by Parag Khanna
Loyalties are strengthening beyond money, power, and kinship toward faith. Islam is spreading today as quickly as it did in the seventh and eighth centuries, its appeal equally political and social in such places as Egypt and Lebanon, where the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah are both political parties and welfare providers. Christianity, too, is rerooting itself in Africa, Latin America, and even China, while in the United States millions of Americans join evangelical mega-churches and profess faith in messianic prophecies.
Once again we live in an age of superstitions that call to mind the Middle Ages, when the church banned paganism and magical practices it deemed either anti-religious or even too religious. The infamous “Toledo letter” predicted a world-ending planetary alignment in 1186, prompting the archbishop of Canterbury to declare a three-day fast. (It seems to have worked.) Today the rapid spread of AIDS, avian flu, and other pandemics perpetually raises the specter of another Black Death. If you live in a tall building, you fear terrorists crashing a plane into it; if you live near the shore (as 50 percent of the world’s population does), you fear getting wiped out in increasingly frequent tsunamis or hurricanes. Today’s Nostradamus figures are bestselling authors such as Eckhart Tolle and Paulo Coelho, who preach salvation through spirituality and raise self-help to a cosmic level with undertones of a “radical crisis” requiring that mankind “evolve or die.”*
Fear of the future is growing as welfare states are dismantled and retirement accounts empty. Some predict that coming out of the financial crisis, members of religious traditions with high birthrates such as Jews, Muslims, and Catholics stand the best chance of economic stabilization because of their religions’ focus on trust-based kinships and self-financing communities—the foundations of local stability in the Middle Ages.
We are never more than a hair’s length away from the symptoms of medievalism: Economic chaos, social unrest, depraved morals, wild expenditures, debauchery, and religious hysteria all lie just under the surface of our many veneers of sophistication. After Saddam Hussein was removed from power in Iraq in 2003, it was only a short time before barbaric sectarianism was stoked and unleashed. During the 2008 credit crisis, hoarding gold became a sound financial strategy, while in Italy, the Naples mafia sprang into old-school action, providing large cash loans to needy businessmen—and showing up at their doorstep with pistols on payment day. In the United States, banks sold uncollected subprime debts to vulture agencies that harassed the overburdened poor like bounty hunters. In Russia, an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the economy quickly reverted to the barter system, while the country’s politics remained focused on private feuds among modern-day robber barons. Around the world, cyber crime, boiler room frauds, fake check scams, and sellers of counterfeited batteries and toothpaste all flourished. Rape, pillage, and massacre are still indistinguishable weapons in African conflicts, where greed and grievance justify warlord control over minerals and slaves against nominally sovereign governments. Arab and African nations are always just a food price spike away from peasant revolt like the one that overran London in 1381.
NGOs and multinational corporations are a huge part of the response to the new medievalism: a new colonialism. Medieval churches, not kings, were responsible for the sick and helpless, and obliged universities and trade guilds to set aside charity money. Today, super-NGOs including Oxfam, Mercy Corps, and the International Rescue Committee run hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. For years in some places they have been the only barrier between humanity and chaos. In the poorest two dozen countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) treats millions of AIDS-infected youth while feeding malnourished children and rehabilitating refugees. Together, strong powers and strong private actors run hopeless postcolonial nations in all but name. The now perpetual tension between building public legitimacy and the need to expeditiously deliver security, food, electricity, health, and education—which corporations and NGOs often do better than governments—has given rise to a new kind of hybrid sovereign state in which the actual government is not necessarily the most influential actor in its own territory.
As a result, the notion that governments do “high policy” while NGOs just “fill gaps” is outdated and insulting. NGOs are the tugboats of progressive diplomacy, steering supertanker governments and international organizations in the right direction on human rights and climate change. It was civil society groups that promoted direct micro-loans to the poor and pushed to ban antipersonnel land mines, and scientists and academics who made climate change prominent. Oxfam tells the UK Department for International Development what to do more often than the reverse, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sets the public health agenda more than the World Health Organization, for which Gates provides up to one-third of the budget. Through their guerrilla diplomacy campaigns, NGOs have become the chief advocates for reforming bloated and wasteful international organizations such as the World Bank, and they are a major force behind corporate responsibility activity as well. As one German diplomat put it, “Civil society does its own work, but its other role is to monitor and be a pain in the ass if things aren’t working right.” Even after the financial crisis, NGOs have delved deeper into the global citizenry to raise funds, and they continue to thrive, delivering welfare faster, cheaper, and better than many governments.
Today, comparisons to the interwar period of 1919–39 are tempting. Then it was Japan rising in Asia, today it’s China; then it was the great influenza, today AIDS; then it was the Great Depression, today the Great Recession; then the League of Nations failed, today the United Nations is in crisis. Yet the Middle Ages parallel is superior in that it emphasizes the complexity of a world populated by many diverse types of actors. It is a mistake to think of the Middle Ages only as history’s darkest era. It was also a time of great East–West commercial expansion and the rediscovery of classical wisdom. The new Middle Ages also need not be a permanent purgatory of uncertainty—in many ways it perversely gives some hope that our present situation may resolve itself in a Renaissance rather than a world war. But the Middle Ages only fully gave way to the Renaissance with the rise of the European nation-state in the sixteenth century. Establishing a new architecture for our current neo-medieval world could take decades.
The New Rules of the Game
There are few terms more fashionable in diplomacy today than “New Deal.” Upon Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president in 2008, European Commission president José Manuel Barosso called for a “New Deal for a new world.” Other leaders seek a “New Deal” to balance global trade with sustainable development. Still we are waiting. Those who seek a grand global “New Deal” should remember that President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered America’s “New Deal” through what he called “bold, persistent experimentation.” Where is that experimentation today?
Running the world is about much more than making laws and rules. That is the easy part. The hard part is implementing, evaluating, fixing, and spreading best practices. Crises such as the Indonesian tsunami, Darfur genocide, and the financial meltdown persistently remind us of the gaps in our control over events and their consequences. There are plenty of resources in the world to solve our problems; what we really lack is the capacity to efficiently bring them to bear. Fortunately, the solution is not to rip up our existing world order and start from scratch. We just need to load new operating software onto our emerging global network.
That software is called mega-diplomacy. It is the key that unlocks and unleashes the resources of governments, corporations, and NGOs—none of which can run the world alone. Globalization has splintered the world into an infinite milieu of actors, but technology allows them to quickly and strategically recombine. Rather than a stiff waltz of rituals and protocol among states alone, mega-diplomacy is a jazzy dance among coalitions of ministries, companies, churches, foundations, universities, activists, and other willful, enterprising individuals who cooperate to achieve specific goals. Twenty-first-ce
ntury challenges will be solved through such coalitions of willing government, corporate, and civic actors who not only sign their names but also put manpower and resources on the table. Mega-diplomacy is the triumph of mini-lateral action over multi-lateral stasis.
There will be no reform of global policies without a reform of global political structure. Historically it takes either a major crisis or a technological revolution to initiate such change—today we have both. Whether combating terrorism, AIDS, or climate change, mega-diplomacy has bounded ahead of traditional interstate diplomacy. Whereas the old diplomacy was about affirming the separateness of each nation through sovereign representation, mega-diplomacy is about creating unity across communities to manage our collective space. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim believed that society has an essence beyond the sum of individual actions; within this social milieu, an increasingly complex division of labor creates a dynamic sense of solidarity. Scholars and politicians search for boundaries among the state, market, and society, but in reality these have blurred into irrelevance. It is hard to imagine anything getting done today without the action-oriented networks that are becoming the cornerstone of twenty-first-century diplomacy. It used to be possible to count how many active public-private partnerships there were; today the number is effectively infinite. Short-term politics cannot deliver the high start-up costs of global solutions, but smart diplomatic coalitions can.
Mega-diplomacy is the best hope to confront a world of high-stakes, neo-medieval chaos. Everyone seems to have micro solutions to macro problems. Mega-diplomacy brings those micro solutions to the macro level as a systemic process. The world needs very few if any new global organizations. What it needs is far more fresh combinations of existing actors who coordinate better with one another. This is not about money, but efficiency. The infrastructure of mega-diplomacy is the roads, or connections, among relevant agents, and the superstructure is the signs or guideposts that steer their coordination. Mega-diplomacy’s success or failure comes down to following three principles:
Inclusiveness: Getting all hands on deck through multi-stakeholder involvement of governments, companies, and NGOs.
Decentralization: Spreading capabilities widely, and as close to problems as possible, promoting empowerment and resilience.
Mutual accountability: Building communities of trust among participants, creating obligations to one another and the mission.
There is no better example of public-private collaboration than the Internet, which was invented by the U.S. military and is now governed by a single small nonprofit, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which registers domain names and IP addresses. Though it has corporate funding from such companies as Cisco and Deutsche Telekom, its twenty-one-member board holds its elections online. The Internet is wider, deeper, and safer than ever because it is a distributed network. Cloud computing—not big buildings and bloated bureaucracies—is the future of global governance.
Mega-diplomacy forces us to cast aside ideologies. In the new marketplace of actors and solutions, collective wisdom is captured through diversity, making the whole smarter than the sum of its parts. As leading political scientist Robert Keohane puts it, “If only the world knew what the people in the world know!” Diplomacy needs more of Guy Kawasaki, the serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who distrusts elitism in favor of passion and trial and error. As Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, likes to say, “Fast failure is good.” We should experiment, learn, share lessons, and move on. Harmonization and synchronicity, not control and direction, are the new virtues of management. There is not one authority or solution, but many; rules emerge not from the top down, but from the bottom up; there is no either-or between state and market, but both-and.
Diplomacy is not about perfection, but accommodation. Diplomacy can’t stop every arms dealer, sex trafficker, forest logger, or rogue trader (and will not persuade Great Britain or its former colonies to drive on the right side of the road), but it can embody principles that will help us manage a messy but interconnected world. Mega-diplomacy can’t be practiced the way bureaucrats tussle over org charts, focusing on who has the most power on paper. Instead, it should be thought of the way the best designers and mechanics work together to build cars—focusing on how to get energy flowing most efficiently through the vehicle—or like architecture, where form follows function. In flat organizations in which people can see what others are doing, everybody faces performance pressure and no one can hide behind bureaucratic silos.
In a world of constantly shifting coalitions, where does the buck stop? Who is ultimately responsible? Aristotle was skeptical of democracy; he wanted rule for the people but not necessarily by the people. For him, a regime’s virtue lay in its ability to maximize the collective ends of citizen security and welfare. Similarly today, it matters far less who conducts an intervention than that it produces positive results. The diplomacy of action—“diplomacy of the deed”—is the new currency of legitimacy. Actors who want to be perceived as legitimate must prove they can do the job best.
Contrary to popular perceptions, this is where some parts of the UN system are strongest. Specialized agencies such as the World Food Program (WFP), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) not only save lives where great powers don’t bother, but in the process change the way the world deals with such issues as food security and public health—both of which have a major impact on political stability. Since they are not top-heavy or centralized, their work happens where the problems are, and they enthusiastically partner with business and NGOs to get the job done. These bodies deserve the Nobel Prizes they have collected. As for the rest, the permissive consensus that allowed the UN Security Council, the World Bank, and other bodies to crawl along doing business as usual is over. They find themselves in a bizarre paradox: They are meant to promote efficiency, but it is most efficient to circumvent them.
Inertia is giving way to impatience. Vague notions of global democracy are not the solution to our problems; more accountable diplomacy is. Government bureaucrats may claim that “sovereign states are the only vehicles for legitimacy and accountability,” but this orthodox lack of imagination has no place in a world needing fresh solutions. We will not have a meaningful global democracy of nations and peoples anytime soon, but we can have more accountable diplomacy today. Globalization doesn’t have a global constitution, but dot-gov, dot-com, and dot-org diplomats can still monitor and hold one another accountable. Informal mechanisms can be more effective than laws that are neither obeyed nor enforced. Think eBay, where peers set value and clients and suppliers monitor one another for honesty and efficiency.
Accountability comes most fundamentally from the strategic use of shame. With so much technological sophistication in the world, it seems that only our own inner personal development is lagging—and shame accelerates our learning curve. Shame has recorded a number of victories: It was integral to ending the practice of slavery in the late nineteenth century, convinced Dow Chemical to stop producing napalm during the Vietnam War, compelled McDonald’s and other fast-food chains to declare the calorie content of their foods, got Nike and Levi’s to improve labor standards in their factories, forced cigarette makers to publicize the deadliness of their products, embarrassed a number of European leaders so that they canceled their visits to the Beijing Olympics over the Chinese crackdown on Tibetans, pressured Persian Gulf states to switch from boy jockeys to robots in camel races, and convinced some Wall Street firms to curb outlandish executive compensation.
Today we rely on the media for transparency: to shame the impudent, deliver accountability, and make us feel informed and empowered. But the media has a limited bandwidth and a dangerous power to exaggerate both good news and bad. Television can generate moral disgust and act as a virtual conscience, but civil wars and famines don’t go away when the press crews pack up after a few days. Haiti is nowhere near “ba
ck to normal” after its early 2010 earthquake. Indeed, such traumas make the news only when it’s already too late. Also, the media is no longer—if it ever was—a neutral source of information. Privately owned cable channels, newspapers, and websites dominate the media landscape, and many of them now depend on private philanthropy to provide deeper reportage. Even public television networks such as America’s PBS rely heavily on private support. Still, the more informed the global public, the more transparency we will have. But remember, on issues from climate change to rallies on the streets of Tehran, the media only highlights people’s power; it doesn’t supply it. You must do that.
The bumper sticker to capture the spirit of the new diplomacy is “Govern globally, act locally.”
We have fallen into the habit of treating the most significant issues of our time—terrorism, climate change, the economy—as if they are global first and local second. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Movements that many consider global—jihadism, anti-corporatism, environmentalism—are far more rooted in local injustices. There is no “global poverty,” but rather varieties of Latin American, African, Arab, and Asian poverty, each with its own blend of drivers, including overpopulation, geography, and corruption. We have an interlinked global economy and a fragile global ecosystem—but making them both more resilient will happen through local or regional measures. Such global ideals as democracy and human rights mean almost nothing until they are accepted and embedded by local actors within local contexts.
The word “global” can inspire, but global action requires the most elusive of forces: political will. How much political will do we have in global reserve? When the genocide in Darfur was unfolding in 2003–4, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan refused to speak the term “genocide,” as it would legally require the international community to act. Instead they just called it a “catastrophe,” leaving the Sudanese regime to continue sponsoring its genocidal pogroms. The year 2010 was supposed to be big for political will, with the United Nations measuring progress toward its development targets. Kofi Annan recently claimed that achieving these goals is still feasible, but the “political will remains largely absent.” Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also implored, “The world has enough resources to satisfy the needs of a population twice as big as the present one. But it lacks the political will to overcome this inequality.” Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008, former Finnish prime minister Martti Ahtisaari called for peace in the Middle East: “It’s only a matter of will.” The sad fact is that few nations demonstrate political will, and fewer still agree on what changes to make. For most leaders, political will lasts at best until the next election.
