Prospects and Ambiguities of Globalization: Critical Assessments from a Christian Point of View

Prospects and Ambiguities of Globalization

Prospects and Ambiguities of Globalization Critical Assessments at a Time of Growing Turmoil

Edited by James W. Skillen

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prospects and ambiguities of globalization : critical assessments from a Christian point of view / edited by James W. Skillen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2669-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-2670-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-3762-8 (electronic) 1. Globalization—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Church and state. I. Skillen, James W. JZ1318.P75 2009 2009001493 261.8’7—dc22 Printed in the United States of America

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To Harold Heie for initiating this project and for decades of work promoting serious argument and engagement across ideological and cultural divides

Contents

Acknowledgments

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To Look at the World Entirely Afresh James W. Skillen, Center for Public Justice

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Kaleidoscopic Change in World Affairs: Emerging Patterns of Sovereignty and Governance Steven E. Meyer, National Defense University

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Faith and Globalization Max L. Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary

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Globalization and the State: A View from Economics Rodney D. Ludema, Georgetown University

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The New Silk Road: Central Asia at the Global Crossroads Alice-Catherine Carls, University of Tennessee, Martin

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Schooling and the Not-So-Sovereign State Charles L. Glenn, Boston University

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Evangelical Christians: The New Internationalists? Dennis R. Hoover, Institute for Global Engagement

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Contending Ways of Life James W. Skillen

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Index

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About the Contributors

131 vii

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College and its former director, Harold Heie, for organizing the roundtable conference that led to this project and for encouraging its development all along the way. We are grateful to both Gordon College and the Lilly Endowment for their generous sponsorship of the project. We also express our thanks to the Center for Public Justice, which made possible the organizing, editing, and some of the writing of this volume. There are too many other persons and institutions to name here who have encouraged our work on this project, but we want to acknowledge our deep indebtedness to spouses, colleagues, friends, and many mentors and authors, without whom we could not have written this book.

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1 To Look at the World Entirely Afresh James W. Skillen

The world is changing very rapidly, more rapidly than we can comprehend. Our mental picture of the world of nations, and even of our own country, is behind the times. For example, the degree to which the global economy now conditions American employment and the costs of our consumption is far greater than a decade ago. Worldwide environmental dangers seem to have appeared suddenly and it is clear that significant changes to protect the environment will require the cooperation of all the world’s industrial nations. And the decline of American influence in almost every part of the world, just two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seems unbelievable and unacceptable to many Americans. Perhaps most of these interconnected changes are for the good. Rapid economic growth in China and India could lead to greater cooperation among potential rivals and more economic opportunity for American exporters in the long term. The rapid increase in the cost of oil may speed up the development and use of environmentally friendlier energy sources. The decline of American influence in the world might help to redirect more of our national treasure to domestic investments in rail transport, flood protection, and other infrastructure needs as well as to better education and new types of jobs, rather than to military expansion. Perhaps it will also open the way for the US and other nations to cooperate more seriously to end the spread of nuclear weapons. Who knows what the future will bring or exactly what American leaders in government, business, education, science, and technology should be doing now to plan for the future. What seems increasingly clear, however, is that a pattern of short-term reaction to shocks and surprises does not appear to be adequate for the exercise of sound governance and international 1

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relations. Certainly one of the chief questions Americans must ask is why so many big changes seem to come as a surprise to us and to our leaders. Does the surprise factor arise because our expectations are unfounded and grounded in a misunderstanding of reality? Are we making assumptions about American power, economic growth, scientific progress, the spread of democracy, and the pursuit of happiness that are simply mistaken? The aim of this book is to raise these kinds of questions while taking a hard look at some of the big changes that are shaping the world today. Our purpose, as authors, is to try to illuminate the global landscape and to provoke debate and critical reflection in classrooms and living rooms. Americans are go-getters, problem-solvers, forward-looking achievers. We want to get things done and make progress. We don’t like barriers that stand in our way. We have a difficult time understanding those who don’t share this approach to life. But what if the American way of life is sagging with doubts and hampered by growing weaknesses rather than gathering steam with one success after another? If, to some degree, whether great or small, doubts and weaknesses are growing, then critical reflection on global changes and on the foundations of American life is called for—and perhaps urgently so. Take, for example, the assumption we’ve all grown up with that America is the exceptional nation—unique in the world, at the forefront of history, the brightest example of democracy, freedom, and prosperity to which all nations should aspire. The United States certainly gained power and prestige throughout the twentieth century and came out of the Cold War as the sole remaining superpower. Yet, our belief in American preeminence is not merely the result of twentieth-century events. “It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world,” writes William Pfaff. That conviction goes back to the American founding and helps to explain why “both the professional foreign policy community and American opinion generally seem to assume that the international system is ‘naturally’ headed toward an eventual American-led consolidation of democratic authority over international affairs.”1 As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, however, American leadership and preeminence in international affairs—the Pax Americana—is in doubt, and in less than a decade it has been discounted by many around the world. The cause of doubt is not just the Iraq war or the Bush administration’s handling of foreign policy and the economy. “The West has lost its coherence,” says Philip Stephens, and the passing of “America’s unipolar moment” has not yet been followed by a new and clearly defined “multipolar system.”2 David Ignatius adds that the Cold War era is over and strategies that fit that era no longer make sense. “The intel-

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lectual matrix formed by the Soviet threat, and before that by Hitler’s rise in Germany, needs to be reworked.”3 Yet even if the “intellectual matrix” must change, will that change engender a reformulation of belief at the inner core of American self-identity? Or will our belief that America should be preeminent simply lead us to look for new and different enemies responsible for thwarting our leadership and the world’s progress? Lawrence Freedman contends that the US has relied more on its imagination of enemies than on real knowledge of them and this has led American leaders to present “all conflicts as straightforward battles between good and evil.” Moreover, this outlook fosters the tendency “to lump together all opponents regardless of whether they have much in common, as if they are all part of the same terrible plot against the US, and then to assume that [the opponents] know exactly what they are doing, with uncompromising goals and a settled strategy to be pursued to the bitter end. The only mistake the foe is ever allowed is to underestimate America’s will and determination to prevail.”4 But has the American unipolar moment really passed and is the US mistaken to see itself as the truest and last best hope for the world, called to stand against global evil? The Cold War may be over, but perhaps the strategies of that era should not be abandoned too quickly if Russia and China are rising to challenge us or if terrorism has replaced communism as the world’s next great enemy. What is belief and what is reality here? If it is true that the Pax Americana is slipping away, perhaps our leaders should try to hold onto American preeminence at (almost) all costs. Do Americans really want this? What grand purposes are we willing to pay for? And which faith, which convictions, should guide citizens and leaders alike either to try to maintain American preeminence or to begin to play a different role in the world—a less pretentious, more cooperative, more subtle, and more diplomatic role as one nation among many? In fact, should we even be thinking any longer in terms of nations and international relations if we want to comprehend the shrinking world in which we are living? After all, the global changes examined in the following chapters concern more than the United States and its role in the world. The power of faith, for example, as a motor for either change or resistance to change is not peculiar to Americans. As Steven Meyer, Max Stackhouse, and Dennis Hoover show, faith is a global dynamic exhibited in both traditional and modern secular varieties of religion. Competing faiths are leading shapers of the conflicts between the West and radical Islamism today because of differing views of the meaning of history and government and not only because of different views of God and the afterlife. And don’t forget that it was the religiously deep ideologies of fascism, communism, and national socialism, not Christianity and Islam, that made the twentieth century the bloodiest century on record. Moreover, religions and their

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differences are not simply negative factors; they can be key to constructive diplomacy and conflict resolution.5 Christian faith and the Roman Catholic Church in Poland helped bring down the Iron Curtain peacefully. Christianity helped bring about a peaceful end to a dictatorship in the Philippines and to apartheid in South Africa. The rise of radical Islamism is one of three contemporary revolutions that Henry Kissinger says are changing the world dramatically. The three are “(a) the transformation of the traditional state system of Europe; (b) the radical Islamist challenge to historic notions of sovereignty; and (c) the drift of the center of gravity of international affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans.”6 Meyer and Rod Ludema explain part of what is happening with the transformation of the state system in Europe due to the growth of the European Union (EU). Alice-Catherine Carls points to another drift in the world’s center of gravity that is closely related to the rise of Asia as an economic powerhouse. She takes us to one of the least understood parts of the world, at least as far as Americans are concerned. There is, she says, a “new Silk Road” emerging as the crossroads of global oil and gas production and transportation.7 It is the region between Turkey and China and between Russia and southern Iran and Pakistan. Some have coined the term “Pipelinestan” to characterize that region. Fifty years from now, according to Dominic Barton and Kito de Boer, “historians may say that one of the [Middle East] region’s most important stories was a profound economic shift: the development of strong ties between the Middle East and the rest of Asia.”8 One Arab businessman, Mohamed Ali Alabbar, told Barton and de Boer, “we want to go global by going east, not west.” Trade between China and Saudi Arabia, the authors report, “increased 30 percent between 2005 and 2006 alone.” Yet the new Silk Road has to do with more than economics, Carls argues. Developments in that region also include a shift eastward of the center of the Islamic world from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to the various “-stans” that border Russia, China, and India, including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. All of these changes mean that the United States, like other nations of the world, must increasingly recognize itself as an “insufficient power,”9 as unable “to protect its citizens acting alone,”10 as no longer the dominant player and mediator in the Middle East,11 and as far less in control of its own destiny than its citizens imagine and desire. Even the almighty American dollar is sliding from the dominance it has held as a global exchange currency since the end of World War II. And the rising economic powers of Asia and Latin America are justifiably demanding a greater influence in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the UN Security Council, and even the G8 economic club of leading industrial nations, which some say should be replaced by a G20—Group of Twenty—that would include Brazil, Argentina, China, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South

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Africa.12 “The old powers have not grasped the new reality,” writes Philip Stephens. There are nods, of course, to a need to restructure international institutions. . . . More seats [for rising nations], maybe, at the World Bank, the United Nations, and, yes, the board of the IMF. But the assumption is that the rising powers will simply be accommodated within the existing system—a small adjustment here, a tweak there and everything will be fine again. Missing is a willingness to see that this is a transformational moment that demands we look at the world entirely afresh.13

However difficult it may be for any nation, including the US, to change its view of itself and the world, “there is one common twenty-first-century international experience,” says Tony Judt, that may force everyone to look at the world in a fresh way. That experience is global warming. “Within the lifetime of many readers of this essay,” writes Judt, “the world is going to slip ever faster into an environmental catastrophe,” and it is “no coincidence,” he says, “that the two countries most responsible for this prospect—China and the United States of America—are also the two Security Council members least amenable to collective action in general. . . .”14 With the growing dangers of global warming we are confronted with yet another factor that is tightly intertwined with worldwide changes in economic growth and national and regional competition. Pressures pushing in the direction of increased world consumption conflict with pressures pushing for collective action on environmental protection. “While western politicians routinely worry about globalization, they have yet to focus on a more plausible threat,” says Gideon Rachman. “It is not the outsourcing of well-paid jobs; or the inflow of cheap goods: it is the globalization of western patterns of consumption.”15 The environmental crisis is nothing if not global. In Charles Glenn’s essay that follows, he uncovers a less noticed dimension of the shrinking world that Ludema also deals with, namely, a shift in the locus of influence within nations to lower levels of governance and other arenas of decision making. While many have paid attention to the relative loss of state sovereignty to higher levels of international organization such as the WTO, NATO, and the European Union (EU),16 fewer have tried to explain movements in the other direction. Sovereign states are losing some of their sovereignty to lower levels of government and to nongovernment organizations. National monopolies over the schooling of citizens, for example, are declining, according to Glenn, as the demand for greater choice in education increases at the local level. The same is happening in the economic sphere, as Ludema demonstrates. These assessments confirm an observation by Britain’s Jeremy Greenstock: “Slowly, the structures and instruments of the state are losing their

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power to produce what we demand of them. Few policies can cope with the complexity of it all. . . . The problem is that culture, identity and politics are going local.”17 Robert J. Samuelson puts it this way: “The line between what’s local and what’s global seems increasingly blurred, and there is a general anxiety that we are in the grip of mysterious worldwide forces.”18 There appear to be dialectical, oppositional forces at work. On the one hand, globalizing tendencies push states in a supra-national direction to try to deal with transnational concerns that affect them all. On the other hand, to the extent that national governments do not, thereby, satisfy the expectations of their citizens, there is a countervailing movement to lower levels of decision making as people seek self-protection and independence. Samuelson continues: “Countries are growing economically more interdependent and politically more nationalistic. This is a combustible combination.” At the same time, we can say that citizens in many countries, aware that their national governments lack self-sufficient control over their nation’s well-being, are taking more initiative at local levels and in nongovernment organizations through independent schools, entrepreneurial efforts, and political interest groups to achieve their aims. Where will all of this take us? No one knows. The optimists point to all the achievements of globalization that are lifting millions of people out of poverty and are pushing countries toward greater cooperation to achieve their mutual and combined interests. Pessimists point to the growing tensions among peoples and nations over food, fuel, and water, and over control of the direction that global shrinkage should take. More wars and conflicts rather than fewer may be the result. The correct outlook is probably to expect both good and evil, both constructive and destructive developments, both progress and regress in human affairs. Yet the question that concerns us the most in this book is not merely how to describe and anticipate what might happen but to learn more about our responsibilities for what should take place. Governments, business people, educators, scientists, and families must make decisions every day. Therefore, the biggest challenge for anyone who bears any kind of responsibility is to exercise that responsibility wisely, constructively, and for the good of those involved. And without doubt, those actions will inevitably be shaped by what the responsible party believes is the purpose of life, the legitimate aims of business, the proper goals of education, and the normative obligations of government. In the end, therefore, our discussions in homes as well as in public should revolve around more than just the latest statistics about economic growth or decline, or the latest reports about ground gained or lost in a particular war zone, or about how much the government and insurance companies should pay to flood victims. Our deepest concern should be to gain wisdom and understanding of life’s purpose, which encompasses all

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that we do in every institution and sphere of life. And with regard to public life, broadly considered, we need to learn how people of different faiths and convictions can live together in a rapidly differentiating and shrinking world. We hope this book will provoke others to do what we have been doing in writing it, namely, to dig beneath the surface of events, to look at many dimensions of our changing world simultaneously, and to seek out opportunities to converse with neighbors both near and far about what we do not know and do not understand. As Christians we are particularly concerned to gain a deeper understanding of how people throughout the world—all created in the image of God—can deal with their responsibilities for, and their distrust of, one another. Rejecting all utopian illusions about the triumph of human goodness, contradicted as those illusions are by human selfishness, crimes, and hatreds, we also refuse to ignore the constant evidence of God’s mercy and grace toward humans throughout all generations, a sustaining mercy and restraining grace that make possible forgiveness, renewal, cooperation, and the continuing search for ways to resolve conflict and to build patterns and institutions of greater justice and stability.

NOTES 1. William Pfaff, “Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America,” New York Review of Books, 15 February 2007, 54. 2. Philip Stephens, “Desperate Need for a New World Order,” Financial Times, 24 January 2007. 3. David Ignatius, “The Value of Newness,” Washington Post, 24 February 2008. Pfaff writes, “The notion of the United States as the providential nation became integrated into American foreign policy under [John Foster] Dulles, so that George W. Bush in 2001 automatically articulated his global war on terror in imitation of Dulles’s conception of cold war (even to the instant portrayal of the 9/11 terrorists as agents of an organized global threat to freedom). The formulation was uncritically accepted in most political and press circles, and much of the professional policy community.” “Manifest Destiny,” 55. 4. Lawrence Freedman, “Know, Rather than Imagine, Your Enemy,” Financial Times, 12 May 2008. 5. See Douglas Johnston, Ed., Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6. Henry Kissinger, “The Three Revolutions,” Washington Post, 7 April 2008. 7. The phrase, the Silk Road, originated as a “metaphor for long-distance trade across Asia that developed from c. 300 BC to c. 200 AD. It was not, in fact, a “road” but a collection of land and sea routes linking cities, trading posts, caravan watering-places, and hostels between the eastern Mediterranean and the Chinese frontier. Afghanistan is centrally located along the major routes. . . . By the first century AD, long-distance trade across Asia was fully established, as demonstrated

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by the artifacts from Rome, India, China, Persia, and Siberia found in Afghanistan.” From a brochure prepared for an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., May 25–September 7, 2008, titled “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul.” 8. Dominic Barton and Kito de Boer, “Tread Lightly Along the New Silk Road,” Financial Times, 30 January 2007. 9. Philip Stephens, “A Last Chance for America to Shape the New World Order,” Financial Times, 4 April 2008. 10. Joseph Nye, “The Long View on China, Political Islam, and American Power,” Financial Times, 16 February 2007. 11. Philip Stephens, “The Middle East Adjusts to America’s Diminishing Power,” Financial Times, 26 January 2007. 12. William Drozdiak, “America’s President Must Back the Group of Twenty,” Financial Times, 3 July 2008, and Paul Keating, “A Chance to Remake the Global Financial System,” Financial Times, 5 March 2009. “The great event of our era,” writes Martin Wolf, “is the spread of industrialization to billions of people. The high prices of resources are the market’s response to this transforming event. . . . Here are three facts about oil: it is a finite resource; it drives the global transport system; and if emerging economies consumed oil as Europeans do, world consumption would jump by 150 percent. What is happening today is an early warning of this stark reality.” Wolf, “The Market Sets High Oil Prices to Tell Us What to Do,” Financial Times, 14 May 2008. 13. Philip Stephens, “Uncomfortable Truths for a New World of Them and Us,” Financial Times, 30 May 2008. 14. Tony Judt, “Is the UN Doomed?” New York Review of Books, 15 February 2007, 48. 15. Gideon Rachman, “The Oily Truth about Foreign Policy,” Financial Times, 13 May 2008. 16. A probing examination of political dynamics in the European Union can be found in Michael Goodhart, “Europe’s Democratic Deficits Through the Looking Glass: The European Union as a Challenge for Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (September 2007): 567–84. 17. Jeremy Greenstock, “Nations Have to Act Locally in a Globalised World,” Financial Times, 16 May 2008. 18. Robert J. Samuelson, “A Baffling Global Economy,” Washington Post, 16 July 2008.

2 Kaleidoscopic Change in World Affairs: Emerging Patterns of Sovereignty and Governance Steven E. Meyer

In his remarkable little book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that scientific investigation is dominated by paradigms that are really “worldviews” supported by theory and experiment that become embedded in the minds of scientists as the only valid forms of understanding and investigation.1 Scientists, Kuhn intimates, are susceptible to the comforts of inertia and often loath to venture beyond their well-established paradigms even when the evidence presses them to do so. Instead, they cling to familiar, well-worn visions of how things should—must—be done until the paradigms begin to crack under the weight of reality. Eventually, nothing short of an “intellectual revolution” is needed to replace the old paradigms with ones that more accurately reflect the new or emerging reality. Kuhn proposes that this problem seems to be “hard wired” within the human brain and extends to all forms of inquiry. “What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. . . . The temptation to write history backward is both omnipresent and perennial.”2

TIME, PLACE, AND PARADIGM In the realm of politics there is a fundamental connection between paradigm and the way we structure problems and solutions, with serious consequences for the way we make policy decisions, use resources, and deal with questions of life and death. The intricate web of paradigm, policy, and consequences has become especially important in these early years of the twenty-first century because we likely are at one of those hinge points 9

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in history when the underlying structure and conceptual paradigms of the international system are changing. Certainly this is neither the first time in history that this has happened nor the first time that many have clung to paradigms that are becoming obsolete. Many people cling to an outmoded paradigm because they gain from it financially or psychologically or because it gives them power. Others cling to anachronisms because they cannot or will not recognize that change is taking place. Faith in residual paradigms often stems from the fact that change normally does not happen suddenly, completely, or neatly. In the international system it has usually taken several generations for paradigm change to yield new patterns and policies. Finally, there are those who recognize that basic change is taking place but try to tweak the old model to make it last, simply because adjusting to a new set of circumstances is extremely difficult work. The study of international relations as a system, and thinking of a system in terms of paradigm and practice, arguably date back only to about the middle of the nineteenth century. Study of the international system began to bear fruitful insights as the industrial revolution matured and as European political and economic powers circled the globe establishing colonies and building empires. Arguably, the Marxists made the first modern comprehensive attempt to describe the structure and dynamics of the international system in response—and violent reaction to—that same European state system. Marxists of different stripes pressed their case for more than a century, battling capitalists and national socialists in the process. Ultimately, the various Marxist models failed to account for, and significantly change, reality; only a small residual expression of Marxist system analysis survives in the paradigms of dependency theory and world systems theory. Two other models that have survived the longest and dominated the discussion of the structure and dynamics of the international system were also born in reaction to world events. Both developed as alternatives to Marxism and eventually triumphed as successors to Marxism. When the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson believed that the international system should—and could—function in an integrated fashion according to a set of rules based on moral principles and a positive view of human nature. Wilson’s moralism (often referred to as liberalism or idealism) had its roots in the Kantian school of “stern morality” (depicted in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason) and the American religious experience of the nineteenth century. During the post-World War I era, moralism was more important as a motivating force for American policy makers than it was for European statesmen. The moralist (liberal/idealist) school fell into disrepute and engendered serious opposition, however, after World War I. The horror of the First World War, combined with the rapid growth of fascism and Stalinism—

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with their own attendant horrors—convinced many that the Wilsonian view of the international system was essentially naïve and had failed miserably. Between the First and Second World Wars a reaction to Wilsonian moralism emerged, called realism. The realist paradigm focused on power and state interests and had a dim Hobbesian view of human nature and an anarchic view of the international system. Although moralism gave way to realism after World War II, moralism did not disappear altogether. For many scholars and statesmen it remained the preferred paradigm because they believed it could once again serve as the underlying rationale for American foreign policy. Since the end of World War II, then, the preferred, contending paradigms of international relations and the international system have been moralism and realism and their derivatives. (Although both the Soviet Union, until its demise in 1991, and China held fast to their own variants of Marxism, both countries participated in the international system largely as classic realist states.) Yet, despite the obvious substantive differences between moralism and realism, what these two schools have in common is more important than what separates them. This is particularly true if we consider the similarity in the context of our rapidly changing, increasingly differentiated, shrinking and globalizing world of the early twenty-first century. • Both are Western constructs, having been born and bred in the United States and Western Europe and then extended into the rest of the world along with the concept of state sovereignty. • Moralism and realism are state-centric. In both cases the state is recognized as the ultimate legitimate and authoritative expression of political organization and power. Likewise, both perspectives assume that international law has been constructed over the past 500 years to serve the interest of the state and the state system. • They both reflect the time and place in which they were born and, therefore, carry specific historical characteristics. Often these characteristics turn into inertia or baggage as the paradigms of international relations outlive historically driven reality.

THE TANNENBERG EFFECT In July 1410, before the emergence of the modern state, at the battle of Tannenberg (Grunefeld/Grunwald), in what is now northeastern Poland, the combined forces of Lithuania and Poland defeated the Knights of the Teutonic Order.3 That defeat brought an end to the Order’s expansion along the Baltic coast and led to the decline in its power. But the defeat did not end the existence of the Order and it did not signal the immediate ascendancy

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of the state as the primary political organization in Europe. Nonetheless, it was an important step in that direction and an important exemplar of the emerging long-term trends in European politics. Actually, it would be another 300 years before the sovereign state would win out decisively and fully as the primary form of legitimate political organization in Europe and then ultimately throughout the world. At the time of Tannenberg, and for a long time thereafter, the outcome of the struggle for political supremacy was uneven and unclear. Often there is a tendency to think that the state and the state system emerged, of necessity, pretty much intact and fairly well complete out of the mists of the declining feudal order and that state sovereignty grew rapidly right along with the state. This is the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The historical emergence of the sovereign state as the dominant mode of political governance was neither foreordained nor immediate. Indeed, in keeping with Kuhn’s argument, it may be instructive to use the ideas of “paradigm inertia” and “paradigm revolution” to help us understand the evolution of the state-centric system. In the study of biotic evolution, for example, the late Stephen J. Gould described uneven, differentiated development as “punctuated equilibrium.” Although the state and the state system are not extensions of natural evolution, both Charles Tilly and Hendrik Spruyt describe the historical development from the pre-state environment to the state-dominated system as the movement from “fragmented sovereignty” to the state-dominated system of “consolidated sovereignty.”4 Their description sounds like “punctuated equilibrium” in many respects. The rise of the state-centric international political order was a drawn-out ordeal through which the forces of newly emerging states, the leagues, and city-states of Europe battled for supremacy. The modern state ultimately won because of specific political, economic, religious, and military capabilities and achievements. But it did not win all at once or in all places, a fact that has had repercussions well into the modern era. According to Spruyt, It is clear that the Hansa, the Italian city states, and the French state all cued in to the new market opportunities created by the transition from local in-kind trade to long-distance monetarized commerce. Yet from these three synchronic alternatives, only one survived. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the city-league no longer proved to be a viable competitor to the sovereign state. The Hanseatic League basically ended in 1667, when the last diet convened. And, although the decline of the city-states proved to be less dramatic, they too, gradually fell by the wayside.5

The relevance of the Battle of Tannenberg and subsequent events for today is fourfold. First, it helps focus attention on the fact that the structure of the international system and, just as important, the way we perceive that structure, is not set in stone, that it changes and adjusts over time because

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of specific historical events and trends. Second, recognizing that change is taking place and understanding the specific nature of that change are extremely important for our most basic policies and their consequences. Third, we must take Kuhn’s admonition seriously. We cannot afford to cling to the comfort of inertia. To cling to familiar, well-worn visions of reality as they are being invalidated or after they have become invalid is at best wasteful and at worst counterproductive and even deadly. Finally, just as Tannenberg and its aftermath exemplify the transition from the pre-modern to the modern system, we are now at a point in time when an equally important similar shift appears to be taking place from the modern to what might be called a postmodern political system. This could be a tectonic shift that will prove to be as influential as what happened after the collapse of the feudal system leading to the long slow triumph of the state-centric system. As was true when the pre-modern, medieval system gave way to the modern state-centric system, so today, the changes in the structure and dynamics of the international system reflect basic changes in the patterns of “material interest and ideological views.”6

THREE CHARACTERISTICS As was true in the early years of the fifteenth century, developments in the early years of the twenty-first century do not allow us to anticipate exactly what the contours of the emerging system will be. But, as with the post-medieval change, new technologies underlie and help drive many of the changes we are facing now. Thus, we can begin to identify three interrelated characteristics of global change—economic, military, and religious or ideological—and begin to speculate on how they will affect us. First, the contemporary world is experiencing profound, technologically driven changes in economic patterns. Kenichi Ohmae writes “that a fundamental paradigm shift has occurred that is changing the way business is being done . . . nothing is ‘overseas’ any more . . . this ILE (interlinked economy) has become so powerful that it has swallowed most consumers and corporations and made traditional borders so faint as to be almost invisible (emphasis added).”7 Thomas Friedman echoes Ohmae in arguing that the “world is flat.” It is my contention that the opening of the Berlin Wall, Netscape, work flow, outsourcing, off-shoring, open-sourcing, in-sourcing, supply-chaining, informing, and the steroids amplifying them all reinforced one another, like complementary goods. They just needed time to converge and start to work together in a complementary, mutually enhancing fashion. That tipping point arrived somewhere around the year 2000. The net result of this convergence was the creation of a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple

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forms of collaboration—the sharing of knowledge and work—in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or, in the near future, even language. No, not everyone has access to this platform, this playing field, but it is open today to more people in more places on more days than anything like it before in the history of the world.8

Certainly globalization as such is not new; people around the world have interacted for centuries. For example, some have argued that there was at least as much international trade and cross-border economic activity in the first years of the twentieth century as there is now. But, unlike the past, today’s globalization, as Ohmae and Friedman assess it, is qualitatively different primarily because of modern technology and increasingly porous borders. Today’s globalization is “quicker” and “thicker.” In the past, economic and business activities were primarily undertaken by companies either wedded to or identified with a particular state. In the contemporary world, however, economic activity is not constrained nearly as much by national affiliation or loyalty as it once was. We are seeing the rise of many more companies that do not have a large stake in any single sovereign state. “National loyalties are diminishing as companies coordinate business assets in multiple countries,”9 as Keith Suter explains. Friedman does point out that not everyone has access to this platform. But he minimizes this point and that is misleading because there is a substantial “dark side” to globalization. Despite the evolution of an economically and technologically flattening and borderless world, there are enormous anomalies in the type, level, and benefits of the emerging economic (and technological) activities. Broad stretches of the world remain mired in grinding poverty and many traditional economies are basically untouched by the economic and technological revolution taking place in much of the globalizing world.10 Also, between the most and least globally integrated societies there are many societies that fall at various levels in between.11 In short, the “rising tide” of globalization is not “lifting all ships” to the benefits of the emerging order. Moreover, many patterns of ideological and material affiliation, interest, and loyalty are emerging among people in cross-border communities who have more in common with one another than they do with people in their own countries. Samuel Huntington argues, for example, that “American foreign policy is becoming a foreign policy of particularism increasingly devoted to the promotion abroad of highly specific commercial and ethnic interests” at the expense of broader, truly national interests.12 Consequently, the evolving international economic and technological system is more multilayered, matrixed, and complex than it is flat. The nature of warfare, which is also technologically driven, is the second characteristic that underlies—and helps drive—the emerging postmodern international system. As has been true with economic developments,

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warfare has evolved as the international system has evolved. Prior to the triumph of the modern state system, other polities—city-states, leagues, and even the Roman Catholic Church—vied with the emerging state as legitimate armed actors. However, as the state took center stage and made Europe the “power house of the universe,” specific state-centric rules and techniques of modern warfare were adopted and spread around the world as the West came to dominate the globe. Pressure grew to broaden, deepen, and further codify a growing body of international law to govern the conduct of warfare between and among states.13 History is replete with efforts, devised by states for the benefit of states, to constrain war through just-war doctrine, international treaties, agreements, covenants, and understandings of common and acceptable rules of war. During the last years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century (especially after World Wars I and II) the major powers made special, concerted efforts to limit—and even outlaw—war. However, it is a myth to imagine that modern warfare has evolved only in the direction of greater restraint by gentlemanly rules of engagement, for it has also become more powerfully destructive, remarkably brutal, and often horrible in the treatment of civilian populations. The development of modern technology combined with human ruthlessness has virtually assured the growing brutality of war, despite efforts to curb it through convention and international law. What has emerged in the last five centuries as a staple of Western military strategy, philosophy, and conduct is the move away from pre-modern private militaries to modern professionalized forces that are agents of the state and therefore considered legitimate tools of violence. The laws, rules, and habits of war have been established and codified by and for states—all other sources of violence have been considered illegitimate. Despite the many economic and technological changes that are forcing structural global change, the United States and most other Western powers continue to adhere to older (i.e., modern) paradigms of thought and traditions of warfare. Most important, major powers continue to see the state as the only legitimate authority that may use force in accord with Westerndefined laws of warfare. Combat that does not conform to internationally recognized rules is seen as asymmetric and almost certainly illegitimate (usually described as terrorism or insurrection). Established states, on the other hand, believe that they conduct symmetric warfare, which is, ipso facto, legitimate. It is symmetric because traditional state authorities say it is, because it conforms to the rules and customs they have devised in the course of the evolution of the modern state system (even though Western states have routinely violated those same rules throughout history). Nevertheless, as time passes and the structure and dynamics of the international system change, the nature of what is considered legitimate warfare

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is also changing. There is nothing automatic about this, but the nexus between legitimacy and warfare is likely to shift, with new actors accepting as legitimate those forms of combat and violence that are currently thought to be illegitimate. It is possible, for example, that organizations such as Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, which cross state boundaries and do not abide by the rules of symmetric warfare, may in the future be seen as legitimate actors on the larger international stage as they are now by the religious and political communities that support them. In other words, just as the customs and laws of war changed in the shift from the pre-modern to modern international system, they are likely to change in the future. Third, every age is, in part, the product of dominant beliefs and ideas. Religions, philosophies, and ideologies have had a powerful impact not only on how the political community is imagined but on how it is actually constructed. In every age, the ideas that swirl around politics are built on the broader foundations of worldviews that dominate the age. The reality of political community in ancient Greece, for example, was carried forward in significant ways by Plato and Aristotle’s philosophies of ideal forms and striving for the good. Later, as Europe changed from the ancient to pre-modern and then to the modern world, the attraction and demands of Christianity played an important role in shaping the continent politically, from the eras of feudalism and Holy Roman imperialism on to the alternating challenges of absolutism and democracy. Samuel Huntington and others have argued that throughout much of the world democracy is the intellectual underpinning of the current age. Huntington contends that in 1974 the third wave of democratization began with the revolution against autocracy in Portugal and that although the advance of democracy is not inevitable and has suffered from occasional reverses, the long-term prospects for democratic government are encouraging.14 The Hoover Institution even talks about the “globalization of democracy” and Francis Fukuyama has presented a Hegelian argument that history has reached the “end point of man’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.”15 Although this “end of history” argument has been extremely controversial,16 the long process of Western secularization and the strong reaction against arbitrary government and toward egalitarianism has led to the argument of the inevitability of democracy. If one assumes little fundamental change in the structure of the international system, continuing democratization might suggest itself as a political imperative. But the relativism, decentralization, and dispersion that characterize contemporary politics around the world suggest a considerably more complicated picture. In the post-modern world, belief in democracy almost certainly will remain a potent force, but it is likely to represent just one of several ideological and intellectual trends in the years ahead. Even

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in solidly democratic states we have begun to see challenges to democratic structures and functions. “Post-democratic” political orders have become an increasingly prominent feature of the emerging world.17 One of the most prominent examples of this can be found in the Lisbon Treaty (Reform Treaty) of the European Union, signed in December 2007. It was intended to take effect in January 2009 if all EU countries ratified it by then. Several member states used post-democratic methods to approve the treaty, but it went down to defeat when Irish voters overwhelmingly rejected it in a national referendum in June 2008 (the Irish Constitution requires that all such questions be submitted to a national vote). All EU members have to support adoption of the Lisbon Treaty for it to become law for the entire community. It was an effort to incorporate portions of the proposed EU Constitution that was defeated in referenda in France and The Netherlands in 2006. The Constitution was written by a committee of “wise men” under the guidance of former French president Valery GiscardD’Estaing, and the Lisbon Treaty was introduced by an EU Intergovernmental Conference, an elite institution. Both efforts have come up hard against popular discontent expressed through the traditional democratic procedure of popular voting. Arguably, therefore, the process employed to try to implement both the Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty bypassed an important democratic test in favor of an elite-driven, post-democratic process. In the case of the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland has come under considerable pressure to vote again in order to “get it right.”18 Moreover, autocracy in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and many countries in Central Asia, stubbornly resists the push toward democracy. The administration of President George W. Bush appears to have gambled away considerable American credibility and resources in a losing venture to promote democracy in these regions. At the same time, the rise of two other pairs of countervailing forces—secularism and religion on the one hand, and ethnicity and multiculturalism, on the other—have emerged at the start of the twenty-first century not only to challenge the end-ofhistory argument but also to blend a variety of ideological dispositions in the same locations. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the end-of-history argument has been badly damaged by the rise of theocratically inspired autocratic movements and the violence associated with the growth of Islam. This brand of Islam, in turn, has little tolerance for the kind of secular democracy practiced in the West. For example, the violence that ensued in 2005, after cartoons appearing in the Danish press supposedly insulted the Prophet Mohammed, demonstrated a conflict between secular, nonreligious (and often anti-religious) European democracies, on the one hand, and Muslim societies, whether democratic or not, on the other hand. Even in the West, there is a growing chasm between the United States, on one

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side, characterized by an officially secular democratic political order and a highly religious society, and most of Europe, on the other side, where both society and political order are secular and often overtly anti-clerical.19

THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF SOVEREIGNTY The new directions in economics, warfare, and belief systems are challenging the modern conception of sovereignty and, in many cases have succeeded in undermining the fundamental pillars of modern state sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty has a long history and has been examined from every conceivable position by a host of scholars.20 Before the era of the modern state, sovereignty was not tied to territory but to individual rulers. For example, a peasant living in the late fifteenth century in what would become the Low Countries was subject to what Tilly describes as “fragmented sovereignty.” He owed allegiance (fealty) to a number of people (Bourbon monarch, Lord of the Manor, and the Pope), several of whom did not live near him or directly control the territory in which he lived. The French political philosopher Jean Bodin, who is often given credit for originating the modern concept of sovereignty, used the term to bolster the power of the monarchy over rebellious feudal lords. But, even for Bodin, sovereignty was vested in the monarch, not in the state as a territorial unit. The concept of sovereignty, then, predates and will postdate the modern state system. “Sovereign” rule can be traced back to the dawn of recorded time itself. Records indicate that sovereignty was practiced nearly 4,000 years ago under Hammurabi in North Africa, in the Shang Dynasty in China as early as the sixteenth century B.C., in the Mauryan Empire in India in the third century B.C., in the Yamato Court in Japan during the second century A.D., among the early nomadic tribes of Africa, and in the great indigenous empires of Africa that rose and fell before the arrival of the Europeans. Consequently, it is not territory per se that holds these examples together; rather, the common denominator is the authority of certain people, whether they are called kings, emperors, popes, clan leaders, or tribal chiefs, who held sovereignty over other people. Consequently, the attributes of sovereignty are not constrained by state sovereignty. They are applicable across time and space in vastly different historical and geographic arenas and are the following: • Power—the capability to make decisions, set agendas, and shape preferences21 even if this capability operates contrary to the will of others in the polity; the capability to force or persuade others to do something they otherwise would not do; the capability to determine outcomes.

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• Authority—the right of individuals or institutions to exercise power, to enforce obedience, or to take action. • Legitimacy—the legal foundation for authority; the exercise of power and authority that is lawful, sanctioned, valid, rightful. In the state system that emerged in modern Europe, sovereignty became more firmly established as a legal concept that was applied specifically to territory, especially after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Although still open to interpretation after Westphalia, sovereignty increasingly became identified with the control of a government over a territorial state. Stephen Krasner offers a useful ideal-type categorization of four kinds of sovereignty that, taken together, summarize the attributes of state sovereignty in the modern era. These attributes of sovereignty apply irrespective of whether the state is democratic, dictatorial, or something in between. International legal sovereignty refers to the practices associated with mutual recognition, usually between territorial entities that have formal juridical independence. Westphalian sovereignty refers to political organization based on the exclusion of external actors from authority structures within a given territory. Domestic sovereignty refers to the formal organization of political authority within the state and the ability of public authorities to exercise effective control within the borders of their own polity. Finally, interdependence sovereignty refers to the ability of public authorities to regulate the flow of information, ideas, goods, people, pollutants, or capital across the borders of their state.22

Despite the profound importance of modern state sovereignty for the development of the West, state sovereignty is still not set in stone even today. First, throughout its long history, state sovereignty has been as much a legal fiction as a legal standard because it has always been subject to the machinations of power. States and groups of states—especially the most powerful—have adhered to the principle of sovereignty insofar as it has suited their own purposes. In short, states have used sovereignty as a binding legal principle when convenient and ignored it when inconvenient. Second, sovereignty is bounded by time and space, a function of the “affinity of interests . . . and . . . ideological views” of a given epoch.23 In Europe, where the sovereign territorial state was born, these affinities were manifest in specific attributes—”shared kinship, similar religious beliefs, or highly personalistic ties of mutual aid and submission”24—as well as in powerful economic, technological, and military capabilities. As the modern era took shape, these attributes increasingly became subsumed under the state. Today, the four attributes of state sovereignty articulated by Krasner are slipping irregularly but perceptibly from the state to other actors in the

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world system. The structure and dynamics of the international system are becoming much more complex, matrixed, and differentiated than they have been at any time since the city states, leagues, and newly emerging states jockeyed for power in pre-modern Europe. Recognition and acceptance of these changes in international law (i.e. de jure) by strong, traditional states (mostly the US) will lag. But changes in the reality of sovereignty (i.e. de facto) already are upon us.

RESTRUCTURING THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM Despite the fact that it is impossible at this point to say precisely what the postmodern international system will look like, it is increasingly clear that it will manifest the gathering complexity and differentiation inherent in new economic developments, in the ways of war, and in old and new belief systems. Even the term “international” is becoming obsolete because it refers to relations among states. It is more accurate today to talk about global change, global relations, and global policy because the world is moving beyond the inter-state system to a truly global stage.25 The Traditional Territorial State First, the state will not disappear. In many areas and on many issues states will remain vital, vibrant parts of the new international system. In fact, there are more states now than at any time in history. With the disintegration of the great European empires during the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century and the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in the second half of the twentieth century, the number of states in the world has grown exponentially. But, the meaning of the state is changing. In most regions of the world, the state’s borders are becoming much more porous and in many places states control less of the life of individuals and organizations than they did in the past. In other words, states are increasingly less capable than they once were to satisfy the requirements of all four aspects of sovereignty outlined by Krasner. The state, which has held the position of unquestioned dominance, now is becoming merely one form of international political organization among many. The state used to be a synonym for the components of sovereignty and governance (power, authority, and legitimacy). It is now a metonym for these attributes. According to Michael Walzer, the state needs to be held in the imagination as a “body politic,” as having a sense of wholeness, completeness, and togetherness expressed through symbols and stories. However, argues Walzer, “in any complex civilization there exists what might be called sym-

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bols-in-reverse, or symbols alternative to the dominant ones, to which men freed for one reason or another from the dominant one can turn.”26 Spruyt argues that the rise of the European state was due in part to the advent of new, alternative symbols. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the attraction of alternative symbols often is leading people to non-state organizations, which are, in part, imagined alternatives to the state. Consider, for example, a few instances where the state is less and less able to exercise the kind of sovereignty and, hence governance or control it once had. The point is not that the traditional state will be incapable of dealing with some—or even many—of these issues successfully. Rather, it is that the number and depth of the challenges to contemporary state sovereignty are unprecedented and are helping to undermine traditional sovereignty and point the way to a more divided, layered, matrixed, complex sovereignty. • Immigration has always been controversial in the United States. But for the first time in history the US not only finds it extremely difficult to control the specifically illegal immigration of millions of people but seems in a quandary about what rights immigrants are entitled to and what benefits they should receive. • The US also cannot control the flow of air and seaborne pollution into the country, some of which emanates from China’s burgeoning industrial plants. • Most governments in West and Central Africa are so weak, corrupt, and ineffective that they are incapable of solidifying power, authority, and legitimacy in the face of almost constant rebellion by various tribal and religious factions. • Many of these same West African states are unable to prohibit poaching on their legal fishing grounds (a vital industry and food source in the region) by pirates and other states. • Ever since the crisis in the Horn of Africa in 1993, which cost 18 US Army Rangers their lives, the West—primarily the US—has been trying to engineer the construction of a traditional state in Somalia, a place where there has never been a successful independent state. • After the presidential election in Kenya in January 2008, ethnic antagonism and conflict plunged the country into violence that took several hundred lives and displaced thousands, shaking the very foundations of the state. • International crime syndicates, often in collusion with terrorists, control vast areas of cross-border territory—especially transit routes—in South America, Central Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. State authorities often are in collusion with crime syndicates or frequently are incapable of controlling them.

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• In 1998 the government of Columbia agreed to the despeje, a deal that ceded a piece of the southern part of the country the size of Switzerland to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) as an inducement to keep FARC negotiating with state authorities. Although a new government rescinded the deal in 2002 because the FARC failed to live up to its part of the agreement, getting this portion of the country back under Columbian sovereignty has proven almost impossible. • When the United Kingdom returned Hong Kong to China in 1997 and Portugal returned Macao in 1999, Beijing agreed not to try to exercise direct sovereignty over the two former colonies. It was feared that direct rule by Beijing would disrupt the booming economies of Hong Kong and Macao to the detriment of mainland China and there was also great concern that an attempt to impose Chinese sovereignty could easily lead to unrest and violence in the former colonies. Consequently, Hong Kong and Macao have their own governments, currency, and laws—including restricted immigration from China proper. • In mid-2006 the government of Pakistan struck a deal with tribal leaders (many of them Taliban) in North and South Waziristan, along the northeastern frontier with Afghanistan, which gave the tribes a virtual free hand in the territory. Islamabad found it so costly to try to control the area that it gave up trying, thus allowing North and South Waziristan to become virtual Taliban mini-states. Although the government of Perez Musharraf subsequently renounced the deal, efforts to claim these areas for the national government have failed, the region continues to be a haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and the government that emerged out of the 2008 elections has again struck a deal not to try to exercise sovereignty over these areas. • Across the border, Afghanistan has never progressed from premodern to a modern form of political organization. It has always been a polity constructed of clans, subclans, and tribes, and this essential character has not changed with the establishment of the post-Taliban government. Afghanistan has never known an effective, legitimate central organizing authority (during the days of the monarchy, the monarch was known as the King of Kabul, because his power extended no further than the boundaries of the city). Moreover, the basic socio-ethnic-political nature of Afghanistan is changing only slightly. At this point, it is unlikely that Afghanistan will pass from a pre-modern, pre-state system to a full-fledged modern state. More likely, it will move to some sort of hybrid that would be quite consistent with the postmodern order. • In the contemporary Middle East, Hezbollah, a non-state actor, arguably has more power, authority, and legitimacy in Lebanon than the official government. Hezbollah is supported by Syria and Iran,

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but it maintains its own military force, provides social services, and was able to provide much quicker relief and reconstruction aid in southern Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel than the official government could. • In Iraq the United States is attempting to help construct a traditional state on the ruins of Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, despite security gains since the middle of 2007, the polity has essentially broken down into its ethnic constituent parts, a point that is actually ensconced in the new Iraqi constitution. Without active US support, the government in Baghdad has almost no power and even less authority and legitimacy. It is a true puppet government that almost certainly will disappear when the US leaves. • Finally, the economic crisis that started with the meltdown of the US credit market in 2007 quickly engulfed banks, stock markets, brokerage houses, and governments around the world. For example, as early as April 2008, UBS (Switzerland) and Deutsche Bank (Germany) lost approximately $23 billion, “adding to hundreds of billions in losses that financial firms already face from the sub-prime mortgage fallout.”27 The Supra State The second change in the international system is the construction of supra states. Although the only major example of this construct so far is the European Union, the establishment and development of the EU is so big and powerful (at least economically) that it represents a fundamental development in the changing structure of the international system. As of January 2007, the EU was a union of 27 countries with a population just under half a billion and a GDP of approximately $13 trillion (the largest single economy in the world). The EU grew from the modest roots of the European Coal and Steel Community after World War II to the European Community in 1957 and finally to the European Union as a result of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997. Consequently, the EU today affects virtually every aspect of the lives of European citizens through institutions and policies that encompass a single customs union, a single currency, a Central Bank, a Common Agricultural Policy, a Common Fisheries Policy, a fledgling Common Foreign and Security policy, common social and labor policies, a European Court, a passport free zone (the Schengen Agreement), and more.28 The EU is a federation of states, each of which has voluntarily surrendered much of its own traditional territorial sovereignty to the larger union. This arrangement manifests a multi-tiered polity exhibiting divided sovereignty in many of the most important aspects of what had once been exclusively national life. At least in form, if not in substance, Europe has come full

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circle because before the era of state sovereignty, Europe exhibited layers of divided sovereignty and governance—as it does now. With the end of the period of traditional territorial state sovereignty, Europe once again is as complex and controversial as it was when the medieval period was dying and the political future was in doubt. With the rejection of the proposed European Constitution in mid-2006 by voters in France and The Netherlands and the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish voters in 2008 the future of European unification and the EU was put in doubt. However, the failure of those referenda did not mean the end of the EU, because a plethora of treaties, agreements, and laws hold the EU in place and are there to stay. However, two major questions about the future are how much the EU will deepen the unification of Europe and how much it will broaden the union to include states that are not (yet) members. Whatever the answer to those questions, the EU has fundamentally altered the structure of the international system and complicates questions of sovereignty and governance. Non-State Organizations The third construct increasingly challenging state sovereignty is non-state organizations (NSOs), some of which are usually referred to as nongovernment organizations, NGOs. Although NSOs have been in existence for centuries, their number, size, and importance have exploded over the past two decades as modern globalization has taken hold. They have become a massive, permanent fixture on the international scene. There are an estimated two million NSOs in the US alone, between one and two million in India, approximately 4,000 are operating in Russia since the demise of Communism, and several hundred have appeared in Communist China. Many NSOs cross international borders and have independent access to funds. Although many of them live by rules established by state organs, many do not, and while many join states in cooperative endeavors, again many do not. In the postmodern age the budgets, financial resources, and influence of some NSOs, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, already are greater than those of many states. Of course, NSOs do not formally replace states, but taken together they provide an enormous challenge to the states’ exclusive claims to power, legitimacy, and authority. Regions One prominent type of NSO is what we will identify as a region or regional entity. For example, Etel Solingen has extensively described both functional and geographic regions across a wide spectrum of political, economic, and security categories.29 For our purposes, regions are important when they are “most robust, comprehensive, least reversible, and able

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to overwhelm remnants of statist-nationalism.”30 Regions, in this sense, are contributing to the changing structure of the international system and represent alternatives or challenges to the traditional, modern state order. To date, there are no examples of “regions” that have assumed all the aspects of sovereignty described by Krasner. At the same time, there are many examples of regions where sovereignty and, therefore, governance, are being shared increasingly with a state—that is, where different parts of Krasner’s four attributes of sovereignty are being divided between state authorities and regional entities, much as they were in Europe before the modern era. In the postmodern world there are three types of regional entities we must consider. First, there are territorial regions comprised of state actors. Perhaps the best examples of this type of regional organizations are the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—blocs the likes of which the world has never seen before. Although more commonly understood as “international regimes,” they need to be considered as regional constructs that at least dilute and challenge state sovereignty and at most replace elements of Krasner’s typology because of the restrictions they place on the individual states that comprise their membership. As such, NAFTA and ASEAN, along with several other prominent organizations, are helping to establish regional territorial blocs as a prominent new feature of the changing international system. In particular, these types of blocs are adding still another layer of complexity to a rapidly differentiating structure, and although states comprise the members, the blocs are assuming a life of their own that is altering state sovereignty and international economic, political, and security patterns. In this sense, they can be compared to the leagues that challenged the rise of states in Europe before the modern era. Established in 1992 as a trading bloc by the US, Canada, and Mexico, NAFTA increasingly has limited the elements of governance in the partner countries, especially power and authority. More important than increasing the trade of the three countries involved, NAFTA—through its tariff requirements—has diverted and altered trade patterns and undermined some industries, while burnishing others. For example, NAFTA has had a serious detrimental impact on the Mexican farming sector, which in turn has contributed to the emigration of poor Mexican agricultural workers to the US. At the same time, the US agricultural sector, already protected and much more efficient than Mexican farming, has become even more prosperous. ASEAN was founded by five countries in 1967 (the Bangkok Declaration) from the defunct Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) to be a bulwark against communism in the region. Today, ASEAN has 10 members, including Vietnam and Laos, which originally were shunned, a population of more five hundred million people, and a GDP (2003 figures) of $2.2

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trillion. In 1976, ASEAN embarked on a plan to create an Asian economic bloc and although it foundered during the late 1980s, the organization’s economic efforts have grown substantially since the mid 1990s. Today, in addition to its economic activities, ASEAN increasingly is becoming an important political and security organization. It has held talks periodically on forming a currency union—an agreement that likely will become reality within the next decade—and was granted observer status at the UN at the end of 2006. Although economic cooperation and intra-bloc trade are the primary objectives of ASEAN, especially as a way to protect its members from the great powers (the US, China, Japan, and the EU), the organization also serves as a vehicle to expand Asian culture and as a forum to mediate disputes among its members. The WTO, like the EU, is in a category by itself.31 It is not a regional territorial bloc such as NAFTA or ASEAN because it spans the world (currently 149 members) and, therefore, is not dedicated to the economic well being of just one specific region of the world. But, as with organizations such as NAFTA and ASEAN, the WTO adds enormously to the complexity and interconnectedness of the international system and places limits on the sovereignty of its members.32 An international trading organization (ITO) originally was proposed at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and was formally agreed to in 1948 by the UN’s Conference on Trade and Employment (the Havana Agreement). But Washington, fearing adverse economic consequences and an infringement on US sovereignty, blocked the implementation of the ITO (only the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade survived). But, times have changed and today the WTO is a large, complex organization that—although imperfect—is intended to level the world’s economic playing field by establishing lower trade barriers and providing a vehicle to limit the use of tariffs and to lower tariffs that do apply. The WTO also provides a mechanism to negotiate and implement specific agreements and to mediate disagreements among members, a process that infringes upon and restricts the sovereignty of the members. A second type of regional entity also ignores state borders, either by crossing them or, in fewer cases, assuming the configuration of a sub-state region. Although this type is territorial, it represents more of an economic zone that has developed because of the increasingly globalized world and in spite of state boundaries. For example, since the implementation of the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, dozens of economic cross-border regions have been developed, often called “institutional entrepreneurships,” that are arranged and managed “between neighboring and local or regional authorities across a European nation-state border.”33 One of the most interesting and dynamic of these regions spans the German-Polish border, a region that flourishes despite the ups and downs of relations between Berlin and Warsaw. Another is the Drei Lander Innovationsoffensive, spanning

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the borders of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Outside Europe, examples of important sub-national, cross-border economic zones can be found in the region of the Sea of Japan, the Canadian-US Pacific Northwest, the Maputo Development Corridor in southern Africa, Central Asia, and even between North and South Korea. As Markus Perkmann and Ngai-Ling Sum note, What is new in recent developments is that the construction of cross-border regions has become a more or less explicit strategic objective pursued by various social forces within and beyond border regions. . . . [There is an ongoing] transfer of specific state powers upwards, downwards, and sideways from the national state form that came to provide the principal matrix for the territorialization of political power around the world after 1945.34

Another kind of region—let’s call it a societal region—crosses or ignores state borders and encompasses a broader range of functions, including political, cultural, military, and social as well as economic activity. These are national or ethno-cultural communities and they constitute a greater threat to the sovereignty and governance of the state than specifically economic regional entities because they more fully satisfy a broader range of needs that have in the past been supplied and controlled by the state. With the rise of globalization, the phenomenon of societal regions and their challenge to existing states has become more pronounced. In parts of the contemporary world, states no longer have the ability to subordinate what Joel Migdal describes as “people’s own inclination of social behavior or behavior sought by other social organizations in favor of the behavior prescribed by the state.”35 In this context we also need to extend the argument to include Rogers Brubaker’s discussion of the nation as an “ethno-cultural community” (i.e. society) that spans state boundaries to form “interlocking and interactive” nationalisms. This point carries the question of loyalty to society above loyalty to the state across international boundaries. In particular, Brubaker sees interlocking, interactive nationalities (societies) that are “bound together in a single relational nexus (that) can be characterized . . . as a triad linking national minorities, the newly nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national ‘homelands’ to which they belong, or can be construed as belonging, by ethno-cultural affinity though not by citizenship.”36 We can see examples of this phenomenon among the Basques, whose society spans Spain and France; among the Kurds in the Middle East; in some of the “frozen” conflicts in the Caucuses, especially in disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan; many tribal and clan regions of Africa; and in the Western Balkans, where Serb, Croat, and Kosovar societies span the borders of Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Macedonia. Examples

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of sub-state societies that also challenge the sovereignty and governance of the state are found in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Functional Communities or Organizations Another challenge to the state can be found in the rapid rise of functional communities or organizations that are based specifically on a union between technology and a “cause” and tend to have a longer if more specific reach than societal territorial regions.37 Some analysts have described these as virtual communities or regions. But that term connotes a degree of unreality or a substitute for something that is real. To the contrary, functional communities are as real and meaningful today as territorial regions. According to Perkmann and Sum, “functional regions can be characterized as units characterized (sic) by a high density of internal interactions compared with the level of interactions beyond their borders.”38 That is, there is some “functional”—as opposed to an overtly societal, geographic, ethnic, or political—reason for these communities or organizations to exist; people and their interactions coalesce around some type—or types—of specific activity. International functional communities may be as permanent or as fluid as issues require, but, just as with territorial challenges to the state, they have the capability—at least in part—to challenge the exclusivity of the state and in so doing they challenge Krasner’s understanding of Westphalian, domestic, and interdependence sovereignty. In other words, it is not necessary for functional organizations to literally replace the state—in almost all cases that is not their aim. But, what it does mean is that the plethora of functional non-state actors that has exploded on the world stage over the past couple of decades has the ability to force or cajole the state to do what it otherwise would not do and that, in turn, impacts substantially on the state’s exclusive claim to sovereignty and governance. Perhaps the most prominent example of a non-state functional community is al-Qaeda (the “base” or “foundation”). Al-Qaeda is a Sunni Muslim organization that blends ethnicity, religion, and social identity into a violent non-state actor dedicated to the cause of eliminating foreign (i.e. infidel) occupation of and influence in Muslim lands and, according to some al-Qaeda spokesmen, intends to reestablish the Caliphate. As one would expect, traditional powers, including the United Nations, have branded al-Qaeda a terrorist organization, while others, who are not stakeholders in traditional states may see al-Qaeda as a liberation movement. Although its size and reach are in dispute, it is clear that al-Qaeda remains a powerful, influential international organization characterized by a decentralized network of cells—some of which are directed by al-Qaeda leadership, while others are independent and collaborative. And, while al-Qaeda has been damaged by US military action since 2001, it remains

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a potent force that exhibits the three critical elements of sovereignty and governance to some degree. Many examples of powerful and important functional communities and organizations can also be found in the business world where, as Kenichi Ohmae reminds us, the changing structure of the international system is most palpable. Large international companies are not new. They have been around for centuries, but in the past they were overwhelmingly products of one state, entwined with one state, and loyal to one state—such as the British and Dutch East India companies. Today’s major multinational business organizations, taking advantage of the latest technologies and the increasing porousness of borders, are more broadly international in every aspect of business—production, financing, customer service, corporate governance, security, etc. While sovereignty and political governance per se are not their explicit goals, the multinational character of many of the world’s leading companies means that they are more likely to exercise power, legitimacy, and authority as international actors in their own right and not connected to or supportive of any particular state. From the perspective of any given state, this often means less control over and responsibility for the corporation. It is possible to cite literally scores of examples of multinational corporations. The tortured saga of Daimler Chrysler provides one particularly interesting and appropriate example because it represents the successes, failures, and complexity of contemporary globalization. In 1998, the Chrysler Corporation (located in the US, and under considerable pressure from the internationalization of the automotive industry) and Daimler Benz of Germany formed a $36 billion merger. The company’s headquarters was split between two countries while production was worldwide. Kuwait was the largest single shareholder, owning about seven percent of the stock. Seventy three percent of the shares in the new company were held by Europeans, about 16 percent by Americans, and just over nine percent by the rest of the world. Daimler Chrysler, in turn, owned 10 percent of the Korean auto company, Hyundai and 37 percent of the shares of the Japanese company, Mitsubishi. As with many other such international corporations, Daimler Chrysler’s political allegiance was spread around the world, beholden to no state in particular, yet vested in many, and thus having some power, legitimacy, and authority in its own right. But, the marriage between Daimler and Chrysler became increasingly unprofitable and difficult to sustain. Consequently, using the same mechanisms of borderless business that brought the two companies together, they separated. In 2007, Daimler sold 80 percent of Chrysler to Cerberus Capital Management, a multinational private equity firm that is headquartered in New York and has holdings and offices around the world. Cerberus, which realizes revenues of about $60 billion a year, specializes in turning troubled companies into profitable operations.39

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Another kind of functional community is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejecrito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional, EZLN) in Mexico. In 1994, the EZLN attempted to organize public awareness of and opposition to the implementation of the NAFTA agreement because of the damage it perceived NAFTA would do to the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. In particular, EZLN argued that the predominantly Indian population of Chiapas, already one of Mexico’s poorest groups, would suffer even greater economic deprivation as a result of NAFTA. The movement gained little traction until EZLN began to gain substantial domestic and international support by using satellite telephones and the internet, earning the Zapatista uprising the aphorism of the “first post-modern revolution.”40 The worldwide linkage between cause and technology qualifies the Zapatista phenomenon and the resultant challenge to the Mexican state as much more than a civil-society organization. The Zapatistas never agitated for independence from Mexico but for greater autonomy and a greater share of the money that is derived from the natural resources (e.g. water) of Chiapas. The technological community that coalesced around the issue helped the Zapatistas establish a considerable degree of power, authority, and legitimacy. After several small-armed clashes and a series of talks between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government, the two sides agreed in 1996 to the San Andreas Accords, which gave Chiapas much of what it had demanded. But since 1996, successive Mexican governments either have been slow to implement important parts of the accords or have ignored them altogether. The resulting ongoing antagonism has helped make the Zapatista issue a longstanding cause among a spate of humanitarian groups, which are bound together electronically, and has helped pull expatriate Chiapas groups in other countries into the community.41 With some parallels to the building of the Zapatista movement, half a dozen human rights organizations and a few individuals began in the early 1990s discussing among themselves the need to build a movement to ban the use of landmines. For about two years the movement was confined pretty much to a relatively small group, but in 1993 a steering committee was formed that began to give direction to the cause, primarily under the leadership of an American, Jodie Williams. Over the next four years the movement grew to include more than a 1,000 nongovernmental “human rights, humanitarian, children’s, peace, veteran’s, medical, development, arms-control, religious, environmental, and women’s groups in over 60 countries.”42 The movement, with its functional cause, was formalized as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and has established chapters or committees in most countries. As with the Zapatista movement, the ICBL gained recognition, influence, and importance—and, in the process, challenged the sovereign power, authority, and legitimacy of several important states—almost exclusively

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through the use of the latest technology. Ultimately, the ICBL helped author an international agreement and in 1997 was able to convince more than 120 states to sign the Ottawa Treaty banning the use of landmines (the US, Russia, India, and China have refused to sign the treaty). That same year, Jodie Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize43 and the ICBL has since become a permanent international fixture that monitors adherence to the Ottawa Treaty and a broad program to control and eliminate landmines (there are still millions of landmines buried in a variety of hotspots and former hotspots around the globe). International Individual Rights Law Despite the great importance of individuals throughout history (witness the “great man theory” as an explanation for the evolution of history), they have played almost no role in the international law that is based on the traditional idea of the sovereignty of states. Although this began to change toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was not until after World War II that international concern for the plight of individuals as individuals became more salient when the United Nations Charter drew serious attention to the relationship “between states and their citizens.”44 The idea that individuals are more than merely subjects of sovereign states grew rapidly after the collapse of communism and the bipolar world. This growth can be seen in two basic areas, both of which play heavily on the interpretation and applicability of international law and custom. First, it can be seen in terms of the rights and responsibilities of individuals as individuals, particularly in respect to the conduct of warfare. After the US attack on Serbia in 1999, President Clinton announced that state sovereignty no longer would be accepted as a legitimate rationale for a government to mistreat its people. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan quickly endorsed the Clinton position. President Bush used the same rationale to help justify the American attack on Iraq in 2003. Moreover, using the precedent of the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, the UN established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) after the Balkan wars of 1990s and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994 after the genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. In both cases, these tribunals were established to hold individuals—not states—responsible for war crimes (as defined by the 1949 Geneva Convention). During the same time, the 1998 Rome Statute established a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), which is designed to hold individuals responsible for serious crimes against other individuals or groups of individuals when states are either incapable or unwilling to investigate and try individuals for war crimes. The ICC, in other words, is recognized by its member states as having legal authority above states when they are deemed incapable or unwilling to exercise “appropriate” sovereignty and governance. Although the

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US, which initially supported the concept of an ICC, has refused to accept it, to date 104 countries have signed the Rome Statute.45 Second, recognition of individuals in distinction from their citizenship in (or mere subjection to) sovereign states is increasingly being expressed in terms of basic human rights that are seen as universal and endemic and not dependent on state prerogatives. Although closely linked to the concept of human responsibility, this aspect of individual sovereignty is normally related to human security. Some efforts to uphold human security are sponsored by the UN, such as the Commission on Human Security, which produced its report in 2003 for the Secretary General. But, the contemporary movement for human security has extended its reach well beyond the UN into individual government offices and NSOs. For example, many Western governments, including the US and Canada, maintain offices that seek to further human rights and security. Recognition and protection of human rights and security are far from perfect in concept and execution because they are still frequently subject to the machinations of state interests and power, but the movement is growing rapidly, because of the explosion of technological capabilities. This is especially true in regard to the alleviation of poverty and disease, the right to be free of oppression, and the right to have adequate energy supplies, adequate income, and freedom from environmental degradation.46 In the final analysis, the concept of the individual as more than the mere subject of a sovereign state will continue to grow and will both cohere and conflict with other postmodern structural expressions. As Donna Arzt and Igor Lukashuk ask: Do these developments mean the collapse of the Westphalian conception of the international legal order—the “de-etatization” of international law? It is perhaps too soon for a definitive answer to this question. Two schools of thought can be identified, however, which begin to suggest an answer by addressing the status of the individual in international legal relations. One school, while supporting developments in the field of human rights, firmly believes that only states and international organizations can be subjects of international law. Another school maintains that to the extent that international law now contains norms on the rights of the individual the latter is increasingly a subject of it.47

The dispute, then, is not over the validity or applicability of human responsibilities and rights, but how to understand the meaning of sovereignty.

AMERICAN POWER AND POSITION How does the United States fit within the emerging international structure? In common parlance, the US is the sole remaining superpower, the most

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powerful country on earth—militarily, economically, and politically. The US is a thriving, mature democracy that for many is an example to the rest of the world of what a state should be. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, rather smugly described the US as the “indispensable nation.” It is, according to many foreign policymakers from both major political parties, a state with a messianic destiny, charged by God to lead or save humankind.48 The propensity toward messianism has been an important point of contention since the founding of the country. In 1821 John Quincy Adams noted in a speech that “wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”49 For the most part, however, American administrations have not heeded Adam’s advice. Instead, “seeking monsters to destroy” and expanding American power, influence, and control have been among the dominant drivers of American foreign policy. This has been an especially powerful force in the post-9/11 policy of the Bush administration. At the same time, the US is an extremely traditional country with respect to issues of sovereignty and governance. America’s position in the modern world was built on a traditional understanding of state sovereignty as the only legitimate, acceptable form of governance. In short, power, authority, and legitimacy—and, in particular, the use of force—remains solely the prerogative of the state. In US foreign policy, this view assumes almost an all-or-nothing position. Essentially, Washington rejects emerging postmodern organizations, institutions, groups, and policies that do not support or enhance the traditional, modernist model of sovereignty and governance. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 says: “America will implement its strategies by organizing coalitions—as broad as practicable—of stable states (emphasis added) able and willing to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.”50 Therefore, Hezbollah, Hamas, and certainly al-Qaeda—and similar organizations—are seen in US foreign policy circles as terrorists, murderers, and illegitimate organizations that need to be expunged or brought under the legal control of particular state governments. Certainly, these organizations perpetrate unspeakable brutality, but so do states, which have a long history of brutality. Thus, the reason for the rejection of non-state actors (and even some states) as illegitimate possessors of sovereignty has much more to do with modern traditions, customs, and practices of state sovereignty and governance than with the strategy and tactics of violence. At the same time, American leaders have been willing to accept and even to help create many international organizations, ranging from the UN to NAFTA, from the World Bank to the WTO, and to encourage the development of multinational corporations. The acceptance of so many of these organizations and regional entities fits with the American idea of limited government and economic freedom. But the US has been naïve about the extent to which international governmental and nongovernment organizations are

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pushing life in this world beyond the point where it can be adequately governed by the traditional modern state and inter-state system. The combination of American exceptionalism (messianism) and its traditional view of sovereignty reflects a fading world. In the context of the emerging postmodern world, American power is overstated. Certainly at the present the US is the most militarily and economically powerful state on earth, if one thinks in traditional and absolute terms, such as the relatively static categories of Hans Morgenthau’s classical realism. But, power is contextual (situational), not absolute, and increasingly authority and legitimacy are becoming contextual as well. The American position began to unravel with the defeat in Vietnam. It has accelerated since 9/11, the military invasion of Afghanistan, and especially the war in Iraq, thus exposing an American strategic weakness that is being exploited by other states, such as Russia and Iran, and by a host of non-state international organizations. In short, the American unipolar moment eloquently described by Charles Krauthammer in 1990 was, in fact, not much more than a moment and certainly did not expand into the unipolar era he predicted some years later. The period of American hegemony is in all likelihood drawing to a close precisely because vast structural changes in the emerging world are ushering in a new configuration and dynamic of power, legitimacy, and authority.51 In the increasingly differentiated world that is emerging, the US will remain the paramount example of a traditional sovereign state for some time to come. As such, it will likely continue to cling to increasingly outmoded strategic concepts such as “Network Centric Warfare” and “the Long War”52 as well as organizations such as NATO—all constructed in and for a modern world that is gradually morphing into something different. It is often said that military establishments fight “the last war” rather than focusing on the circumstances that define the present conflict. But, the problem is even worse because military establishments tend to focus on the “last war they liked”—and for the United States that is World War II. Moreover, the problem extends beyond military issues into economics, diplomacy, and a strategic understanding of how the world is built. Consequently, as an essentially status-quo state, the United States has built its power with a philosophy and in a system that are in decline and cannot be sustained. Although the US will not bend until forced to do so—perhaps by more Iraq-type situations—its position is likely to continue to weaken in the face of the changes taking place around it. Ultimately the US, too, will be forced to adapt to new global realities.

CONCLUSION In the context of the emerging postmodern world, can anything useful be salvaged from the traditional moralist and realist paradigms that try to

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explain the structure of the international system and the ways in which the units in that system approach the great issues of the day? In the final analysis, it will be necessary to deconstruct these paradigms. They still can be used to some extent to explain—and perhaps predict—the policy formations and behavior of some individual units in the system. That is to say, individual states, regions, and other actors, can still act as realist organizations, seeking power and their own interest or as agents of moral change in the world. But state-centered realism and moralism are no longer capable of explaining the structure of the emerging system. Both doctrines are statecentric in an arena that is no longer as state-centric as it once was and that will become increasingly less state-centric as time passes. For this reason, it is necessary to find some new lenses through which to try to understand the world and interpret human actions. More important than the residual qualities of realism and moralism that remain applicable, complexity theory and constructivism are two theoretical approaches that offer some useful tools for understanding and explaining the structure and interrelated dynamics of the evolving international system, although they are far from perfect in their present forms. Complexity theory has been adapted by the social sciences from mathematics and the physical sciences, and is useful because, as David Byrne explains, it “deals exactly with nonlinear relations, with changes which (sic) cannot be fitted into a simple linear law taking the form of statement of single cause and effect.”53 As such, complexity theory is in a much better position to understand, explain, and perhaps predict the future structure and dynamics of a matrixed, complex nonlinear, evolving international system than are realism and moralism, which were built to deal essentially with linear state-centric systems. In short, complexity theory allows for system development over time and for the examination of parts of the system and their integration and interaction. The inadequacy of complexity theory is that it unnecessarily rejects metanarratives and teleological explanations of reality. But, this is a shortcoming that can be rectified through further adaptation of complexity theory to the social sciences. Constructivism dovetails very nicely with complexity theory because both stress the centrality of “intentionality and human consciousness.” Constructivism focuses on ideas, culture, context, and intersubjectivity, emphasizing the importance of social practices and recognizing that social relations “construct us into who we are.” According to the constructivists, the way we shape our world depends on our norms, rules, interests, and understanding. Alexander Wendt, one of the founding fathers of constructivism, has famously noted that “anarchy is what states make of it.”54 As Maja Zehfuss explains, “Wendt argues that the way international politics is conducted is made, not given, because identities and interests are constructed and supported by intersubjective practice. The approach revolves

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around identity, which is construed as more basic than interests. Notions of self and the environment shape interactions and are shaped by interactions. Thereby social reality is created.”55 This means that state activity, in the context of anarchy, is socially constructed, not a given as is assumed by the traditional realist or idealist state-centric paradigms. But, this position points to a flaw in constructivism as explained thus far in the literature. Its proponents have shortsightedly not developed or applied it beyond the state system. The challenge in dealing with constructivism, then, is to account for social and political construction as two distinct, yet intimately entwined spheres and to use constructivism to focus on the international system as a non-state-centric, multi-institutional environment. In this emerging, complex, constructivist postmodern world how do we go about seeking justice, fair play, good governance, and human welfare and security? It is not possible to seek these things without an understanding of the context in which they are played out. During the modern era, the great issues of justice, fair play, governance, and human welfare and security almost always were defined in the context of the state, either because they were defined by the state or because they were couched in terms of challenges to the state and demands for a change in state behavior. For example, issues of human bondage—such as serfdom in Russia and slavery in the US—ultimately were ended by the state. Until recently, when states deemed it necessary to move beyond their own borders, usually to expand their power, hunt for natural resources, outflank other states, or to tame what they perceived to be an unacceptable environment, they usually did so either acting alone or by banding together either under the terms of agreements, such as treaties, or in statecentric organizations, such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Court, alliances, coalitions, etc. It is under the guise of such state cooperation that international law grew, mostly to regulate the behavior of states but also upon occasion to pursue a measure of justice, fair play, good governance, and human welfare and security. In the postmodern era, some philanthropic issues will, of course, continue to be wedded exclusively to specific states, but increasingly the nature of these issues, combined with the emerging structure of the international system, will not allow all or perhaps even most issues to be addressed in an exclusively state context. Indeed, many of these issues already have moved well beyond the exclusivity of specific states into a much more institutionally complex arena. The Zapatista and landmine issues, cited earlier, gained prominence because those who interpreted the circumstances as human rights violations were able to move them beyond their state jurisdictions, where they had gained no traction, into the international arena, where they gained considerable traction and ultimately forced authorities to deal with

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them. Likewise, the major issues of justice, fair play, good governance, and human rights and security that are dominating the postmodern world and issues such as poverty, environmental degradation, energy, arms and drug trafficking, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and issues of democracy and civil society will be dealt with in the context of a very complex international structure. In the future, international agreements, including treaties, policy, action, and international law increasingly will have to be coordinated and constructed among a growing plethora of institutions and organizations— not just states—that all claim power, authority, and legitimacy.

NOTES 1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, third edition), 151–152. While this chapter could be constructed using either the concept of theory or paradigm, usually I will use paradigm. I do this for the sake of uniformity and clarity. Certainly, aspects of the definitions of theory and paradigm overlap. According to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica, theory is defined as a tool to describe, explain, model the manner of interaction of an identifiable pattern of variables. Theory also can provide a framework to test, affirm, or falsify hypotheses and predict future occurrences of the variables. While the term “paradigm” originated in linguistics, Thomas Kuhn updated and expanded the definition to refer to patterns of thought in any epistemological context. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he uses it to define practices that “define a discipline during any particular period of time.” According to Kuhn, paradigms focus on what is to be observed, the kinds of questions that need to be answered, how the questions need to be structured, how the results of investigation should be reported, and what tools are needed to conduct investigations. For our purposes, the concept of paradigm provides a framework for understanding, explaining, and working with structural and dynamic political phenomena. 2. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 113. 3. The Teutonic knights are formally known as the House of the Hospitalers of St. Mary of the Teutons in Jerusalem. Originally it was a religious order that played major political, economic, and military roles as well as a religious role in Central and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 1189–1190 (usually associated with the Third Crusade). Since 1834, it has survived almost entirely as a hospital order. 4. Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 154. 5. Spruyt, Sovereign State, 154. The Hanseatic League (or Hansa) was a functional organization established by towns, villages, and cities in northern Germany to protect regional economic, financial, and trade interests. It was a major force from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Leagues were especially prominent in the Holy Roman Empire and were a common way for communities to band together for mutual interest and security. As such, they often had their own military forces. 6. Spruyt, Sovereign State, 105.

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7. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), xiii–xvi. 8. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 9. Keith Suter, Global Order and Global Disorder: Globalization and the Nation State (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 70. 10. For a discussion of such disparities, see Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Collier actually may be underestimating the number of very poor people in the world because his methodology tends to aggregate data according to state categories rather than by poverty statistics across national boundaries. 11. See Joel Migdal, State in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for an excellent discussion of the role of societies, especially in relation to states. 12. Samuel Huntington, “The Erosion of American National Interests,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (September–October 1997). 13. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992 (Boston: Wiley Blackwell, 1992), 185. 14. Samuel Huntington, “After Twenty Years: The Future of the Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 8, no. 4 (1997). 15. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18. 16. See, for example, Victor Davis Hanson, “Why History Has No End,” City Journal (Autumn 2003). 17. For an in-depth discussion of “post-democracy,” see Peter Baofu, Beyond Democracy to Post-Democracy: Conceiving of a Better Model of Governance to Supersede Democracy, vol. 1 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). 18. http://france24.com/en/20080721-live-ireland-sarkozy-lisbon-treaty-en -protests,France24,InternationalNews. 19. See Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 27, no. 3 (Summer 1993). 20. Daniel Philpot, Revolutions in Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16–17. Many scholars define sovereignty as “supreme authority within a territory” or they link the concept of sovereignty exclusively to the state while acknowledging that the term “sovereignty” has been used in different ways. 21. These three aspects of power have been discussed by Robert Dahl, Peter Burchrach, and Steven Lukes. See especially, Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000) and Lukes, Power (New York: NYU Press, 1986), chap. 3. 22. Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–4. 23. Spruyt, Sovereign State, 105. 24. Spruyt, Sovereign State, 67. 25. Suter, Global Order, 133. 26. Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967), quoted in Spruyt, Sovereign State, chap. 4, note 30. 27. The New York Times, April 2, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/busi ness/worldbusiness/02ubs.html?em&ex=1207368000&en=ca212a1a3e4ofceb&e.

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The truly international character of this financial crisis is evident in the worldwide electronic movement of capital that is made possible by new technology, market deregulation, and the absence of transnational regulations. All of this has helped create a functional network that overlaps with the role of state financial institutions and sometimes challenges the power, authority, and legitimacy of those same state organs. Increasingly, money is transferred either by cell phone or the click of a computer key—and both ways are faster, less cumbersome, and more profitable than using traditional bank methods that often are tied down by state-required forms, red tape, and regulations. On average, $1.9 trillion is currently transferred each day across borders (up from just $15 billion in 1973) and this amount is expected to double in the next three years. Much of this capital is divided among foreign direct investment, portfolio debt flows, portfolio equity flows, and bank and money market flows, all of which can be passed across state borders without traditional governments knowing about it. At least another $2 trillion per year is transferred across state borders for activities that are deemed illegal, such as terrorism, arms smuggling, and narcotics trafficking. An increasing number of legal and illegal transfers blend into a third category of capital transfers. In this case, transfers pay for and support legitimate businesses whose products are used for illegal purposes, to support the ownership and control of legal organizations by illegal entities, or to support the ownership of illegal entities by legal organizations. The bottom line is that state laws and institutions can no longer control the flow of significant amounts of capital beyond state borders to the extent they once could. 28. The Euro, some social and labor legislation, and the Schengen Agreement are not accepted by every member country of the EU. 29. See Etel Solingen, Regional Orders at Century’s Dawn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), and the World Fact Book of the Central Intelligence Agency at http://www.cia/publications/factbook/index.html. 30. Solingen, Regional Orders, 258. 31. See the web site of the WTO: www.wto.org. 32. The WTO’s Doha Round of negotiations, which began in 2001, has essentially failed in its mission to lower trade barriers between the developed and underdeveloped world, primarily because of disputes over agricultural subsidies. 33. Markus Perkmann, “Euroregions: Institutional Entrepreneurships in the European Union,” in Perkmann and Ngai-Ling Sum, eds., Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Regions (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 103. 34. Markus Perkmann and Ngai-Ling Sum, “Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Regions: Scales, Discourses and Governance,” in Perkmann and Sum, Globalization, 3–4. 35. Migdal, State in Society, 22. For our purposes, we will treat societies, nations, and cultures as synonymous because the primary ingredient in each is people who are held together by a variety of bonds such as language, religion, dress, kinship, customs, and self-definition as opposed to the territory and legalisms that define the state. 36. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4, 53. 37. Valerian T. Noronha, “Functional Regions Reexamined: The Black White Interaction Model,” paper produced by the Department of Geography, University of

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Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 1986: http://digitalgeographic.com/resources/ publications/divide/Noronha-Nystrom1986.pdf. 38. Perkmann and Sum, “Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Regions,” 4. 39. On the Cerberus Corporation see: http://www.hoovers.com/cerberus -capital-management/--ID_112328-co-factsheet.xhtml, and http://www.business .com/magazine/content/05_40/b3953118.htm. 40. See the Zapatista Network (a clearing house for Zapatista information and support worldwide) at http://www.zapatistas.org; also see http://www.ezh.org for more information on the Zapatista movement. 41. Tim Weiner, “Mexican Officials Report Threats by Zapatista Rebels,” New York Times, 1 January 2003. 42. See: http://www.icbl.org. 43. See: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1997/icbl-history. html. 44. Donna E. Arzt and Igor I. Lukashuk, “Participants in International Legal Relations,” in Charlotte Ku and Paul F. Diehl, eds., International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 157. 45. The ICC is different from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICC deals with individuals, while the ICJ deals with states. 46. For examples of human security initiatives, see: http://www.humansecurity centre.org and http://www.humansecuritynetwork.org. 47. Arzt and Lukashuk, “Participants in International Legal Relations,” 157– 158. 48. See, for example, Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, 70, no. 1 (1990/1991), and “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” The National Interest, 70 (Winter 2002/2003). In the first article Krauthammer introduced the “unipolar moment.” He expanded it to a “unipolar era” in the second piece. 49. From a speech delivered by John Quincy Adams on July 4, 1821: http:// economicthinkingjohnquincyadams’July4speech(2).htm. 50. The National Security Strategy (NSS) for 2002, Article VIII, at http:www. whitehouse.gov/nsc/nsc3.html. This point is echoed in the NSS of 2006 at http:// www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nsc/2006. 51. Charles Krauthammer (see note #48 above). See Parag Khanna, “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” New York Times Magazine, 27 January 2008. 52. The “Long War” is a phrase coined by the George W. Bush administration to describe the expectation that the “war on terror,” commencing after 9/11, will extend well into the future. “Network Centric Warfare” (also called Network-Centric Operations) is the term given by the Department of Defense to a new military strategy that uses cutting-edge information technology that allows critical information to be distributed to and shared among diverse military forces. 53. David Byrne, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2005), 5. 54. Alexander Wendt, quoted in Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. 55. Zehfuss, Constructivism, 12.

3 Faith and Globalization Max L. Stackhouse

There is, in my opinion, no greater public issue before humankind than the fact that a new public is being created by the complex dynamics of globalization. These dynamics are essentially social and ethical, driven by or legitimated by religious convictions, particularly those of Christianity. There are, to be sure, major issues of ecological peril, nuclear threats, energy crises, imperialist temptations, and continued poverty that might be considered the most important issues before us. But all of these take place within the comprehending dynamics of globalization. In the view of many, globalization is driven primarily by economic interests, and the power of those interests cannot be doubted. Yet, economic interests are by no means new, while modern globalization is. An inquiry into why globalization is taking its present shape and organizing the economic forces the way it does convinces me that an economistic view is too limited—so limited in fact that to treat it as the key to globalization is to obscure the scope, structure, dynamics, and spiritual meanings of the phenomenon. In his opening essay, Steven Meyer explores the multifaceted character of contemporary globalization, giving particular attention to shifts in the locus and meaning of sovereignty. It is his recognition of the significance of faiths, philosophies, and worldviews that concerns me in this chapter. Globalization, I believe, is a potential civilizational shift, involving the growth of a worldwide technical and moral infrastructure that bears the prospect of a new form of civil society, one that may well comprehend all previous national, ethnic, political, economic, or cultural contexts. It portends a cosmopolitan possibility that modernity promised but could not deliver and thus can be considered as the most profound form of 41

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postmodernism. The spread, for instance, of the ideals of democracy and human rights, of musical styles and scientific education, of international law and mass media, of technological know-how and missionary efforts, of medical care and management techniques, and of the ideal of lovebased marriages with the wider acceptance of interracial families are all parts of globalization. Together these make certain economic changes possible and others necessary. They also make the growth of the middle classes more likely, extending what modernization has begun to many peoples who were long desperately poor. Although far too many people are still being left behind, many are finding their way out of poverty by efforts to develop these complex cultural and social realities. Participation in the globalizing changes is almost always shaped by adopting religious or worldview presuppositions that formed or legitimated the changes and then adapting them to indigenous circumstances, thus making even more complex the social, cultural, and religious menu of options. This is true in spite of the fact that some peoples and cultures resist such developments or have not yet found out how to become a part of them. Because of the significance of religious and worldview transformations for globalization, any substantive critique or embrace of these developments will demand attention to a theology able to form or reform the inner moral fabric of the globalization process. A fuller treatment of the arguments for this view can be found in the fourth and final volume of my series on God and Globalization.1 The previous three volumes already suggested that a major part of the impetus for the globalizing developments derive from the ways in which Christianity has shaped cultural and social institutions and given rise to transforming patterns of life. The question, therefore, is not only whether religions have shaped the formation of civilization. That is beyond serious doubt. But the question is still alive as to whether religions still can do so, and which of them should guide our thinking and action with regard to the dynamics of globalization and why? This is especially important for our relative assessments of the three great missionizing religions, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, all of which are growing at exponential rates, each with a quite different sense of the “divine destiny” that should be pursued spiritually and socially.

THREE WORRISOME DEVELOPMENTS There are three reasons, however, why I am worried about the ability of today’s Christians to address globalization wisely and effectively. The first reason arises from what I see as the confused arguments and international policies of the George W. Bush administration, which was more identified with the Christian faith than most recent US administrations. Those policies conveyed to many around the world that globalization is little more

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than an American agenda—guiding imperialist and neocolonial policies while hiding raw interest with a thin veneer of piety. Those policies also suggested to many that Christianity is not only transformative but fundamentally aggressive. It would be strange if a nation did not defend its own interests, but how it does so and whether its methods and policies have moral and spiritual integrity is the more important issue. Believing that religion has made and can make a difference in social history does make one alert to the danger of today’s militant Islamists, and no responsible administration can avoid dealing with the threat of terrorism. But not all Muslims are terrorists or militant, and those who are terrorists have attacked others on every continent and not only Americans. Moreover, the persistent reports about American torture of prisoners has fueled Islamist militancy, and unwarranted violations of the civil liberties of American citizens has appeared to subvert the very constitutional democracy and human rights that the Bush administration was advocating. All in all, these actions have contributed to the discrediting of the moral and spiritual bases on which democracy and human rights were developed. In addition, the ecological, energy, and banking practices of some corporate managers who shared the faith of these political leaders and supported their election cast a shadow over the world’s perception of the dominant economic system. The recent election of a new president is bringing policies that may well transform these damaging attitudes and policies. The weakness of many leaders who profess Christian faith is that they do not have a faith able to guide them in the task of building on the promise of a wider civilization visible in globalization. Their faith may be quite profound at the personal level, and it may prompt a desire to defend the nation’s values, as they perceive them; but it has a thin public vision and too slender a view of the emerging global civil society. Therefore some of those identified as Christian leaders are tempted in the direction of national self-righteousness and idolatrous nationalism. A second trend with global manifestations that worries me is evident in the work of a number of neoliberal economists who have developed a new sub-discipline that interprets religion in reductionist terms. This school of thought, based in the Chicago School of rational-choice theory and now defended on the basis of evolutionary psychology, sees religion as a subjective desire that functions according to market forces and can best be understood as a consumer commodity.2 My objection to this reduction of religion is not that religion does not or cannot have powerful personal effects but that the theory’s claims fail to provide any normative guides for structuring the forms of social life. My third worry is about the ideological perspective of those who are most visibly opposed to the slender public theology of the Bush administration and its business supporters and most critical of the narrow utilitarian views

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of religion held by neoliberal economists. The critics I have in mind are those anti-globalization ecumenists within the World Council of Churches, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the Lutheran World Federation who contend that globalization should be denounced as a matter of status confessionis. In other words, if anyone believes that globalization bears within it any divinely blessed or grace-filled possibility, that person should be declared a heretic and should be kept out or thrown out of the community of believers. In this view, globalization is reduced to a totally economic phenomenon by which the rich systematically increase their own wealth while further impoverishing the poor, thereby creating an “economy of death.”3 This baptism of class analysis as the guiding light for interpreting globalization is, I think, a substantive theological mistake, a misreading of history, and an inaccurate social analysis that does not understand how and why the contemporary dynamics were generated and have such power. It fails to foresee the devastating consequences for Christian faith and for the world’s poor if such an interpretation is heeded. What all three of the influential perspectives share is a failure to grasp the way in which religion shapes the public life of civilizations, including the social and economic spheres of life through its influence on culture, childrearing, education, technology, and law, and the ways in which the Christian faith, and particularly Protestantism until quite recently, has generated those forces that are now driving globalization in its several social, political, cultural, and professional dimensions. My quarrel with these views is, in short, both theological and sociological: each has an inadequate view of faith that leads to a misperception of how religion works in the common life and how faith could create a new, more inclusive possibility for the common life. To give voice to my worries about these three developments does not mean that there is nothing valid about them. The United States, as the dominant contemporary superpower, needs a faith-based ethic guiding its policies if it is to advocate constitutional democracy, human rights, and an open civil society with a flourishing economy. No such society has ever long endured without a faith-based ethic. But the faith has to be deep and its ethic universalistic and persuasive. This is not so in these cases. Further, the faith has to be carried by meeting the felt needs of the people. Yet any faith worth having must also make warranted claims about the truth it advances and the justice of its ethic. The new discipline of the economics of religion does not do that, and its presuppositions do not appear to be capable of doing that. Further, the anti-globalization activists know that current global dynamics disrupt traditional cultures and cause hardship for those caught in social changes that they did not choose and cannot control. But they do not see the consequences of a failure to face these changes and to gain the resources to reshape them.

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DEFINING FAITH AND GLOBALIZATION Of course, we must recognize that there are competing definitions of faith and of globalization, but the three developments just introduced seem to me to be particularly perilous to faith and to the global future in part because they have a partial validity that gives them partial credibility. In this regard, I should outline my own basic understanding of faith and globalization and why I think it is pertinent to our situation and to the ability to correct these dangers. I am using the word “faith” here to mean confidence in a comprehensive worldview or metaphysical-moral vision that is accepted as binding on believers because it is held to be, in itself, basically true and just. Further, every worldview worth worrying about is functional: it interprets the realities of life in the world and guides the basic beliefs and behaviors of persons, empowering believers to seek to transform the world in accordance with a normative vision of what should be. This normative vision implies that something real and important transcends the world as it is and offers a vision of the world as it ought to be or ultimately shall be. I am persuaded that the Christian faith is the most valid faith available to humanity, but I recognize that others have other views and that we have to encounter them in a globalizing world and may gain from a sympathetic encounter. A faith in this broader sense may be essentially theistic or more humanist or naturalist, and it generally organizes itself into a creed, a code, and a cult (in the specific, classical sense of liturgical forms or practices) that together form a religion. Further, I think the evidence is clear that where a religion becomes widely shared, it shapes an ethos that gives identity to a particular group and tends to promote a social ethic that fosters public institutions. By this definition, worldviews such as a philosophical-ethical Confucianism, an atheistic Buddhism, a secular-humanist liberalism, or a revolutionary radicalism, whenever they form a creed, a code, and a cult and are used to interpret and guide the formation of an ethos, can properly be seen as faiths. They function as religions, shaping an ethos, even if they are opposed to theistic traditions or do not recognize themselves as religious. They are also subject to theological analysis, for they inevitably contain a metaphysical-moral ontology and a theory of history that involve some sense of transcendence or what others call “sacred.” I also need to indicate what I think globalization is. In general, globalization is best understood as a worldwide set of social, political, cultural, technological, and ethical dynamics, as prompted and originally legitimated by certain theological motifs, all of which are creating a worldwide civil society that stands beyond the capacity of any nation or state to control. It is influencing every local context, all peoples, all social institutions, and the ecosystem of the earth itself. It is forming an alternative postmodernism, one

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that has elements of the fragmentation and the relativization of all previous securities, but is also demanding the rediscovery of universalistic principles of spirituality, morality, and law, refining distinctive purposes, and forming new institutions that require common recognition. Thereby, globalization is creating a new, and newly contentious, comprehending public—one that modulates every regional and local context and yet is adapted into them and adopted by them in novel ways.4 It is breaking down old barriers between people and creating new ways to interact and to define identities. Specialists in various fields treat the changes from the point of view of their disciplines and often tend to attribute the dynamics to the factors that most interest them. We have already mentioned the economists (and business leaders and critics who are suspicious of business) who treat globalization as an economic dynamic. They see capitalist practices and institutions that can leap over the borders of nations to escape legal limitations, establish new markets, and find cheap labor, which simultaneously makes the economy more inclusive and productive.5 Political scientists (as well as politicians and public-policy critics) treat globalization as the emerging realignment of power in a new world order that has been emerging since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States to the position of sole remaining superpower.6 Meanwhile, communications specialists speak of the spread of information technology and media availability that allow the peoples of the world to discover new commonalities, while cultural critics speak of the collapse of meaning as earlier dominant cultural assumptions are shattered by their exposure to a host of alternatives. Still others cite demographic studies of massive migration flows such as those from the south and east to the north and west, while anthropological romantics celebrate the values of traditional cultures and mourn the global forces that disrupt indigenous societies. The problem is that these particular definitions by the advocates of particular disciplines are all correct, although they are partial. More general definitions seek to comprehend these partial perspectives and they are often more accurate because they try to grasp the universal scope of the present dynamics. They see all of the factors mentioned above as contributing to the formation of a social and technological public infrastructure that, while still fragile, could well lead to a new worldwide civilization. Theirs is a catholic, ecumenical vision, signaling a potential change like the shifts from hunting and gathering societies to agricultural and urban societies and then to industrialized nation states. Each shift involved crises and conflicts. Each shift was also made possible by both material and political factors as shaped by dominant religious and ethical transformations, although some religions, more than others, seem to have the theological and ethical resources to induce transformational shifts and to correct, modulate, or restrain particularly odious aspects of them.

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Today’s globalizing developments are forming the infrastructure of what could become a new, worldwide, federated civil society, though it is not yet a singular global civilization and may never be that. This partially formed global civil society is messy, pluralistic, and conflictual and is developing beyond the control of any single state. Many developed countries and increasingly China and India, plus Brazil and South Africa to a significant degree, are rapidly adapting to these changes and taking advantage of the opportunities afforded. They also appear to accept the adaptations as spiritually and ethically valid, thus giving support to the international legal arrangements that regularize them. China is a particularly important example in this area. Through its “new cultural revolution” it is adopting international standards in many areas of thought and life, including those deriving from Christian (essentially evangelical) ethics, tradition, and theology, stamping them with Chinese characteristics drawn from Tao, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Maoism. Through rapid development, China is pulling millions of people out of poverty and giving the young hope even if very large numbers of people are still caught in stagnation and far from the realization of democracy and human rights.7 Similarly, India, the second most populous country in the world, is globalizing at an amazing rate and is viewed by Thomas Friedman as the next great cultural, political, and economic superpower. Friedman, perhaps the premier reporter on things global, believes that India may eventually surpass China because of its more democratic traditions, its increasingly world-class educational system, and the growing willingness of the burgeoning middle classes to adopt foreign influences in their cultural patterns of life. And all of this despite persistent patterns of caste discrimination, the rise of a militant Hindu nationalism, and a huge underclass of Dalit populations whose vocal leaders continue to debate the legitimacy of globalization. Furthermore, many smaller countries of Asia and scattered people in Latin America and Africa are also adopting the worldviews and values indispensable for the web of development, especially where evangelical and Pentecostal movements are bringing them to people long marginalized.

THE TEMPTATION OF IMPERIALISM Still, in this context, the United States is the only world-dominant superpower and is tempted to become imperial. In a world without a universal political order, that dominance is both resented and, ironically, expected to function constructively in the trouble spots of the world, from Haiti to Darfur, from Bosnia to Rwanda, from the drug trade in Latin America to the AIDS crises of sub-Sahara Africa. As the only major north-Atlantic nation

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that was born in a revolution against a colonial empire and the only one that had no colonies in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, most Americans do not see the US as an imperial power. Accusations of neocolonialism don’t ring true to them. It is surely the case, however, that the US already functions as a hegemonic power, influencing political, cultural, and economic, as well as educational, technological, and family patterns around the globe, while leaving space for other centers of authority and governance to operate largely on their own terms. This, in part, challenges the argument of historian Niall Ferguson, who contends, “America is heir to the (British) Empire in both senses: offspring in the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”8 Ferguson thinks that the world needs an imperial center. But at the end of his study he concludes that the US is an “empire in denial . . . an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those . . . regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dares not speak its name.”9 Ferguson could be correct, but hegemonic influence rather than either imperialism or colonialism is probably a better description of America’s mode of engagement in the world, as Michael Mandelbaum recently argued.10 Mandelbaum uses the biblical story of David’s boyhood defeat of the giant Goliath as the source for the title for his book—The Case for Goliath. But Mandelbaum also knows that the extended biblical text celebrates the development of a relatively peaceful and just administration under the mature David who tolerated prophetic criticism in the face of internal and external temptations. After all, there is a certain pride, even a duty, of power, and with that in mind Mandelbaum asks, to whom should the world turn if no effective world government exists and if local disputes threaten tribal genocide or wider violence within or beyond any existing regime? Is there not a moral duty for a superpower to help establish and preserve a network of cooperating polities that can openly interact to jointly constrain the attempts of totalitarian powers to close down religious-moral ways of life that preserve the possibility of the rule of law, pluralism, human rights, and economic opportunity? At another level, the power of American popular culture is also a globalizing force, spread by tape, disc, video, movie, and satellite TV that carry its homogenizing, often immoral influence to the far corners of the world. This popular culture is rooted in the ideal of freedom of expression and is seen by people around the world as something to be imitated for the sake of freedom or to be controlled to prevent its libertinism from catching on. But this power grows not so much because it is imposed but because it is invited, pirated, and imitated. The police power needed to stop it would be enormous and intrusive.

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More vexing to many is the increased power of the transnational or multinational corporation, an old institutional form that was once under the control of leading families, churches, or states but which has now become substantially freed from the more local constraints of any of these and enjoys relative autonomy in its economic behavior. Thus, what we are witnessing today is a decline of control of economic resources by patriarchal authority, religious leadership, and even nation-state governance that was once traditional in Europe and Asia. The modern transnational or multinational conglomerates are incorporated, limited-liability, holding companies that are formed in one place with the ability to roam the world, setting up subsidiaries or branches as they go. They are in fact much sought after by coalitions of economic and political leaders in underdeveloped regions where their plants, factories, and outlets are sorely wanted. These corporations are often said to be totally uncontrolled, but that is not quite right. They are controlled in part by the laws of the host countries, although some countries are quite weak. They are more controlled by the market and by competitors, although these are not trusted by their critics as sufficient. Indeed, insufficiency of market controls appears to be evident from the growing efforts to establish international legal controls through a host of international treaties and regulative agencies, such as the European Union (EU), NAFTA, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The latter organizations have negotiated agreements with procedures for legal enforcement and the revision of unjust provisions. Still, the nature and character of these new corporate actors on the world scene, which I have elsewhere called “regencies”11 (thrones on which these powers sit, although they are not the power behind the thrones), need extensive and systematic investigation and likely further legal regulation. But that will require a new form of cooperation between the transnational regulatory agencies, the consent of the world’s more powerful nations, and the acquiescence of the corporations themselves. It is more than interesting that the deep recession into which the unfettered neoliberal policies have led the world is demanding governmental and international regency actions to restore economic viability. In short, the current, if perhaps ebbing, political, cultural, and economic hegemony of the United States is not identical with globalization, although it is one manifestation of globalization; nor is it identical with imperialism or neocolonialism. The temptations of that hegemony can more accurately be seen as the result of secularizing forms of a Christian worldview or metaphysical-moral vision, which have become separated from their deeper roots and wider ethical contours and have taken on a socially embodied, transformative power of their own. It is an open question as to whether these powers can be transplanted in the wider worldwide public they are helping to create. Insofar as these principalities, authorities, thrones, and dominions are not guided by a normative Christian perspective, they tempt any host society to arrogance, idolatry, and injustice. Many are convinced

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that this process is already well advanced in the United States and elsewhere. If Christian renewal does not take place, the societies that host these powers are likely to become more dangerous, as the critics already claim is the case. If the critics are correct, then sooner or later the American way of life will join the rubble of dead civilizations and lost faiths, and great will be the fall of it.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS Today’s globalization, fostering technological transformation, a communications revolution, and cultural realignment, is carried largely by institutional arrangements that have deep roots. However, this new globalization may turn out to be merely another transnational exercise in power and greed that reaches the whole known world. Something like this has happened before, and perhaps we can learn from those experiences. After humanity spread to most parts of the earth and developed distinctive local religions and societies, some began to find ways to develop links with others. Driven by cultural curiosity, a hope to learn from others, a quest for profitable trade, a desire for adventure, a chance to get away from unhappy local situations, a love for the exotic, and a drive to share their faiths, people created routes of travel between west and east, north and south. Combinations of interests drove merchants and adventurers, monks and literati to develop and use a variety of treks for caravan, collectively called the Silk Road that joined Turkey with China, with connecting routes to European and Slavic lands as well as to Korea and Japan, and in between to India, Arabia, and Africa. Buddhist, Christian, and later Islamic believers, driven by their universalistic religions, took their faiths to others on these routes. For centuries, goods, ideas, weaponry, musical instruments, gold, and pieties were exchanged and civilizations were enriched. Many died en route while some gained great wealth. Imperial conquerors and local warlords used these roads to their own advantage, sometimes raiding trading posts and demolishing monasteries in search of gold or to punish those disloyal to this or that emperor or false god. The old Silk Road could be considered, as Alice-Catherine Carls does in her chapter, the harbinger of a wider and deeper globalization to come. Centuries later, new technologies were fostered by the faith-driven view that nature is fallen and in need of repair, that progress is possible in history, and that social transformations could more nearly approximate the New Jerusalem promised at the end of the New Testament. Caravans were replaced by clipper ships and then steam ships. These accelerated the exploration of the continents, the colonization of new portions of the globe, and the spread of Christianity and new technologies. It must be said that these developments also enabled the expansion of slavery, already widely prac-

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ticed in the old world, into the new world. But more importantly, it also invited missionary activities in unprecedented numbers. Christians from the West took advantage of these conditions. Priests and preachers, educators and doctors, soldiers and administrators brought to peoples around the world faith-shaped perspectives on God and humanity, new interpretations of the earth and the cosmos, new means of nurturing the young and curing the sick, and new modes of organizing the common life. The colonizers and the missionaries cooperated in many ways and brought much with them from their home culture. At times this combination obscured the missionaries’ intended message and almost overwhelmed indigenous societies. But the receiving peoples adopted only portions of what was offered and only selectively modulated their preexisting beliefs, practices, and social patterns. As a result, new synthetic worldviews were created, making it more possible to speak of a worldwide aspiration for human rights, democratic nation building, and the modernization of education and social life.12 Today’s globalization represents another wave of such development, a moment marked not only by the displacement of older closed systems and the formation of new religious and cultural syntheses, but also by the technological artifacts of communication, from jumbo jets and the internet to new modes of genetic and urban engineering. The increased ability to control the biophysical world is matched by newly created channels of access to information and opinion that is different from what is approved or expected in our communities of origin. Such developments disorient established views of what is natural, of how we think of time and space, and of what the normative guidelines for life are and should be.13 Thus, they force all those who do not see everything ensnared in a nihilistic breakdown to ask what values, principles, and purposes should drive our responses to globalization’s promises and perils. Everyone knows, for example, that some are still left out of the globalization process and that special attention must be paid to those who are victimized by it—the peasants of western China, the Dalits of India, the tribal peoples of Central Africa, and the favalla dwellers of Latin America. Equally striking, however, is the dramatic resurgence of old-world religions and new prophecies, with some wanting to determine the destiny of globalization. Particularly obvious, of course, is militant Islam, spreading from the Middle East to Indonesia in the Far East as well as into North Africa and Europe. Militant Islam has some structural parallels to certain forms of Christian fundamentalism, but it has its own dynamics, as does the resurgence of Buddhism, which is probably growing as fast in China as evangelical Christianity. And then there are the New Age spiritualities, which are mostly old paganisms, now common among some post-theistic intellectuals in the West. Such developments represent a widespread quest for a guiding ethical and spiritual worldview that can open the soul to the deepest meaning of life and make sense out of the incredible myriad of

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cultures and beliefs while being simple enough to shape the most basic of human loyalties.

BACK TO FAITH This matter of loyalties and the quest for a normative worldview in which to place our confidence lead us back to the question of faith. If it is true that globalization has been formed substantially by the power of religions and pseudo-religions shaping social developments in many spheres of life, then even if the consciousness of that dynamic is now thin, contemporary globalization once again forces the question of faith. Globalization is not the result of the naked play of impersonal, or amoral, or non-religious forces and purely material interests. What then is, what has been, what can be, and what should be the relation of faith to this global formation of a new worldwide civil society and to the powers that have historically generated it and now help to sustain it? If the view of globalization that I’ve articulated is valid, then it is a major mistake to see globalization only as capitalism unleashed, as some globalists and anti-globalists do. We cannot accurately grasp, reform, correct, or redirect globalization without wrestling with basic theological questions and the full complexity of human social life. Nor can we get an accurate read of the principles by which we need to evaluate the consequences of present trends if we do not see whence they came and where they are going. The systemic amnesia about these matters that besets many university faculties, nearly all journalists and media mavens, most political and business leaders, many scientists and technologists, and no small number of theological teachers means that we are traveling with few mental maps of where we came from, where we are going, and how we might best get to where we want to go.14 Therefore, we must study carefully the contemporary dynamics of globalization with an eye to the relationship of faith to culture, culture to societies, and societies to the formation of a new public—a worldwide civil society and possibly a new civilization in which economic, scientific, technological, and other modes of human social and cultural life find their place.

NOTES 1. Max L. Stackhouse, Globalization and Grace, vol. 4 of God and Globalization (New York: Continuum, 2007). The first three volumes are: Religion and the Powers of the Common Life (New York: Continuum, 2000); The Spirit and the Modern Authorities (New York: Continuum, 2001); and Christ and the Dominions of Civilization (New York: Continuum, 2002). This essay depends on these volumes.

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2. The research by this school was recently summarized by Lawrence Iannaccone in “Introduction to the Economics of Religion,” Journal of Economic Literature 36 (September, 1998), 1465–1496. 3. See Alternative to Globalization: Addressing Peoples and Earth (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2005), passim. 4. See, for example, Peter L. Berger, et al, Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Michael Walzer, ed., Toward a Global Civil Society (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1995). 5. Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). 6. Notable among such interpreters is Samuel Huntington, who argues that civilizations, not states, are the unit of world organization now, although military and diplomatic policy remains in the hands of those states who are at the center of civilizational clusters, and at the root of what they can do remains the possibility of “applying organized violence . . . which Westerners often forget . . .; non-Westerners never do.” The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 24. 7. See the following: Nicholas Kristof, et al, Thunder in the East (New York: Vintage Books, 2001); David Sheff, China Dawn (New York: Harper Collins, 2002); David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing (New York: Regnery, 2004); and James Kynge, China Shakes the World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006). 8. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), xii. 9. Ferguson, Empire, 370. 10. Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, DC: World Affairs, 2005). 11. See the Introduction to my The Spirit and the Modern Authorities. 12. Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005). 13. Carl Raschke, GloboChrist (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008). 14. Compare David Hollenback, S.J., The Global Face of Public Faith (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003) and William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004).

4 Globalization and the State: A View from Economics Rodney D. Ludema

INTRODUCTION In the lead essay of this volume, Steven Meyer highlights some of the ways in which globalization poses a challenge to the modern notion of state sovereignty and points to the emergence of a more complex “postmodern” international system in which power is shared by a variety of state, supra-state, and non-state organizations. Indeed, the question of how globalization is reshaping national sovereignty has become a leading topic in several branches of social science. Numerous aspects of this question have been addressed and remain a matter of much debate and speculation. For example, which of these aspects is most important? How will the nation states of today change in response to the challenge of globalization? The purpose of this essay is to consider some of the ways in which economists think about globalization and the role of the state and to explore whether this viewpoint is helpful in understanding the relationship between them. The trends that Meyer’s chapter describes are of utmost importance to economic policymakers, not least because governance significantly impacts economic performance. In its first World Development Report of the new millennium, the World Bank declared the twin forces of globalization and localization—the continuing integration of the world economy, on the one hand, and the increasing demand for local autonomy, on the other—to be two of the most important forces shaping development in the twenty-first century.1 While such bold claims are somewhat unusual for a mainstream international organization like the World Bank (Joseph E. Stiglitz was chief economist at the time, which may have something to do with it), this declaration was actually 55

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the culmination of a large amount of scholarly research, occurring both within and outside of the Bank. The report goes on to say, At first glance, globalization and localization may look like countervailing forces, but in fact they often stem from the same source and reinforce each other. For example, the same advances in information and communications technology that have been so important in the spread of global economic forces often allow local groups to bypass central authorities in the search for information, visibility, and even financing. Together, these global and local pressures are revolutionizing traditional forms of centralized governance and dramatically affecting development thinking.2

The idea that globalization and localization are related, and indeed mutually reinforcing, processes is intriguing and potentially far-reaching in its implications. But beyond being merely facilitated by information technology, how exactly do these processes reinforce each other? And beyond causal observation, what empirical evidence exists that globalization and localization are actually connected? In what follows, I will argue that the forces in question can be understood through the lens of a well-established literature on multi-layer governance known as “fiscal federalism.”3 Fiscal federalism provides an economic rationale for allocating different policies to different levels of government, depending on the characteristics of the policies and of the localities being governed, characteristics that are affected by the mobility of goods and factors of production across space. I will summarize some of the empirical support for this viewpoint and its application to one particular form of localization, namely, political disintegration, or the break up of nations. Finally, I will conclude by arguing that fiscal federalism, as an organizing principle for the international system, has its limitations. The key limitation is that, in the absence of a world government, international agreements must be voluntary and self-enforcing. Thus, there is limited ability for redistribution across countries or for using international carrots and sticks to bring about cooperative behavior. This suggests that the state as we know it will continue to play a central role in governance even if in a different way than before.

FISCAL FEDERALISM The branch of economics that is most closely connected with questions of governance is Public Economics, and the analytical framework in Public Economics most relevant to questions of sovereignty is that of fiscal federalism. Wallace Oates provides an excellent summary of both the traditional and more recent treatments of this subject.4 Fiscal federalism is concerned

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with the normative question of how to optimally assign policies to different levels of government within a federal system. That is, it asks which level of government (e.g., national, provincial, local) should be given responsibility for which policies if the goal is to maximize the social welfare of the country. An implicit assumption is that each level of government would, in fact, seek to maximize the social welfare of its respective constituency. Thus, a local government, for example, would be expected to promote the interests of those within its limited jurisdiction. It follows that for policies that have primarily local effects, decentralized decision-making offers some potentially important opportunities for gains in social welfare. In the case of local public goods, local governments can provide such goods in levels that meet the demands of the residents of their respective jurisdictions. Such an outcome, with local supply tailored to the particular demands and conditions of each jurisdiction, would result in higher levels of social welfare than one in which a central government provides a single, uniform level of the public good for all jurisdictions.5 Fiscal federalism thus envisions a setting in which governments at different levels are assigned policies whose spatial effects are encompassed by the geographical scope of their jurisdictions. But since there are many policies with varying geographical scope, it is unlikely that a level of government would exist whose jurisdiction coincided perfectly with the geographical scope of each policy. In particular, some local public goods (such as roads and clean rivers) can provide benefits for residents of other jurisdictions, or “interjurisdictional spillovers.” One solution to this problem is to assign the policy to the central government and thereby give up the benefits of local variation. Another is to enable the central government to provide incentives to local governments to behave in a cooperative manner. In a federal system, this is often done with subsidies in the form of matching grants. Such grants encourage local governments to provide higher levels of the public good than they would otherwise do, thereby counteracting the tendency for them to ignore the interjurisdictional spillover benefits. Redistribution and macroeconomic stabilization are two functions that fiscal federalism generally assigns to the central government, because such policies cannot be adequately managed at the local level. For example, with highly open local economies, local governments have only a limited capacity to influence local levels of employment and prices. Thus, the primary responsibility for the macroeconomic stabilization function must rest with the central government. Likewise, the mobility of households and firms limits the redistributive potential of local governments. An aggressive local government program, for example, to redistribute income from rich to poor establishes undesired incentives for the poor to flock and the rich to scatter. Thus, fiscal federalism envisions the central government having the primary role in establishing an equitable distribution of income.

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Fiscal federalism also addresses the issue of taxation. The main concern is the distortions that can result from the decentralized taxation of highly mobile tax bases (especially capital). Thus local governments should primarily rely on benefit taxes (e.g., property taxes and user fees). In fact, economic efficiency generally requires the benefit taxation of mobile economic units.6 Taxes equal to the marginal cost of providing local services are needed to induce households and firms to choose jurisdictions that provide them with an efficient level of these services. The central government has greater scope for the use of income taxes, including progressive income taxes as part of a broader program for redistribution. It may also pursue equalizing, lump-sum grants to regional (or local) governments. Such grants can help to correct distorted migration patterns7 and can also provide assistance to poorer jurisdictions. Indeed, such grants are a common feature of many federal systems. At first glance, it may not be obvious how all of this can help us understand the relationship between globalization and sovereignty. Two limitations of fiscal federalism theory stand out. First, fiscal federalism poses a normative question, whereas the relationship between globalization and sovereignty is essentially about what is actually taking place. That is to say, the question of how national sovereignty is being affected by globalization is not about what is best for social welfare but about what is actually happening. For fiscal federalism theory to have explanatory power, therefore, it must be shown that governments actually follow its prescriptions. This is the subject of a large literature in the public-choice tradition that Oates refers to as “second-generation fiscal federalism.”8 While a detailed account of this literature is well beyond the scope of this chapter, suffice it to say that, as an empirical matter, federal governments do appear to follow fiscal-federalism principles. Local governments tend to rely on property taxes and provide local public goods, like garbage collection and streetlights, while national governments rely more on income taxes and provide national public goods, like defense. Other ideas from fiscal federalism, such as the effects of matching and lump-sum grants, find strong empirical support as well.9 The second limitation of applying fiscal federalism to the international system is that it presumes the existence of a central government. However, in the international setting there is no world government. Policy at the international level is implemented through international agreements and practices between “sovereign” states. Such agreements are voluntary and, to have any practical value, must be self-enforcing. This is a significant limitation that I will return to later in this chapter. For now, however, let us put aside this issue and investigate just how far fiscal federalism can take us toward understanding the topic at hand. An application of the logic of fiscal federalism to the issue of globalization goes something like this: globalization creates incentives to internationalize

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certain policies and decentralize others, both of which diminish the role of national governments. By increasing the mobility of goods, services, capital, labor, and information, globalization generally increases international policy spillovers and makes certain policies more costly to conduct at the national level. According to fiscal federalism, this should increase the economic gains to international policy coordination. As the policy functions of the national government diminish, so does the rationale for diverse regions or ethnic groups within a country to remain under the umbrella of the national government. Countries may split up and form new countries, or more often, they decentralize. At the same time, globalization may lead to divergence in incomes and economic patterns between regions. As regions diverge, so do their demands for public goods, which further enhances the rationale (as per fiscal federalism) for decentralized policymaking.10

THE EXPANSION OF INTERNATIONAL POLICYMAKING Most of the major international economic institutions that are in place today were born in the aftermath of the Second World War. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the European Union (EU) all have their roots in this time. The original rationale for these institutions was to prevent future war by stabilizing the world economy, managing the sources of international economic conflict, and promoting prosperity through interdependence. Over time these institutions have grown in size, influence, and scope. In the last two decades, the expanding reach of multilateral institutions has been eclipsed by an even more dramatic rise in regional economic institutions, such as NAFTA, that have moved into policy areas where multilateral institutions have dared not enter. The net result has been an unprecedented internationalization of economic policymaking. At this point, it may be useful to draw a distinction between the internationalization of economic policymaking and economic globalization itself. By globalization, I mean the integration of world markets—the increased mobility of goods, services, factors of production, technology, etc. This phenomenon is the result of both technological advances in transportation and communications and deliberate policy choices by governments to lower barriers to international mobility. Such government choices can be made unilaterally or as part of international agreements. The internationalization of economic policymaking refers to the conduct of policy through international agreements. Thus, an international agreement to lower tariffs on traded goods would constitute internationalization but would also contribute to globalization.

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Our interest here is on the reverse causation: that globalization has contributed to the internationalization of policies. The WTO provides a perfect example of this. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was negotiated at a meeting held in Geneva in 1947 involving 23 countries, with the stated purpose of raising incomes, employment, and growth “by entering into reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements directed to the substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade and to the elimination of discriminatory treatment in international commerce. . . .”11 While the idea was to cut tariffs, it became immediately evident that agreeing to tariff cuts alone was not enough, because countries would have an incentive to circumvent their tariff obligations and obstruct trade by other means. Thus, they drafted a set of general rules on the use of other trade-related policies, such as subsidies and quantitative restrictions, to prevent this. Table 4.1 shows what happened next. The membership of the organization grew from 23 to over 150 from 1948 to the present. The reason for the accessions was arguably the growth of trade itself. As world trade and GATT membership grew, the benefits of securing market access to these economies grew as well. Members met periodically to negotiate new obligations in what became known as negotiating “rounds.” The first five of these rounds focused on tariff obligations and on the accession of new members. By the mid-1960s, however, tariffs were already quite low by historic standards and trade was growing fast. It became evident that the general rules governing non-tariff barriers to trade were inadequate to handle the growing integration of the world economy and the ingenious ways governments had devised to manipulate it. From the Kennedy Round (1963–1967) onward, the scope of the negotiations grew to include more detailed rules regarding non-tariff barriers, customs valuation, antidumping and countervailing duties, subsidies, rules of origin, health and safety rules, and many others. By the Uruguay Round (1986–1994), the agenda had expanded into new subject areas: agriculture, textiles, services, intellectual property, and investment measures. This round also established the WTO, with new powers and an enhanced dispute settlement system for enforcing the rules and obligations. The Doha Development Round, which began in 2001, began with an agenda of including competition policy and environmental policy, though this has been put on hold. The point is that as trade barriers came down and globalization took hold, more and more issues became “trade related,” which made them candidates for inclusion in the WTO. This is entirely consistent with fiscal federalism, because trade is one of the chief ways in which interjurisdictional spillovers occur in the global arena. As far as the WTO has come, however, it is limited by the diversity of its members. The interests of developing country members often differ sharply from those of advanced countries with respect to trade policy. Indeed, this fact has made Doha negotiations particularly difficult. Fiscal federalism

Table 4.1. GATT/WTO Rounds, 1947–2007 Name of Round

Period

Number of Parties

Geneva

1947

Annecy

Torquay

Subjects

Results

23

Tariffs

Concessions covering 15,000 tariff lines.

1949

33

Tariffs

5,000 tariff concessions; 9 accessions.

1950

34

Tariffs

8,700 tariff concessions; 4 accessions.

Geneva

1956

22

Tariffs

Modest reductions.

Dillon Round

1960– 1961

45

Tariffs

4,400 tariff concessions.

Kennedy Round

1963– 1967

48

Tariffs, non-tariff measures, customs valuation

Average tariffs reduced by 35%; 33,000 tariff lines bound; agreements on customs valuation and antidumping.

Tokyo Round

1973– 1979

99

Tariffs, non-tariff measures, antidumping, customs valuation, subsidies and countervail, government procurement, import licensing, product standards safeguards, special and differential treatment.

Average tariffs reduced by one third to six percent for OECD manufactures; voluntary codes of conduct agreed for all non-tariff issues except safeguards.

Uruguay Round

1986– 1994

117

Tariffs, non-tariff measures, all Tokyo issues, plus agriculture, services, intellectual property, preshipment inspection, rules of origin, traderelated investment measures, dispute settlement, transparency and surveillance.

Average tariffs again reduced by one third; agriculture and textiles and clothing subjected to rules; creation of WTO; new agreements on services and TRIPs; majority of Tokyo Round codes extended to all WTO members.

Doha Round

2001–

150

All Uruguay issues, plus investment, competition policy, trade facilitation, electronic commerce, environment.

Source: WTO (2007).

TBD

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would suggest that in cases where interjurisdictional spillovers are present but diversity is acute, decentralized decision-making coupled with centralized incentives (e.g., matching grants) is the solution. However, as of yet the WTO has no such powers. Instead, the more common solution we observe is regionalism. Regional agreements permit a smaller number of like-minded countries to go further than might be feasible through more extensive multilateral negotiations. The most extreme example of this is the European Union (EU), which is effectively an international federal government in the economic realm. Its membership has also been steadily expanding. The United States has recently embraced regionalism as well. It now has free trade agreements in force or pending with 29 different countries, all but three of which were negotiated since 2001,12 as well as more than 40 bilateral investment treaties with developing countries. These agreements contain provisions covering labor rights, environmental policy, intellectual property protection, and investment measures that are beyond the obligations of the WTO. Worldwide, the WTO reports 205 regional trade agreements currently in force, the vast majority of which were formed since the mid-1990s. An area in which there has not been much internationalization of policy is taxation, which seems to run contrary to fiscal federalism. There are many international tax treaties, to be sure, but these focus primarily on avoiding double taxation of foreign-earned income and profits. One exception is the EU, which issued a code of conduct for business taxation in 2003 to curb tax competition between member states. Perhaps one reason that the internationalization of tax policy is not more widespread is that there is not much evidence that globalization has substantially reduced the ability of countries to levy taxes on capital.13 One reason for these findings is that even mobile capital will stay in relatively high tax societies when these environments provide valuable public goods such as a well-educated workforce, social stability, and proximity to cutting-edge research institutions. (This is consistent with fiscal federalism). There is also a growing literature on economic geography, which predicts that freer international trade leads to the agglomeration of industrial activity in certain countries14 or in certain regions within a country.15 Ian Wooton and I have shown that because of this type of agglomeration, economic integration actually increases the ability of countries (or regions) to tax mobile factors.16

DECENTRALIZATION Along with the internationalization of policies related to trade, investment, intellectual property, and so on, we are witnessing the decentralization of fiscal policies. Although quantifying this trend is somewhat tricky due to

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problems with classifying policies and levels of decision-making, a few rough and simple measures make the point. One measure, for example, is to look at the share of subnational government expenditures in total government expenditures. Another measure is to look at the extent to which subnational governments rely on their own revenues instead of on the central government for financing. Figure 4.1 shows the change in “own” share of subnational government revenues as well as in the share of direct and total subnational government expenditures in total government expenditures for OECD countries between the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Ten countries, including the US and Canada, show increases in fiscal decentralization by all three measures, while four countries show declines. The most decentralizing countries were Spain and Belgium. Can this fiscal decentralization be linked to globalization? Dan Stegarescu finds evidence that is broadly consistent with a decentralizing effect of economic integration, particularly in the context of the European Union.17 Moreover, as the cases of Spain and Belgium suggest, he finds the negative impact of economic integration, and particularly European integration, on the share of central government expenditure and revenue appears to be stronger in ethno-linguistically heterogeneous countries. These results are consistent with fiscal federalism if we consider that heterogeneity within a country is the main force pulling toward decentralization. Ample economic theory and empirical work supports the notion that globalization can increase heterogeneity. It does this in a number of ways.

Figure 4.1. Security)

Fiscal Decentralization in OECD Countries, 1970–2001 (excluding Social

Source: Stegarescu (2004)

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One is through the changes in the distribution of income between different factors of production. For example, since the early 1980s, the US economy has experienced a growing wage differential, with the wages of high-skilled workers growing in relative terms, and the real wages of low-skilled workers declining.18 The sources of this disparity are a matter of ongoing debate, but two competing theories have come to the fore. One focuses on international trade and labor market globalization as the driving force behind the loss of low-skill jobs, and the other focuses on the role of technological change as a catalyst for the escalation of high-skill wages.19 Either way, whether the cause is the technology that is driving globalization or globalization itself, there is a change in the distribution of income within countries. The second factor is specialization. Free trade generally causes regions to specialize in what they do best, which leads to larger disparities in the composition of production. Finally, there is the aforementioned literature on economic geography, which predicts regional clustering of economic activity into a core-periphery pattern.20 This could cause greater income inequality and divergence in economic structure between regions.

POLITICAL DISINTEGRATION Further support for the fiscal-federalism approach comes from studies of the effect of economic integration on the number and size of nations. Over the past half century, the world has witnessed a substantial increase in the number (and decrease in the average size) of nations. Recent studies have linked this political disintegration to economic integration.21 The basis for this link is a theory of the optimal size of countries that borrows heavily from fiscal federalism. The optimal size of a country reflects a trade-off between the benefits and costs of national size. According to Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, and Romain Wacziarg,22 the main benefits from size can be summarized in six points. 1) Economies of scale in the production of public goods, meaning that per capita cost of public goods is lower in larger countries. Examples are national defense, a monetary and financial system, a judiciary system, infrastructure for communications, public health, etc. In many cases, the cost of public goods is independent of the number of users or taxpayers, so that the per capita costs of many public goods is declining with the number of taxpayers. 2) Larger countries are less subject to foreign aggression, perhaps because larger countries have to spend proportionally less for defense than smaller ones due to economies of scale in defense spending. 3) Larger countries can better internalize the external factors that extend across regions by centralizing the provision of those public goods that involve strong external factors. 4) Larger countries are better able to

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provide insurance to regions within their borders that are affected by heterogeneous shocks. That is, if one region experiences a recession not felt by other regions, it can receive fiscal transfers, on net, from the rest of the country. 5) Larger countries can build redistributive schemes from richer to poorer regions, thereby achieving distributions of income not available to individual regions acting independently. Typically, poor regions want to form larger countries inclusive of richer regions, while the latter may prefer independence. 6) Finally, larger countries provide a larger domestic market for goods, services, factors of production (e.g., labor and capital), and technology. Larger markets allow for greater gains to specialization as well as allowing firms and regions to take advantage of economies of scale in production, distribution, and marketing. For a country that has no access to the world market, this benefit to country size is very large. However, for a country that has free access to the world market, this benefit is much less significant. In other words, in a regime of free trade, small countries can prosper, while in a world of trade barriers, being large is much more important for economic prosperity. The main cost to country size is the heterogeneity of different individuals. Being part of the same country implies sharing public goods and policies in ways that cannot satisfy everybody’s preferences. While certain policies can be delegated to subnational levels of government through decentralization, some policies must be national. Examples include defense and foreign policy, monetary policy, redistribution between regions, and the legal system. Heterogeneity may be due to differences in language, culture, or ethnicity. Several scholars have shown that ethnolinguistic fractionalization is inversely related to economic success and to various measures of the quality of government, economic freedom, and democracy.23 Ethnic fractionalization in Africa, for example, which is partly induced by absurd borders left by colonizers, is largely responsible for the economic failures of this continent. Another source of heterogeneity is from regional disparities in income and the composition of production. Patrick Bolton and Gerard Roland emphasize the importance of income heterogeneity.24 Poor regions would like to join rich regions in order to maintain redistributive flows, while richer regions may prefer to be alone. Of course, unequal distribution of income often goes together with ethnolinguistic fractionalization. As the world economy becomes more integrated, one of the benefits of large countries (the size of domestic markets) tends to vanish. Hence the trade-off between size and heterogeneity shifts in favor of smaller and more homogeneous countries. There is also a possible reverse causality: small countries have a particularly strong interest in maintaining free trade because so much of their economy depends upon international markets. It has been demonstrated empirically that larger countries tend to be more

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closed to trade.25 Thus, globalization should lead to more secessions and smaller countries, and conversely smaller countries opt for freer trade. This theory finds considerable support both in history and in recent data. Alesina, Spolaore, and Wacziarg interpret six periods of history from the Renaissance to the present in light of their theory.26 The first was the period of the city-states of Italy and the Low Countries that was characterized by very small and numerous states, free trade, and low demand for public goods. This was followed by the absolutist period, during which large centralized states emerged from the consolidation of feudal manors. This was driven by technological innovations in military technology that increased the benefits of scale in warfare. Territorial expansion and fiscal pressure went hand in hand. The large states, such as France and England, also turned quite protectionist in the early seventeenth century. Thus, the small, open city-states with low taxation gave way to large countries pursuing inward looking policies with a heavier burden of taxation to service war. The nineteenth century saw the birth of the nation-state in modern form, both in Europe and North America. It was widely believed that a nation needed a minimum size to be economically viable. The unification of Germany can be viewed along these lines. The German nation-state started as a customs union (the Zollverein), which was viewed as necessary to create a sufficiently large market. The establishment of a common market free of trade barriers was also one of the motivating factors behind the creation of the United States. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of European (and North American) powers over much of the “less developed” world. Empires were seen as a solution to the trade-off between size and heterogeneity. Large empires guaranteed large markets, especially necessary when protectionism was on the rise, but at the same time, by not granting citizenship to the inhabitants of the colonies, the problem of having a heterogeneous population with full political rights was reduced. The interwar period was characterized by a collapse of international trade, the emergence of dictatorships, and strained international relationships. During this time, borders remained virtually unchanged. No decolonization occurred. Leaving aside Vatican City, the only countries created between 1920 and the Second World War were Ireland (1921), Mongolia (1921), Egypt (1922), Iraq (1932), and Saudi Arabia (1932). Finally, during the fifty years since the Second World War, the number of independent countries increased dramatically. There were 74 countries in 1948, 89 in 1950, and 193 in 2001. This has coincided with globalization, during which the share of international trade in world GDP increased dramatically. Alesina, Spolaore and Wacziarg show that these trends are indeed strongly correlated.27

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CONCLUSION Looking through the lens of fiscal federalism, we have argued that the twin phenomena of globalization and localization can be understood as related processes. Globalization changes the balance between the economicefficiency benefits of centralized policies—economies of scale, interjurisdictional spillovers, etc.—and the efficiency and other costs of applying uniform policies to heterogeneous populations. Policies for which the benefits of centralized decision-making are enhanced, such as trade, macroeconomic stabilization, and global environmental problems, are moved to the international level, while other policies are decentralized, both because of the irrelevance of the national government and because of increased regional heterogeneity caused by globalization itself. But just how far will this process go? Will national governments become irrelevant or alternatively downsize to the point of political disintegration? Are international organizations robust enough to take over all of the relevant functions of the national governments? Certainly not at this time. In particular, international agreements must be voluntary and self-enforcing. Thus, there is limited ability for redistribution across countries or for using international carrots and sticks to bring about cooperative behavior. This is important because globalization creates winners and losers. If the losers are to participate in the internationalization of policies, there will have to be some means to compensate them. At the moment, there is none. Thus, the Doha Round of world trade talks is in trouble, and the Kyoto protocol is in ruins. In fact, as of this writing, populations are looking more than ever to their national governments to provide protection from the losses associated with globalization. This suggests that the modern state as we know it will continue to play a central role in international politics for the foreseeable future.

NOTES 1. World Bank, Entering the 21st Century: World Bank Development Report, 1999/2000 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000). 2. World Bank Development Report, 32. 3. See Wallace E. Oates, Fiscal Federalism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). 4. Wallace E. Oates, “Toward a Second-Generation Theory of Fiscal Federalism,” International Tax and Public Finance 12 (2005): 349–373. 5. The second implicit assumption is that central governments are constrained to provide a uniform level of the public goods and cannot tailor policies to local conditions the way local governments can. This is typically justified by appealing to

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informational asymmetries or political constraints at the central-government level. See Oates, “Second-Generation Theory.” 6. See Wallace E. Oates, “Taxation in a Federal System: The Tax Assignment Problem,” Public Economics Review 1 (1996): 35–60. 7. See F. Flatters, V. Henderson, and P. Mieszkowski, “Public Goods, Efficiency, and Regional Fiscal Equalization,” Journal of Public Economics 3 (1974): 99–112. 8. Oates, “Second-Generation Theory.” 9. See Wallace E. Oates, “An Essay on Fiscal Federalism,” Journal of Economic Literature 37 (September, 1999): 1120–1149. 10. Pressure for decentralization most commonly comes from those regions favored by globalization. Regions of a country that are hurt by globalization are more apt to favor greater power for the central government, particularly in its redistributive role. 11. GATT, Text of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947): http://www .wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/legal_e.htm#gatt47. 12. See Rodney Ludema, “Allies and Friends: The Trade Policy Review of the United States 2006,” The World Economy 30 (August 2007): 1209–1221. 13. D. Swank analyzed the impact of international capital mobility on corporate profits taxation for the period 1966–1993, however, and discovered that “if anything, direct effects of globalization of capital markets are associated with slightly higher business taxes and, to a degree, the diminution of tax policy responsiveness to the conditions that underpin investment.” “Funding the Welfare State and the Taxation of Business in Advanced Market Economies,” Political Studies 46, no. 4 (1998): 690–691. With respect to trade, Swank reports a small positive effect of trade openness on the fall of business-profits taxation. 14. Paul R. Krugman and Anthony J. Venables, “Globalization and the Inequality of Nations,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 110, no. 4 (1995): 857–880. 15. Paul R. Krugman, “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,” The Journal of Political Economy 99, no. 3 (1991): 483–499. 16. Rodney Ludema and Ian Wooton, “Economic Geography and Fiscal Effects of Regional Integration,” Journal of International Economics 52, no. 2 (December 2000): 331–357. 17. Dan Stegarescu, “Economic Integration and Fiscal Decentralization: Evidence from OECD Countries” (discussion paper no. 04-74, Center for European Economic Research, ZEW, 2004). 18. See Richard Freeman, “Are Your Wages Set in Beijing?” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, no. 3 (1995): 15–32. 19. For a summary see Robert C. Feenstra, The Impact of Trade on Wages (Chicago: NBER/University of Chicago Press, 2000). 20. Krugman, “Increasing Returns.” 21. See Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, “On the Number and Size of Nations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (November 1997), 1027–1056; Alesina, Spolaore, and Romain Wacziarg, “Economic Integration and Political Disintegration,” American Economic Review 90, no. 5 (December 2000), 1276–1296; and Alesina, Spolaore, and Wacziarg, “Trade, Growth and the Size of Countries,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, ed. Philippe Aghion and Steven Durlauf (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), Chap. 23.

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22. Alesina, Spolaore, and Wacziarg, “Trade, Growth, and the Size of Countries.” 23. William Easterly and Ross Levine, “Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (November 1997): 1203–1250; Alberto Alesina et al, ““Fractionalization,” Journal of Economic Growth 8, no. 2 (June 2003): 155–194. 24. Patrick Bolton and Gerard Roland, “The Breakups of Nations: A Political Economy Analysis,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (November 1997): 1057–1089. 25. Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, “Borders and Growth,” Journal of Economic Growth 10, no. 4 (2005): 331–338. 26. Alesina, Spolaore, and Wacziarg, “Trade, Growth.” 27. Alesina, Spolaore, and Wacziarg, “Economic Integration.”

5 The New Silk Road: Central Asia at the Global Crossroads Alice-Catherine Carls

Central Asia is rising. The region between Turkey and China, which has thus far resisted classification within the modern state system and has long been the territory of imperial Great Games, is coming into its own. American geopolitical expert Alfred Thayer Mahan, remembered mainly for his advocacy of United States naval power to build a twentieth-century energy empire, predicted Central Asia’s eventual prominence more than a century ago in his book, The Problem of Asia and its Effect upon International Policies. Discussing the reopening of the centuries-old Silk Road, which was one of the stakes in European rivalries that led to World War I, Mahan gave a surprisingly accurate description of the world’s last frontier: the “debatable and debated ground” on a “beltway lying roughly between the 30th and 40th parallels” from Suez to Shanghai, a region hemmed in from the north by Russia and from the south by Britain that did not appear clearly divided into eastern and western parts.1 Hastened by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, which coincided with, and enabled, growth in energy commerce, the rise of Central Asia has been somewhat disjointed over the last fifteen years. Today, a century after Mahan’s astute observations, Central Asia still does not represent a unified region. Nation-states are emerging and degrees of regional cooperation are evident, but outside pressures remain powerful, and clear political definition of the region is absent. Yet, a revival of interest in its land-travel routes, coming after five centuries of maritime transport dominance, signals one of the most important geopolitical realignments of the twenty-first century. Pipelines, railroads, highways, and a fiber-optic network are taking over where the camel caravans once plodded along over the old Silk Road. As a result, the United States and other nations face a challenge that is not easily 71

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grasped within the old realism/idealism paradigms of the sovereign-state system. Since the modern state system is a relatively recent construct, as Steven Meyer explains in his opening essay, we should not be surprised to discover that that system is neither the predetermined goal of history nor a necessarily permanent fixture in world affairs. The contemporary rise of Central Asia helps make clear why this is so. From the beginning of recorded history, Central Asia has rarely if ever been independent from its neighbors or unified under its own power. It was subsumed by China, made an enclave by Islam, and functioned as the linchpin of Genghis Khan’s four medieval Khanates before getting caught in the empire-building games of modern European nations. With each successive collapse of a dominant empire, the Great Game continued in pursuit of control both of shipping routes and of various parts of the region. In the twentieth century, Central Asia was divided into an eastern portion that was incorporated into the Soviet Union for seventy years and a western portion that was dominated by the British and the French until after World War II and is now under considerable American influence. Of particular importance are the expanding oil and gas pipelines, which are becoming a relatively safe and cheap alternative to maritime shipping that dominated the twentieth century. The transportation routes and the geography of energy supplies, however, are still mired in many Cold War patterns and post-colonial competitions.

THE GREAT TRANSITION IN ENERGY TRANSPORTATION With recent advances in technology and a relatively new focus on natural gas, Central Asia is now caught up in the competition between two landtransportation systems: Russia favors the Soviet-era umbrella routes that converge on Russian soil; India and Pakistan favor a north-south route; and the European Union and China favor east-west routes. The United States favors all three energy routes. Anchored in OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the US is trying to secure Iraq’s integration into the increasingly vulnerable Black Sea oil route; it is actively partnering with Russia to develop a far eastern route that would bring Siberian oil and gas resources to the west coast of the US; and it is working to help stabilize the middle section of the Silk Road that includes Iraq and Afghanistan.2 The energy-producing countries of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran, at the center of this new Silk Road, are poised between east and west. Surprisingly perhaps, the major players are not really that different from the old ones, although the global contrast today between rich, postindustrial, Western societies, on the one hand, and newly industrializing societies such as China and India, on the other, is striking. All the major

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players in Central Asia except the United States are geographical neighbors. All of them without exception find themselves at critical junctures. The US is trying to preserve its global presence. The European Union (EU) is expanding in membership but having difficulty developing a more deeply federated unity. Russia is now breaking free from its communist past and trying to capitalize on its vast energy resources to build an energy empire. China and India (and South Korea and other Asian Tigers) are reaching out as never before to Central Asia to satisfy their rapidly growing appetites for energy. And Islamic fundamentalists are forcing a reconsideration—and perhaps even a redrawing—of the Middle Eastern map that they see as a product of Western imperialism. How do all these players relate to the Central Asian countries? Russia’s behavior is “akin to the protective post-colonialism exhibited by Britain and France” fifty years ago.3 China is making resurgent commercial inroads into the Silk Road and trying to tighten control over its vassal neighbors in the Himalayas. The EU unequivocally and from its start has favored investment in Central Asian infrastructure and transportation development. The United States is closely watching all three parts of the region with principal concern for energy security. Meanwhile, “the foreign devils on the Silk Road”4 (i.e., drug traffickers, Muslim warriors, and terrorists) are using political destabilization to try to advance their cause, making it imperative for state actors to cooperate in trying to strengthen regional stability and to prevent a triumph of neocolonialism. The timing of this growing interest in Central Asia shows the intensification of global energy politics and the rapidly increasing significance of the emerging Asian markets for oil, gas, coal, and uranium production and consumption. These developments have upset the world of OPEC, challenging the dominance of the oil-rich countries of the Fertile Crescent. Middle Eastern players, specifically those Muslims who have, since 1979, tried to unify Islam under the banner of Islamic fundamentalism, were the first to act. We are familiar by now with the most radical of the actors: the Afghan Mujahadeen, the engineers of the Iranian Revolution, the organizers of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and other similar groups. The EU made a big move eastward in 1992, seizing the momentum of the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia under Vladimir Putin began around 2000 to capitalize on its vast energy resources. The US upped the ante after 9/11, taking its “war on terror” into the heart of Central Asia and bringing a new war to Afghanistan and to Iraq. And the huge growth of industry and markets in China, South Korea, Japan, India, and countries of Southeast Asia have finally galvanized the world’s attention during the last 10 years. Contending concepts of international energy security along with rivalry for the control, exploitation, and transportation of energy resources have created an oscillating pattern in the region between cooperative efforts, on

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the one hand, and an “energy Cold War,” on the other. The “reopening” of the Silk Road in 1992 under the auspices of the EU is an example of successful cooperation to integrate energy, communication, and transportation growth with regional development. The “Silk Road of the Twenty-First Century” is an east-west project that links Europe to China and enjoys the financial backing of major international banks and institutions. It has four components: 1) a Eurasian Continental railroad bridge, 2) a major highway system (TRACECA, Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia); 3) a fiberoptic highway; and 4) a pipeline network (INOGATE, Interstate Oil and Gas Transport to Europe). All of these are integrated in a European transport, telecommunications, and energy infrastructure program called TransEuropean Energy Networks, or TEN-E. China’s east coast is already linked to Rotterdam by a southern rail route through Central Asia and the Caucasus. And since 2004, a northern corridor links Korea and China to Western Europe through Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Equally ambitious is the 2004 Asian Highway Agreement, which is backed by 32 countries and will feature routes from Tokyo to Bulgaria through a unified highway system. In contrast to these cooperative efforts, the competition for energy routes also manifests elements of an “energy Cold War” that reverberates throughout the region and the world. The location of the energy sources determines the paths of the pipelines, which in turn play a large role in defining the trade routes, thus affecting a wide variety of commercial and development issues. The western oil center—the Caspian Sea area (Azerbaijan to Iraq)— around which all development was focused until recently, is a case in point. Now suffering relative diminishment because of rising costs and dwindling supplies, this area is nonetheless the locus of intense rivalries for control of oil and gas transportation westward, as demonstrated by Russia’s incursion into Georgia in August 2008.5 The EU-built BTC pipeline (Connecting Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey), which brings Caspian Sea oil to the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea without transiting through Russia, is rivaling the Soviet-era Dagestan-Chechnya-Ukraine pipeline. Parallel to the BTC, the EU and the US are backing a gas pipeline called NABUCCO, a 2,050-mile line whose construction is slated to begin in 2010. Routed through Turkey, gas would flow to Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Austria, and eventually to Germany. This pipeline is particularly important because it was started in 2002 to lessen Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and was revived early in 2008 as a show of European unity and transatlantic solidarity. Russia is countering that move with a “Blue Stream” gas pipeline from the Caucasus into Turkey that would connect with a South-stream line into Serbia and Bulgaria and eventually cross the Adriatic Sea to Italy. To strengthen his hand, Putin announced in early 2008 the planning of a gas pipeline extending to Libya, which some have called a pincer movement to try to gain a stranglehold on Southern Europe.

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The next frontier for natural gas is the area around the Aral Sea, whose resources will be divided in the next ten to fifteen years among Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The entire middle region of energy-exporting countries finds itself at the crossroads between east-west and north-south distribution routes, with pipelines extending in all directions. The TransAfghan gas pipeline (TAPI), running through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, rivals an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline called the Peace Pipeline (IPI). Both projects received a recent boost from the completion of a Tajik-Afghan bridge in 2007, from gas purchase agreements by TAPI countries, and from renewed IPI activities in the spring of 2008. There is, however, more intense crossfire. Kazakhstan is being courted on one side by Russia for a northern route, which would privilege the Japanese markets and help Russia link its eastern Siberian resources with an impressive China-Barents Sea route, and on the other side by China for a southern route through Xinjiang6 that would privilege the Chinese market. Turkmenistan is in a position to choose among 1) the Trans-AfghanPakistan (north-south) gas pipeline, 2) a tripartite gas agreement with Russia and Kazakhstan, 3) an eastern route in partnership with China, and 4) a western route in partnership with the US. The latter two feature gas lines parallel to the oil lines. In response to Turkmenistan’s refusal to commit to the tripartite gas agreement last September, Vladimir Putin signed a Russian-Indonesian Treaty of Cooperation. Russia’s resolve to secure a monopoly of gas exploitation and transportation from Indonesia to North Africa was evident in initial talks in 2000 between Iran, Venezuela, and Russia to establish a Russian-led gas-OPEC. If realized, this organization could unite all the major gas-producing countries of Central Asia, dictate their economic and development priorities, and cover a territory as large as that covered by medieval Islam. It would crisscross the Silk Road from Dakar to Xinjiang with a maze of parallel oil and gas pipelines. But this ambition will not be easy to realize in view of the Central Asian players’ market-dictated moves and countermoves. Perhaps this is why Putin today denies any ambition to create an international gas cartel.

REGIONAL RE-CENTERING EASTWARD Interestingly, the new Silk Road tracks the old Silk Road to a significant degree. As in the days of yore, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Xinjiang are strategic locations. Furthermore, the maritime Silk Road is being revived from Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, from Shanghai to Singapore. The maze of paths stretching from the Caspian Sea to China includes inroads into Pakistan and India. New labels have appeared: CHIME, for the trade region of

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China, India, and the Middle East, and MENA for the region of the Middle East and North Africa. Along these routes, overlapping zones are common, but one thing is clear: the epicenter of the new Silk Road is no longer the Middle East, as that was understood up through the Cold War; the center has shifted eastward, making Pakistan-Afghanistan-Kazakhstan, not Saudi Arabia or Iraq, its new center. This re-centering of the Silk Road eastward is affecting a broad range of issues from national-sovereignty disputes and energy policies to the future of modernization, democratization, and economic development. The stakes are high and reach deep into religious-civilizational identities. The changes are related as well to the re-centering of the Muslim world eastward, and that could, for the first time in five centuries, signal a power reversal between East and West. At the very least, as Meyer and Max Stackhouse have projected, technological, economic, political, cultural, and religious dynamics are ushering in an unfamiliar, complex, multilayered, more interdependent world that is driving toward new institutional structures even while many of the world’s major players continue to try to hold on to institutions and behavior patterns of the Cold War era and earlier. Facing many external pressures, Central Asian countries are struggling to find identity and security. Democracy and statehood in the modern sense are not really taking hold and the meaning of sovereignty is being redefined. From west to east along the Silk Road, however, a maze of regional overlapping organizations testify to the desire for security, growth, and development within a cooperative framework. TRACECA is more than a transportation corridor: it unites fourteen member states of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia in an international organization of economic cooperation complemented by a European aid program called TACIS. The Eurasian Economic Community (comprised of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia) and the Greater Tumen Initiative (uniting China, Russia, both Koreas, and Japan) favor a gradualist approach to regional economic cooperation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose members include Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, and Kyrgyzstan, has a dual purpose: it is used primarily as a security pact by Russia, while China wants to use it to promote economic integration. All these organizations testify to the recent growth of region-wide organizations that are seeking a unified economic space in Central Asia, all of which are enjoying support from the EU, Russia, China, the UN, and many international organizations and investment banks. These organizations are trying to achieve some of the purposes that Meyer associates with supra-states. Two issues should be remembered here, however. First, even if Central Asia becomes more integrated, it may not look or act much like a modern federation or confederation on a European or American model. Secondly, as the process of bloc building advances and

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becomes more complex, opposing pressures from outside mount to try to slow it down. Major powers want Central Asia to be a compliant resource center, not another competing political power. Who will emerge as the winner of the Great Energy Game: the United States, China, Russia, the EU, Muslim insurgents, or the Central Asian peoples themselves? Experts are divided as to the pace of the restructuring and about which if any of these power centers will come out on top. In the western section of the Silk Road—the Caucasus and the Balkans—experts see Russia winning control of energy supplies to Europe, though some believe that Putin is overplaying his strong hand. Competition is strong in the middle and eastern portions of the pipeline routes as well, even if it receives less coverage from Western media. Rivalry for control is accompanied by conflict ranging from war to verbal sparring, especially between Russia and the US, and that further compromises the potential for ongoing development and stabilization of the energy corridor. Peripheral diplomatic issues are being pulled into this volatile mix as well: Kosovo’s independence; NATO’s future expansion in Ukraine and Georgia; Abkhazian and South Ossetian independence; and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In the east, unrest in the Uighur region of China, anti-Chinese rioting in Tibet, joint Russian-Chinese military maneuvers, and elections in Nepal—all of these signal tension between China and the West that are related to the Silk Road’s realignment.

AMERICAN POSITIONING Where does the United States stand in regard to these global developments? During the past seven years, the US has appeared undecided about a number of issues. First, it has divided its attention in Central Asia, shifting focus from the middle part of the Silk Road (Iraq) to the eastern part (Afghanistan), where it has tried to create conditions favorable for the advancement of the pipeline routes, and then, in the spring of 2008, to a renewed partnership with the EU in the western part (Caucasus). Arguably, the most sustained American policy has been the prioritization of eastern Siberian oil and gas ventures that can most immediately benefit the US. If successful, those ventures follow a fairly uncomplicated route along the Siberian seaboard through the Barents Sea to the west coast of the US. Secondly, the US has appeared ambivalent about its actions through diplomacy, military intervention, and simply making room for economic exchange. It has chosen war as a political stabilization tool, yet deliberately left the negotiation of commercial deals to the oil companies. And American actions have been complicated by the primacy given by the Bush administration since 2001 to “high policy” initiatives, such as the fight

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against terrorism, which have overshadowed the “low policy” issues of development and transportation. Third, the US has shown ambivalence about its dependence on Russian energy, struggling against such dependence by participating in the pipeline competitions at the western end of the Silk Road, while cementing its dependence on Russia through deals to obtain oil and gas from eastern Siberia. Fourth, the US has shown some hesitation about whether to focus chiefly on energy issues or to make a broader commitment to regional development, including support for the democracy in the Central Asian region. American policy seems to lack a clear trajectory, its ad hoc responses still framed to a significant degree by post-colonial and Cold War paradigms and fueled by American exceptionalism. Perhaps American hesitation is due to uncertainty about the future of energy supplies. Perhaps too it comes from the fact that the US is not a geographical neighbor in Central Asia. How is American policy being received? In 2007, Vladimir Putin called for a multilateral world order in which Russia would play the role of a cultural and civilizational bridge between the West and the Middle East,7 and he expressed his opposition to American policies in Iraq and Afghanistan that, in his view, continue the nineteenth-century Western colonial mission. The EU holds out a comprehensive vision of multilateral diplomatic solutions that the major powers, including the US, have been slow to embrace. According to the late Charles William Maynes, past president of the Russia Foundation and editor of the Asia Times, current developments in the Muslim world require a broader vision of regionalism and a willingness to reconcile democracy and Islam in a non-colonial way.8 James Skillen asks, “Is it wise for us [Americans] to continue to fight terrorism only by reference to our own criteria of judgment?”9 The challenges of Central Asia and of growing energy use throughout the world call for new ways to think about economic and political cooperation and competition; a new paradigm is trying to break free from the one dominant during the Cold War. The changing realities that have brought Central Asia into global focus reflect the structure and needs of an increasingly interdependent world in which regional issues of development, energy, and nation-building are intertwined with a complex set of pre-existing civilizational and religious dynamics. The stakes are high, making the need to shape a new vision all the more urgent. Old paradigms are no longer dependable. Competing visions emerged among the dominant powers of the last century—European, American, and Russian—and they are still trying to adapt to the post-Cold War world. The twenty-first century can and should be a century of global and energy security marked by sustainable social and economic development in a world that respects diversity. In such a world, the revival of the Silk Road would open sea- and land-transportation corridors that could circle the globe from the Pacific to Australia through the Panama and Suez

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canals. Tomorrow, every major trade route across the globe will connect through Central Asia. Will the prospect of that Central Asian crossroads encourage peaceful cooperation and the continued building of new and better international organizations, or will it simply intensify differences, competition, terrorism, and military conflict? That is one of the most urgent questions of our time and it calls for exceedingly wise and responsible actions by those with the greatest power and influence.

NOTES 1. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Problem of Asia and its Effect upon International Policies (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.; 1900; Elibron Classics reprint, 2005), 22, 34. 2. For a detailed presentation of American energy policy in Eurasia, see “Energy Supplies in Eurasia and Implications for U.S. Energy Security, S. Hrg. 109–866” (Washington, D.C.: US Government Publication, 2005), 1–75. 3. The phrase “protective post-colonialism” was coined by a student of the Silk Road, Christiane H. Evaskis, in a paper on current events written for my Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia class in the spring of 2008. 4. M.K. Bhandrakumar, “The New ‘NATO of the East’ Takes Shape,” Asia Times Online (25 August 2007): http://japanfocus.org/_M_K_Bhadrakumar-The_New_ _NATO_of_the_East__Takes_Shape__The_SCO_and_China_Russia__and_US_ Maneuvers. 5. See Isabel Gorst’s report, “Blow Dealt to Prospect of Oil Pipeline Security,” Financial Times, 11 August 2008. 6. Xinjiang is the western-most province of China, bordering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Its population of Uighurs is mostly Muslim who speak a Turkic language. 7. Similar views have been expressed by other Russian officials, such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who wrote in 2006, “I think that now this role of Russia—not of a ‘shield,’ but of a cultural and civilizational ‘bridge’—turns out to be called for as never before and integrally fits . . . into the collective interests of the entire world community.” Lavrov, “The Rise of Asia and the Eastern Vector in Russian Foreign Policy,” Russia in Global Politics 2 (March–April 2006): http:// www.indonesia.mid.ru/ros_asia_e_3.html (accessed 26 July 2008). 8. Charles William Maynes has frequently advocated a rethinking of American foreign policy. In 1998, he criticized the US for its imperious, presumptuous, and unilateral initiatives, as cited by Nancy Snow in her article, “The Losing Battle Against Anti-Americanism,” Asia Times 20 (December 2006): http://www.atimes .com/atimes/Middle_East/HL20Ak03.html. 9. James W. Skillen, With or Against the World? America’s Role Among the Nations (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 9.

6 Schooling and the Not-So-Sovereign State Charles L. Glenn

Steven Meyer describes a world in which the sovereign state has lost much of the preeminence it enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Max Stackhouse stresses the importance of the institutionally diversified and complex civilsociety dimensions of globalization. Changing patterns in schooling help to illuminate both of their arguments. While the state has by no means crumbled away as the primary provider and guarantor of schooling in most of the world, its role is no longer taken for granted as it was a generation ago. At the levels of both theory and practice developments in education open an important window on our shrinking yet expanding world.

AN INTERNATIONAL RIGHT Take theory first: the articulation of a right to education in a variety of international covenants represents a fundamental shift in perspective from schooling as something provided by government to nurture a loyal and well-disciplined citizenry to something that individual parents have a legal right to demand on behalf of their children. For more than a hundred years, starting in the 1830s (and earlier in Prussia), every government in Europe, North America, and eventually the world saw the establishment of a system of popular schooling for its entire population as a fundamental expression of its sovereignty, as well as an instrument for making that sovereignty real. Through the gendarme and the schoolmaster in every village, Guizot promised, France would be ruled, with the former disciplining the bodies and the latter disciplining the minds of its people. 81

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When, in 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 26 stated, “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.”1 The article went on with hopefulness to specify that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.” This was standard boilerplate UN wishful thinking and consistent with the rhetoric adopted by many national education systems. But then the Declaration added something that challenged the assumption that schooling could be simply an instrument of government policy: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” This implied that they had a right to choose an education other than that provided by government. This right had of course already been fought for and won in a number of European countries. It was a part of the compromise basic to the formation of Canada and had been affirmed by the US Supreme Court in 1925, in Pierce v Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510). Now, the United Nations was elevating it to a fundamental principle, which, by implication at least, was superior to the particular political compromises and jurisprudence of nations. The Universal Declaration was a statement of principles rather than a formulation of international law. Max Stackhouse explains that “the provisions of the UN declaration are not themselves law. They are statements that point toward a transcendent moral law and thus serve as plumb lines for the law to be enacted. They are ‘common standards’ which Conciliar Catholics would know by ‘graced reason,’ Calvinists by ‘common grace,’ and Liberals by ‘self-evident truths.’”2 The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1966 and coming into force in January 1976 after it had been ratified by thirtyfive countries, was intended to set an international legal standard. Article 13 of the Covenant was more specific about the rights of parents and also the rights of those who establish non-government schools: 3. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to choose for their children schools, other than those established by the public authorities, which conform to such minimum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the State and to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

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4. No part of this article shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principles set forth in paragraph I of this article and to the requirement that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State.3

More succinctly, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (also adopted in 1966) provided that “The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.”4 Unresolved in these provisions was the question whether this language about educational freedom was intended simply to restrain the state from infringing upon the rights of parents or was intended to impose an obligation upon the state to take measures to make it possible for parents to choose schools providing “religious and moral” education consistent with their own convictions. If only the former, it is obvious that many parents would not be in a position, for financial and other practical reasons, to act upon their choices. As Jack Donnelly puts it, “the modern state has emerged as both the principal threat to the enjoyment of human rights and the essential institution for their effective implementation and enforcement.”5 The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the UN addressed this issue in 1999 in a lengthy “General Comment” on the Right to Education as spelled out in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This includes a significant set of definitions:6 While the precise and appropriate application of the terms will depend upon the conditions prevailing in a particular State party, education in all its forms and at all levels shall exhibit the following interrelated and essential features: (a) Availability—functioning educational institutions and programs have to be available in sufficient quantity within the jurisdiction of the State party. What they require to function depends upon numerous factors, including the developmental context within which they operate; for example, all institutions and programs are likely to require buildings or other protection from the elements, sanitation facilities for both sexes, safe drinking water, trained teachers receiving domestically competitive salaries, teaching materials, and so on; while some will also require facilities such as a library, computer facilities and information technology; (b) Accessibility—educational institutions and programs have to be accessible to everyone, without discrimination, within the jurisdiction of the State party. Accessibility has three overlapping dimensions: Non-discrimination—education must be accessible to all, especially the most vulnerable groups, in law and fact, without discrimination on any of the prohibited grounds (see paras. 31–37 on non-discrimination);

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Physical accessibility—education has to be within safe physical reach, either by attendance at some reasonably convenient geographic location (e.g. a neighborhood school) or via modern technology (e.g. access to a “distance learning” program); Economic accessibility—education has to be affordable to all. This dimension of accessibility is subject to the differential wording of article 13 (2) in relation to primary, secondary and higher education: whereas primary education shall be available “free to all”, States parties are required to progressively introduce free secondary and higher education; (c) Acceptability—the form and substance of education, including curricula and teaching methods, have to be acceptable (e.g. relevant, culturally appropriate and of good quality) to students and, in appropriate cases, parents; this is subject to the educational objectives required by article 13 (1) and such minimum educational standards as may be approved by the State (see art. 13 (3) and (4)); (d) Adaptability—education has to be flexible so it can adapt to the needs of changing societies and communities and respond to the needs of students within their diverse social and cultural settings. When considering the appropriate application of these “interrelated and essential features” the best interests of the student shall be a primary consideration.

While most of these criteria are the sort of standards that educational experts might be called upon to measure, the criterion of “acceptability” gives a sort of Copernican twist to the process of determining whether a particular country is meeting its obligation to ensure that its citizens enjoy their right to education. Only the pupil and his or her parents can decide whether the schooling provided is acceptable. It would be too dramatic to describe this as a dethroning of the state with respect to education, but it certainly suggests that governments and their educational experts should not see themselves as authorized to simply provide whatever they think best. And while the force of these international standards penetrates only slowly and unevenly into actual practice, the recent appointment of Jan De Groof as Chargé de Mission for UNESCO on the Right to Education, with a mandate to investigate the specific legal arrangements under which these norms are or are not being implemented, should promote their general acceptance.

EUROPEAN PRACTICE Turning from the general (at least so far) realm of international human rights to actual educational practice, we can see a similar weakening— though by no means elimination—of the role of the sovereign state. It is true that in the formation of the European Union the principle of subsidiar-

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ity was invoked to reassure the member states that education would remain subject to national control and goal-setting,7 but in the subsequent period, the various institutions of the EU have taken an ever-expanding role in promoting commonalities as well as quality in education. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which created the twelve-member European Union, provided the following in article 126: 1. The Community shall contribute to the development of quality education by encouraging co-operation between Member States and, if necessary, by supporting and supplementing their action, while fully respecting the responsibility of the Member States for the content of teaching and the organization of education systems and their cultural and linguistic diversity. 2. Community action shall be aimed at: —developing the European dimension in education, particularly through the teaching and dissemination of the languages of the Member States; —encouraging mobility of students and teachers, inter alia by encouraging the academic recognition of diplomas and periods of study. . . .8 This last point has been implemented since 1999 through the “Bologna Process,” creating a so-called European Higher Education Area within which students are able—while many thorny details are being worked out—to transfer credits among universities and other post-secondary institutions in the various countries of the EU. Similarly, the European Council met in March 2000 in Lisbon to set strategic goals for the EU “in order to strengthen employment, economic reform and social cohesion as part of a knowledge-based economy.” The member states were exhorted, in order to make the European economy more globally competitive, to strengthen schooling in a variety of ways. Specific targets were set:9 —a substantial annual increase in per capita investment in human resources; —the number of 18 to 24 year olds with only lower-secondary level education who are not continuing on with further education and training should be halved by 2010; —schools and training centers, all linked to the Internet, should be developed into multi-purpose local learning centers accessible to all, using the most appropriate methods to address a wide range of target groups; learning partnerships should be established between schools, training centers, firms and research facilities for their mutual benefit;

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—a European framework should define the new basic skills to be provided through lifelong learning: IT skills, foreign languages, technological culture, entrepreneurship and social skills; a European diploma for basic IT skills, with decentralized certification procedures, should be established in order to promote digital literacy throughout the Union; —define, by the end of 2000, the means for fostering the mobility of students, teachers and training and research staff both through making the best use of existing Community programs (Socrates, Leonardo, Youth) . . . and through greater transparency in the recognition of qualifications and periods of study and training; to take steps to remove obstacles to teachers’ mobility by 2002 and to attract high-quality teachers. —a common European format should be developed for curricula vitae, to be used on a voluntary basis in order to facilitate mobility by helping the assessment of knowledge acquired, both by education and training establishments and by employers. While this still fell far short of, for example, prescribing a common curriculum or means of assessing academic achievement, it clearly gave an impetus toward such commonalities as the “new basic skills,” which each member state would seek to promote. Although the Bologna and Lisbon processes could not accurately be called shifts in authority for education, they are clearly shifts in the locus of initiative for defining the content of instruction, despite the language of the Maastricht Treaty. There are clear parallels here with the growing role of the federal government in the United States where, despite the constitutional jurisdiction of the fifty states for education, and the overwhelming dependency of schools on state and local taxation, there are increasing pressures through the federal “No Child Left Behind” legislation and through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) toward at least comparable if not common standards nationwide. The same process is occurring in higher education in the United States, despite the important role of private institutions and the greater autonomy of public institutions from government than is characteristic in the European Union. This is seen most clearly in the efforts of US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in the George W. Bush administration to persuade the government-recognized accrediting agencies to put more emphasis on measuring the outcomes of the institutions they accredit.

DECENTRALIZATION In Europe, the shift in initiative is not only from the nation-state to the institutions of the EU but also from the state to regions in certain countries.

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The example of Spain is perhaps the best known, since it has been accompanied by controversy over the role of regional languages—most notably Catalan and Basque—in schooling. But there has also been a significant shift from the national level to the regions in Italy with respect to the locus of both initiative and authority. The process was given an impetus by the Bassanini Law (1997), which called for the decentralization of some administrative functions and tasks, including the organization of schools, to regions and local authorities, and it was solidified by the constitutional revision of October 18, 2001, under which (article 117, section 3) education is no longer the exclusive responsibility of the national Ministry of Instruction (Ministero dell’Istruzione). This shift in Italy has resulted in experimentation with vouchers and other measures that could never have been tried in the earlier, heavily centralized Italian system. Although there is no general, nationwide funding for independent schools, several regional governments have made moves in this direction. The regional law 14/9110 in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, for example, extended support to families whose children attended “obligatory and secondary schools [which are] non-state, authorized, equivalent, legally recognized” on the grounds that equal treatment of pupils in state and non-state schools was guaranteed by the Constitution. Similarly, Emilia Romagna stated, in 1999, that the regional and local governments would favor the creation of an “integrated educational system for the right to instruction, based upon an increasing coordination and cooperation among the various providers of education, while respecting autonomy and pedagogical-didactic identity, freedom of teaching, and also the freedom of families to make educational choices.”11 Piedmont, Veneto, and other regions have made provisions for funding part of the cost of pupils attending non-state schools under arrangements designated as “scholarships” (borse di studio), “reimbursement of costs” (rimborso spese), or “school vouchers” (buoni scuola) and typically limited to families with below-average incomes. Lombardy, in 2000, instituted a voucher worth, initially, 25 percent of the cost of tuition, up to two million lire per pupil for families with moderate incomes; this voucher was available for pupils attending state or comparable non-state schools and could be supplemented with other support from local authorities. In the first year, there were 47,000 applications on behalf of 56,000 pupils, of whom 1000 were enrolled in state schools. The intention was that the amount of reimbursement would increase to 50 percent in 2001 and that the cost would be subsidized 100 percent by 2005, but fiscal problems have so far kept the level below that. A long-established program in the Valle d’Aosta provides nearly full funding for the costs of non-state schools that agree to enroll pupils without tuition and to follow the educational programs prescribed for state schools. In Trento, a provincial law of 1990 provided a scholarship to pupils attending

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non-state schools, as well as a subsidy to schools which met certain requirements such as nondiscrimination in admitting pupils, conformity with the curriculum followed by state schools, and disclosure of finances. A careful study of the effects of this last program, carried out for the provincial government, found evidence that it had contributed to socio-economic integration in schools and was broadly supported in the province.12 A similar process of devolution of both authority and initiative has occurred in Wales. While the educational system of Scotland had traditionally been distinct within the United Kingdom, that of Wales had been conformed to that of England. Since 1999, however, education in Wales has been under the authority of the Welsh National Assembly, with its own Minister for Children, Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills. This has resulted in the abolishment of several of the tests that had been given to all pupils in elementary school. The Welsh Assembly Government states on its website that “our ambition is to transform Wales into a self-confident, prosperous, healthy nation and society, which is fair to all.”13 The use of the word “nation” is significant. Of course, as the example of Scotland illustrates, education has by no means been dominated by the state in all Western countries. Federal systems have characterized not only the United States but also Canada, Australia, Germany, and Belgium. Under the European Union, new forms of collaboration are emerging between regions across national borders, with Lombardia forming links with Catalonia, Rhone-Alpes, and Bavaria on the basis of similar interests, including education.

AMERICAN CHARTER SCHOOLS A final example of the weakening of the role of the sovereign state in popular schooling that characterized the nineteenth-century project of turning “peasants into Frenchmen”14 can be seen in the proliferation of what could be called semi-public school models. The clearest instance of this is the charter school in the United States, a public school functioning in many respects like a private school. The experimentation with vouchers in several Italian regions is, of course, another example. According to the website of the Education Commission of the States, Charter schools are semi-autonomous public schools, founded by educators, parents, community groups or private organizations, that operate under a written contract with a state, district or other entity. This contract, or charter, details how the school will be organized and managed, what students will be taught and expected to achieve, and how success will be measured. Many charter schools enjoy freedom from rules and regulations affecting other public schools, as

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long as they continue to meet the terms of their charters. Charter schools can be closed for failing to satisfy these terms.15

More than for other public schools, there is greater public accountability of American charter schools to both the state and the families. Because families voluntarily enroll their children in charter schools, the latter remain dependent on family choice for their continued existence. Like most innovations in policy, the charter school is a response to a perceived problem; more accurately, it responds to two perceived problems. One problem is concern about the lack of educational quality due to the limited autonomy of American public schools and thus the limited scope of their teachers and other staff to function in a really professional way. This limited autonomy of schools is sometimes hard for Europeans to understand because the United States is supposedly the country par excellence of decentralization of educational authority to elected school boards in some fifteen thousand local districts. But decentralizing decisions to the local district is not the same thing as granting real autonomy to individual schools and to the professional educators in those schools. In fact, the local school board and its administrative staff are in a position to interfere with the decisions of school staff on a more frequent and explicit basis than are government officials in a European-style educational system. It was in fact the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the late Albert Shanker, who first promoted the idea of charter schools as a way to improve the professional status of teachers by allowing them to function in a more autonomous manner. Ironically, however, the teacher unions generally oppose charter schools and seek to limit their number and their independence, seeing them as a threat to the interests of teachers who work in regular public schools. Although teachers in charter schools have a right to form locals within the state and national unions, that has occurred in few if any cases, and union officials are naturally concerned about the resulting loss of dues and influence as more and more teachers work in charter rather than in regular public schools. The other perceived problem is one of equity or justice. It is an unfortunate reality that in every country, schools located in and serving affluent communities produce better results than those in poor communities. The reasons are complex and do not necessarily reflect greater financial resources or a different course of study: it remains true in educational systems with a prescribed national curriculum and with centralized funding, and also remains true in societies where the official rhetoric emphasizes the interests of the poor, as in the former Soviet Union or in Communist China. Among the causes of the achievement gap between schools in different communities is the presence in more successful schools of pupils from families with a tradition of academic effort and the habits and attitudes that

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support success in school. Children from homes without those conditions can do well if they are in classrooms with a sufficient number of children who are well prepared to learn. Classrooms without such well-prepared children often develop low expectations, which further depress achievement, even when a standardized curriculum is followed and resources are equal. There is growing evidence from research in several countries, however, that schools with a clearly defined mission that distinguishes them from other schools are more likely to be effective in reducing the achievement gap. While the causes of this phenomenon are still somewhat mysterious, there is now abundant evidence that, for example, Catholic secondary schools have a positive impact upon the achievement of African American youth.16 It would certainly appear to be a matter of social justice that most poor parents are unable to send their children either to the high-performing public schools of affluent communities (since attendance is limited to the residents of those communities) or to Catholic and other non-public schools with a distinctive mission (since these must ask parents to pay for the cost of schooling). In recent years, the problem has grown worse as hundreds of Catholic schools serving working-class communities have been forced to close for financial reasons. As a result, there has been a concern on the part of many advocates for social justice in the United States and other English-speaking countries, in particular, to make it possible for the parents of these children to choose the schools in which they have most confidence and thus to allow their children to escape from the low-performing schools to which they are often assigned because of where they live. Charter schools in the United States (and to some extent in Canada) are a response to the concern about access of poor families to distinctively effective schools. They operate on the basis of parental choice, with no assigned attendance zones, and with considerable latitude to be distinctive. But because charter schools are public schools, supported entirely by public funds, and forbidden to select their pupils on the basis of academic performance or family background, they are a means to address this equity concern. Poor parents have the same access to charter schools as do middleclass parents, and in fact most charter schools in Massachusetts and other states were established precisely to offer opportunities to poor families who cannot afford to move to the communities with high-performing schools. A limitation of charter schools in the United States is that, under current interpretation of the Constitution’s First Amendment (and by the terms of many state charter-school laws), they cannot have a religious character.17 Even if such legal limitations can be overcome, public funding of such schools can raise difficult questions about the relationship between government and religious organizations and prove to be an “ambiguous embrace.”18 While it is the case—in Portugal, for example—that government

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inspection of nonpublic schools can cover teaching methods to ensure that the education provided is of the same level as that provided in public schools, experience shows that governments are constantly tempted to extend their reach improperly into the ideological, philosophical, or religious basis of teaching. The current controversy in Spain over the civic education to be provided in Catholic schools funded under contracts with the government (conciertos escolares) has parallels in many other countries. Naturally, any government will seek to ensure that all of its future citizens share certain common commitments to principles which will ensure their ability to live and work together, but the totalitarian (and “soft totalitarian”) examples of the twentieth century should warn us against pressing this goal too far. As legal scholar Rosemary Salomone points out, Standing alone, the notion of education for citizenship risks negating or at best minimizing the benefits that children gain from becoming self-fulfilled individuals who can choose from among various visions of the good life under the guidance of their family and cultural community. Indeed, it presents a frightening image of children as instruments for advancing political ends. When one talks about education for democratic citizenship one needs to temper the discussion by reflecting on the developmental needs of children, including their need for a culturally coherent life.19

So here we come back to the problem of the sovereign state and its potentially stifling tendency—even with the best of liberal intentions—to extend its reach into the minds and hearts of children. Charter schools offer an opportunity to put some distance between the state and public schools and even to widen the definition of public schools. Surely the time has come to recognize that any school that provides a public benefit, is publicly accountable, and admits pupils without discrimination (discrimination that is unrelated to the specific mission of the school) is in fact a public school. These are exciting times in which the monolithic structures created in support of popular schooling in the nineteenth century are being called into question, not only in theory but even more in practice, at every level from the transnational to the face-to-face community of parents and educators who care about a particular group of children.

NOTES 1. Alfred Fernandez and Siegfried Jenkner, eds., International Declarations and Conventions on the Right to Education and the Freedom of Education (Frankfurt: Info3Verlag, 1995), 15. 2. Max L. Stackhouse, Creeds, Society, and Human Rights (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984), 108.

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3. Fernandez and Jenkner, International Declarations, 19–20. 4. Fernandez and Jenkner, International Declarations, 18. 5. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 35. 6. UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “General Comment,” Annex VI, 111–134, http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/48caae1c5c498 24c802568e300333c37/$FILE/G0041210.pdf(1999). 7. See Jan De Groof, ed., Subsidiarity and Education: Aspects of Comparative Educational Law (Leuven, Belgium: Acco, 1994). 8. Fernandez and Jenkner, International Declarations, 69–70. 9. European Council, http://eees.umh.es/contenidos/Documentos/PRESIDENCY_ CONCLUSIONS_Lissabon.pdf (March 2000). 10. http://lexview-int.regione.fvg.it/FontiNormative/xml/IndiceLex.aspx?anno =1991&legge=14&lista=1; http://www.regione.emilia-romagna.it/agenziasan/pps/ area_doc/lg_reg_n0003_99.htm. All quotations in this paragraph are from this source. 11. Legge regionale 15 gennaio 1999, n. 155 concernente Diritto allo studio ed all’apprendimento per tutta la vita e qualificazione del sistema formative integrato 1999. 12. See Charles Glenn and Jan De Groof, Balancing Freedom, Autonomy and Accountability in Education, vol. 2 (Tilburg, The Netherlands: Wolf, 2005), 223–247. 13. http://new.wales.gov.uk/ 14. See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). 15. Education Commission of the States, http://www.ecs.org/html/issue. asp?issueid=20 16. This was pointed out several decades ago by John S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities (New York: Basic Books, 1987); John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990); Anthony S. Bryk, Valerie E. Lee, and Peter B. Holland, Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and others, and has been noted recently in careful evaluations of voucher programs in a number of cities. 17. One of my former students has just published a legal analysis of the terms on which charter schools could have a religious character. See Lawrence Weinberg, Religious Charter Schools: Legalities and Practicalities (Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age, 2007). 18. See Charles L. Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-based Schools and Social Agencies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 19. Rosemary C. Salomone, Visions of Schooling: Conscience, Community, and Common Education (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 201.

7 Evangelical Christians: The New Internationalists? Dennis R. Hoover

The Cold War order has given way to a more diversified, postmodern disorder in which the role of non-state actors—religious non-state actors in particular—is increasingly significant in world affairs. As Steven Meyer and Max Stackhouse note, the most prominent example is transnational radical Islam, represented by al-Qaeda and kindred groups. But other religious groups, including evangelical Protestants, have also become forces to be reckoned with in international affairs. Indeed, in the United States one of the biggest stories of the post-Cold War period has been the rising clout of evangelical Protestants in the politics of foreign policy. Whereas the adherents of this large religious tradition were once thought to be preoccupied only with domestic “culture wars” over prayer in public schools, abortion, and gay rights, they have become increasingly active on global issues, injecting a distinctively evangelical brand of moralism into foreign-policy discourse. To some critics, Evangelicals’ turn toward greater involvement in foreign affairs is merely a projection of old Christian Right tendencies onto a larger, international screen. For example, in Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism, Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose allege that American evangelicalism aggressively proselytizes for an American-formulated “gospel” that stokes right-wing ideological support for American interests in capitalism, democracy, anti-communism, and, more recently, anti-Islamic fervor.1 William Martin warns that Evangelicals are moving into international affairs with an agenda consisting of positions such as opposition to international family planning, deep mistrust and opposition to the United Nations, strong support for the US military, and unqualified loyalty to Israel.2 93

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Some observers point specifically to the upsurge in pro-Israel activism among certain evangelical leaders as evidence confirming the stereotype of evangelical dogmatism and stridency. The media have been taking increasing notice of evangelical interest groups that fervently support Israel, such as Stand for Israel, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, Churches United With Israel, American Alliance of Jews and Christians, and Christians United for Israel.3 Of particular interest to the media has been the dispensational premillennial eschatology that drives much of evangelical Zionism. This apocalyptic theology has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity due in part to the wildly successful “Left Behind” series of novels and movies (which, it’s worth noting, cast a fictional UN Secretary General in the role of the Antichrist). Some evangelical leaders have likewise been making headlines for sharply criticizing Islam and for supporting the notion that the US must take tough military action against the gathering threat of radical Islamism. Pat Robertson made waves for saying that Islam “is not a peaceful religion that wants to coexist.” Former Southern Baptist Convention president Jerry Vines drew applause and fomented anger for saying Mohammed was a “demonpossessed pedophile.” Jerry Falwell followed the same path in charging that Mohammed “was a terrorist.” Shortly after 9/11, Franklin Graham, son of legendary evangelist Billy, said Islam “is a very evil and wicked religion”; in 2002, he was honored by the conservative evangelical magazine World as its “Daniel of the Year” for his public stand on Islam.4

THE NEW INTERNATIONALISTS? However, notwithstanding these examples of right-wing evangelical forays into international affairs, the bigger media story in recent years has in fact been the rising success and assertiveness of evangelical leaders who defy right-wing stereotypes, especially on global issues. Among commentators and scholars in the elite media, one of the earliest to call attention to this trend was the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who on May 21, 2002 wrote glowingly about the “new internationalist” type of evangelical leadership. Kristof argued that, “The old religious right led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, trying to battle Satan with school prayers and right-to-life amendments, is on the ropes. It is being succeeded by Evangelicals who are using their growing clout to skewer China and North Korea, to support Israel, to fight sexual trafficking in Eastern Europe and slavery in Sudan, and, increasingly, to battle AIDS in Africa.”5 Kristof sounded this theme again in a February 3, 2008 column slugged, “Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love”: [C]onservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

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. . . Today, many evangelicals are powerful internationalists and humanitarians—and liberals haven’t awakened to the transformation. The new face of evangelicals is somebody like the Rev. Rick Warren, the California pastor who wrote “The Purpose Driven Life.” Mr. Warren acknowledges that for most of his life he wasn’t much concerned with issues of poverty or disease. But on a visit to South Africa in 2003, he came across a tiny church operating from a dilapidated tent—yet sheltering 25 children orphaned by AIDS. “I realized they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch,” Mr. Warren said, with cheerful exaggeration. “It was like a knife in the heart.” So Mr. Warren mobilized his vast Saddleback Church to fight AIDS, malaria, and poverty in 68 countries. . . . “Almost all of my work is in the third world,” Mr. Warren said. “I couldn’t care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.”

In “The Evangelical Crackup,” the cover story of the October 28, 2007 New York Times Magazine, David D. Kirkpatrick explored in greater detail how increasing numbers of evangelical leaders have been publicly breaking with right-wing ideology and partisanship, particularly on issues of international security, poverty, human rights, and the environment.6 In addition to Warren, Kirkpatrick cites the example of Chicago-area megachurch pastor Bill Hybels, who has spoken publicly against the Iraq War and who brought former president Jimmy Carter to his influential leadership conference in 2007. Indeed, the populist/compassionate style of these newer evangelical leaders is, historically, the central tendency of evangelical politics, with the period of Christian Right ascendancy under the likes of Falwell and Robertson representing something of an anomaly. Most analyses have missed this historical dimension of the story, but a helpful exception is Walter Russell Mead’s essay “God’s Country?” in the September/October 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs. As Mead argues: Evangelicals in the Anglo-American world have long supported humanitarian and human rights policies on a global basis. The British antislavery movement, for example, was led by an evangelical, William Wilberforce. Evangelicals were consistent supporters of nineteenth-century national liberation movements— often Christian minorities seeking to break from Ottoman rule. And evangelicals led a number of reform campaigns, often with feminist overtones: against suttee (the immolation of widows) in India, against foot binding in China, in support of female education throughout the developing world, and against human sexual trafficking (the “white slave trade”) everywhere. Evangelicals have also long been concerned with issues relating to Africa.7

Here it is important to note as well how intertwined revivalism and social reform were in the world of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism.8 Abolitionism was particularly precedent setting. In the years prior to the Civil War the abolitionist Liberty Party had enjoyed substantial evangelical

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support, as did the Republican Party in the North through to the populist era. As Brian Stanley has argued, the campaign to eradicate the sin of slavery became central to the identity of Northern Evangelicals, establishing a “liberationist dynamic” in evangelical culture that was later applied to other issues.9 Movements for public education, poverty relief, child labor reform, and prison reform all tapped the evangelical concern for spiritual and physical reform of society. Moreover, Evangelicals had in large part taken this felt humanitarian burden on themselves, establishing a “benevolent empire” of voluntary societies and agencies, which, according to George Marsden, together rivaled the federal government in total expenditure.10 Because of its mixture of tendencies—moral conservatism, humanitarianism, individualism, idealism, voluntarism, and populism, to name just a few—the evangelical tradition has usually defied easy left/right categorization, and will sometimes join remarkably diverse coalitions depending on the issue. The most important example from the recent history of US evangelical politics is the campaign to put international religious freedom on the agenda of US foreign policy. As Mead notes in his “God’s Country?” essay, “[Evangelicals] have made religious freedom—including the freedom to proselytize and to convert—a central focus of their efforts. Thanks largely to evangelical support (although some Catholics and Jews also played a role), Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, establishing an Office of International Religious Freedom in a somewhat skeptical State Department.”11 Moreover, Allen Hertzke has documented in his excellent 2004 book, Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights, that the mid-1990s campaign for legislation on international religious freedom not only created strange-bedfellow coalitions of organizations and activists normally on opposite sides of the culture war; it also catalyzed a trend toward expanding evangelical engagement on international human rights issues, including human trafficking, genocide in Sudan, and more.12 At least some American Evangelicals, then, can accurately be described as progressive internationalists in the sense intended by Nicholas Kristof when he applied this word in 2002. Whether this internationalism is “new” depends on your historical frame of reference. Certainly when compared to the Cold War period, the nature and significance of contemporary evangelical politics is changing in complex ways. On the one hand, as Steven Meyer notes, the entire global system is in the midst of a paradigm change that diffuses sovereignty and elevates the profile of non-state actors. Accordingly, American evangelical internationalists are arguably better positioned than ever before to have impact. But at the same time, the center of gravity in global evangelical Christianity is no longer in America but rather in the Global South, which has seen explosive growth in evangelical churches, particularly of the Pentecostal and charismatic variety. As such, it may be mis-

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leading and presumptuous to look exclusively to American Evangelicals for global leadership, whether conservative, liberal, or anywhere in between. One thing sorely needed to help clarify the discussion of Evangelicals in international affairs is careful examination of evangelical opinion at the mass level. Most of the analysis and commentary to date has focused on the role of key leaders and advocacy groups (whose “mass” membership is not necessarily very large, nor necessarily representative of evangelical public opinion in general). In an era in which the “social construction” of global issues is increasingly important in determining action/inaction, the role of elites in “framing” reality should of course not be underestimated. But there are limits to how far progressive internationalist leaders can go in framing positions and priorities in a way that goes against the existing grain of public opinion in the population they claim to represent.

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SURVEYS It is here where national and international survey data are helpful, and fortunately there are two excellent data resources that can be brought to bear—namely, the 2004 National Survey of Religion and Politics (conducted by the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron and sponsored by The Pew Forum), and the 2000 World Values Survey. For the balance of this essay, I will provide a basic, introductory overview of major findings of these surveys, comparing evangelical averages to national averages across a wide range of questions measuring the extent of agreement or disagreement with progressive new-internationalist views. I first present findings comparing American evangelical opinion to that of the general American public.13 For ease of presentation, I group these findings into three categories: Global Engagement and Multilateralism, Economic Philosophy, and Contemporary Foreign Policy Issues. I then add a Global South dimension to the analysis by comparing American Evangelicals to their counterparts in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Global Engagement and Multilateralism American evangelical internationalist leaders believe, as do traditional Christian Right leaders, that domestic cultural issues such as family values and sexual ethics are important, but they believe that international issues should be given a similar priority. They also tend to be more open to multilateral cooperation and ambivalent about “American exceptionalism.” Christian Right leaders often embrace exceptionalism with zeal because it reinforces Christian nationalism and the belief that God chose the US to be a sort of “new Israel.”

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Table 7.1 presents results of four survey questions that tap attitudes in this area. The first question is from the World Values Survey. It asked a general question about the United Nations: “Could you tell me how much confidence you have in the United Nations: a great deal of confidence, quite a lot of confidence, not very much confidence, or none at all?” A majority of 55 percent of Americans overall expressed either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the UN. Among evangelicals, notwithstanding the popularity of apocalyptic speculations involving the UN, the percentage was identical. The other three questions in Table 7.1 are from the Bliss Institute data. First, respondents were asked the following open-ended question: “What do you feel is the most important problem facing America today?” Answers were coded by the Bliss Institute into four major categories: economic issues, foreign policy issues, cultural issues, and political process issues. Unsurprisingly, Evangelicals were more concerned with cultural issues than the general public (29 percent vs. 20 percent), but on foreign policy issues, Evangelicals were indistinguishable from the general public (both at 30 percent). Second, respondents were asked to choose between two statements: “The US should take the lead in maintaining world peace, using military force if necessary,” or “The US should primarily cooperate with international organizations to maintain world peace.” In this case, although a sizable majority of Evangelicals, 65 percent, said the US should cooperate with international organizations, an even larger majority (74 percent) of the general population favored this multilateral option. Third, the survey probed attitudes toward American exceptionalism by asking respondents if “The US has a special role to play in world affairs and should behave differently than other nations.” At the national level, only 42 percent disagreed, and among evangelicals an even smaller proportion, 35 percent, disagreed.14 Table 7.1.

Has “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the United Nations.* Foreign policy issues are the most important facing America today.** United States should primarily cooperate with international organizations to maintain world peace.** Disagree that United States has a special role to play in world affairs and should behave differently than other nations.** *World Values Survey, 2000 **Bliss Institute, 2004

US

US Evangelicals

55%

55%

30

30

74

65

42

35

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Economic Philosophy Unlike most Christian Right leaders, new internationalist evangelical leaders are often open to somewhat progressive views on economic matters, especially when it comes to economic issues that directly affect the poor. Is there support for liberal approaches among average Evangelicals? Table 7.2 presents findings from several survey items relevant to economics; the first two are from the World Values Survey and the next four from the Bliss Institute survey. First, the WVS asked respondents to rate their views on a 10-point scale in which 1 = “The government should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for” and 10 = “People should take more responsibility to provide for themselves.” The proportion of the general public rating themselves 1, 2, or 3 was 15 percent, but among evangelicals it was even lower, 7 percent. Second, the WVS asked, “Do you think that this country should provide more or less economic aid to poorer countries? Would you say we should give . . . a lot more, somewhat more, somewhat less, or a lot less than we do now?” The percentage answering either “a lot” or “somewhat” more was 42 percent nationwide and slightly lower, 39 percent, among Evangelicals. The Bliss Institute survey asked respondents if they think there should be more, the same, or less government spending than current levels. The national percentage saying they prefer more spending was 34 percent, but among Evangelicals it was a bit lower, 29 percent. Respondents were also asked if they agree that, “Large tax cuts are good for the economy because they encourage necessary investment and create jobs.” The national percentage that disagreed was 45 percent, but only 33 percent of Evangelicals disagreed. Finally, respondents were asked in two different ways for their views on government programs to fight poverty and hunger: (a) should Table 7.2.

Government should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for.* This country should provide more economic aid to poorer countries.* There should be more government spending.** Disagree that large tax cuts are good for the economy.** Government should spend more fighting poverty and hunger even if it means higher taxes on the wealthy.** Government should spend more fighting poverty and hunger even if it means higher taxes on the middle class.** *World Values Survey, 2000 **Bliss Institute, 2004

US

US Evangelicals

15%

7%

42

39

34 45 62

29 33 55

50

43

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government spend more on such programs “even if it means higher taxes on the wealthy,” and (b) should it spend more “even if it means higher taxes on the middle class.” Among Evangelicals 55 percent agreed with spending more if it raises taxes on the wealthy, as did 43 percent if it raises taxes on the middle class. However, the national percentage was 7 points higher on each of these measures (62 percent and 50 percent, respectively). Contemporary Foreign Policy Issues These surveys also asked respondents for their views on a variety of contemporary foreign policy issues. Table 7.3 summarizes the findings across a broad selection of topics, including the environment (WVS), preemptive war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, AIDS, famine, and religious persecution (Bliss). New internationalist evangelical leaders and traditional Christian Right leaders would agree that fighting religious persecution should be a priority in US foreign policy, but new internationalist leaders would likely put relatively higher priority on protecting the environment, fighting AIDS, and providing famine relief. They would also be more likely to disapprove of preemptive war and disapprove of pro-Israel bias in US engagement of the Middle East. First, regarding the environment, the WVS asked respondents if they “would agree to an increase in taxes if the extra money were used to prevent environmental pollution.” Among both the general public and the evanTable 7.3.

Increases taxes if the extra money is used to prevent environmental pollution.* Protect environment even if it causes slower economic growth and some loss of jobs.* Disagree that the U.S. must be able to take preemptive military action.** Disagree that the U.S. should support Israel over the Palestinians in the Middle East.** U.S. foreign policy should give high priority to fighting religious persecution.** U.S. foreign policy should give high priority to famine relief.** U.S. foreign policy should give high priority to fighting AIDS.** *World Values Survey, 2000 **Bliss Institute, 2004

US

US Evangelicals

60%

60%

59

60

22

13

38

25

28

37

53

49

66

58

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gelical population, 60 percent agreed. And when asked if “Protecting the environment should be a priority, even if it causes slower economic growth and some loss of jobs,” the result was nearly identical: 59 percent of the general public and 60 percent of evangelicals said yes. The Bliss Institute survey asked a wide variety of questions that are also relevant to the question of liberal internationalism. First, when presented with the statement, “Given the threat of terrorism, the US must be able to take preemptive military action against other countries,” 22 percent of the general public disagreed, but an even smaller proportion (13 percent) of Evangelicals disagreed. The difference was even starker in response to the statement, “The US should support Israel over the Palestinians in the Middle East.” In this case, 38 percent of the general public disagreed but only 25 percent of the evangelicals disagreed. Respondents were then presented with a list of three items—fighting AIDS around the world, providing famine relief, and fighting religious persecution—and for each item they were asked if US foreign policy should give it “high priority,” “some priority,” or “low priority.” A disappointing finding for Christian Right and new internationalist leaders alike is that only 37 percent of Evangelicals gave fighting religious persecution high priority. However, such leaders might take some solace in the fact that this level of support was significantly higher than among the general public (only 28 percent). Regarding famine relief, a narrow majority of 53 percent of the general public gave it a high priority, but a narrow minority (49 percent) of Evangelicals did so. And when it comes to fighting AIDS, while a majority of 58 percent of Evangelicals gave it high priority, the general public supported this priority even more strongly, at 66 percent. American Evangelicals and Global South Evangelicals As Global South Evangelicals are quickly becoming the drivers of growth and vitality in evangelicalism worldwide, it is important to ask: do their views align more with the issue positions of the traditional Christian Right or with the new internationalists? Many who have studied evangelicalism in the developing world would suggest the latter. For example, Timothy Shah has argued that, “Though evangelicals [in the South] are assumed to be agents of the American religious right and purveyors of militant ‘fundamentalism,’ their lower socioeconomic status often leads them to consider economics at least as important as ‘morality’ and consequently to align with left-wing political movements perceived to be pro-poor.”15 Table 7.4 sheds light on this broader comparative question, presenting findings from the WVS survey for the US, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.16 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sharpest contrast is in response to the

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Table 7.4.

Government should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for.* This country should provide more economic aid to poorer countries.* Increase taxes if the extra money is used to prevent environmental pollution.* Protect environment even if it causes slower economic growth and some loss of jobs.* Has “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the United Nations.*

Latin Latin America America Evan

US

US Evan

Africa

Africa Evan

15%

7%

39%

45%

51%

51%

42

39

52

59

38

39

60

60

52

53

48

46

59

60

49

55

40

41

55

55

40

32

63

64

*World Values Survey, 2000

question about the government’s role in ensuring that everyone is provided for. Latin American and African Evangelicals are far more progressive—a spread of 38 and 44 percentage points, respectively. The findings are also striking in response to the question about providing economic aid to poorer countries. Even though African and Latin American countries are themselves far poorer than the US, African Evangelicals approve of foreign aid at the same level as US Evangelicals (39 percent), and Latin American Evangelicals approve foreign aid at a markedly higher level (59 percent). The contrast goes in the other direction, however, on the survey questions about environmental protection. As with the questions about government help for the poor, evangelical responses generally track fairly closely with regional responses in Latin America and Africa. However, the respondents in these regions appear somewhat less willing than US respondents to absorb costs associated with protecting the environment. Finally, there is an interesting contrast in both directions when it comes to the level of confidence in the UN. Latin American Evangelicals are markedly less confident than US Evangelicals (32 percent vs. 55 percent), and also somewhat less confident than Latin Americans in general (32 percent vs. 40 percent). However, African Evangelicals (64 percent), like Africans in general (63 percent), are somewhat more confident in the UN than their US counterparts.

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CONCLUSION What do Tables 7.1–7.4 tell us, then, about the prospects of the evangelical rank and file lining up behind certain progressive views now advocated by growing numbers of evangelical leaders? To be sure, these data are surfacelevel descriptive statistics, without the benefit of multivariate analysis. And it’s always possible that more recent data might reveal a shifting pattern. Still, the evidence available here suggests that the impact of evangelical identity on new internationalist priorities is either negative or negligible on most measures. A modest exception is revealed in Table 7.4, specifically Latin American Evangelicals, who are somewhat more likely than Latin Americans in general to support domestic and foreign aid to the poor, and to support environmental protection even if it slows economic growth. However, apart from these specific items in the Latin America data, the proportion of Global South Evangelicals holding progressive opinion is at or below the corresponding regional levels. Moreover, none of the indicators of progressive views in Table 7.4 generate a majority across all three evangelical populations (US, Latin America, and Africa). In other words, there isn’t an obvious global evangelical consensus to which new internationalist leaders can appeal. Tables 7.1–7.3 likewise reveal formidable challenges facing leaders who wish to appeal to American Evangelicals as Evangelicals to support their progressive agenda. In these tables, the level of evangelical support for the new internationalism was either at or below the US national level on every measure except one: 37 percent of Evangelicals believe that US foreign policy should give high priority to fighting religious persecution, as opposed to 28 percent of Americans in general. But the fact that this level of evangelical support falls so far short of an actual majority hardly bodes well, particularly since international religious freedom was in many ways the catalyst issue in the new internationalist trend among evangelical activists. The more encouraging news for new internationalist leaders is that they do enjoy majority support among US Evangelicals on some issues: feeling confidence in the United Nations, believing that the US should cooperate with international organizations to maintain world peace, believing that government should fight poverty and protect the environment even if it is costly, and believing that US foreign policy should give high priority to fighting AIDS. In other words, the stereotype of evangelicalism as the handmaiden to unremitting right-wing conservatism is false on a number of the most important global issues of our day. The caveat, however, is that on these issues evangelical opinion appears to be simply tracking along with national opinion; in terms of progressive

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internationalism, Evangelicals are not out ahead of the general public, but only keeping pace with it. The challenge for new internationalist leaders is therefore to both broaden and deepen a Christian political philosophy of global engagement, a vision that can be both compelling and sustainable at the grassroots of evangelicalism.

NOTES 1. See Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (New York: Routledge, 1996). 2. William Martin, “The Christian Right and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy (Spring 1999). 3. Dennis R. Hoover, “Choosing up Sides in the Middle East,” Religion in the News 5, no.3 (Fall 2002), available online at http://caribou.cc.trincoll.edu/depts_ csrpl/RINVol5No3/middle%20east.htm. 4. This paragraph was adapted from Dennis R. Hoover, “Is Evangelicalism Itching for a Civilization Fight? A Media Study,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 2, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 11–16, available online at www.RFIAonline.org. 5. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Following God Abroad,” New York Times, 21 May 2002. See also David Brooks, “A Natural Alliance,” New York Times, 26 May 2005. 6. On evangelical environmentalism see “A Cross of Green,” The Economist, 29 November 2007, and Andrew Walsh, “Men in Green,” Religion in the News 10, no. 3 (Winter 2008). 7. Walter Russell Mead, “God’s Country?” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 5 (September/ October 2006), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85504/walter-russell -mead/god-s-country.html (accessed 10 April 2008). 8. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957). 9. Brian Stanley, “Evangelical Social and Political Ethics: An Historical Perspective,” Evangelical Quarterly 62 (1990): 20. 10. George M. Marsden, “Evangelical Social Concern: Dusting Off the Heritage,” Christianity Today, May 1972, 9. 11. Mead, “God’s Country?” 12. Allen D. Hertzke, Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 13. In the Bliss Institute data the “definition of Evangelical Protestantism includes the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant denomination), the Assemblies of God, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Lutheran ChurchMissouri Synod, and a large number of smaller denominations. Also included are nondenominational churches identified with evangelical religious movements (such as fundamentalism).” Black Protestants are categorized as a distinct religious tradition. See http://pewforum.org/newassets/misc/green-full.pdf. The World Values Survey unfortunately did not contain detailed denominational data. The proxy definition I employed for this study uses measures of religious tradition, race, and religious belief. Evangelicals are defined as Protestants who affirm all of the religious

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beliefs included in the survey: belief in God, life after death, the soul, heaven, and hell. In the US, black Protestants were screened out of the evangelical category. 14. For all statistics cited in this chapter, “Agree” and “Agree Strongly” responses are combined into a single “Agree” percentage. Likewise for “Disagree” and “Disagree Strongly.” 15. Timothy Shah, “The Bible and the Ballot Box: Evangelicals and Democracy in the ‘Global South’,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 24, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2004): 117. 16. Latin American countries included in the WVS data employed here are Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela. African countries included in the WVS data employed here are South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Uganda.

8 Contending Ways of Life James W. Skillen

May we now declare this book a wrap? Have we neatly wrapped up the complex and perplexing world in which we live? Of course not. No one but God can do that; only God “holds the whole world in his hands.” What we do hope, however, is that this book will provoke creative and critical thinking about our rapidly changing world and encourage reflection on the responsibilities we face today. Our aim now is to draw together some of the threads running through the preceding chapters and to highlight a few of the most important responsibilities that face humankind in the years ahead.

THE CHANGING LOCUS OF SOVEREIGNTY There can be little doubt that the sovereignty of states is being reshaped today. It is not so much that states are disappearing or being displaced by either anarchy or a global tyranny. Rather, the very nature of international intertwinement and global shrinkage is demanding of states an exercise of responsibility that they cannot adequately fulfill on their own as separate states. Picture it in the simplest of terms: there once was a day when a few ambassadors and a few trading companies and, on occasion, a few armies made almost all the connections that existed among states. Today, new technologies of communication, travel, and transportation allow hundreds of millions of people, many of whom represent millions of organizations, to interact with one another across borders as quickly and as thoroughly as they interact with people in their own countries. Trade and diplomacy are now highly multilateral and happen to be so dense and intricate that 107

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they require the establishment of countless international organizations to try to manage their interactions by rules that apply across the board. States themselves, in other words, have pushed some of their traditional responsibility and authority to a higher, multilateral level in order to try to fulfill obligations they have to their own citizens. A small-scale example of this process was the early American colonies, which tried to shore up their independence as states at the time of the Revolution and found that they needed to establish a minimal central government to regulate interstate commerce and to provide for their common defense. On a larger scale today, think of the European Union (EU), which represents a deepening bond among a growing number of European countries that want transnational management of their multifaceted, densely intertwined populations. Old-style diplomacy between governments, which drew up specific trade agreements on a bilateral or trilateral basis, would be completely inadequate to deal with the number and the scope of relationships among European peoples, companies, institutions, and organizations today. During the same time that we’ve seen the transfer of a degree of state sovereignty “upwards,” however, we have also witnessed the “downward” distribution of a degree of state sovereignty, whether willingly or unwillingly, to local and regional levels, as Steven Meyer and Rodney Ludema have explained. Furthermore, we are witnessing in many parts of the world the ongoing differentiation and expanding influence of nongovernment organizations (schools, churches, development organizations, musical groups, the media, watchdog organizations, and scientific bodies as well as businesses). One reason for these developments is that national governments are too slow or unable to deal with matters that need to be handled at lower levels of government. Another reason is that nongovernment responsibilities have a character of their own and independent responsibilities to exercise. Yet, increasingly, those activities are expanding and deepening across national boundaries. Relationships among scientists, artists, humanitarian activists, medical professionals, educators, journalists, investors, and development organizations, to name only a few, are becoming so direct and dense that they bear their own witness to the fact that people are not defined or confined primarily by their national identity and citizenship. All of this means that national governments in traditional states today possess relatively less sovereignty than they did 200 years ago or even 50 years ago. If we now add the growing transnational challenges of environmental degradation, financial flows, terrorism, weapons production and distribution, and the vast migration of peoples, it is easy to see that there is relatively little that a single state (or small group of states) can do by itself to deal with matters that are both global and local in character. It is useful to look at these developments from the perspective of international law. For the most part, people everywhere depend on laws made by

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tribal, local, and/or national governments. These include laws for marriage, ownership, markets, religious practice, public health, crime, and much more. Healthy and stable governments are needed to make, enforce, and adjudicate laws. But what happens when a growing body of law is needed for international trade, for regulating atmospheric pollutants, for capturing and trying terrorists, or for determining when an international body of police or military forces should go into a conflict region such as Darfur, Rwanda, Kosovo, or Afghanistan to try to stop the conflict and protect innocent people? The need for these types of transnational law has been growing rapidly as the world shrinks, warms, flattens, and endures war and genocide. Yet there is no transnational government to initiate and back up such lawmaking. Even though the need for lawful governance at levels beyond the state is becoming more obvious by the day, there is far too little such governance available when it is needed. This means that states, international organizations, and non-state organizations often feel compelled to take action to deal with problems beyond their range of competence, and that may only make things worse. And it means that some crises will continue to grow because existing states and international organizations cannot agree on what to do. An example today of such international indecision is that of world trade talks conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization that grind on slowly year after year with few resolutions of the pressing problems and opportunities that brought the WTO into existence in the first place. At the end of July 2008, the seven-year Doha Round of talks in Geneva broke down for the third or fourth time. A Washington Post editorial writer opined that “members of the World Trade Organization proved themselves unready for such a [new trade and development] deal for the foreseeable future. This result casts a long shadow over the WTO’s future relevance and increases the likelihood that global trade will splinter into competing regional or sectoral blocs” (30 July 2008). Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, agreed, saying that what is most likely to happen now is “‘a real fragmentation of world trade’, with more bilateral agreements, more dispute settlement procedures at the WTO and, especially, more protectionism.”1 Ludema set the stage to help us understand this dynamic. What we are witnessing today in the shift away from an old international framework defined largely by sovereign states is not something that we may ignore or reject as simply a disagreeable idea. Many Americans want the US to retain its absolute and unchallenged sovereignty and even get out of organizations like the UN that confine its freedom to operate. But that is a wish grounded in a nationalist ideal that has less and less grip on reality. Even our most nationalistic presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who intended to strengthen US sovereignty and independence, contributed to America’s growing interdependence with other states in the world through their policies on trade, resource consumption, arms production and sales,

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defense alliances, and more. The shrinking, flattening, warming, warring world at our doorstep is not something one nation can retreat from or resist on its own simply by the power of its belief or by regularly repeating the mantra that American sovereignty will never diminish. Looking to the future, the challenge as we see it is not one of either resisting or merely giving into the weakening of the sovereign-state system. Rather, the challenge is to figure out how to promote just governance for the good of all. What will it take to do that? In some parts of the world, it is precisely a sound and stable state that is needed to displace tribal warring, or anarchy, or the oppression of an unaccountable dictator. In other parts of the world, the release of smaller regions from imperial governments or from unwieldy states to become independent themselves is just what may be needed to make just governance possible at local levels. And the strengthening of localities and regions within some centralized states has been a good thing for the strengthening of just governance. At the international level, however, the challenge seems far greater, in part because of the complexity of the world’s peoples and cultures and because of the difficulty in creating international and transnational governing structures that can assure people and states of better governance than they now have. After all, it is not obvious that the creation of a larger, more authoritative international governing institution or of a new kind of transnational state (which the EU might someday become) will mean that the peoples of the world will automatically enjoy better governance. Good government is something that must be achieved and demonstrated, not merely wished for. It is something that requires adequate accountability as well as support from those who are governed. And just governance at a transnational level cannot mean the elimination of lower levels of government. To the contrary, just governance will require strong agreement among peoples and nations about the relationship between different levels of government all the way up to the highest level and all the way down to the lowest. What we have tried to show in the essays of this book is that good governance in a shrinking globe now requires some new and better modes of international and transnational governance. And that is something different from merely pushing for freedom and democracy within the current system of supposedly sovereign states.

ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION From an economic point of view the shrinking, flattening world is more and more familiar to a wide public, even if no one can understand all its complexities. The preceding essays have tried to illuminate the landscape of this high drama on main street, across the network of global pipelines, and

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in the fields of agricultural production. Americans are now aware that most of their clothes and children’s toys are made in China or Korea or Vietnam. Many jobs that once existed in the US are now being performed somewhere else in the world. We know that an American debit card inserted into an ATM machine in Spain or Australia or Brazil can put that country’s currency into the cardholder’s hands while simultaneously subtracting just the right amount of US dollars from her home bank account. We’ve heard the news that Anheuser-Busch—the most famous American beer company—has been bought out by a Belgian company and will no longer be “American.” We realize, at least in some dim sense, that rising oil and gas consumption all over the world has, for all practical purposes, created a single world market. Pipelines built by groups of companies from many countries pump and transport oil and gas across vast stretches of land, ice, and even the sea, as Alice-Catherine Carls explained.2 Perhaps the most difficult thing for Americans to adjust to is the fact that the global economy is being shaped increasingly by the initiatives of other countries and by companies from other parts of the world. On a July morning in 2008 (and almost any morning in recent years), one could read news like this: “China is preparing to move into Africa on a scale that far outstrips its acquisitions on the continent to date. . . . High-level groups of bankers from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China [ICBC] and Standard Bank, respectively China and Africa’s biggest banks, are examining potential targets in Africa’s oil and gas, telecommunications, base metals and power sectors. . . .” The ICBC and Standard Bank, according to the latter’s chief executive, “can build a [financial and trade] superhighway that connects China and Africa” (Financial Times, 31 July 08). In this story there is no reference to, or no need for, American or European bankers. The optimists, as we’ve heard many times, look on the bright side of economic globalization: more jobs, more goods, more services for more people, including more and more poor people. The pessimists notice the millions of people who are not benefiting from this process and stress the negative consequences of ever increasing industrial growth and global shrinking: climate change, conflicts over limited resources, sweatshop labor conditions, the concentration of power in a few large transnational companies, and more. The views of both optimists and pessimists push the “responsibility question” to the fore once again. What is responsible economic development on a global scale? What ought we and our businesses and our governments to be aiming for with respect to buying and selling, production and labor relations, and government policymaking? Is the responsible thing simply to let people produce and sell whatever they want? Is economic growth, as measured by various GDP figures, the goal we should all be striving for? Or should our goal be to try to preserve American economic preeminence? Or should our aim be to increase personal wealth,

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or to strengthen national power, or to fight global poverty in the face of economic globalization? It is difficult enough to try to answer such questions within a national context where governments are, to some degree, held accountable by citizens and where enterprising and consumption can be defined, protected, regulated, and weighed to some degree with reference to the common good. But how do we even begin to think about global economic responsibility, especially during the current economic crisis? To be sure, there are certain natural limits built into creation: fossil fuels are not inexhaustible; the intensification of pollution will cause human, animal, and plant degradation; and rising commodity prices can force a reevaluation of agricultural priorities and the value and limits of good crop land for a growing world population. But humans are more than merely reactive animals. We are the ones who set aspirational goals, decide what to produce and to consume, and make laws that define the corporation, set tax rates, and encourage or discourage investment. It may be a long time, if the time ever comes, before adequate international standards and transnational means of governance are established to govern healthy and balanced economic behavior that is global in scope. Yet, here and now we have to make personal decisions, act responsibly in our businesses, and call our local and national governments to action. How should we act personally and as part of these institutions to promote sustainable, humanly honoring, and balanced economic development both domestically and internationally? How should we shape decision making about healthy global economic integration (and differentiation)? These are increasingly urgent questions, especially if it appears that some of the institutional means for addressing them are not in place.

DIFFERENTIATING SPHERES OF RESPONSIBILITY Compared to changes in the locus of sovereignty and economic globalization, there are other dimensions of our rapidly changing world that receive less attention in the public media and in scholarly studies. These are the matters that Meyer, Max Stackhouse, Charles Glenn, and Dennis Hoover have illuminated for us. The world is shaped not only by states, international government organizations, and business and commercial companies. People throughout the world educate their children, worship gods, pursue scientific and philosophical inquiries, make music, write poetry, take action to serve neighbors in need, develop widely diverse cuisines, create popular culture, engage in sports, and communicate increasingly via the Internet. We cannot adequately understand what is going on in these spheres of life if we look at the world only through political or economic spectacles. Consider, for example, the crisis in the communion of Anglican churches

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worldwide. Most of the Anglican churches are organized within national boundaries, such as the Episcopal Church in the US. But given current disputes, such as the one over the ordination of gay priests, there is a growing realignment of churches throughout the world either in favor of or in opposition to gay ordination. As a result, many American Episcopal churches are now placing themselves under Anglican bishops in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. Here is a theological and moral dispute within an ecclesiastical communion that transcends national boundaries and has little to do with what is happening politically or economically in the world. And yet this is part of what is shaping globalization today. Or consider education, which is the subject of Glenn’s essay. Most American schools, run largely by local governments under state direction, serve the same general purpose, which is backed by the federal government’s investment in various special programs. But there have always been nongovernment schools in the US and many of them have been closely connected in philosophy or religious purpose with schools in other countries run by Catholic orders or by Protestant school associations, or affiliated with a Montessori educational philosophy. Today, parents and educators are developing a wider array of aims and purposes for the education of children. Not only are national and state-run schools around the world losing some degree of the monopoly they once held, but the means of organizing and affiliating nongovernment schools are evident internationally as well as locally. Here again, what we are witnessing is a dynamic that doesn’t fit old paradigms for national schooling. As a third example, consider the work of scientists. Most of us may still tend to think of American scientists working to advance American industry and interests, such as designing an atomic bomb before the Germans could do so or giving an edge to American businesses because of the technological innovations they make possible. We tend to count the number of Americans who have won Nobel prizes in contrast to the number of winners from other countries. But science was never a nationally circumscribed mode of human intellectual achievement. And today we are witnessing the expansion of networks of scientists cooperating in the study of space, the environment, and human diseases with little if any regard for the political and economic aims typically considered under the rubric of globalization. Perhaps most familiar to the public are the periodic reports put out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from dozens of countries around the world. Rather than thinking of a flattening world, therefore, we might better think of the world as an arena where new valleys and peaks are emerging in a culturally and institutionally differentiating world. Flattening may be true to the extent that the work of scientists is communicated more quickly and uniformly throughout the world and that scientific methods can spread

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more extensively and become common languages across all borders. But it is also true that we are now discovering more and more species of plants and other creatures as well as becoming aware of the serious rate of species extinction. We are also learning about other kinds, and a greater number of, medical treatments in different cultures and about types of knowledge that Western sciences ignored or could never have obtained through their methods. In all of these respects the world is expanding, not shrinking; it is becoming more undulated, creviced, and peaked rather than flattened. And in the realms of science, the arts, medicine, religious institutions, schooling, and more, we are confronted with types of human activity that are not primarily defined by political or economic boundaries or purposes. If we are to understand in some small way the world that is taking shape before our eyes, we will have to think and act much more multidimensionally and multi-institutionally, as Stackhouse has argued. On the one hand, we can recognize that there is nothing new on the human horizon: humans have always engaged in production and exchange, education, governance, and social organizing. There is nothing new under the sun, as the Preacher of Ecclesiastes reported long ago. On the other hand, however, the historical and institutional framework within which we have been developing these activities for the last 60 years, the last 250 years, or the last 500 years is morphing into new configurations. And those configurations are more complex both locally and internationally than ever before. Consequently, we are thrown back on the most fundamental questions of all: Who are human beings? What is the meaning of life? How should the wide variety of human capabilities and achievements (family life, agriculture, science, the arts, economic development, worship, governance, and more) be understood and developed in relation to one another? Is the highest realization of life’s meaning to be found in military combat, or in scientific and philosophic thought, or in loving relationships, or in the governance of a complex society, or in technological innovation, or in the production of wealth, or in the love and service of God through a balanced development of all human gifts toward that end?

RELIGIONS AS WAYS OF LIFE With all the discussion of globalization in the last two or three decades, perhaps the least understood dimension of it has been the meaning and role of religions. Not only has the continuing vibrancy of traditional religions surprised many Westerners who had come to believe that religions were on their way out, yet even those who pay attention to religious matters have often misidentified and misjudged the character of religions. Part of the reason for the misunderstanding is that when Westerners, in particular,

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turn their attention to religion, they treat it as one among many activities or variables of human life, distinguishing religion from sports or politics or science, for example. Yet, if we look carefully at religious communities and even whole societies around the world, we can see that religions typically function not as one variable among others but as the root from which life’s branches grow and on which they continue to depend. Worship services and religious ceremonies of various kinds are only one kind of activity among many, but religions are ways of life and not only ways of worship. Consider, for example, an op-ed column by John Kay in the Financial Times of London (9 January 2007). “Environmentalism,” he writes, “offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anticapitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.” Environmentalism, in other words, has become a kind of religion, or a stand-in for religions. Business people, says Kay, should respond to the rise of environmentalism as they would to “other forms of religious belief. Business leaders do not themselves have to believe its doctrines. Indeed we should be wary if they do: business linked to faiths and ideologies is a sinister and unaccountable power.” Kay is correct, I believe, in stating that for many people modern ideologies, including environmentalism, have displaced Christian and other religious ways of life. Environmentalism, like socialism or any other “-ism,” comes to function as an encompassing frame of reference and approach to life. Yet Kay apparently believes that all religions and ideologies are dangerous. And he wants business people to avoid their dangers and stick to sound judgments about life in this world. That means not mixing business with religions of any kind. He imagines that religions and religious “isms” can be shunted off to the side so they won’t interfere with secular life. However, Kay seems unaware of the degree to which many people have turned business, or the market, or profit, or capitalism into their way of life—into the central axis around which all of life turns, the central motivation for life as a whole. Religion, when thought of only as that which is cultic or ceremonial and led by bishops and pastors, may indeed be only one among many activities in which some people engage. But we may not so easily discount as un-religious those ways of life that direct whole communities and cultures even if they make no reference to a transcendent or mysterious source of life. Secular religions, including capitalism as an integrating way of life, can become the deepest motivating drives of a society. Let’s take another contemporary illustration. Most religious practices are tightly controlled in China. Like many educational, scientific, and media organizations, churches must meet strict registration guidelines. Many groups that cannot accept the strictures operate secretly, underground, for as long as they can. Would we be correct, then, to identify China as a

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non-religious, secular, communist system, which happens to restrain or oppress religions? No, that is not quite accurate, for it keeps us from seeing the religiosity of China, the nation, as a whole. China’s leaders are at work today in a subtle way, trying to revive admiration for, if not veneration of, Confucius, as Richard McGregor recently reported.3 The religious zeal that characterized the communist regime of Mao Zedong (from 1949 to 1976) led him to attack Confucius as an outdated drag on the transformation of China. Mao destroyed the temple that honored Confucius in the ancient philosopher’s hometown of Qufu. As a comprehensive wisdom for life, Confucianism was perceived as a major roadblock to Mao’s plan to radically transform China into a communist society. It may be surprising, then, to realize that Mao’s attempt to build a new kind of society based on his own wisdom—published as a devotional guide in his little Red Book—led him to assume a position similar to that of earlier Confucian emperors. Mao adopted a role like that of the ancient Son of Heaven (the emperor) who was empowered by the Mandate of Heaven to establish a harmonious Confucian social order. For Mao, the new religion would be harmonious communism. Among the problems China faces today, decades after Mao, is a weakening moral fabric. The current way of life that China’s leaders have authorized is dedicated to ever-increasing economic growth, which also justifies personal quests for wealth. As has happened in the West where consumerism, individualism, and the all-out push for economic growth can undermine moral obligations and social solidarity, so in China there is a similar tendency in evidence today. The present government in China senses that its moral authority is weaker than Mao’s and much weaker than the authority once enjoyed by the emperors who nurtured strong Confucian moral bonds with the people. This may be the reason why the Communist Party is now beginning to reinstate Confucius, as became quite evident in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. To be able to keep pushing an agenda for China’s growth, the political leaders need to regain something like the mantle of benevolent and enlightened authority that once united the people with their leaders in earlier eras. The leadership needs the people to trust it and to agree that the government’s strong control over society and the economy is best for achieving a harmonious society. This quest for national harmony in China today requires that any set of beliefs, any pattern of wisdom, held by any group must conform to, or remain subordinated to, the way of life prescribed by the government and the Communist Party. The government alone bears the Mandate of Heaven (even if “heaven” is no longer mentioned or is granted only a metaphorical status). The party’s path to social harmony is the only legitimate path for China as a whole to take.

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The description just offered is of nothing less than a government-led religious way of life, and this is where Confucius reenters. As McGregor writes, Confucius can serve as “an important antidote to organized religion, which is growing rapidly in China, especially Christianity in various forms. At a time when Chinese leaders fret about rampant capitalism and a parallel ‘collapse in values’, they prefer any spiritual vacuum to be filled by a quasi-state religion framed around Confucius rather than a potentially dangerous import.” There is no room, in other words, for two (or more) ultimate authorities and comprehensive ways of life to coexist in the same place at the same time. A Confucius-blessed, communist-capitalist way of life ordained by a government that subordinates every other way of life to its own, is nothing less than a religious way of life.4 One final example. According to Omer Faruk Genckaya, a professor at Bikent University in Turkey, “Secularism is the most defining element of the establishment of the republic. It is a kind of religion in Turkey that is as important as Islam.”5 Vincent Boland, who quoted Genckaya, then goes on to say, “The idea of secularism as religion is a paradox, but it helps to explain the singular notion of what Turkish secularism actually means.” Turkey is one of the most important places in the world today in which to observe the dynamism of religions (including secularism) competing to shape society and government at their very root. It is a country of 74 million people, most of whom (above 90 percent) are Muslim. Yet its state structure, established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, has been absolutely secular, entailing the exclusion of all Muslim practices—even the wearing of head scarves—in the affairs of government and in much of the economy and education. Ataturk had reason in 1923, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, to worry about the stability and success of an Islamic state in such a large and populous territory. Taking a cue from French laicism, which had forcefully displaced public Christianity with secularism, Ataturk set out to define government and citizenship in terms of secular nationalism rather than Islam. In many respects, Ataturk was successful beyond most expectations. Secular nationalism was taught so well in schools and enforced so strongly in public life that it became an article of faith as part of the entire national way of life. Not everyone was converted to the new public religion, but most people accommodated themselves to its requirements enforced by secularist elites, especially the military. Yet, we might ask, isn’t the privatization of Islam a contradiction in terms? Muslims believe in a God who transcends all human political authority and governs all of life. It might be one thing for Muslims to accommodate themselves somewhat uncomfortably to a regime that disallows full public expression of Islam, but to demand of all citizens that they accept public secularism as a matter of faith is another

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thing altogether. In fact, since 1923, many kinds of rebellion and resistance to Turkey’s secularism have arisen from among the people, but none was able to change the system. Whenever it appeared to be necessary, the military put down rebellions, ousted governments, and made clear to everyone that force was on the side of “Kemalism”—political secularism. Over time, however, and particularly in the last two decades, popular movements arose to address the needs of the middle classes and the poorer communities in Turkey’s cities, villages, and countryside, needs that were not being met by the increasingly complacent elites. Leaders among the common people focused on jobs, health care, and other public services, and those development efforts were expressive of obligations incumbent on the Muslim faithful. Before long, some of these leaders were elected to city councils and then eventually to mayoral offices, and finally, through the rapidly expanding Justice and Development Party (the AKP), to the prime minister’s office in 2002. The relatively new AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became the prime minister, won the support of ordinary people—mostly faithful Muslims—who had not been served well by the secular nationalists. Here was something new, a political party that did not hold to or insist on the ideology (religion) of secularism but did accept the practice of democracy with no evident intention of seeking governmental power to establish Islam as a public monopoly. Erdogan and his supporters fostered economic growth, built up the infrastructure, and worked harder than any prior government to move Turkey toward entrance into the European Union. And the AKP demonstrated that it is not necessary for citizens to believe in secularism in order to enjoy full citizenship in the republic. In essence, the AKP is trying to put something new into practice, different from both monopolistic secularism and monopolistic Islam. We might call it public pluralism, through which people of all faiths, including both secularists and Muslims, are given room to live out their faiths in public life without any of them being allowed to monopolize the political arena. Erdogan and the AKP may not succeed in their effort. The difficulty of achieving a pluralist polity in Turkey seems great. Will the more radical Islamists support a society in which they have more room to express themselves but cannot dominate? Will radical secularists, including the military leaders, accept a system that gives believing secularists continued access to political life but no longer a monopoly over government, the military, and the bureaucracy? If so, Turkey may well be developing a model that could have potent significance not only for other Muslim countries and religiously diversified states, such as India and Indonesia, but also for the world at a transnational level. Will any of the major ways of life that are strongly influential in the world today become more powerful than all others? Will it be nationalism

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in all its variegated colors (Chinese, American,6 Russian, and others) that comes to dominate? If so, nationalism does not appear to be the kind of religion that can bring the world together and help build stronger and more just transnational modes of governance. Or perhaps capitalism will become the dominant religious driving force throughout the world, seeing that even in China capitalists can now be members of the Communist Party. If capitalism becomes the dominant way of life, it may be able to transcend and bring conformity to the world’s many states that are now losing some of their sovereign power and authority. In part, this is the faith and hope of many economic globalists. However, if capitalism cannot bring rich and poor together into its way of life, then divisions and conflicts may increase both transnationally and within states, between wealthier groups who keep the capitalist faith and poorer people who give up or denounce that faith. Perhaps, however, we are about to enter a time when one or more of the older world religions—Christianity or Islam, for example—will become most influential and draw people together beyond their national and class identities and establish the framework for multicultural and multiinstitutional community on a global level. Yet, here too, the historical record of conflict and opposition between and among religious ways of life does not make one overly optimistic. What seems more likely is that competing ways of life with their guiding faiths and ideologies—including capitalism and nationalism, Christianity and Islam—will continue to contend with one another for control of the hearts and behaviors of peoples without any of them becoming dominant worldwide. Samuel Huntington’s argument about the “clash of civilizations” builds on this possibility.7 Yet Huntington’s argument assumes, for the most part, a kind of solidarity or coherence within civilizations, when, in fact, many of the clashes are taking place inside states and cultures of the same civilization. This is what we see in Turkey with the internal clash between Islam and secularism, and in a milder way in places like the United States and Great Britain, between Christianity and secularism. Early in 2008, for example, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, stirred up an international hornet’s nest with a lecture exploring how Muslim sharia (law) might be accommodated within the British legal system.8 Leaving to one side a consideration of the distinctive character of the British system of laws and institutions, two elements of his lecture are worth noting in our present context: his references to “religious communities” and his argument about the relation of “universal secular law” to “social pluralism.” The Anglican Archbishop’s references to religious communities are important not only in regard to the conflict between Christianity and secularism but also in regard to our concern in this book with the complex character of differentiated civil societies with their many institutions

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and organizations. Primarily, Dr. Williams was concerned in his talk with those minority communities inside Britain, such as Muslims and Jews, who “relate to something other than the British legal system alone.” In other places, however, he had in view institutions that are different from the Church of England yet function similarly within Muslim and Jewish communities. And at other points he seemed to have in view a community of Abrahamic faith communities that could in some way share a theology of law and society. One problem created by his equivocation about “faith communities” shows up in his comment that they “relate to something other than the British legal system alone.” Part of what he meant, surely, is that anyone in Britain, not only a Muslim, should be free to belong to non-state organizations. He opposes a “monopolistic” conception of “universal secular law” that would force people to choose between “cultural loyalty” and “state loyalty,” as if there were nothing outside “the British legal system.” If this is what he meant by “something other” (i.e. arenas of life in which parents, educators, publishers, and others bear responsibilities different from the responsibilities of parliament and the courts), then everyone, and not only minority communities should have freedom to relate to something more than the British legal system alone. Pluralism of that kind is already recognized in British law and in most Western legal systems and it may simply need to be adjusted or expanded to make sure that Muslims are treated with equal justice. If Dr. Williams meant by “something other” a realm of divine law or moral constraint that transcends the entire British system of law, then again minority religious communities in Britain are not peculiar. Christians themselves give allegiance to the higher authority of God that transcends both the Crown and the Church of England. Perhaps the Archbishop’s equivocation was due to the fact that the Church’s law is, as he said, “the law of the land” in a way that Muslim sharia is not. In that case, he may be looking for a way to permit Muslims to heed what they revere as divine mandates not currently recognized by the British legal and ecclesiastical system. Such a change, however, may require either the disestablishment of the Church of England, so it would become like other “religious communities,” or the pluralization of the Church to the point where it could make room, under its authority, for Muslim practice of some elements of sharia. That brings us to the second point about universal secular law and social pluralism. The Archbishop’s argument toward the end of his lecture suggests that he wanted to reconceive the universality of public law more narrowly in a “negative rather than a positive sense.” In other words, what he would like to see remain universal about the law is the protection it provides for every person’s basic human dignity, while beyond that, people should be free to pursue social and cultural pluralism—in marriage, finance, and

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perhaps education and other spheres of life. “The role of ‘secular’ law,” he said, “is not the dissolution of these things [religion, custom, and habit] in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress.” However, this argument presupposes the existence of something more than just a legal-rights umpire; it presupposes a British political community in which every citizen is a member and in which the government governs everyone for the common good of all. After all, who has authority to decide when a religious community has become too “isolated”? Who is to judge when the “restraints” of a religion on citizens are too great and call for public redress? Who decides when different ways of understanding human liberties are “incompatible” enough to require public action? The answer, of course, is that the national community’s government and courts will decide. Perhaps what Dr. Williams was after is an idea of how diverse religious communities, including Muslims, can be allowed to give allegiance to God beyond allegiance to Crown and Church, while being equally free to live in Great Britain. Public “secular” law would also thereby recognize the right of all British citizens, who are members of different religious communities or of none, to engage in diverse practices in the nongovernment spheres of marriage, private finance, education, and more. However, the foundation for such religious freedom and social pluralism is that all citizens, as members of the same political community, must abide by the public laws of the nation that make religious freedom and societal pluralism possible. And if any community of citizens wants to change the laws that stipulate the obligations of citizenship, or that protect religious freedom, or that articulate the identities and freedoms of nongovernment organizations, they will have to participate in the open democratic process to try to do so. We are left with at least three questions here, and they are questions relevant to developments throughout the world and not only within Great Britain. Are public pluralism and religious freedom compatible with sharia and/or the legal norms of other religions? Is open pluralism, which makes room for the equal treatment of all faith communities in public, compatible with secularism? And finally, does open-society pluralism have a foundation in Christianity and/or in other religious ways of life? There can be little doubt today that the dominant ways of life in the world are not confined within national borders. Nationalism, capitalism, Christianity, and Islam, to take just four of the most vibrant shapers of societies and civilizations, are global forces. None has a monopoly over the shaping of life, and in most regions of the world two or more of these ways of life are in strong contention with one another. In many cases the

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contention is at play within the hearts and minds of the same persons. American civil-religious nationalism and capitalism contend with one another and with the Christian way of life in the United States. Secularism contends with nationalism, capitalism, and Islam in Turkey. Nationalism and capitalism contend with Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths in China. And all of these ways of life are in contention at the UN, in the WTO, in NATO, and in other international forums. The challenge facing people of every faith and every way of life is global in scope as never before, but this should not be a surprise to Christians who profess that the Creator, Judge, and Redeemer of all things is the God who rules all nations and calls people everywhere to account. From a biblical point of view, the whole world is one world and it is God’s world. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is for the whole world. Christians should, in principle, in faithfulness to Christ, have no difficulty subordinating every responsibility they have (political, economic, familial, educational, and more) to the coming of the worldwide kingdom of God. They should have no trouble recognizing that the Christian way of life must contend with ways of life that drag them away from loving God and their neighbors through the love of Christ. And yet, the difficulties of living as faithful Christians are ever present and continue as a perpetual challenge. No Christian person or community may act self-righteously or claim a place of special privilege or preeminence among fellow humans. In our shrinking, warming, flattening, warring world, people everywhere may legitimately ask, what does the Christian way of life (or the Muslim way of life, or the nationalist or capitalist ways of life) have to offer by way of wisdom, justice, and love for the human responsibilities of governance, child raising, economic development, science, technology, schooling, and anything else that pertains to human life in this world. That is a question that cries out for demonstrable answers today.

NOTES 1. Jonathan Wheatley, “Collapse of Doha Forces Acceptance of Second Best,” Financial Times, 3 August 2008. 2. For a fascinating look at the history of trade see William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Has Shaped the World from Prehistory to the Present (New York: Atlantic Books, 2008). 3. Richard McGregor, “The Pursuit of Harmony,” Financial Times, 12 April 2007. 4. China’s development along these lines to date also speaks to the lack of room and encouragement for the development of nongovernment organizations and institutions (NGOs). In a recent column, Minxin Pei explains that most of the so-called nongovernment organizations in China are “gongos”—governmentorganized nongovernmental organizations, which are typically “headed by retired

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officials and funded by the state. They have no genuine autonomy.” And even among genuine NGOs there are no independent labor unions, student unions, and religious groups “capable of large-scale collective action.” One of the problems with this centrally controlled system, Pei points out, is that suppression of civil society puts all liability for society’s problems squarely on the government. “Without alternative civic organisations to provide relief, aggrieved Chinese citizens naturally hold the government responsible for its failings.” Pei, “China’s Repression of Civil Society Will Haunt It,” Financial Times, 5 August 2008. 5. Quoted by Vincent Boland, “In Ataturk’s Shadow,” Financial Times, 3 May 2007. 6. On the influence of the American civil-religious nationalism in American life and foreign policy see James W. Skillen, With or Against the World? America’s Role Among the Nations (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), chaps. 6–8. 7. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster Touchstone Books, 1997). 8. For the full lecture, see, www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575.

Index

abolitionism, 95–96 Adams, John Quincy, 33 Afghanistan, 4, 22, 34, 73, 75, 77, 78 Africa, 21, 48, 65, 111, 113; Evangelicals in, 94–95, 101–5 AIDS, 94–95, 100–101 Albright, Madeleine, 33 Alesina, Alberto, 64, 66 al-Qaeda, 16, 28, 33, 73, 93 American exceptionalism, 2–3, 34, 78, 97–98 American Federation of Teachers, 89 Amorim, Celso, 109 Annan, Kofi, 31 Aral Sea, 75 Arzt, Donna E., 32 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 25–26 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 117 Australia, 78, 88 Azerbaijan, 74, 75 Barton, Dominic, 4 Belgium, 63, 88 Bodin, Jean, 18 Boland, Vincent, 117 Bolton, Patrick, 65

Brazil, 47, 109 Brouwer, Steve, 93 Brubaker, Rogers, 27 Buddhism, 42, 45, 51 Bulgaria, 74 Bush, George W., 31, 42, 77, 86, 109 Byrne, David, 35 Canada, 63, 82, 88, 90 Carter, Jimmy, 95 Caspian Sea, 74, 75 Caucasus, 74, 76, 77 Central Asia, 71–79 China: commerce of, 50, 71–77, 111; education in, 89; evangelical attitudes toward, 94, 95; international affairs, 4, 11, 22; and religion, 115–17, 122 Christianity, 4, 7, 41–43, 45, 49–50, 119, 122; Anglican communion, crisis of, 112–13; Evangelicals and evangelicalism, 93–105; and Islam, 119–21 Clinton, Bill, 31 Cold War, 3, 72, 76, 78, 93, 96 Coleman, John, 92 Columbia, 22

125

126 Commission on Human Security, 32 Communist Party (Chinese), 116–17, 119 complexity theory, 35 Confucianism, 47, 116, 122 Confucius, 116–17 constructivism, 35, 97 Daimler Chrysler, 29 Darfur, 94, 95 de Boer, Kito, 4 de Groof, Jan, 84 democracy, 16–18, 76, 78, 118 Donnelly, Jack, 83 education: charter schools, 88–91; and childrearing, 44; and government, 81, 84–91; parental choice in, 82, 89–91; right of, 81–84 Egypt, 66 empires, European, 66, 72 energy: commerce, 71–76; politics, 73, 74 environment, 5, 41, 67, 95, 100–104 environmentalism, 115 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 118 Eurasian Economic Community, 76 European Union (EU): economic purpose of, 49, 59, 62; education in, 5, 84–86, 88; and the new Silk Road, 72–73, 76–78; emerging “supra state,” 17, 23–24, 108; and Turkey, 118 Evangelicals. See religion(s) faith. See religion(s) Falwell, Jerry, 94, 95 Ferguson, Niall, 48 fiscal federalism, 56–59 France, 66, 72–73 Freedman, Lawrence, 3 Friedman, Thomas, 13, 14, 47 Fukuyama, Francis, 16 G8 group of nations, 4 G20 group of nations, 4 Genckaya, Omer Faruk, 117

Index General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 60 Geneva Convention (1949), 31 Genghis Khan, 72 Georgia, 74, 77 Germany, 66, 74, 88 Gifford, Paul, 93 Giscard-D’Estaing, Valery, 17 the Global South, 97, 101–4 globalization: anti-, 44, 52; and civilsociety, 41, 43, 45, 47, 112–14; cultural, 44, 48, 50; economic, 4, 14, 23, 38n27, 43, 46, 49, 55–69, 110–12; political, 20, 46, 59–67, 107–10; and religion, 42, 45–47, 50–52, 114–22 Gould, Stephen, 12 Graham, Franklin, 94 Great Games, 71, 72, 77 Greater Tumen Initiative, 76 Greenstock, Jeremy, 5 Hamas, 33 Hertzke, Allen, 96 Hezbollah, 16, 33 The Hoover Institution, 16 human rights, 31–33, 95, 96 Hungary, 74 Huntington, Samuel, 14, 16, 119 Hybels, Bill, 95 idealism, 10, 72, 96; See also moralism ideologies, 3–4, 16, 118 Ignatius, David, 2–3 imperialism, 47–50 India, 4, 47, 51, 72–75, 118 Indonesia, 4, 51, 75, 118 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 113 interjurisdictional spillovers, 57, 59, 62, 67 international business corporations, 29, 49 International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), 30–31, 36 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 83

Index International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 82 International Criminal Court, 31–32 international criminal tribunals, 31 international economic policymaking, 59–60 international law, 11, 15, 36, 59, 108– 9; See also human rights International Monetary Fund (IMF), 59 international religious freedom, 96 Iran, 34, 72, 75 Iraq, 23, 34, 66, 72, 77, 78, 95 Ireland, 66 Islam, 4, 17, 72–73, 76, 94, 117–22 Islamism, radical, 4, 43, 51, 73, 93, 94 Italy, 66, 74, 87 Japan, 73, 75, 76 Judt, Tony, 5 Kant, Immanuel, 10 Kay, John, 115 Kazakhstan, 72, 74, 75, 76 Kirkpatrick, David D., 95 Kissinger, Henry, 4 Korea: North, 94; South, 4, 73, 74, 76 Krasner, Stephen, 19, 20, 28 Krauthammer, Charles, 34 Kristof, Nicholas, 94, 96 Kuhn, Thomas, 9 Kyrgyzstan, 76 Latin America, 48, 51; evangelicalism in, 97, 101–4 Libya, 74 Lisbon Treaty, 17, 24 Low Countries, 66 Lukashuk, Igor I., 32 Lutheran World Federation, 44 Maastricht Treaty, 85, 86 macroeconomic stabilization, 57 McGregor, Richard, 116 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 71 Mandelbaum, Michael, 48 Mao Zedong, 116 Marsden, George, 96

127

Martin, William, 93 Marxism, 10, 11 Maynes, Charles William, 78 Mead, Walter Russell, 95 Middle East, 22–23, 51, 77 Migdal, Joel, 27 Mohammed, 17, 94 Mongolia, 66, 74 moralism, 10–11, 34–35 Morgenthau, Hans, 34 National Survey of Religion and Politics (2004), 97–104 nationalism, 119 Nepal, 77 non-state organizations, 24–32, 93–94, 96, 108, 109, 112–15 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 25, 30, 33, 49, 59 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 5, 34, 77, 122 Oates, Wallace, 56, 58 Ohmae, Kenichi, 13, 29 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 59, 63 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 72 Ottawa Treaty, 31 Pakistan, 72, 75 paradigms, 9–10, 12, 34–35, 72, 78, 96 Pax Americana, 2, 3 Peace of Westphalia, 19 Perkmann, Markus, 27, 28 Pfaff, William, 2 Philippines, 4 Pierce v Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510), 82 pipelines (oil and gas). See energy Poland, 4 political systems: federal, 57–59, 76, 88, 108; international, 10, 20, 36, 56; state-centric, 12–13, 18–20, 35, 71, 72

128

Index

Portugal, 90 poverty, 6, 14, 37, 41, 44, 47, 95, 99– 100, 103, 118 Putin, Vladimir, 73, 74, 75, 78 Rachman, Gideon, 5 Reagan, Ronald, 109 realism, 11, 34–35, 72 regional organizations/communities: economic, 26–27; societal, 27–28; territorial, 25–26 religion(s), 3–4, 7, 16, 41–53, 76, 93, 114–23; See also Buddhism, Christianity, globalization, and Islam Robertson, Pat, 94, 95 Roland, Gerard, 65 Romagna, Emilia, 87 Romania, 74 Rose, Susan, 93 Russia, 4, 34, 71, 72–79 Rwanda, 95 Saddleback Church, 95 Salomone, Rosemary, 91 Samuelson, Robert J., 6 Saudi Arabia, 4, 66, 76 secularism, 45, 115, 117–18 schooling. See education science and technology, 13–15, 44, 50, 64, 72, 113–14 Serbia, 74 Shah, Timothy, 101 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 76 Shanker, Albert, 89 Silk Road: new, 4, 71–79; old, 7n7, 50, 71, 75 Singapore, 75 Solingen, Etel, 24 South Africa, 4–5, 47, 95 sovereignty: attributes of, 18–19; changing locus of, 107–10; premodern, 18; postmodern, 19–21, 96. See also states Soviet Union, 11, 20, 71–73, 89 Spain, 63, 87, 91

Spolaore, Enrico, 64, 66 Spruyt, Hendrik, 12, 21 Stanley, Brian, 96 states: and schooling, 81; sovereignty of, 11, 12, 18–20, 58, 107; supra states, 23, 76; traditional, 20, 34, 76, 108. See also political systems Stegarescu, Dan, 63 Stephens, Philip, 2, 4, 5 Stiglitz, Joseph, 55 Sudan, 96 Sum, Ngai-Ling, 27, 28 Suter, Keith, 14 Tajikistan, 76 Tannenberg, 11–13 taxation, 58, 62, 66 terrorism, 21, 28–29, 72, 78 Tilly, Charles, 12, 18 trade: international, 59–67 Turkey, 50, 71, 74, 117, 118 Turkmenistan, 72, 75, 76 Ukraine, 74, 77 United Kingdom, 22, 28; England, 66, 71; Scotland, 88; Wales, 88 United Nations (UN): Charter of, 31; and education, 82–84; evangelical attitudes toward, 93–94, 98; relation to other organizations, 32, 36, 76; Security Council, 4; and the US, 33; and worldviews, 122 United States of America (U.S.): the Christian Right in, 93, 95, 97, 99; colonial period of, 108; common market in, 66; and energy commerce, 71–79; and the environment, 5; fiscal decentralization in, 63; hegemony of, 48–49; imperialist temptation of, 47–50; income differential in, 64; the National Security Strategy of (2002), 33; schooling in, 82, 86, 88–91; Supreme Court of, 82 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 82 Uzbekistan, 73–76

Index Venezuela, 75 Vietnam, 34 Vines, Jerry, 94 Wacziarg, Romain, 64, 66 Walzer, Michael, 20 warfare, 14–16, 31, 34, 66 Warren, Rick, 95 Wendt, Alexander, 35 Wilberforce, William, 95 Williams, Jodie, 30, 31 Williams, Rowan, 119 Wilson, Woodrow, 10 Wootton, Ian, 62

129

World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 44 World Bank, 33, 59 World Council of Churches, 44 World Development Report (1999/2000), 55 World Trade Organization (WTO), 4, 5, 25, 26, 49, 59, 60–62, 109, 122 World Values Survey (2000), 97–104 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EALN), 30, 36 Zehfuss, Maja, 35 Zionism, 94

About the Contributors

Alice-Catherine Carls is Tom Elam Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She is a member of the editorial boards of World History Connected and Poésie Première. A forthcoming essay on the Silk Road of the twenty-first century is at press with the online journal World History Connected, April, 2009. Charles L. Glenn is Professor of Educational Policy and a Fellow of the University Professors at Boston University. He served as the Massachusetts official responsible for educational equity for 21 years. Currently, he is completing a two-volume work on the history of educational policy in the West since Antiquity as well as the fourth volume (with Jan De Groof) of a work on how dozens of nations balance freedom, autonomy, and accountability in schooling. Dennis R. Hoover is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Institute for Global Engagement, where he also serves as Editor in Chief of The Review of Faith & International Affairs. His publications include Religion and Security: The New Nexus in International Relations (2004), coedited with Robert A. Seiple, and Religion and International Affairs: A Reader (forthcoming), co-edited with Douglas Johnston. Rodney D. Ludema is Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University. He has written extensively on international trade policy, WTO institutions, economic geography, and environmental policy. He served as an advisor to the US International Trade Commission and is currently associate editor of the Journal of International Economics. 131

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About the Contributors

Steven E. Meyer is Professor of National Security Studies, Industrial College of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University. A specialist on Eastern and Central Europe, his essays include “Kosovo: The Risks of an Imposed Settlement,” The National Interest (online, 3 March 2007), “The Carcass of Dead Policies: The Irrelevance of NATO,” Parameters (Winter 2002/2003), and “Religion and Security in the Post-Modern World,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs (Fall, 2008). James W. Skillen is President of the Center for Public Justice, a publicpolicy and civic-education organization headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland. He edits the Center’s bimonthly Capital Commentary and writes an occasional commentary Root & Branch: the Religion and Society Debate. His latest books are With or Against the World: America’s Role Among the Nations (2005), and In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations (2004). Max L. Stackhouse is the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life Emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary. He is currently serving as president of the American Theological Society and is the primary author of the four-volume series, God and Globalization (2000–2007). Earlier works include On Moral Business (ed.), Creeds, Society, and Human Rights, and Public Theology and Political Economy.