GLOBAL CONTRADICTIONS
AND AMERICAN LEADERSHIP

THOMAS L. HUGHES

I—MARKET VERSUS NONMARKET GLOBALIZATION

Three enduring sets of contradictions now confront American policy-makers. The first revolves around the concept of market-driven globalization, a still evolving phenomenon. It expanded enormously in the decade of the 1990s and is now retrenching.

Globalization started out as an economist’s catchword for interdependence plus. It featured an unprecedented integration of markets and technologies which, as Tom Friedman of The New York Times has written, “enabled individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.” Above all globalization meant economic interaction, at an ever growing pace and trajectory, with capital soaring through an increasingly borderless world, applying new information technologies to transnational production and financial flows.

In this new hyperconnected world, billions of people were theoretically engaged in highly intrusive activities along a global front. They operated personally and through governments, international organizations, NGOs, private businesses, and assorted experts, all using instantaneous new communications to play in new trillion- dollar markets.

For many this economic experience and the accompanying belief system seemed so inevitable and so overwhelming that a Globalist Assumption arose. Geoeconomics was conspicuously outrunning geopolitics. Nation states themselves were being displaced by the sheer force of this market-driven transnational pull.

On the Internet or in the airplane, CEOs and their lawyers and consultants were typically involved in so much of the outside world that they were becoming Men Without a Country. At one point Pat Buchanan became so worried about it that he proposed that all Business Roundtable members begin their boardroom meetings with a pledge of allegiance to the United States of America. Today, amid escalating corporate scandals, many would like to have them regularly pledge allegiance to their shareholders as well.

Go-go-globalization seemed the inexorable wave of the future when the last change of American national administrations took place. Movers and shakers all agreed that the Gods of the Marketplace were making the world more prosperous. Every year the Davos conferees told one another that globalization could not be stopped, even if two-thirds of the world’s people had yet to reap any tangible benefits from it. Indeed many of those in the global village who were left out—and certainly their socially conscious spokesmen like labor unions and environmentalist—wanted to tame or steer globalization, not kill it.

One of globalization’s chief virtues, of course, was its non-accountability. The magic of the global marketplace made the decisions efficiently and anonymously. Only Adam Smith’s invisible hand was there, silently recommending to everyone to stay the course. In the long run, growth via globalization would supposedly even ease domestic tensions.

But patience in politics is a precious commodity. No sooner had the invisible hand set about achieving perfection anonymously in the global marketplace than corrective impulses began to stir.Notions of responsibility, indeed demands for pin-pointable accountability, emerged. Highly visible, personally identifiable actors like environmental monitors, climate controllers, religious leaders, labor standard enforcers, international lawyers and activists sensitive to the status of women and children became part of a countervailing process—people seeking responsibility not anonymity.

Thus, partly through its own logic or mysticism, the market-driven Gospel of Globalization attracted a swath of non-market critics and compensators, both old and new. A broad assortment of non-market global actors and agencies emerged that were less devoted to pure market orientations. Indeed some two thousand multilateral agreements, setting rules over a broad range of global issues, also came to be considered part of the globalization process.

The non-market varieties of globalization came to embrace most prominent global concerns: from communications, corruption, and health to arms traffic, human rights, and AIDS; from ozone layers, corporate transparency, and refugees to crime, energy, and development; from environment, labor standards, and soil conservation to pollution, civil unrest, and the status of women. Many if not most of these causes took a regulatory form, skeptical of, if not antithetical to, the creed of market-driven globalization. Indeed they tended to generate regulations aimed at enforcing standards of responsibility designed to compensate for market defi- ciencies.

These already existing contradictions between market and non-market globalization were suddenly sharpened in January 2001, when the new American leadership quickly made clear its enthusiasm for the market as the only form of globalism it really liked. Far from positioning itself to manage these contradictions, it fulsomely endorsed the market while opposing, often with contempt, global institutional efforts to restrain it. The result has been an American leadership posture on several long-term economic, environmental, and social issues that is far more narrow and ideological than the American national interest deserves.

II—9/11 INJECTS NEW CONTRADICTIONS

A second set of contradictions suddenly arose out of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those strikes wrought intellectual havoc as well as enormous human tragedy. Many globalist expectations must now be counted among the fatalities. Previous American dispositions to identify with one or another global view have themselves gone into suspended animation as Americans flounder among the many deglobalizing lurches of the months since 9/11.

Alongside of, and in addition to, the Administration’s globalist equivocations, the war on terror has forced a sharp and general attitudinal change. On September 10, 2001, trade and technology were still supposedly driving the globe toward greater integration. Globalization had spawned a rationale for supranational bodies and a sporadic surrendering of sovereignty. Many commentators saw the nation state in a permanent decline, with a new medievalism succeeding it. National borders were supposed to be disappearing, as impediments to the efficiencies of the global market. The political authority of governments was related less and less to the quite different geography of markets and production networks.

On September 12, 2001, US borders were rediscovered with a vengeance. For security reasons, inspections, regulations, surveillance, and border controls became top priorities. The inefficiencies of body and baggage searches, waiting lines at airports and frontier crossings, time-consuming interrogations, lengthy delays in truck and rail transport are now taken for granted. The open skies and open borders of easy immigration, two key assumptions of market-driven globalization, became things of the past.

Terrorism suddenly exploded the logic of globalization and put the brakes on trends toward global governance overnight. The new Administration’s nationalist impulses were given a big inadvertent boost. Even before 9/11 its spokesmen had talked about “allies of convenience,” “places that count and places that don’t,” and global commitments among which we would pick and choose by a process of “multilateralism a la carte.” After 9/11 these tendencies quickly became so pronounced that Chris Patten, the British Conservative foreign policy spokesman for the European Union, denounced American policy as “unilateralist overdrive.”

American leadership initially put together an impressive worldwide anti-terror coalition, but at the same time we embarked on steps that could render that coalition a fragile one. Our reassertion of the inviolability of our own borders contrasted ironically with the borderlessness we proclaimed for everyone else. Indeed the Administration has asserted its right to intervene unilaterally across any border we choose to pursue terrorists and evildoers.

Moreover, to fight an open-ended war against terrorism, we deliberately thrust forward our military and intelligence services as our chosen instruments of world policy. With our massive new expenditures on defense and intelligence, we will soon be spending more in both cases than the rest of the world combined. Obviously this enormous public emphasis on force and stealth fits uneasily into a long-term globalist agenda.

Globalization’s efficient market forces have not only been distorted by our draconian security measures, but by our billion dollar bailouts for the airlines and other industries.

Our combined budgets for external and homeland security are now so large that they squeeze almost down to zero our ability and our willingness to fund serious attacks on the basic causes of terrorism worldwide. These include, of course, widespread economic deprivation, deepening societal conflicts especially in the Middle East, and the mal-distribution of resources generally which are the breeding grounds for helplessness, outrage, and despair.

Even more ominously, immediately after 9/11, we tumbled into a synchronous international recession. In the last months of 2001, global trade flows were reduced dramatically. Exports dried up. Tourism dwindled. Conferences were cancelled. Consumer confi- dence plummeted. Corporate decision-making went on hold. Risk calculations for investors were severely affected. Openness itself had been attacked. Human rights and globalism, previously linked by many, became much more antithetical.

All this happened after a single day of terror exposed our enormous vulnerabilities and before our season of corporate scandals made matters worse. Much now depends on whether 9/11 turns out to have been a onetime event. The attacks in New York and Washington dramatically exposed the vulnerability of the cybernetic systems on which our economic structure depends. Our networks for energy, communications, and water supply; our transport grid; our health care delivery system; our food supply infrastructure—all are now plausible targets of terrorist choice. Thus if there are to be more terrorist attacks—and all intelligence warnings tell us there absolutely will be—the economic and psychological consequences could be incalculable.

So 9/11 has set in motion a second set of contradictions, this time between our two highest official commitments —to market-driven globalization and to the war on terrorism. The tension between these two fixed official mindsets has forced the Administration into a Janus-faced posture, looking in opposite directions at once and pretending not to notice. More and more the war against terrorism, if we are serious about it,will collide with market-driven globalization. Pursuing both is not indefinitely sustainable. These two organizing principles are in conflict. Superpower patriotism, geared up to fight an unending war against terror, contradicts in fundamental ways the prerequisites for free market forces. Never mind that neither of them is an adequate organizing principle for US foreign policy itself.

A contest of coalitions may eventually develop. Many business leaders in the globalizer’s coalition are already restive about the war-on-terrorism coalition. The essential forces needed to sustain the former are at odds with those needed to sustain the latter. The national agenda necessary to fight terror, and the passions necessary to support it, are already at war with the requirements of the globalization process. In a prolonged contest, one or the other of these coalitions is likely to succumb. Far from attempting to manage this new second set of contradictions, the Administration seems determined to expand the war against terror by expanding its definition and preempting selected evildoers by force. This expansion of war aims also further antagonizes the champions of globalization by multiplying the inconsistencies in our declared objectives.

III—THE DILEMMA OF CONTRADICTORY AUDIENCES

A third major set of contradictions has now become more serious than ever, the contrast between the President’s domestic and worldwide audiences. As a homeland politician, he obviously relishes the wartime opportunity to stimulate the patriotic fervor of 200 million Americans. But as the superpower leader, he cannot without penalty simply ignore the contrasting sentiments of most of the six billion non-Americans outside. Unfortunately he now has to grapple with big attitudinal gulfs between audiences at home and audiences abroad regarding both globalization and the war on terror.

Indeed the growing cleavages between these audiences can be simply tested. Forget Al-Jazeera. Merely compare the network coverage of daily international events on American TV with the BBC, or even the coverage provided by CNN’s domestic versus its international service, and you will find them significantly different on globalism and terrorism issues.

So dominant is America, whatever the context, that outsiders always perceive Americanization at work. Thus one of the standard complaints about globalization has often been that it is a codeword for Americanization—a thinly disguised, 21st century version of American Manifest Destiny. Globalization undeniably played to our strengths by reinforcing the dominance of the English language with our economic models and business practices.

After 9/11, this critical perception of disguised Americanization was quickly sharpened by a perception of undisguised Americanization unleashed in the form of our unrivalled high tech military applications in Afghanistan. The accompanying resentments have been further deepened by the ethnocentric nonchalance of Pentagon briefings, which so often have projected callousness about our “collateral” civilian damage.

The millions of non-Americans who formerly viewed globalization as a clever if covert American imperial affair will surely find their numbers swollen by those who view America’s new overt and covert interventionism as imperialism of an even more flagrant kind. Champions of these perceptions are already joining forces in a new and larger anti-American attitudinal alliance.

Unless our leadership suddenly becomes more adroit in averting it, this action-reaction dynamic could easily become a dominant new feature of the global scene. Public opinion polls show that a majority outside the US see US policies as a major reason for 9/11. Almost no Americans do. To help us see ourselves as others see us, Le Monde already has a web site called “Unloved America” which features the complaints of five continents against the US.

Of course, many varieties of anti-Americanism have existed around the world for years. The wisest American response has always been to discriminate among them and not allow them to coalesce. Today the spread of communications and the ineptitude of many of our official spokesmen invite a conflation of all the deepest-running streams of anti-Americanism abroad, pitting highly aggrieved world audiences against the aroused juggernaut of a fervent, flag-waving America. The situation requires from us something considerably better than towel-snapping lectures hectoring recalcitrants around the world to shape up. Here is a third fateful set of contradictions waiting to be sensitively managed.

Instead of trying to moderate globalization’s internal contradictions, our leadership sharpens them by its naïve devotion to unfettered market values. Instead of trying to manage the contradictions between globalization in general and worldwide anti-terrorism, our leadership stubbornly endorses both as they increasingly collide. Instead of coming to grips with the contradictions between its domestic and worldwide audiences, our leadership continues to put American ethnocentricity on full display.

Here are three sets of endemic and potentially pervasive contradictions that should preoccupy America’s leaders but of which they often seem carelessly unaware. Many of our policy makers unfortunately cast themselves as pillars and point men in the contests themselves, thereby seriously shrinking our national reach and influence in world affairs.

Managing contradictions successfully, of course, is easier said than done. But the contradictions themselves are given. As we enter this angry new century, an American leadership that recognizes and comes to grips with them will stand a better chance of success than one that ignores or denies them. Indeed such recognition, in public and practical ways, may ultimately make all the difference between our ending up as part of the solution or part of the problem. At many earlier highpoints in history, we Americans succeeded in making our national interest interesting to others. We should try to do so again.

Thomas L. Hughes (CC ’72) is president emeritus of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Mr. Hughes opened the Cosmos Club Spring Symposium on Globalization on March 23, 2002. This article is distilled from his spoken remarks on that occasion. .

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