One example is the article titled "The Future of American Power" by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, that appeared in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. Zakaria declares that the post--Cold War world of unipolar domination by the United States is ending and that "we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people," including such newly emerging countries as China and India.
As the power of other countries rises, that of the United States will decline in relative terms. Even so, as long as the United States is prepared to cooperate with the emerging countries and listen to various other voices around the world--and not cling to the notion of exclusive power for itself--Zakaria believes it will be possible to stabilize the world order. Since the countries on the rise are moving toward free markets, democracy, and openness and transparency, the new world order can be one in which American ideas and ideals prevail. But there is also a danger that, if the US response is wrong, rising nationalism will tear the world order apart. (This article is adapted from Zakaria's new book The Post-American World.)
The same issue of Foreign Affairs carried two other interesting articles about the prospects for a globalizing world by commentators from the United States and Asia.
In "The Age of Nonpolarity," Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, suggests that the world of the twenty-first century will be "nonpolar" rather than multipolar. China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States now account for over half the world's people, 75% of global economic output, and 80% of global defense spending. This looks like a multipolar world, but according to Haass it is not. The nation-states that would seem to constitute the elements of a classical multipolar setup are now subject to a variety of constraints from regional organizations and international institutions. Other influential players on the international scene include nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, international media organs like CNN and al Jazeera, and international terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Haass calls this world of diverse power centers "nonpolar." It includes various forces beyond the control of the traditional nation-state.
In a nonpolar world, according to Haass, traditional alliances between states lose much of their importance, and diplomacy becomes more complex. In this context, he suggests that "concerted nonpolarity" based on multilateral cooperation centering on a core group of countries and organizations would help preserve the stability of the international system. He also calls for revitalization of the World Trade Organization, which has been tending to fade from view, and offers an interesting proposal for the establishment of a new body, the World Investment Organization, to ensure the smooth flow of investment across borders and provide a mechanism for resolving disputes.
A much bolder message than those of Zakaria and Haass comes from Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore in an article titled "The Case against the West." According to Mahbuhani, the West is failing to address the major challenges facing today's world, such as the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, stalled trade liberalization, and global warming. This suggests that "a systemic problem is emerging in the West's stewardship of the international order." He calls for a more democratic system of global governance and decision making with greater involvement of Asian countries, with the abolition of such existing institutions as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (essentially a rich countries' club) and the Group of Eight. He declares that the development assistance Western countries have been extending is mainly in service of their own interests, and he suggests that the success of Asia in achieving modernization and development based on good domestic governance can serve as the key to global stability. The focus on domestic governance is only to be expected of a commentator from the Singapore of Lee Kuan Yew, but his article contains much truth.
In an article published in the Financial Times on May 21 titled "Europe Is a Geopolitical Dwarf," Mahbuhani criticizes Europe harshly for seeking to enjoy the benefits of peace and comfort while being a "free rider" on US power. He offers the notable suggestion that Europe should encourage the Muslim countries of the Middle East to look to East Asia and India as models for their moderrnization.
The above three articles in Foreign Affairs all seem to have been presented with a view to the July G8 summit hosted by Japan in Hokkaido.
Prescriptions for "healthy" globalization
In an article published in the International Herald Tribune on May 30, "Globalization and Its Discontents," veteran foreign policy commentator Henry Kissinger addressed the same general set of issues, offering specific suggestions for closing the gap between the economic and political orders in the globalizing international system. His six "prescriptives" include the following: (1) The Group of Eight summits should revert to their original role as forums for discussing economic policy, with the addition of China, India, and perhaps Brazil. (2) These enlarged summits should be accompanied by meetings of finance ministers from the Group of Seven, focusing on how to deal with the distortions caused by globalization. (3) The International Monetary Fund should be reformed so that it can cope with the financial crises of the twenty-first century.Lawrence Summers, secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton and now a professor at Harvard University, offered his own recommendations in "A Strategy to Promote Healthy Globalisation," Financial Times, May 2. In a globalized economy, corporations look around and shift their operations to the countries offering the lowest taxes on corporate income and the loosest regulations in various areas. This forces countries to compete in a "race to the bottom," cutting their tax rates and relaxing their regulatory frameworks. This process exacerbates inequality (and it erodes the fiscal foundations of social security programs). Summers calls for America to take the lead in promoting global cooperation in the tax and regulatory arenas. This strikes me as an apt proposal.
Stephen King, managing director of economics at HSBC, offers a prescription that is similar in thrust to that of Summers, though not so specific. In "Give Globalisation a Human Face," published in the British daily Independent on May 6, he accurately notes that globalization "reduces income and wealth inequalities between nations yet it seems to increase these inequalities within nations." He also points out that "efficiency gains can sometimes come at the expense of distributional losses." King calls for "enlightened" globalization, including income redistribution measures to compensate the losers. Otherwise, he warns, we are liable to end up with unenlightened protectionism.
To turn to the political and security sphere, neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, presents "The Case for a League of Democracies" in the Financial Times on May 13. Kagan is advancing a proposal under which the world's democratic nations would form a league to work together in tackling serious global issues. The idea is that this league could act in cases where UN action is blocked by a Chinese or Russian veto. In rebuttal, Columbia University Professor Mark Mazower argues that this would be tantamount to returning to the nineteenth-century system of great powers. In "America Needs the United Nations," Financial Times, May 29, he notes that the failures of this system led to the two world wars of the twentieth century and the establishment of the United Nations based on the painful lessons of these wars. Kagan is an informal adviser to John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. But the idea of a league of democracies has been advanced from the Democratic side as well. Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy adviser to Democratic candidate Barack Obama has offered a similar proposal. Whichever party wins the White House, this discussion can be expected to continue.
Dealing with the food crisis
The media coverage of globalization-related issues in May included some even more specific prescriptions. In an article published in the Financial Times on May 30, World Bank President Robert Zoellick offered "A 10-Point Plan for the Food Crisis." Following the first oil crisis, the International Energy Agency was created in 1974 to coordinate stockpiling of oil for use in future crises; Zoellick suggests using this as a model for an international food stockpiling arrangement among the G8 and major developing countries. Another noteworthy proposal concerns the use of corn to produce bioethanol; this is one of the direct causes of the current food crisis, and Zoellick calls on the United States and Europe to shift to imported biofuels produced from sugarcane. His proposals merit discussion at the G8 summit.In "Threat or Opportunity," an article in the May 2 Guardian Weekly, Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam GB, cites an estimate from the Asian Development Bank that 300 million people in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan may be at risk of starvation because of rising food prices. She urges greater investment in agriculture and investment, and she criticized the EU for pushing developing countries to accept rapid liberalization and deregulation under economic partnership agreements, saying that this has left them more vulnerable to shocks.
In "How to Feed the World," Newsweek, May 19, Michael Pollan, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that modern agriculture depends heavily on fossil fuels, which are used for fertilizer, for pesticides, and for processing and transportation. He writes, "Today it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy." So it is not surprising that the sharp rise in the price of oil has led to surging food prices. And since it takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce a single kilogram of beef, eating beef is in a sense equivalent to chugging down large amounts of oil.
Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research in Frankfurt, offered an interesting perspective on the effects of climate change on the global tourism industry between now and 2030 in an article published under the title "The Holiday's Over" in the South China Morning Post on May 8 (originally published in YaleGlobal Online, May 2). Based on the results of his study, it appears that the developed North will gain and the developing South will lose; within Europe, meanwhile, the northern countries will fare better than those on the Mediterranean.
Amid the debate on weighty issues like these, the May/June issue of Foreign Policy carried a list of "The Top 100 Public Intellectuals." Among them were 12 Asians, including Indians (Amartya Sen and others) and Chinese, but not a single Japanese. At this rate one can only wonder about the prospects for Japan's intellectual presence in the "post-American" world.
