The 21st Century, like the 20th, has begun as a belle epoque for those lucky enough to enjoy it. It is a golden age of peace, great wealth, booming markets, easy travel, instant communications, fabulous comfort and, with it, an innocence and confidence that this good fortune is not only deserved but permanent.
These chosen many are scattered, unevenly, across the globe. They include American traders and investors, European workers who still have jobs, Russian mafiosi, Polish and Chinese entrepreneurs, Colombian drug lords, Indian software programmers, global lawyers in New York and global bankers in Singapore, media superstars in Los Angeles and Rio, high-flying students of all nationalities and hues at Harvard and Oxford.
They are not a majority. As the articles in this special edition of Perspective make clear, most of the world lives in shantytowns on the outskirts of the global village. From their beats around the world, Tribune correspondents reported on the rest of humanity–millions of unemployed nomads in China, street people in Calcutta, European workers without jobs, the 28 percent of Americans whose jobs pay poverty-level wages, semi-educated young men in Morocco begging in four languages, the hopeless poor of Africa, child laborers in Bangladesh, the pensioners of Poland, the Russians wondering what happened to their lives.
The rich and the poor have always been with us. What’s new is the post-Cold War explosion of technology, trade and finance that is creating a global market for money, goods, information, entertainment, drugs, ideas and virtually anything else that can be bought and sold.
To its supporters, globalization embodies the promise of wealth and liberty across the planet. Free markets, untrammeled by government controls, will send money and goods where they are most useful and ideas where they are most needed.
Many of these supporters are American. Their creed can be called the Washington Consensus.
To its critics, from the protesters at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle to the Taliban of Afghanistan to worried workers of Germany and Japan, globalization is a blunt weapon and the Washington Consensus an American-sponsored outline for change in a world that isn’t so sure it wants to change.
The backlash has begun. Like the protagonist of some Shakespearean tragedy, globalization may carry the seed of its own destruction. It has happened before.
The late historian Barbara Tuchman wrote about the confident years at the century’s birth in her 1966 book, “The Proud Tower.” Tuchman took her title from Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling couplet:
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
Tuchman could have been writing about our time.
Man, Tuchman said, “entered the 20th (Century) with his capacities in transportation, communication, production, manufacturing and weaponry multiplied a thousandfold by the energy of machines.
“Industrial society gave man new powers and new scope while at the same time building up new pressures in prosperity and poverty, in growth of population and crowding in cities, in antagonism of classes and groups, in separation from nature and from satisfaction in individual work. . . . By the time he left the 19th Century, he had as much new unease as ease.”
The proud tower was the hubris of the time, the belief that the world was in good hands, that statesmen had discovered the secrets of peace and prosperity and did not need to heed the rumblings offstage, from those at home appalled by inequality and “by upstart nations and strange challenges from abroad”–the conflicts that led within 14 years to World War I, then the Depression, then World War II and the Cold War.
As the 21st Century begins, the industrialized nations, especially the United States, have built a new proud tower.
American military power, mightier by far than the combined armies of all potential rivals put together, keeps a global peace. Mighty markets and instant communications can speed trillions of dollars around the world at the flick of a mouse, turning the globe into one big market for the goods and investment of global corporations, many of them bigger and richer than the countries where they do business. The proposed $162 billion takeover of Time Warner by American Online last week would dwarf the gross national product of all but the world’s 30 richest nations.
American unemployment is low and, for some, incomes (not to mention bonuses and stock options) are beyond avarice. The average American, European or Japanese enjoys a standard of living that would have been inconceivable to the average citizen of the year 1900.
Many gains are both real and irreversible.
Life expectancy, which was 47 years in 1900, is 76 now. Medicine has worked miracles: No woman in the poorest country today need suffer as did Queen Anne of England who, in the early 18th Century, had 18 pregnancies and five live births, though all five babies died in childhood. In 1900, women could not vote: now, about half the students in law and medical schools are women.
No spot on the globe is beyond the reach of technology. For much of the world, airliners are as common as buses. The most poignant moment of Jon Krakauer’s book, “Into Thin Air,” came when a guide, dying in a blizzard on Mt. Everest, talked to his pregnant wife in New Zealand by satellite phone to say goodbye.
Many gains are real but reversible.
Global markets brought unprecedented prosperity to the countries of Southeast Asia in the 1980s and took that prosperity away in the 1990s; two years later, recovery has begun. Of the world’s 191 countries, 88 are free, according to Freedom House, a U.S.-based human rights organization. This means that they “maintain a high degree of political and economic freedom and respect basic civil liberties.” Another 53 are “partly free,” Freedom House says.
Mali, Kuwait, Slovakia and Mongolia are free. Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia and Haiti are partly free. Each could be made unfree in the twinkling of a coup.
Many gains, like those at the start of the 20th Century, may come back to haunt us.
Unemployment in the United States is low, but largely because of the boom in new jobs at the bottom of the pay scale. No less than 28 percent of employed Americans earn wages that keep them beneath the poverty levels.
The after-tax income of America’s wealthiest 1 percent is up 115 percent since 1977, and 79 percent in the past decade; the poorest one-fifth has lost 9 percent of its income since 1977 and even the three-fifths in the middle have gains of less than 8 percent to show for the last quarter of the American Century.
Americans are not opposed to globalization so much as they are concerned where it is taking us. They see million-dollar bonuses on Wall Street, and multimillion-dollar golden parachutes for failed CEOs, and welfare reform driven by the need to soothe the bond markets, and government run by politicians who get 90 percent of their campaign financing from the wealthy 1 percent, and they wonder where all this is going.
Internationally, the disparities are doubly true. One reason Third World countries share in global investment at all is their rock-bottom wages and sweatshop conditions. Half the world has never taken an airplane nor dialed a telephone. The United States has more than half of all the world’s computers and 91 percent of its Internet users. The three wealthiest men at Microsoft–Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer–have a combined net worth that is greater than the gross national product of the 43 least-developed countries and their 600 million people.
The result is resentment. American triumphalism chafes national pride from Canada to Russia to France. The march of freedom threatens to shatter more traditional societies in the Middle East and South Asia. The “Talibanization” of Islamic Asia is part of the backlash.
This sounds a lot like the forces at work beneath the belle epoque, the grinning gargoyles on the proud tower that destroyed the civilization that ushered in the 20th Century.
As Tuchman pointed out, the early years of the 20th Century were “not a Golden Age or Belle Epoque except to a thin crust of the privileged class.” The rest, she said, had so little stake in the prosperity of the era that they quickly rallied to jingoistic calls to war in 1914, despite wide predictions that war would destroy that prosperity.
The world today is more complex, more intertwined and interdependent, than it was in 1900 and hence much more vulnerable. It is a world that is moving toward global standards enforced by
global institutions that must be made to work without crushing the customs, even the identity, of its very different people.
What this means is years of negotiation, of establishing global protections for the local freedoms and quirks that each nation prizes, of preserving valued societies from the gales of the market. It may be the hardest thing humanity has ever tried.
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R.C. Longworth, a former foreign correspondent based in London, Moscow, Vienna and Brussels, has reported from 75 countries around the globe. As a Tribune senior writer, he specializes in international and economic reporting.
