by Parag Khanna
One of the enduring images frequently deployed to capture the planetary crisis is of a lone polar bear stranded on a tiny floating ice patch. No government in the world has rescued that polar bear or devised a plan to save his species from drowning or extinction. You will have to do it.
Chapter Eleven
The Next Renaissance
Philosophers have all interpreted the world differently. It now depends on changing it.
—KARL MARX
If it’s fair, it’s good.
—AMARTYA SEN
More than two hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant claimed, “The history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally perfect political constitution as the only possible state within which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.” If there is such a hidden plan, it is unlikely to emerge during our current period of global uncertainty—even if now is when we need it most. Instead we are headed into the “turbulent teens,” a decade (or more) of confusion, disorder, and tension between tradition and modernity. How can we steer mankind from the new Middle Ages into the next Renaissance?
Typically books on global politics end with bromides about how the world needs more rationality, creativity, common sense, generosity, kindness, cosmopolitanism, democracy, or humanism, and calls for new super-organizations to instill these virtues. But as H. L. Mencken famously remarked, “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” Antiquated debates about whether America can lead the world—or whether any single power or institution can—no longer meet even the most basic test of taking place in reality. For those who prefer some centralized, overarching governance with values shared by all, the writing is on the wall: It isn’t going to happen.
Traditional models of diplomacy hold only one lesson for how to manage this world: that they are themselves totally insufficient. Rather than finding common projects through which to transcend their differences, the few leading powers of the world, from America and Brazil to China and Japan, are still feeling one another out about which red lines should not be crossed in one another’s affairs. Any time we turn to them for leadership—whether at the UN Security Council or the Copenhagen climate summit—we are let down. Where governments fail, great powers come to prop them up, not to reinvent them. Where people clash, they send peacekeepers, not peacemakers. And so we accelerate into a perfect storm.
All grand global schemes miss the point that representation—democratic or otherwise—is not enough to satisfy our visceral need to be in control of our own affairs. Today, for the first time, the under-represented and disenfranchised have access to information, communication, money, and the tools of violent revolution to demand and effect real change, not just new variations on the status quo. They will constantly pressure the system to evolve. Out-of-touch governments and international organizations are already feeling the heat from a bottom-up awakening: labor unions and coca farmers in Latin America, the Arab underclass in the Middle East, the Pashtuns of south-central Asia, Maoists and Naxalite tribal groups in India, and migrant laborers in China. International bureaucrats should expect nothing less than a technologically empowered revolt against their plans—or perhaps they will simply be ignored altogether. It would be too easy to suggest that all states must be strengthened and that the world of strong sovereign nations should be re-created. That world never really existed. We should embrace the next one.
The same continent that brought us medievalism also brought us a road map toward the next Renaissance: Europe. Indeed, the most inspirational figure for twenty-first-century diplomacy shouldn’t be balance-of-power statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, but rather Jean Monnet, the architect of European unity after World War II. Monnet was the original shuttle diplomat. Named deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations after World War I, he used his family’s financial business to stabilize eastern European currencies in the 1920s, then in the 1930s worked with Chiang Kaishek to reorganize China’s railway system. As the drumbeats of war sounded, he shuttled between Paris and London to help forge an anti-Nazi alliance, and then shifted to Washington to purchase war supplies for Europe. He also cajoled President Roosevelt to undertake the Victory Program that brought America into World War II.
Monnet, in other words, was the first multistate diplomat, a global statesman for our postmodern times. Having experienced two great European wars, he realized that rebuilding Europe on the basis of national sovereignty was a recipe for deferred disaster. Instead, Monnet devoted most of the next three decades to promoting first the 1950 Schuman Plan, which created the European Coal and Steel Community, and gradually other pan-European institutions such as the European Economic Community (“Common Market”), European Commission, European Monetary System, and European Parliament. Within the European Union he inspired, diplomats don’t really represent their countries to one another so much as co-govern a common space alongside transnational networks of farmers, industries, regulators, unions, and other groups. The European Union spends massively on “cohesion funds” to raise living standards in poorer regions, turning medievalist disparity into postmodern solidarity.
Today Europe has countries but virtually no borders, making it a hopeful metaphor for our neo-medieval universe of linked but autonomous communities. Importantly, the European Union is not an end state but a constant process and an experiment. As two scholars recently wrote, “Europe does not exist, only Europeanization.”1 The ever thickening integration of Europe is a successful end in itself and a model for other regions. From Morocco to Azerbaijan, laws are evolving toward European standards even as such countries may never become full EU members. Monnet believed that such dynamic European solidarity was “not an end in itself, but only a stage on the way to the organized world of tomorrow.” To have such solidarity beyond the state on the global level is both the most—and the best—toward which we can aspire.
The transition from the late Middle Ages to the modern era began unexpectedly with the existential calamity of the Black Death that ravaged much of Europe’s population in the mid-fourteenth century. In a moment of turbulence among Italian city-states, the same Medici family of Florence that had risen to prominence and power in the papal era came to be counseled by the founding father of secular rational governance, Machiavelli, and sponsored two of history’s greatest artists and inventors, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The Renaissance’s rediscovery of classical scholarship, coupled eventually with the invention of moveable type and Gutenberg’s printing press, paved the way for the Protestant Reformation, which culminated in the bloody Thirty Years’ War of the mid-seventeenth century. We cannot forget that the Renaissance was a politically volatile era even as it bred some of mankind’s greatest cultural accomplishments. If we are on the path to another Renaissance, it will be a similarly uneven and tumultuous time.
Yet the pillars of the next Renaissance—intellectual humanism, the rediscovery of ancient wisdom, and the rise of vernaculars—can now flourish on a global scale. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the early Renaissance champion of human freedom, sought to re-center discussions of the divine around the individual. Even as his Oration on the Dignity of Man was taken as a secular manifesto, in fact his true effort was to reconcile the church with classical strains of logic such as Aristotle’s. His lesson for today’s age is that our fruitless debates between the West and Islam should instead become a more inclusive discourse on achieving spiritually and morally informed governance.
Similarly, the Renaissance witnessed innovations such as double-entry bookkeeping and large-scale credit, bringing new commercial opportunities to Europeans whose geographic and cultural horizons were gradually opening as Crusaders returned home. The manner in which the current economic turbulence has shaken up our financial architecture could do the same. Chastened bankers from Lehman Brothers are actually leading an effort to revise models of financial analytics to emphasize v
alue creation, not just wealth creation. At the invitation of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is reinventing the notion of GNP to include measures of sustainability. Just as great companies like Google and PayPal took off after the late 1990s dot-com bubble burst, new innovators are emerging from the recession. They are focusing on serving ordinary people, including the world’s poorest, wherever they may be.
The next Renaissance, then, is about universal liberation through exponentially expanding and voluntary interconnections. We are in the early phase of a new era in which each individual and collective has the ability to pursue its own ends. The information revolution has empowered individuals to claim their own authority, leading us into a world of mutuality among countless communities of various sizes. This unfolding epoch will force us to appreciate the second law of thermodynamics: the inexorability of universal entropy. Complexity is our permanent reality. The future will be about multiple sovereignties, not exclusive ones.
We must pursue an active evolution toward this more networked order. “Active” means not waiting for a more capable America, China’s adaptation to global leadership, or more blue-ribbon panels to reform the United Nations. In their own spheres of activity, governments should focus on internal stability and delivering the basics to the populations within their borders, NGOs should devote themselves singularly to empowering local communities, companies should view their employees and supply chains as their citizens and infrastructure, and religious groups should practice the Golden Rule themselves to be considered legitimate. Importantly, all of these actors should allow organic alliances to emerge to solve the problems at hand. We can admire the boundless creativity of human ingenuity all we want. Better diplomacy is how to harness it. If you can afford to buy this book, or have the technology to order it, you have no excuse not to contribute to the new mega-diplomacy.
The future of global governance is not as simple as talking about the “BRIC” countries. Instead, it is a bricolage of movements, governance arrangements, networks, soft law codes, and other systems at the local, regional, and global level. Some experts are skeptical that a world of connected but self-governing communities of various sizes—and many more transcending space altogether—can be more than the sum of their parts. But we don’t have to be skeptics to apply skepticism to evaluate what works in diplomacy today. Witness how central mechanisms have ceased to be useful proxies for human progress, and how it progresses nonetheless: The WTO is stalled, but global trade is carried on by merchants at the top and bottom of the global economic food chain; the Copenhagen process did nothing for the climate, but clean-tech companies forge ahead with innovation undeterred; the UN Security Council may never be reformed, but regional organizations are picking up the slack. Each of those local experiments holds greater promise than banal global org charts. Compliance with weak treaties is not a measure of our collective evolution; increasing participation in the actions that produce global solidarity is.
If a new global social contract is to emerge, it will be as a result of the communities of the world—whether nations, corporations, or faiths—sharing knowledge and cooperating, but also learning to respect one another’s power and values. As they practice mega-diplomacy, they leverage each other’s resources and hold one another accountable. In a world in which every player has a role in global policy, the only principle that can reliably guide us is pragmatism: learning from experience and applying its lessons. The dot-gov, dot-com, and dot-org worlds are converging toward such pragmatism. How will we know when we have succeeded? By lives saved and improved, crises averted, and networks built. This networked world need not be a tribal one. Webs of interdependence among diverse enclaves are the logical extension of globalization, not a break from it. The local to the local is still global.
Interdependence is one of the buzzwords of our age, but it is an observation, not a strategy. Perpetual resilience, not stiff governance, is the strategy that nations, economies, and communities must pursue irrespective of their degree of interdependence with the rest of the world. A world changing so quickly needs to be run in real time, and even anticipate the future. It has to be made up not of rigid states, but rather of networks of resilient systems. Resilience is about local stability rather than centralized dependence, a diversity of approaches rather than reliance on any one solution, flexibility of institutions to change as the tasks shift, and transparent collaboration to build trust and generate maximum resources.2 Resilience means Africans don’t have to wait for the United Nations to approve military interventions or for the World Bank to provide them loans; it means Europeans and Australians don’t wait for the United States to sign climate treaties before turning global warming into a commercial opportunity; and it means emerging markets don’t wait for G-20 meetings to launch stimulus packages or issue local-currency bonds. Resilience is how the local thrives amid the global.
We need risk management systems more than we need—or will ever have—powerful global institutions. Our goal should be an autopoietic world: self-regulating and re-creating. We must be vigilant, recognizing the fact that contagions can spread rapidly in networks, so we must code an operating template that builds immunities after failure and learns with each cycle of reproduction. Think of it like a world of wikis that everyone can access and navigate, and if one link breaks, there are alternative paths. If you poke a spiderweb, it doesn’t fall apart.
A hybrid, diffuse, public-private world is not flawless and is certainly far more complex than our existing order, but it is an improvement rather than a step backward. If the diverse groups populating the world can feel that they have a direct or indirect say in global policies, the next phase of diplomacy will be better than the last. It is said that the pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity and the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty. Winston Churchill was a pragmatist. He said, “I’m an optimist—it doesn’t seem of much use to be anything else.”
Acknowledgments
Over the past decade I’ve been privileged to sit at many of the crossroads of global thinking on how we run the world, from the United Nations to the World Economic Forum to Washington think tanks to closed-door foreign ministry discussions to the world’s leading NGOs. I deeply appreciate the support of so many individuals who have shaped my thinking on global governance, while taking full responsibility for the arguments and claims in this book.
I would like to thank the members of the 2005 Low Level Panel on UN Reform and the 2007 Next Generation Fellows of the American Assembly, and participants in the March 2007 InWent conference in Berlin on “Global Governance in Flux,” the April 2008 NGO Leaders Forum in New York, the October 2008 Geneva High-Level Symposium on Global Health Governance, the August 2008 Global Institutional Reform workshop at Princeton, the February 2009 International Studies Association Annual Convention in New York, the March 2009 Bertelsmann Global Policy Council in Berlin, the April 2009 Center for Post-Industrial Studies roundtable in Moscow on “Democracy in a Changing World,” and the April 2009 Georgetown Global Forum on “Profits, Philanthropy and Development.”
I hope this book lives up to the reputation of the New America Foundation as a hub for the next generation of policy innovation. My colleagues there once again provided a steady stream of fresh ideas and constructive feedback. I am indebted to Steve Coll, Steve Clemons, Sherle Schwenninger, Maria Figueroa, Michael Cohen, Peter Bergen, Priscilla Lewis, Janine Wedel, Doug Rediker, Flynt Leverett, Sean McFate, Nick Schmidle, Ray Boshara, and Jamie Zimmerman, and researchers Jeff Meyer, Katherine Tiedemann, Ben Katcher, Faith Smith, and Jeremy Strasser. I would also like to thank Bonnie Jenkins, my program officer from the Ford Foundation, which generously supported research for this book. Colleagues from fraternal think tanks have also been enormously helpful: Ben Barber, David Callahan, Miles Rapoport, and Michael Edwards of Demos; David Devlin-Foltz and Peter Reiling of the Aspen Institute; Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Joerg Hu
sar, Guenther Maihold, and Ulrich Schneckener of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik.
Numerous experts in global affairs have provided wisdom and insights over the course of my research: Kishore Mahbubani, Barry Carin, Gordon Smith, Steve Weber, Ely Ratner, Bruce Jentleson, Nazneen Barma, Alan Alexandroff, Andy Cooper, Jonathan Hausmann, Stephen Stedman, Thomas Wright, Vladislava Inozemtsev, Daniele Archibugi, John Dunn, Natan Sharansky, Amitai Etzioni, Ekaterina Kuznetsova, Jim DeWilde, Janice Stein, Paul Mayer, Rana Sarkar, Thierry Malleret, Chandran Nair, Barry Buzan, David Held, Danny Quah, Tyler Brule, Peter Marber, Raymond Saner, Lichia Yiu, Iver Neumann, James Der Derian, Lora Viola, Vikram Raghavan, Pamela Mar, Francisco Martinez Montes, Simon Maxwell, James Traub, Ethan Burger, Fouad Ghanma, Neemat Frem, Pete Singer, Ali Wyne, Nadia Sood, Paul Romer, Sara Agarwal, Joel Harrington, and Philip Zelikow.
From the World Economic Forum, I am grateful to Klaus Schwab, Rick Samans, Kevin Steinberg, Paul Smyke, Fiona Paua, David Aikman, Michael Seo, and John Moavanzadeh; and from the WEF’s Global Governance Initiative, I am indebted to Ann Florini, Sartaj Aziz, Joachim von Braun, Gareth Evans, Al Sommer, Jonathan Lash, Chris Colclough, Mirai Chatterjee, Moisés Naím, and Mary Robinson. WEF senior advisers, including Sean Cleary and Subi Rangan, also provided valuable insights.
