Parag Khanna - The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order

CONTENTS

T O B HAGWAN D AS S ETH:
DIPLOMAT, THINKER, GRANDFATHER

PREFACE

N O ONE KNEW the world like Arnold Toynbee did. His twelve-volume A Study of History is the most cohesive treatment of human civilizations ever written (and the longest work composed in English). But Toynbee waited until he retired from Londons Royal Institute of International Affairs before boarding a ship with his wife to meet people and see places that were already familiar to us from our work, but only at second hand. Over seventeen months, they circumnavigated the globe, traveling from London to South America, the Pacific Rim, South Asia, and the Near East. The dispatches Toynbee pennedcontaining observations on the remnants of empires long extinct and predictions on an uncertain futurewere published in 1958 under the title East to West: A Journey Round the World.

A half century later, a leatherbound first edition of Toynbees narrative was my most insightful guide as I set out around the world to explore the interplay of two world-historical forces he grasped intuitively without ever using the terms: geopolitics and globalization. Geopolitics is the relationship between power and space. Globalization refers to the widening and deepening interconnections among the worlds peoples through all forms of exchange. Toynbee had been the first to chronicle the rise and fall, expansion and contraction of historys empires and civilizations, and his life spanned the major waves of global integration that began just before World War I and then exploded with the rise of multinational corporations in the 1970s. Since Toynbees time, geopolitics and globalization have so intensified as to become two sides of the same coin. I wanted to separate the inseparable.

The regions and countries explored in this bookcollectively referred to as the second worldare today the central stage on which the future course of global order is being determined. That term, second world, once referred to the socialist sixth of the earths surface, and then briefly to the postcommunist transitional states, but mention of the second world gradually disappeared. Yet there are more than twice as many countries in the world today than when Toynbee set sailand an ever-greater number of them fall into this new second-world space where geopolitics and globalization clash and merge.

Like elements in the periodic table, nations can be groupedaccording to size, stability, wealth, and worldview. Stable and prosperous first-world countries largely benefit from the international order as it stands today. By contrast, poor and unstable third-world countries have failed to overcome their disadvantaged position within that order. Second-world countries are caught in between. Most of them embody both sets of characteristics: They are divided internally into winners and losers, haves and have-nots. Will second-world countries react by repelling, splitting, or merging into compounds? That is one of the questions this book seeks to answer.

Schizophrenic second-world countries are also the tipping-point states that will determine the twenty-first-century balance of power among the worlds three main empiresthe United States, the European Union, and Chinaas each uses the levers of globalization to exert its gravitational pull. How do countries choose the superpower with which to ally? Which model of globalization will prevail? Will the East rival the West? The answers to these questions can be found in the second worldand only in the second world.

To comprehend the morphing spheres and vectors of influence across the five regions of the second world, one must begin to think like a country, to slip into its skin. World Bank officials joke that they would never purport to be experts about countries they had not at least flown over. Experts of this kind point to statistical indicators and declare things are getting much better in this or that country. Usually, this means that a capital city has been cleaned up, provided with sprouting hotels, banks with cash machines, and shopping malls, while crime has been isolated to outer neighborhoods. What about the rest of the country: cities that dont have airports, provinces that have poor roads and dilapidated infrastructure? Are things getting much better out there? Does it even feel like the same country? It is no wonder people are surprised by a coup here, an economic collapse there, in countries that are constantly said to be thriving.

Saint Augustine declared that the world is a book, and those who have not traveled have read only one page. Only firsthand experience can validate or challenge our intuitions, giving us confidence about risky political decisions in a complex world of instant feedback loops and unintended consequences. During my travels through the second world, I never left a country until I had developed a sense of its meaning on its own terms, until I had assimilated a blend of perspectives from cities, villages, and landscapes, based on conversations with a wide variety of people, including officials, academics, journalists, entrepreneurs, taxi drivers, and students. I stayed until I saw the world through their eyes. This book is devoted purely to exploring how these nations view themselves in this age of globalization and geopolitical flux.

During travel, perception and thought merge; a contradiction can emerge as a truth to be revealed, not some exception to be disproved. Such ambiguity is the corollary of complexity, after all. Reality is famously resistant to theories that measure the world according to what it should be rather than how it really is. Instead, exploring the patterns of the second world aesthetically, honoring the value of purely sensory judgmentsthis exposes characteristics that are common to the entire second world; differences are revealed to be more relative than absolute. For example, the civility of peoples behavior tends to reflect the decency of their governments, which in turn often correlates to the quality of their roads. In the first world, roads are well paved, and the view is clear for miles, whereas clogged third-world roads are obscured by dust and exhaust; second-world roads are a mix of both. First-world countries can accommodate millions of tourists, while visiting third-world states often involves choosing between exclusive hotels or low-cost backpacking; many second-world countries simply lack the infrastructure for mass tourism. Garbage is recycled in the first world and burned in the third; in the second world, it is occasionally collected but is also dumped off hillsides. Corruption is widely invisible in the first world, rampant in the thirdand subtle in the second. Diplomatically, first-world states are sovereign decision-makers, and passive third-world nations are objects of superpower neomercantilism. Second-world countries are the nervous swing states in between.

A journey around the world reveals an increasingly clear underlying logic: The imperial norms of the American, European, and Chinese superpowers are advancing. Political borders matter less and less, and economies are integrating. The world map is being redrawnand the process is not driven by Americans only. Yet even as the world becomes increasingly non-American, American attitudes toward the places that suddenly appear in U.S. headlines reflect a deep cartographic and historical ignorance. But this book is not written for Americans only, for the task of adapting the United States to a world of multiple superpowers and an amorphous but deepening globalization is too important to be left to Americans alone. War may be Gods way of teaching Americans geography, but there is a new geography of power that everyone in the world must understand better. If we do not find common ground in our minds, then nothing can save us.