Essential Readings in World Politics S E C O N D E D I T I O N The Norton Series in World Politics Jack Snyder, General Editor Essentials of International Relations Karen A Mingst From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict Jack Snyder Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development Robert H Bates Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations Bruce Russett and John Oneal The Tragedy of Great Power Politics John Mearsheimer Lenses of Analysis Richard Harknett Coming soon: Stephen Krasner on international political economy Bahan asal darl Arklb Negara Malaysia Essential Readings in World Politics S E C O N D EDITION EDITED BY K A R E N A M I N G S T A N D JACK L SNYDER Copyright © 2004, 2001 by W W Norton 8c Company, Inc CONTENTS PREFACE STEPHEN M WALT J O H N LEWIS GADDIS THUCYDIDES IMMANUEI KANT WOODROW WILSON GEORGE R KENNAN ("X") J O H N LEWIS GADDIS ix "International Relations: One World, Many Theories" "History, Theory, and Common Ground" 11 "Melian Dialogue," adapted by Suresht Bald F R O M Complete Writings: The Peloponnesian War 18 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," PROM Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals 20 "TO "The Fourteen Points," Address to the U.S Congress, January 1918 26 "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" 28 "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System" 33 v vi CONTENTS HANS MORGENTHAU "A Realist Theory of International Politics" and "Political Power," Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace 49 FROM JOHN MEARSHEIMER M I C H A E L W DOYLE ANDRE GUNDER FRANK J A N N TICKNER M A R T H A FINNEMORE HEDLEY BULL HANS MORGENTHAU I M M A N U E L WALLERSTEIN ROBERT STEPHEN D JERVIS KRASNER ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER ROBERT SAMUEL P I ROTBERG HUNTINGTON "Anarchy and the Struggle for Power," F R O M The Tragedy of Great Power Politics 54 "Liberalism and World Politics" 73 "The Development of Underdevelopment" 86 "Man, the State, and War: Gendered Perspectives on National Security," F R O M Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security 94 "Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention" 102 "Does Order Exist in World Politics?" FROM The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics 120 "The Balance of Power," "Different Methods of the Balance of Power," and "Evaluation of the Balance of Power," FROM Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace 124 "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis" 130 "The Compulsive Empire" 138 "Sovereignty" 143 "The Real New World Order" 149 "Failed States in a World of Terror" 157 "The Clash of Civilizations?" 163 CONTENTS EDWARD W SAID G R A H A M E FULLER MARGARET G H E R M A N N "The Clash of Ignorance" 170 "The Future of Political Islam" 173 "International Decision Making: Leadership Matters" 182 A N D JOE D H A G A N ROBERT JERVIS CYNTHIA ENLOE MICHAEL J G L E N N O N EDWARD C L U C K "Hypotheses on Misperception" 189 "The Personal Is International," F R O M Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics 202 "Why the Security Council Failed" Responses 208 219 A N N E - M A R I E SLAUGHTER IAN H U R D MARGARET E KECK AND K A T H R Y N SIKKINK S A M A N T H A POWER H E N R Y A KISSINGER KENNETH ROTH G J O H N IKENBERRY J O H N J MEARSHEIMER "Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics: Introduction" and "Human Rights Advocacy Networks in Latin America," F R O M Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics 222 "Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen" 233 "The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction" 253 "The Case for Universal Jurisdiction" 258 "Is American Multilateralism in Decline?" 262 "The False Promise of International Institutions" 283 VII Viii C O N T E N T S C A R L V O N CLAUSEWITZ "War as an Instrument of Policy," T H O M A S C SCHELLING "The Diplomacy of Violence," F R O M Arms and Influence 301 ROBERT JERVIS SCOTT D S A G A N A N D K E N N E T H N WALTZ JOHN MUELLER M I C H A E L W DOYLE BARRY R POSEN AUDREY K U R T H C R O N I N ROBERT A PAPE ROBERT GILPIN STEPHEN D KRASNER FROM On War "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma" "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World" 341 "International Intervention," FROM Ways of War and Peace 347 "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict" 357 "Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism" "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" 367 382 "The Nature of Political Economy," FROM U.S Power and the Multinational Corporation 403 "State Power and the Structure of International Trade" BRUCE R SCOTT "The Great Divide in the Global Village" "The World Bank's Mission Creep" DAVID HELD AND 309 "Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Weapons: For Better or Worse?" F R O M The Spread of Nuclear Weapons 322 JESSICA EINHORN JOSEPH E STIGLITZ 297 410 421 430 "The Way Ahead," FROM Globalization and Its Discontents 437 "Globalization" 462 A N T H O N Y M C G R E W , WITH DAVID GOLDBLATT A N D JONATHAN PERRATON T H O M A S FRIEDMAN AMARTYA SEN "The Backlash" F R O M The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization 471 "Universal Truths: Human Rights and the Westernizing Illusion" 477 PREFACE This reader is a quintessential collaborative effort between the two co-editors and Ann Marcy of W W Norton In a flurry of e-mails during 2003, the coeditors suggested articles for inclusion, traced the sources, and rejected or accepted them, defending choices to skeptical colleagues It became apparent during the process that the co-editors, while both international relations scholars, read very different literatures This book represents a product of that collaborative process and is all the better for the differences The articles have been selected to meet several criteria First, the collection is designed to augment and amplify the core Essentials of International Relations text (third edition) by Karen Mingst The chapters in this book follow those in the text Second, the selections are purposefully eclectic, that is, key theoretical articles are paired with contemporary pieces found in the popular literature When possible articles have been chosen to reflect diverse theoretical perspectives and policy viewpoints The articles are also both readable and engaging to undergraduates The co-editors struggled to maintain the integrity of the challenging pieces, while making them accessible to undergraduates at a variety of colleges and universities Special thanks go to those individuals who provided reviews of the first edition of this book and offered their own suggestions and reflections based on teaching experience, Our product benefited greatly from these evaluations, although had we included all the suggestions, the book would have been thousands of pages! Ann Marcy orchestrated the process, reacting to our suggestions, mediating our differences, and keeping us "on task." To her, we owe a special thanks Andrea Haver guided the manuscript through the permissions and editing process, a very labor-intensive task incorporated into global financial markets, but the nature of their access to these markets is highly uneven When foreign exchange markets turn over sixty times the value of world trade, this is not just a staggering increase; it is a different type of activity altogether The instantaneous transactions of the twenty-four-hour global markets are largely speculative, where once most market activity financed trade and long-term investment The fact that these global markets determine countries' long-term interest rates and exchange rates does not mean that the financial markets simply determine national economic policy But they radically alter both the costs of particular policy options and, crucially, policymakers' perceptions of costs and risk Speculative activity on this scale brings both unprecedented uncertainty and volatility—and can rapidly undermine financial institutions, currencies, and national economic strategies It is not surprising that policymakers take a distinctly risk-averse approach and therefore adopt a more conservative macroeconomic strategy as a result Even if there is often more room for maneuver with hindsight, future policy will change only marginally when the risks of getting it wrong appear to be, and are, potentially so catastrophic The 1997 East Asian crisis forcibly demonstrated the impact of global financial markets and the shifting balance between public and private power The global financial disruption triggered by the collapse of the Thai baht demonstrated new levels of economic interconnectedness The "Asian tiger" economies had benefited from the rapid increase of financial flows to developing countries in the 1990s and were held up as examples to the rest of the world But these heavy flows of short-term capital, often channeled into speculative activity, could be quickly reversed, causing currencies to fall very heavily and far in excess of any real economic imbalances The inability of the existing international financial regime to prevent global economic turmoil has created a wide-ranging debate on its future institutional architecture—and the opportunity to promote issues of legitimacy, accountability, and effectiveness Another important change on the policymak- ing menu arises from the exchange rate crises of the 1990s Fixed exchange rates are ceasing to be a viable policy option in the face of global capital flows of this scale and intensity The choice that countries face is increasingly between floating rates and monetary union—shown by the launch of the euro and discussion of dollarization in Latin America Globalization and the Environment Environmental change has always been with us What is new today is that some of the greatest threats are global—and any effective response will have to be global too For most of human history, the main way in which environmental impacts circulated around the earth was through the unintentional transport of flora, fauna, and microbes The great plagues showed how devastating the effects could be The European colonization of the New World within a generation wiped out a substantial proportion of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean, Mexico, and parts of Latin America Over the following centuries, these societies saw their ecosystems, landscapes, and agricultural systems transformed Early colonialism also damaged the environment in new ways The Sumatran and Indian forests were destroyed to meet consumer demand in Europe and America Seals were overhunted to dangerously low levels And some species of whale were hunted to extinction But most forms of environmental degradation were largely local until the middle of this century Since then, the globalization of environmental degradation has accelerated Fifty years of resource-intensive and high-pollution growth in the OECD countries and the even dirtier industrialization of Russia, Eastern Europe, and the exSoviet states have taken their toll on the environment The South is now industrializing at breakneck speed, driven by exponential growth of global population We also know much more about the dangers and the damage that we have caused Humankind is increasingly aware that it faces an unprecedented array of truly global and re- gional environmental problems, which no national community or single generation can tackle alone We have reacted to global warming; to ozone depletion; to destruction of global rainforests and loss of biodiversity; to toxic waste; to the pollution of oceans and rivers; and to nuclear risks with a flurry of global and regional initiatives, institutions, regimes, networks, and treaties Transnational environmental movements are also more politically visible than ever But there has simply not been the political power, domestic support, or international authority so far on a scale that can any more than limit the very worst excesses of these global environmental threats Governing Globalization Contemporary globalization represents the beginning of a new epoch in human affairs In transforming societies and world order, it is having as profound an impact as the Industrial Revolution and the global empires of the nineteenth century, We have seen that globalization is transforming our world, but in complex, multifaceted, and uneven ways Although globalization has a long history, it is today genuinely different both in scale and in form from what has gone before Every new epoch creates new winners and losers This one will be no different Globalization to date has already both widened the gap between the richest and poorest countries and further increased divisions within and across societies It has inevitably become increasingly contested and polidcized, National governments—sandwiched between global forces and local demands—must now reconsider their roles and functions But to say simply that states have lost power distorts what is happening, as does any suggestion that nothing much has changed The real picture is much more complex States today are at least as powerful, if not more so, than their predecessors on many fundamental measures of power—from the capacity to raise taxes to the ability to hurl force at enemies But the demands on states have grown very rapidly as well They must often work together to pursue the public good—to prevent recession or to pro- tect the environment And transnational agreements, for example dealing with acid rain, will often force national governments to adopt major changes in domestic policy So state power and political authority are shifting States now deploy their sovereignty and autonomy as bargaining chips in multilateral and transnational negotiations, as they collaborate and coordinate actions in shifting regional and global networks The right of most states to rule within circumscribed territories—their sovereignty—is not on the edge of collapse, although the practical nature of this entitlement—the actual capacity of states to rule—is changing its shape The emerging shape of governance means that we need to stop thinking of state power as something that is indivisible and territorially exclusive It makes more sense to speak about the transformation of state power than the end of the state; the range of government strategies stimulated by globalization are, in many fundamental respects, producing the potential for a more activist state But tire exercise of political and economic power now frequently escapes effective mechanisms of democratic control And it will continue to so while democracy remains rooted in a fixed and bounded territorial conception of political community Globalization has disrupted the neat correspondence between national territory, sovereignty, political space, and the democratic political community It allows power to flow across, around, and over territorial boundaries And so the challenge of globalization today is ultimately political Just as the Industrial Revolution created new types of class politics, globalization demands that we re-form our existing territorially defined democratic institutions and practices so that politics can continue to address human aspirations and needs, This means rethinking politics We need to take our established ideas about political equality, social justice, and liberty and refashion these into a coherent political project robust enough for a world where power is exercised on a transnational scale and where risks are shared by peoples across the world And we need to think about what institutions will allow us to tackle these global problems while responding to the aspirations of the people they are meant to serve This is not a time for pessimism We are caught between nostalgia for causes defeated and ideas THOMAS lost, and excitement at the new possibilities that we face We need to think in new ways Globalization is not bringing about the death of politics It is reilluminating and reinvigorating the contemporary political terrain FRIEDMAN The Backlash A nalysts have been wondering for a while now whether the turtles who are left behind by globalization, or most brutalized or offended by it, will develop an alternative ideology to liberal, free-market capitalism * * * [I]n the first era of globalization, when the world first experienced the creative destruction of global capitalism, the backlash eventually produced a whole new set of ideologies—communism, socialism, fascism— that promised to take the sting out of capitalism, particularly for the average working person Now that these ideologies have been discredited, I doubt we will see a new coherent, universal ideological reaction to globalization—because I don't believe there is an ideology or program that can remove all of the brutality and destructiveness of capitalism and still produce steadily rising standards of living, Another reason the backlash against globalization is unlikely to develop a coherent alternative ideology is because the backlash itself involves so many disparate groups—as evidenced by the coalition of protectionist labor unions, environmentalists, anti-sweatshop protestors, save-the-turtles activists, save-the-dolphins activists, anti-genetically altered food activists and even a group called "Alien Hand Signals," who came together in December 1999 to protest globalization at the Seattle WTO summit These disparate groups are bound by a common sense that a world so dominated by global corporations, and their concerns, can't help but be a profoundly unfair world, and one that is as hostile to the real interests of human beings as it is to turtles But when it comes to actually identifying what the real interests of human beings are and how they should be protected, these groups are as different as their costumes The auto workers, steelworkers and longshoremen, who were in Seattle to demand more protectionism, doubtlessly couldn't care much whether America allows imports of tuna caught in nets that also snare turtles Indeed, I wouldn't want to be the turtle that gets in the way of one of those longshoremen offloading a boat in Seattle harbor This makes the power of the backlash hard to predict, because while all the groups can agree that globalization is hurtful to them, they have no shared agenda, ideology or strategy for making it less so for all That's why suspect that the human turtles, and many of those who simply hate the changes that globalization visits on cultures, environment or communities, are not going to bother with an alternative ideology Their backlash will take a variety of different spasmodic forms The steelworkFrom Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: ers will lobby Washington to put up walls against Understanding Globalization (New York; Farrar, Straus, foreign steel Others, such as the radical environGiroux, 1999; reprint, New York Anchor Books, 2000), mentalists who want to save the rain forest, will chap 15 (page citations are to the reprint edition) simply lash out at globalization and all its manifestations, without offering a sustainable economic alternative Their only message will be: STOP As for the poorest human turdes in the developing world, those really left behind by globalization, they will express their backlash by simply eating the rain forest—each in their own way— without trying to explain it or justify it or wrap it in an ideological bow In Indonesia, they will eat the Chinese merchants by ransacking their stores In Russia, they will sell weapons to Iran or turn to crime In Brazil, they will log the rest of the rain forest or join the peasant movement in the Brazilian countryside called "Sem Teto" (Without Roofs), who simply steal what they need There are an estimated 3.5 million of them in Brazil— agricultural people without land, living in some 250 encampments around the country Sometimes they live by the roads and just close the roads until they are paid or evicted, sometimes they invade supermarkets, rob banks or steal trucks They have no flag, no manifesto They have only their own unmet needs and aspirations That's why what we have been seeing in many countries, instead of popular mass opposition to globalization, is wave after wave of crime—people just grabbing what they need, weaving their own social safety nets and not worrying about the theory or ideology But while this backlash may be a bit incoherent and only loosely connected, it is very real It comes from the depth of people's souls and pocketbooks and therefore, if it achieves a critical mass, can influence politics in any country Societies ignore it at their own peril In almost every country that has put on the Golden Straitjacket you have at least one populist party or major candidate who is campaigning all the time now against globalization They offer various protectionist, populist solutions that they claim will produce the same standards of living, without having to either run so fast, trade so far or open the borders so wide They all claim that by just putting up a few new walls here and there everything will be fine They appeal to all the people who prefer their pasts to their future In Rus- sia, for instance, the communist members of the Duma continue to lead a backlash against globalization by telling the working classes and pensioners that in the days of the Soviet Union they may have had lousy jobs and been forced to wait in breadlines, but they always knew there would be a job and always knew there would be some bread they could afford at the head of the line The strength of these populist, antiglobalization candidates depends to a large degree on the weakness of the economy in the country that they are in Usually, the weaker the economy, the wider the following these simplistic solutions will attract But these antiglobalization populists don't only thrive in bad times In 1998, a majority of the U.S Congress refused to give the President authority to expand N A F T A to Chile—little Chile—on the argument that this would lead to a loss of American jobs This wrongheaded view carried the day at a time when the American stock market was at a record high, American unemployment was at a record low and virtually every study showed that N A F T A had been a win-win-win arrangement for the United States, Canada and Mexico Think of how stupid this was: The U.S Congress appropriated $18 billion to replenish the International Monetary Fund, so that it could more bailouts of countries struggling with globalization, but the Congress would not accept expansion of the N A F T A free trade zone to Chile What is the logic of that? It could only be: "We support aid, not trade." It makes no sense, but the reason these arguments can resonate in good times as well as bad is that moments of rapid change like this breed enormous insecurity as well as enormous prosperity They can breed in people a powerful sense that their lives are now controlled by forces they cannot see or touch The globalization system is still too new for too many people, and involves too much change for too many people, for them to have confidence that even the good job they have will always be there And this creates a lot of room for backlash demagogues with simplistic solutions It also creates a powerful feeling in some people that we need to slow this world down, put back some walls or some sand in the gears—not so can get off, but so I can stay on And don't kid yourself, the backlash is not just an outburst from the most downtrodden Like all revolutions, globalization involves a shift in power from one group to another In most countries it involves a power shift from the state and its bureaucrats to the private sector and entrepreneurs As this happens, all those who derived their status from positions in the bureaucracy, or from their ties to it, or from their place in a highly regulated and protected economic system, can become losers—if they can't make the transition to the Fast World, This includes industrialists and cronies who were anointed with import or export monopolies by their government, business owners who were protected by the government through high import tariffs on the products they made, big labor unions who got used to each year whining fewer work hours with more pay in constantly protected markets, workers in state-owned factories who got paid whether the factory made a profit or not, the unemployed in welfare states who enjoyed relatively generous benefits and health care no matter what, and all those who depended on the largesse of the state to protect them from the global market and free them from its most demanding aspects This explains why, in some countries, the strongest backlash against globalization comes not just from the poorest segments of the population and the turtles, but rather from the "used-to-bes" in the middle and lower-middle classes, who found a great deal of security in the protected communist, socialist and welfare systems As they have seen the walls of protection around them coming down, as they have seen the rigged games in which they flourished folded up and the safety nets under them shrink, many have become mighty unhappy A n d unlike the turdes, these downwardly mobile groups have the political clout to organize against globalization The AFL-CIO labor union federation has become probably the most powerful political force against globalization in the United States Labor unions covertly funded a lot of the advertising on behalf of the demonstrations in Seattle to encourage grass-roots opposition to free trade One of my first tastes of this middle-class backlash against globalization came by accident when I was in Beijing talking to Wang Jisi, who heads the North America desk at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences We drifted from talking about America to talking about his own life in a China that was rapidly moving toward the free market, which many Chinese both welcome and fear "The market mechanism is coming to China, but the question is how to impose it," said Wang "I depend on my work unit for my housing If all the housing goes to a free-market system, I might lose my housing I am not a conservative, but when it comes to practical issues like this, people can become conservatives if they are just thrown onto the market after being accustomed to being taken care of * * * " You don't have to have been a communist worker bee to feel this way Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, a consulting firm, once told me about a conversation he had before being interviewed in London for an economics program on the BBC: "The British reporter for the show, while escorting me to the interview, was asking me about some of my core ideas I alluded to the idea that Britain was a good example of the takeoff of the entrepreneurial economy—particularly compared to the rest of Europe—and that the best indicator of the difference was the difference in unemployment in the U.K and continental Europe At that point he said to me: 'Isn't that terrible? Unemployment benefits are now so low in Britain it isn't worth staying on the dole anymore and people have to go to work.' " Schwartz then added: "There are people who see this transformation [to globalization] as a big loss, not a gain They are losing not just a benefit but something they perceived as a right—the notion that modem industrial societies are so wealthy that it is the right of people to receive generous unemployment insurance," If you want to see this war between the protected and the globalizers at its sharpest today, go to the Arab world In 1996, Egypt was scheduled to host the Middle East Economic Summit, which was to bring together Western, Asian, Arab and Israeli business executives The Egyptian bureaucracy fought bitterly against holding the summit In part, this was politically inspired by those in Egypt who did not feel Israel had done enough visa-vis the Palestinians to really merit normalization But in part it was because the Egyptian bureaucrats, who had dominated the Egyptian economy ever since Nasser nationalized all the big commercial institutions in the 1960s, intuitively understood that this summit could be the first step in their losing power to the private sector, which was already being given the chance to purchase various state-owned enterprises and could eventually get its hands on the state-controlled media The Islamic opposition newspaper al-Shaab denounced the economic summit as "the Conference of Shame." For the first time, though, the Egyptian private sector got itself organized into power lobbies—the American-Egypt Chamber of Commerce, the President's Council of Egyptian business leaders and the Egypt Businessmen's Association—and tugged President Mubarak the other way, saying that hosting a summit with hundreds of investors from around the world was essential to produce jobs for an Egyptian workforce growing by 400,000 new entrants each year President Mubarak went back and forth, finally siding with the private sector and agreeing to host the summit, and bluntly declaring in his opening speech: "This year Egypt joined the global economy, It will live by its rules." But the Egyptian bureaucracy, which does not want to cede any power to the private sector, is still fighting that move, and every time there is a downturn in the global economy, such as the Asian collapse in 1998, the Egyptian bureaucrats go to Mubarak and say, "See, we told you so We need to slow down, put up some new walls, otherwise what happened to Brazil will happen to us." For a long time, I thought that this Egyptian reluctance to really plug into the globalization system was rooted simply in the ignorance of bureaucrats, and a total lack of vision from the top But then I had an eye-opening experience I did an author's tour of Egypt in early 2000, meeting with students at Cairo University, journalists at Egyptian newspapers and business leaders in Cairo and Alexandria to talk about the Arabic edition of this book Two images stood out from this trip The first was riding the train from Cairo to Alexandria in a car full of middle- and upper-class Egyptians So many of them had cell phones that kept ringing with different piercing melodies during the twohour trip that at one point I felt like getting up, taking out a baton and conducting a cell-phone symphony I was so rattled from ringing phones, I couldn't wait to get off the train Yet, while all these phones were chirping inside the train, outside we were passing along the Nile, where barefoot Egyptian villagers were tilling their fields with the same tools and water buffalo that their ancestors used in Pharaoh's day I couldn't imagine a wider technology gap within one country Inside the train it was A.D 2000, outside it was 2000 B.C The other image was visiting Yousef BoutrousGhali, Egypt's M.I.T.-trained minister of economy, When I arrived at his building the elevator operator, an Egyptian peasant, was waiting for me at the elevator, which he operated with a key Before he turned it on, though, to take me up to the minister's office, he whispered the Koranic verse "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." To a Westerner, it is unnerving to hear your elevator operator utter a prayer before he closes the door, but for him this was a cultural habit, rooted deep in his tradition Again, the contrast: Mr, Boutrous-Ghali is the most creative, high-tech driver of globalization in Egypt, but his elevator man says a prayer before taking you up to his office These scenes captured for me the real tension at the heart of Egypt: while its small, cell-phonearmed, globalizing elites were definitely pushing to get online and onto the global economic train, most others feared they would be left behind or lose their identity trying to catch it Indeed I was struck, after a week of discussing both the costs and benefits of globalization, how most Egyptians, including many intellectuals, could see only the costs The more I explained globalization, the more they expressed unease about it It eventually struck me that I was encountering what anthropologists call "systematic misunderstanding." Systematic misunderstanding arises when your framework and the other person's framework are so fundamentally different that it cannot be corrected by providing more information The Egyptians' unease about globalization is rooted partly in a justifiable fear that they still lack the technological base to compete But it's also rooted in something cultural—and not just the professor at Cairo University asked me: "Does globalization mean we all have to become Americans?" The unease goes deeper, and you won't understand the backlash against globalization in traditional societies unless you understand it Many Americans can easily identify with modernization, technology and the Internet because one of the most important things these is increase individual choices At their best, they empower and emancipate the individual But for traditional societies, such as Egypt's, the collective, the group, is much more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society So "globalizing" for them not only means being forced to eat more Big Macs, it means changing the relationship of the individual to his state and community in a way that they feel is socially disintegrating "Does globalization mean we just leave the poor to fend for themselves?" one educated Egyptian woman asked me "How we privatize when we have no safety nets?" asked a professor When the government here says it is "privatizing" an industry, the instinctive reaction of Egyptians is that something is being "stolen" from the state, said a senior Egyptian official After enough such conversations I realized that most Egyptians—understandably—were approaching globalization out of a combination of despair and necessity, not out of any sense of opportunity Globalization meant adapting to a threat coming from the outside, not increasing their own freedoms I also realized that their previous ideologies—Arab nationalism, socialism, fascism or communism—while they may have made no eco- nomic sense, had a certain inspirational power But globalism totally lacks this When you tell a traditional society it has to streamline, downsize and get with the Internet, it is a challenge that is devoid of any redemptive or inspirational force A n d that is why, for all of globalization's obvious power to elevate living standards, it is going to be a tough, tough sell to all those millions who still say a prayer before they ride the elevator This tug-of-war is now going on all over the Arab world today, from Morocco to Kuwait As one senior Arab finance official described this globalization struggle in his country: "Sometimes I feel like I am part of the Freemasons or some secret society, because I am looking at the world so differently from many of the people around me There is a huge chasm between the language and vocabulary I have and them It is not that I have failed to convince them I often can't even communicate with them, they are so far away from this global outlook So for me, when I am pushing a policy issue related to globalization, the question always becomes how many people can I rally to this new concept and can I create a critical mass to effect a transition? If you can get enough of your people in the right places, you can push the system along But it's hard On so many days I feel like I have people coming to me and saying, 'We really need to repaint the room.' And I'm saying, 'No, we really need to rebuild the whole building on a new foundation.' So their whole dialogue with you is about what color paint to use, and all you can see in your head is the whole new architecture that needs to be done and the new foundations that need to be laid We can worry about the color of paint later! Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, they now have that critical mass of people and officials who can see this world But most developing countries are not there yet, which is why their transition is still so uncertain." In Morocco, the government is privatizing simply by selling many state-owned enterprises to the same small economic clique tied to the royal palace that once dominated the state monopolies This is why percent of Morocco's population controls 85 percent of the country's wealth M o - rocco's universities, which uniquely combine the worst of the socialist and French education systems, each year turn out so many graduates who cannot find jobs, and have no entrepreneurial or technical skills suited for today's information economy, that Morocco now has a "Union of Unemployed University Graduates." As more countries have plugged into the globalization system and the Fast World, still another new backlash group has started to form—the wounded gazelles This group comprises people who feel they have tried globalization, who have gotten hammered by the system, and who, instead of getting up, dusting themselves off and doing whatever it takes to get back into the Fast World are now trying artificially to shut it out or get the rules of the whole system changed The poster boy for this group is Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Hell hath no wrath like a globalizer burned On October 25, 1997, in the midst of the Asian economic meltdown, Mahathir told the Edinburgh Commonwealth Summit that the global economy—which had poured billions of dollars of investments into Malaysia, without which its spectacular growth would never have been possible—had become "anarchic." "This is an unfair world," Mahathir fumed "Many of us have struggled hard and even shed blood in order to be independent When borders are down and the world becomes a single entity, independence can become meaningless." Not surprisingly, in 1998 Mahathir was the first Asian globalizer to impose capital controls in an effort to halt the wild speculative swings in his own currency and stock market When Singapore's Minister for Information, George Yeo, described Mahathir's move at the time, he said, "Malaysia has retreated to a lagoon and is trying to anchor its boats, but the strategy is not without risk." Indeed it is not If you think you can retreat permanently into an artificially constructed third space, and enjoy all the rising living standards of the Fast World without any of the pressures, you are really fooling yourself and your people Nevertheless, Mahathir's retreat, which proved to be only temporary, was received with a certain amount of sympathy in the developing world— although it was not copied by anyone As we enter this second decade of globalization, there is an increasing awareness among those countries that have resisted the Golden Straitjacket and the Fast World that they cannot go on resisting And they know that a strategy of retreat will not produce growth over the long run For several years I would meet Emad El-Din Adeeb, editor of the Egyptian journal Al Alam Al Youm, at different World Bank meetings and other settings, and for several years he would express to me strong reservations about Egypt joining this globalization system When I saw him in 1999, at the Davos Forum, he said to me, "O.K., I understand we need to get prepared for this globalization and that is partly our responsibility There is a train that is leaving and we should have known this and done our homework But now you should slow the train down a bit and give us a chance to jump on." I didn't have the heart to tell him that had just come from a press lunch with Bill Gates All the reporters there kept asking him, " M r Gates, these Internet stocks, they're a bubble, right? Surely, they're a bubble They must be a bubble?" Finally, an exasperated Gates said to the reporters: Look, of course they're a bubble, but you're all missing the point This bubble is going to attract so much new capital to this Internet industry that it is going to drive innovation "faster and faster." So there I was: in the morning listening to Bill Gates telling me that the Fast World was about to get even faster and in the afternoon listening to Adeeb tell me he wanted to hop on but could someone just slow it down a bit, I wish we could slow this globalization train down, I told Adeeb, but there's no one at the controls * * * Universal Truths: Human Rights and the Westernizing Illusion y students seem to be very concerned and also very divided on how to approach the difficult subject of human rights in non-Western societies Is it right, the question is often asked, that non-Western societies should be encouraged and pressed to conform to "Western values of liberty and freedom"? Is this not cultural imperialism? The notion of human rights builds on the idea of a shared humanity These rights are not derived from citizenship of any country, or membership of any nation, but taken as entitlements of every human being The concept of universal human rights is, in this sense, a uniting idea Yet the subject of human rights has ended up being a veritable battleground of political debates and ethical disputes, particularly in their application to non-Western societies Why so? A Clash of Cultures? The explanation for this is sometimes sought in the cultural differences that allegedly divide the world, a theory referred to as the "clash of civilizations" or a "battle between cultures." It is often asserted that Western countries recognize many human rights, related for example to political liberty, that have no great appeal in Asian countries Many people see a big divide here The temptation to think in these From Harvard International Review 20, no (summer 1998): 40-43 This article is a revised version of the Commencement Address given at Bard College on May 24,1997 Related arguments were presented in Professor Sen's Morgenthau Memorial Lecture ("Human Rights and Asian Values") at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs on May 1, 1997, and published by the Carnegie Council regional and cultural terms is extremely strong in the contemporary world Are there really such firm differences on this subject in terms of traditions and cultures across the world? It is certainly true that governmental spokesmen in several Asian countries have not only disputed the relevance and cogency of universal human rights, they have frequently done this disputing in the name of "Asian values," as a contrast with Western values The claim is that in the system of so-called Asian values, for example in the Confucian system, there is greater emphasis on order and discipline, and less on rights and freedoms Many Asian spokesmen have gone on to argue that the call for universal acceptance of human rights reflects the imposition of Western values on other cultures For example, the censorship of the press may be more acceptable, it is argued, in Asian society because of its greater emphasis on discipline and order This position was powerfully articulated by a number of governmental spokesmen from Asia at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993 Some positive things happened at that conference, including the general acceptance of the importance of eliminating economic deprivation and some recognition of social responsibility in this area But on the subject of political and civil rights the conference split through the middle, largely on regional lines, with several Asian governments rejecting the recognition of basic political and civil rights In this argument, the rhetoric of "Asian values" and their differences from Western priorities played an important part If one influence in separating out human rights as specifically "Western" comes from the pleading of governmental spokesmen from Asia, another influence relates to the way this issue is perceived in the West itself There is a tendency in Europe and the United States to assume, if only implicidy, that it is in the West—and only in the West—that human rights have been valued from ancient times This allegedly unique feature of Western civilization has been, it is assumed, an alien concept elsewhere By stressing regional and cultural specificities, these Western theories of the origin of human rights tend to reinforce, rather inadvertendy, the disputation of universal human rights in non-Western societies By arguing that the valuing of toleration, of personal liberty, and of civil rights is a particular contribution of Western civilization, Western advocates of these rights often give ammunition to the non-Western critics of human rights The advocacy of an allegedly "alien" idea in non-Western societies can indeed look like cultural imperialism sponsored by the West There are, however, other ideas, such as the value of toleration, or the importance of individual freedom, which have been advocated and defended for a long time, often for the selected few For example, Aristotle's writings on freedom and human flourishing provide good background material for the contemporary ideas of human rights But there are other Western philosophers (Plato and St Augustine, for example) whose preference for order and discipline over freedom was no less pronounced than Confucius' priorities Also, even those in the West who did emphasize the value of freedom did not, typically, see this as a fight of all human beings Aristotle's exclusion of women and slaves is a good illustration of this nonuniversality The defenses of individual freedom in Western tradition did exist but took a limited and contingent form Confucius and Co Modernity as Tradition How much truth is there in this grand cultural dichotomy between Western and non-Western civilizations on the subject of liberty and rights? I believe there is rather little sense in such a grand dichotomy Neither the claims in favor of the specialness of "Asian values" by governmental spokesmen from Asia, nor the particular claims for the uniqueness of "Western values" by spokesmen from Europe and America can survive much historical examination and critical scrutiny In seeing Western civilization as the natural habitat of individual freedom and political democracy, there is a tendency to extrapolate backwards from the present Values that the European Enlightenment and other recent developments since the eighteenth century have made common and widespread are often seen, quite arbitrarily, as part of the long-run Western heritage, experienced in the West over millennia The concept of universal human rights in the broad general sense of entitlements of every human being is really a relatively new idea, not to be much found either in the ancient West or in ancient civilizations elsewhere Do we find similar pronouncements in favor of individual freedom in non-Western traditions, particularly in Asia? The answer is emphatically yes Confucius is not the only philosopher in Asia, not even in China There is much variety in Asian intellectual traditions, and many writers did emphasize the importance of freedom and tolerance, and some even saw this as the entitlement of every human being The language of freedom is very important, for example, in Buddhism, which originated and first flourished in South Asia and then spread to Southeast Asia and East Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand In this context it is important to recognize that Buddhist philosophy not only emphasized freedom as a form of life but also gave it a political content To give just one example, the Indian emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE presented many political inscriptions in favor of tolerance and individual freedom, both as a part of state policy and in the relation of different people to each other The domain of toleration, Ashoka argued, must include everybody without exception Even the portrayal of Confucius as an unmitigated authoritarian is far from convincing Confucius did believe in order, but he did not recommend blind allegiance to the state When Zilu asks him how to serve a prince, Confucius replies, "Tell him the truth even if it offends him"—a policy recommendation that may encounter some difficulty in contemporary Singapore or Beijing Of course, Confucius was a practical man, and he did not recommend that we foolhardily oppose established power, He did emphasize practical caution and tact, but also insisted on the importance of opposition "When the [good] Way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly When the state has lost the Way, act boldly and speak softly," he said The main point to note is that both Western and non-Western traditions have much variety within themselves Both in Asia and in the West, some have emphasized order and discipline, even as others have focused on freedom and tolerance The idea of human rights as an entitlement of every human being, with an unqualified universal scope and highly articulated structure, is really a recent development; in this demanding form it is not an ancient idea either in the West or elsewhere But there are limited and qualified defenses of freedom and tolerance, and general arguments against censorship, that can be found both in ancient traditions in the West and in cultures of non-Western societies Islam and Tolerance Special questions are often raised about the Islamic tradition Because of the experience of contemporary political battles, especially in the Middle East, the Islamic civilization is often portrayed as being fundamentally intolerant and hostile to individual freedom But the presence of diversity and variety within a tradition applies very much to Islam as well The Turkish emperors were often more tolerant than their European contemporaries The Mughal emperors in India, with one exception, were not only extremely tolerant, but some even theorized about the need for tolerating diversity, The pronouncements of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor in sixteenth century India, on tolerance can count among the classics of political pronouncements, and would have received more attention in the West had Western political historians taken as much interest in Eastern thought as they in their own intellectual background For comparison, I should mention that the Inquisitions were still in full bloom in Europe as Akbar was making it a state policy to tolerate and protect all religious groups A Jewish scholar like Maimonides in the twelfth century had to run away from an intolerant Europe and from its persecution of Jews for the security offered by a tolerant Cairo and the patronage of Sultan Saladin Alberuni, the Iranian mathematician, who wrote the first general book on India in the early eleventh century, aside from translating Indian mathematical treatises into Arabic, was among the earliest of anthropological theorists in the world He noted and protested against the fact that "depreciation of foreigners is common to all nations towards each other." He devoted much of his life to fostering mutual understanding and tolerance in his eleventh-century world Authority and Dissidence The recognition of diversity within different cultures is extremely important in the contemporary world, since we are constantly bombarded by oversimplified generalizations about "Western civilization, Asian values," "African cultures," and so on These unfounded readings of history and civilization are not only intellectually shallow, they also add to the divisiveness of the world in which we live Boorishness begets violence The fact is that in any culture people like to argue with each other, and often I recollect being amused in my childhood by a well-known poem in Bengali from nineteenth century Calcutta, The poet is describing the horror of death, the sting of mortality "Just think," the poem runs, "how terrible it would be on the day you die / Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to respond." The worst sting of death would appear to be, in this view, the inability to argue, and this illustrates how seriously we take our differences and our debates Dissidents exist in every society, often at great risk to their own security Western discussion of non-Western societies is often too respectful of authority—the governor, the Minister, the military leader, the religious leader This "authoritarian bias" receives support from the fact that Western countries themselves are often represented, in international gatherings, by governmental officials and spokesmen, and they in turn seek the views of their "opposite numbers" from other countries The view that Asian values are quintessentially authoritarian has tended to come almost exclusively from spokesmen of those in power and their advocates But foreign ministers, or government officials, or religious leaders not have a monopoly in interpreting local culture and values It is important to listen to the voices of dissent in each society National and Cultural Diversity To conclude, the so-called "Western values of freedom and liberty," sometimes seen as an ancient Western inheritance, are not particularly ancient, nor exclusively Western in their antecedence Many of these values have taken their full form only over the last few centuries, While we find some anticipatory components in parts of the ancient Western traditions, there are other such anticipatory components in parts of non-Western ancient traditions as well On the particular subject of toleration, Plato and Confucius may be on a somewhat similar side, just as Aristotle and Ashoka may be on another side The need to acknowledge diversity applies not only between nations and cultures, but also within each nation and culture In the anxiety to take adequate note of international diversity and cultural divergences, and the so-called differences between "Western civilization," "Asian values," "African culture," and so on, there is often a dramatic neglect of heterogeneity within each country and culture "Nations" and "cultures" are not particularly good units to understand and analyze intellectual and political differences Lines of division in commitments and skepticism not run along national boundaries—they criss-cross at many different levels The rhetoric of cultures, with each "culture" seen in largely homogenized terms, can confound us politically as well as intellectually