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.“.as China becomes stronger andricher,” wrote Walter Russell Mead, “it also seems to be developing adeeper appreciation of the value of participating in the kind of systemthe United States has tried to build.China’s growing economic might anddiplomatic sophistication enable it to achieve more of its objectives withinthe kind of international system the Untied States hopes to stabilize inAsia.China and the United States seem closer to a genuine meeting ofthe minds than ever before.” 12 “China’s move to the market and opening to the outside world have loosened party controls over everyday life andled to the emergence of ideological diversity,” Merle Goldman tells us.Sheadds that these developments are important as far as they go, but do notP1: FCW0521857444c03Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 3, 200611:58The Illusions That Confuse Us49guarantee movement toward democracy.Supporters of convergence in thepublic culture ignore her important caveat.13Globalization of commerce is a positive force in the world for peace, but itcannot be expected to have enough influence to provide peace on its own –not when significant countries and their leaders have objectives involvingpower-seeking in addition to, or instead of, the welfare of the people of theirnations.This is true even if power seeking is subjected to a rigorous eco-nomic analysis, with governments behaving in a rational way to maximizeboth their economic and political objectives, so that optimal amounts ofsecurity and power are governed by laws of supply and demand.Then pur-chases of power imply an intention to violate the rules of the competitivemarketplace by influencing, coercing, or compelling others to alter theirbehavior instead of treating them as arms-length competitors.Nothing pre-cludes authoritarian regimes that are largely indifferent to consumer welfarefrom building superior military forces when the priority their leaders placeon security and power exceeds that of the people in democracies.Democraticfree enterprise isn’t sufficient to assure protection against an authoritarianfoe seeking domination.Moreover, the notion of convergence is wrong on every point.r The world is not converging on a particular set of economic policies;r If it did converge on policies, the result would not be to drive theeconomies of the world closer in performance (that is, for the poor tocatch up with the rich), but quite the opposite; andr Where there is a catchup of the poor with the rich (as especially withrespect to China today), the result is not to make peace more likely, butmore likely the opposite – it is to provide fuel for the furnace of nationalistexpansionism.For decades now – despite the apparent tighter linking of world economiesthrough globalization – the action of underlying economic forces has beento drive the world apart, to cause the long-term economic performance ofnations to diverge and thereby to impose continual pressures for change ingeopolitical relations, continually increasing potential conflict and creatingchallenges to peace.The world does not converge toward stability but diverges towardconflict – a result of underlying economic forces and cultural differencesamong human societies.The high hopes expressed for China hurrying toenter the American system of world economic interdependence ignoresthe duality of China (liberalizing economic development and tighteningP1: FCW0521857444c03Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 3, 200611:5850American Public Culture and the Worldauthoritarian control) and gives a primacy to economic advancement overpolitical and nationalistic goals that is not merited by the evidence.Reporting on Pakistan, Robert Kaplan informs us that, “South Asiaillustrates that globalization.can lead to war and chaos as easily as toprosperity and human rights.The very accumulation of disorder andirrationality.was so striking and.must be described in detail – notmerely stated – to be understood.” He goes on to describe the extremes ofwealth and poverty in the third world which point to conflict in the future:Karachi’s villas look like embassies, with guards, barbed wire, iron grills, and beau-tiful bougainvillaea and jacaranda trees adorning stucco ramparts.The villas, withtheir satellite dishes for watching CNN, MTV and other international channels sym-bolize a high-end kind of globalization;.the slums.a low-end.[There were ten days] in succession without water for part of the city.The wealthy have theirown private water tanks, water-distribution network, and generators.Kaplan quotes a high official of the Pakistani government who had read theFederalist Papers and John Stuart Mills’s On Liberty, “Every single ingredientthat the authors of those books say is necessary for a civil society – education,a moral code, a sense of nationhood.we haven’t got.”14What is the record of the past few decades in economic progress? Recentdata give a very different picture than general progress.Says a recent review:While some nations made considerable progress in the last decade or so and thereis no gainsaying that globalization was often a help matters are actually worse formany nations and have more or less stagnated for a great swath of them.For manycountries, the 1990’s were years of despair, the Human Development Report 2003of the United Nations Development Program concludes.In 1999 1.2 billion peoplelived on less than $ 1 per day; 2.8 billion (roughly half the globe’s population onless than $ 2 per day [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]