The prospect of an 'After America' global civilization is becoming increasingly plausible.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
by Paul Starobin
-The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today.
--V.S. Naipaul, in a lecture at the Manhattan Institute in New York City, October 1990
Henry Luce's fondest dream was that the American way of life would become the basis of a universal civilization in which all peoples of the world would live happily. This was what the idea of the American Century was all about -- an omnipotent, omnipresent America as the inspiration and the enforcer of a universal democratic ideal, embodied by the peerless American republic of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But while that dream has evaporated, the idea of a universal civilization is very much alive. In fact, it has never been more alive--and never closer to becoming a reality -- than it is today, in the globalizing world of the 21st century.
A universal civilization can be considered like any other civilization -- as a distinctive mix of customs, habits, and beliefs, of amusements and ritual practices. A universal civilization, for it to deserve that name, must have global institutions, including a global media and global universities, that will observe the world with a global eye and apply global standards of judgment to the news and social trends. It must produce people who naturally think of themselves as belonging to this civilization. If the "global citizen" is ever to have a passport, that person first must think of his or her identity in those terms -- and not simply, say, as a member of a global city-state. In these terms, a universal civilization suggests the grandest "After America" possibility of them all -- the possibility of global government.
The chain of reasoning is straightforward enough. This is the sort of process that belongs to the paradigm of tipping points. Before America could become a republic, it had to feel keenly its sense of Americanness; and before Europe could become the European Union, it had to cross a certain threshold feeling of Europeanness. In both cases, these processes took a great length of time. More than a century and a half passed between John Smith's landing in Virginia, on behalf of the British Crown, and Jefferson's Declaration of Independence; and even with the passage of another 70 years, Ralph Waldo Emerson still found cause to lament the tendency of Americans to imitate Europe in styles of art and architecture. The same logic suggests that a universal civilization, over time, could -- let's just stick with "could" for now -- give rise to a universal government. The key is a critical mass of people and institutions with a sufficient sense of universalness.
The case for world government has tended to belong to the poets. If the globe had but one monarch, Dante mused in an unfinished treatise known as Convivio, or The Banquet, war and indeed the cause of war would be no more: "Because he possesses everything, the ruler would not desire to possess anything further, and thus, he would hold kings contentedly within the borders of their kingdoms, and keep peace among them." Dante began work on Convivio, which he wrote in Latin, at the dawn of the 14th century. His muse, Beatrice, had died some years earlier, and his native Italy, as ever, was embroiled in strife, a sequence of wars involving factions representing the papacy on one side and the Holy Roman Empire on the other. His yearning was understandable, but his timing could not have been worse. His world of city-states would in a few centuries give way to the even more cutthroat world of European nation-states.
Creeping Globalization
But let's depart from the realm of poetry. The plausible path to global government is a prosaic one -- a creepy-crawl of an organic kind. It's the sort of thing that, after it happens, everyone will look back in astonishment and say that they never quite realized that this was where things were headed all along. It's best to think not in terms of a Dante but, considerably less lyrically, of a Talcott Parsons, one of the more influential sociologists of the 20th century. Although his writings are difficult to digest, Parsons, the Colorado-born son of a Congregational minister, was an interesting and original thinker; and he can be broadly associated with those, like Leo Tolstoy and Fernand Braudel, with a perspective on change as a bottom-up process. Parsons's key insight, as he began to develop it in the 1930s, was known as "structural functionalism." The basic idea is that social institutions adapt and evolve, of their own accord, to meet unmet needs -- the institutions thus can be said to serve a rational, problem-solving role, in the interest of efficiency and productivity. In this way of thinking also can be seen shades of Darwin: Parsons studied both biology and the social sciences at Amherst College in the 1920s, and his career is defined by an effort to combine the two disciplines within a single theoretical model.
Parsons himself viewed America as the summa of modern, efficient social development, but in this he can be seen as a product of his times. His influence peaked in the 1950s, when the American Century was in its infancy and Europe was still a mess. Since his time, the European Union has evolved, to the point of a common currency, to make Europe more governable. An alphabet soup of supranational institutions like the International Criminal Court have taken on problems, such as the pursuit of justice against war criminals, that tend to fall between the cracks of the nation-state system. And in our times, the 21st-century version of globalization -- aided by the marvels of modern communication technologies that improve by the month -- is promoting a feeling of universal oneness as never before.
I have in mind, to start with, three examples, each of which can be seen as a path by which the universal civilization, and hence global government, can be constructed. The first and most progressive path is what might be called the commerce path, advanced by economic globalists -- including multinational corporation executives, lawyers, and economists -- who already view the world as one big market and are seeking, for the sake of efficiency, to work out common operating rules. The second path is the human-rights one, advanced by transnational groups like Amnesty International, seeking to replace the traditional law of the sovereign-state system with a universal regime of justice. The third path might be called the planetary-health one. In this path, common environmental challenges, such as global warming, are rallying activists, including many government leaders, to think and act globally. Although the three paths are distinct, they have some common features and could at some point converge, contributing to momentum for world government.
America is often seen as an opponent of the supranational impulse and supranational institutions -- as in its refusal to be a signatory to the treaty creating the International Criminal Court. But how America acts as a nation-state needs to be separated from how Americans, and nongovernmental institutions, are acting on their own initiatives. Across the broad spectrum of society, and even within certain quarters of Washington, there are many Americans -- judges, business leaders, educators, scientists, political activists, various other intellectual types -- who are helping to build the global institutions that could produce global government. Although they may not see their work quite this way, they are helping to construct the conditions of an After America world.
Justice Breyer's Worldview
A universal civilization needs a system of universal law, and that process is well under way, aided by the likes of Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. Breyer is well known in legal circles for his debates with Justice Antonin Scalia on the question of whether the Supreme Court should pay attention to the decisions of foreign judges in the process of interpreting law in the United States.
For Scalia, the answer is a definite no. As he once put it, speaking of Americans, "We don't have the same moral and legal framework as the rest of the world, and never have.... I doubt whether anybody would say, 'Yes, we want to be governed by the views of foreigners.' " This is spoken like a good American Exceptionalist.
Breyer, though, ardently believes that American courts can profit by keeping up with what is happening elsewhere on the legal front. His passion came across at a 2007 forum in Washington that the French-American Foundation organized to give him a chance to talk to a small group about his views on the law. When I asked him to elaborate on his perspective, he responded with a vivid metaphor. All those involved in making the law, all around the world, he said, are seated together at a loom, "knitting or weaving" a "carpet or fabric." And "that's what the world is like today."
I later met with Breyer in his chambers at the Court. A former law professor at Harvard, he was born in San Francisco in 1938 and was named by Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court in 1994. He works out of a corner office, on the first floor, previously occupied by Justice Harry Blackmun. He had removed the wall-to-wall carpet to expose the hardwood floors, changed the fluorescent lighting to natural settings, and put up on the walls oil paintings, selected from the U.S. government's vast art collection, by Gilbert Stuart and James Whistler. But the eye-catcher, for me, was a book prominently displayed on the coffee table, titled Ciel! Blake! Dictionnaire Francais-Anglais des Expressions Courantes, by the French author Jean-Loup Chiflet. I knew that Breyer was fluent in French and liked to visit the country, but I had not really grasped the depth of his interest in French culture and history. He told me that he liked to keep up with news and trends in France by tapping into French sources on the Internet.
Breyer looked rather buttoned-down, in his business suit and dress shirt with cuff links, but his sentences had an animated crackle to them. To start things off, I asked him to elaborate on his image of the loom. Critics tend to caricature Breyer's views on the importance of foreign law. For one thing, he does not really have in mind hot-button social-policy issues such as gay marriage -- this is not about, as cultural conservatives worry, his desire to smuggle the law of the Netherlands into the United States. His main focus, as he told me, is global commerce -- how a "tremendous knitting together" of the law is taking place in the global business and economic arena. He ticked off four examples.
First, he said, the weaving is occurring at the very practical level of the international conferences that he regularly attends in Europe and elsewhere. One of his favorites is the annual economic forum every July, in Aix-en-Provence, organized by the French group Le Cercle des Economistes. The event is attended by a global elite crew of jurists, law professors, economists, and others and addresses the sorts of problems that need to be solved in order for globalization to advance. Thus at the 2005 conference, discussion revolved around the question of "how to reconcile two legal systems, one stemming from the Anglo-Saxon law and the other from the Roman law and Napoleonic Code." Another typical conference topic is intellectual-property rights. On that subject, Breyer explained to me, "everyone is interested in solutions" to a common problem. "They may arrive at different solutions, but inevitably that kind of discussion promotes tremendous similarity because people learn from each other" and because "the underlying principles are similar." And so "the discussion becomes universal and the law becomes universal."
Breyer's second example is the evolution of a global commercial code gradually being adopted in various countries, in the same way the Uniform Commercial Code came to be adopted in the United States. The UCC, as it is known, evolved as private organizations and individuals involved in commerce made recommendations that state legislatures adopted as laws that became, in turn, the basis for court decisions. Nowadays, Breyer said, American state legislatures are bound to pick up recommendations from foreign sources as commerce becomes increasingly global.
His third example was the work of international trade institutions like the World Trade Organization, which are knitting together both "laws and practices," and his fourth example, coming from outside commerce, was the harmonization of global law enforcement institutions as they addressed common problems such as terrorism.
I asked Breyer if the evolution he was describing amounted to "modernity," to the next logical step for a modernizing world. "Yes, that's right. It's exactly what I'm talking about," he replied. He balked, though, at the suggestion that he was seeking to impose his values on the world, emphasizing that he was in the business, above all, of problem-solving: "I'm looking for means, not ends." While I take his point, it still seems to me that his choice of means -- his eagerness to partake in a global discussion on what the law should become -- was in itself a reflection of a certain value. Breyer is an enthusiastic, unapologetic globalist, just as Scalia, a Reagan appointee, is an unapologetic American Exceptionalist.
Global Tycoons
Still, it is not as if Breyer, philosophically speaking, is occupying an isolated island. America's Founders readily looked to foreign examples, like the Swiss and German systems, in devising the U.S. Constitution. (Scalia concedes that point but argues that once the U.S. Constitution was settled, there was no need to keep looking beyond America's shores for legal guidance.) On the east pediment of the Supreme Court -- at the rear of the building -- is a sculpted trio of three great lawgivers: Moses, Solon of Athens, and Confucius. This grouping is the conception of the American artist Hermon Atkins MacNeil, who worked with the architect Cass Gilbert on the Supreme Court's construction in the early 1930s. "Law as an element of civilization was normally and naturally derived or inherited in this country from former civilizations," MacNeil explained to the committee formed to supervise construction of the Court. In other words, even the law of the United States is derived from a universal stream of law as old as human civilization itself.
If the law of commerce is becoming universal, it is not only because "the discussion," as Breyer puts it, is becoming universal; it is because, more fundamentally, the great institutions of modern capitalism -- the corporation, the investment bank, the hedge fund -- treat the world as one. In certain respects, this is not a new thing. In 19th-century London, and even earlier, business and finance operated on a global scale. Back then, though, there was an intimate joining of money and imperial political power: The purpose of these enterprises based in London was to make the British Empire rich and powerful.
In today's wave of "globalization," the globally minded corporation and financial house do not really have this type of bond--or, to put it another way, they are absent a national political loyalty. They are heartless creatures, faithless to their roots, as Halliburton was when its CEO, David Lesar, decided to move the company's global headquarters from Houston to Dubai. This was a cold-eyed business decision that angered the community leaders of Houston and some members of Congress, who believed that Halliburton was seeking to evade the web of U.S. regulators, but what of it? There was nothing to stop Halliburton from leaving.
Were Theodore Dreiser alive today to write a new trilogy of novels on the rise of the modern business tycoon, surely his "Titan" would be not a baron of American capitalism but a prince of global capitalism -- a financial predator-prince (and creative genius) of the planetary scale and ambition of a Rupert Murdoch. The story line would take us from the prince's middling origins in Australia to his ascension in the great global centers of popular media and commerce -- Hollywood, London, New York -- and his bid for the new markets of places like China. While Murdoch became a naturalized American citizen in 1985 so he could be eligible to purchase U.S.-based television stations, America is no more his home than Australia or the United Kingdom. The global tycoon, like his tamer counterpart, the global business manager, is a person without a country.
Global Currency
America's time of robber-baron capitalism, in the 19th century, eventually gave way to the Progressive era, in which Washington sought to rein in the barons with regulatory institutions intended to protect the broad public interest. At the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos early in 2008, George Soros argued that today's global economy needs a "global sheriff" to keep order. His proposal was greeted with skepticism, but Soros may be ahead of his time -- he was, at the least, several months in front of the financial crisis that brought down some of Wall Street's biggest firms and knocked back on their heels bank regulators the world over.
As markets in the United States, Europe, and Asia together melted down, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a "global system of financial regulation" to replace the antiquated patchwork of national regulators. This is already happening in the area of corporate accounting principles as multinationals gravitate to a single standard as published by the International Accounting Standards Board, based in London. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in August of 2008, proposed a series of steps by which all major U.S. companies would switch from U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, known as GAAP, to uniform international standards by 2014.
Perhaps the next step will be a global currency, as proposed by an Italian count, Gasparo Scaruffi, in the 16th century. "A global economy requires global currency," Paul Volcker, the ex-chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, likes to say.
Might the global multinational company come to have an active preference for world government? I put that question to Richard Burt, who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1980s. Burt now works at Henry Kissinger's global consulting firm, which specializes in advising clients like the multinationals on relations with the various governmental regimes of the planet. We met at his office in Washington's Farragut Square on the eve of a visit to town by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. He told me how eager Merkel was to engage Washington on the vexing issue of "regulatory harmonization" -- how to bring about a synchronization of the rules governing business in Europe and America. Yes, Burt answered without hesitation, the multinationals would prefer world government to current arrangements. "It would be good for them, assuming they could lobby and influence the process," he told me.
An Islamic Caliphate
Ultimately, a universal civilization will be defined by its values. So far I have been describing the building blocks of a liberal universal civilization -- a civilization hospitable to markets, democracy, and freedom of expression. But there are other possible variants of a universal civilization. Communism made a strong bid to become a universal civilization starting in the 19th century, and not until well into the 20th century did it become apparent that this effort would fail; even today, the flames of Maoism and related peasant-based movements flicker from the Indian subcontinent to Latin America. As of now, the main competitor to the liberal civilization as a universal standard is the Islamic caliphate, which deserves to be treated in this regard because it aspires to cover everyone on the planet, with a comprehensive set of rules and system of justice -- a world government of a kind. As Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has said, "Islam does not recognize boundaries."
The Islamic caliphate has to be taken seriously, if only because a fair number of people appear willing to kill others and become martyrs for this endeavor -- and also because there is the historical precedent of the jihad that came to large portions of Europe and Asia in medieval times. Philosophically speaking, the modern-day effort to establish a caliphate by violent means can be thought of as a branch of the totalitarian thinking that made its own bid for control of Europe and Asia in the early 20th century.
Washington's intelligence analysts take the prospect seriously: The National Intelligence Council's "Mapping the Global Future" report, published in 2004, imagined a scenario in which a new caliphate is proclaimed "and manages to advance a powerful counter-ideology that has widespread appeal." A fictional grandson of Osama bin Laden writes a letter to a family relative in 2020, boasting that "an almost forgotten word re-entered the Western lexicon, and histories of early caliphs suddenly rose to be best-sellers on Amazon.... The Europeans thought they could dodge a clash of civilizations, but they now see that growing numbers of Muslims in their midst are turning to the caliph." At this point, though, the idea of a new caliphate is a profoundly controversial and divisive one within the Muslim world itself; as the example of Turkish society illustrates, questions of how far to proceed with Islamic law and identity are as likely to provoke as to unify Muslims. The caliphate has no prospect of becoming a universal standard until Muslims themselves claim this banner as their own, and there is a better than even chance that they will not.
As for a universal liberal civilization, its sources are various. Although America is not going to be the source, as Henry Luce hoped, it is certainly one source. A small example is the American style of casualness in business dress and manners, which has infiltrated itself into modern business life just about all over the planet.
Another source, perhaps a more important one, is Europe. In my earlier discussion of the prospects of a multipolar world, I suggested that post-national Europe lacked the willpower necessary to reconstitute itself as a great power. But this is not the same as saying that European civilization is moribund. As seen in its efforts to transcend the traditional nation-state -- in its reach for a European Union and its contributions to a global environmental and human-rights movement -- Europe is making its own bid to define the landscape of a universal civilization. The universalist impulse is especially powerful in Northern Europe and in particular in Germany. Historian Isaiah Berlin called the Germans "the first true nationalists," and now they may be the world's most ardent post-nationalists. This is not surprising. Notwithstanding the German embrace of Nazism, German philosophy has long had a powerful current of universalist thinking, as seen, for example, in Immanuel Kant's efforts to articulate a universal standard of enlightenment.
East Leads West
In these terms, the ongoing two-steps-forward, one-step-back effort to achieve a united Europe can be seen as a proxy for an effort to achieve a universal civilization. Sometimes the European Union is portrayed as a United States of Europe. But the E.U. and the U.S.A. embrace distinctly different formulas for unification. American civilization was all about forging "a new race of men," as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, the mid-18th-century immigrant from France, defined the melting pot. The European vision of unity is a multicultural one, with much wider scope for ethnic and linguistic diversity.
Justice Breyer suggested that I watch a film called L'auberge Espagnole, "The Spanish Apartment," to get the flavor of how Europe is trying to come together. The movie, made in 2002 by the French director Cedric Klapisch, is about a French economics graduate student, Xavier, who leaves his native Paris to study in Barcelona on an E.U.-sponsored program known as Erasmus. He moves into an apartment occupied by other students in the program, from such places as Belgium, England, and Denmark. His real education takes place in the apartment and in the streets of Barcelona, and while his Spanish improves, he is baffled by a teacher who insists on speaking in Catalan. At the end of the film, we find a somewhat disoriented Xavier, back in Paris to work at the plum business job his studies have earned him but no longer quite at home there. His experience in Barcelona has left him with an identity crisis. He is sitting shirtless in the room in which he grew up, with snapshots of his ex-apartment mates scattered on the floor. "I'm French, Spanish, English, Danish," he says. "I'm not one, but many. I'm like Europe. I'm all that. I'm a mess."
That parting image, "a mess," is meant sardonically; the movie's message is more along the lines that Europe is an uneven work in progress -- confusing and at times dispiriting, but moving along nevertheless. One does not imagine Xavier becoming a French nationalist any more than one imagines him giving up his precious new friendships. His European identity is something to wrestle with, not discard. Sometimes messy arrangements prove more enduring than tidy ones. "Europeanism," with its acceptance of multiculturalism, is less of a forced conversion than traditional Americanism, with its fundamentalist insistence on the melting pot. The European multicultural union is not unlike the union that keeps ethnically and linguistically divided India together, and multiculturalism is also making powerful inroads in parts of 21st-century America.
There is also a contribution to the universal civilization that can come from the East. The 21st century may be shaping up as the century of resource constraints. It could be a new age of limits -- not least on consumption. Although all religions, including the Judeo-Christian variants, emphasize the need to moderate one's material wants, this tradition is especially well grounded in Eastern religions such as Buddhism. Global warming and the exhaustion of hydrocarbon reserves could turn a growing number of Western minds (and souls) to Eastern sources of spiritual wisdom. The East may also prove a growing influence on global medical practices as the limits of the traditional Western model, with its tendency to divide body from spirit, become increasingly apparent. For the better part of 500 years, the West has dominated the East.
Perhaps what comes next is not the return of serve, the Eastern domination of the West, but the universal civilization that marries strands of both.
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Reprinted from AFTER AMERICA: Narratives for the Next Global Age by Paul Starobin, with permission of Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.