. Americans on the whole benefit from cheaper cars and can save money or get more value for their money by buying imported vehicles. For those Americans who lost their jobs when factories closed because of cheaper or better imports, however, their entire lives have been turned upside down. While economists agree that the country as a whole is better off, a small portion is worse off.

  Globalization can also be seen as a threat to local identity and culture. It can be difficult for small businesses to compete with large global firms that enjoy economies of scale and famous brands. McDonald’s and Starbucks stores span the globe. It can also be difficult for traditional lifestyles to resist the appeal of exciting new images and ideas from elsewhere that are presented via television and movies or are available on the internet. The competition is uneven, in that it is often easier for globalization to affect individuals and societies than it is for individuals and societies to affect globalization.

  All of which brings us back to the notion that globalization is a powerful force in the modern world, one that generates benefits and challenges alike. The task for individual governments and for the world collectively is to promote those aspects of globalization that do the most good, to push back against those doing the most harm, and to assist those individuals and countries that are having the most difficulty.

  Terrorism and Counterterrorism

  Terrorism is best defined as the intentional use of violence by non-state actors against civilians in pursuit of political objectives. Several words are critical to this definition. To qualify as terrorism, an action must involve violence or the threat of violence in some form, be intentional, be taken in pursuit of a political objective, be carried out by a non-state actor, and target civilians. As such, terrorism is something very different from crime, which is normally motivated by objectives that are not political. It also differs from traditional warfare, which is conducted by sovereign states and for the most part by uniformed soldiers. Finally, when civilians are not targeted but become victims all the same, that is not an act of terrorism.

  Some will ask why terrorism is only a tool of individuals and groups other than states. If a state carries out purposeful violent actions against the citizens of another country, we already have a name for it: war. Countries, however, can choose to support terrorists if they see them as a useful tool, in which case the government risks being judged a state sponsor of terrorism and attacked or sanctioned as a result. This was exactly what happened to Afghanistan’s Taliban government following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the United States and its allies judged that the Taliban had provided safe haven to the al-Qaeda terrorists behind the attacks and had to be removed.

  COUNTRIES MOST AFFECTED BY TERRORISM

  Number of terrorist attacks, 2017

  Note: A terrorist attack is defined as “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.”

  Source: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), University of Maryland (2019). The Global Terrorism Database retrieved from www.start.umd.edu/gtd August 22, 2019.

  While the definition of terrorism above is the one most commonly used, no universally accepted definition exists. It is impossible to remove all subjectivity from the issue, because individuals and governments are often reluctant to label as terrorism actions done in pursuit of goals they support. The old adage was that one person’s terrorist was another person’s freedom fighter. In recent years, however, there seems to be greater, although far from total, agreement among governments that no cause or goal justifies terrorism.

  Terrorism itself is not new. One can find examples that stretch back centuries or even millennia. A century ago, a terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, which set in motion a train of diplomatic and military events that led to World War I. Terrorism was a centr
al means used to bring an end to colonialism, an era of European control of many territories and peoples around the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Provisional Irish Republican Army employed terrorism in an attempt to force British troops out of Northern Ireland and bring about Irish unity, and the Palestine Liberation Organization used terrorism to target Israel in an attempt to bring about the state of Palestine. The most recent wave of international terrorism is associated mostly with individuals and groups such as al-Qaeda, ISIS (sometimes called ISIL, the Islamic State, or Daesh), Boko Haram, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and others acting in the name of their vision of Islam.

  Terrorists can be individuals or groups and can be directed by some authority or simply inspired by one. Countries can be involved in terrorism in two ways. The first is by choosing to provide resources, be they financial, intelligence, military, or territory, to a terrorist group. As already noted, such states (Iran for one) are commonly known as state sponsors of terrorism. Second, a state can allow a terrorist group to use its territory or gain access to some of its resources not out of choice but out of weakness. This was the case with ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Increasingly, terrorist groups have found ways of accessing needed resources directly, relying less on state supporters.