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GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: REBUTTALS AND COMMENTARY: SAM CRANE

Part of an occasional series, the rebuttal and commentary posts will address the roundtable on Globalization and War. This format is open to both the symposium’s participants and other interested bloggers or scholars who would like their views published here.

Link Preface:

Globalization and Conflict in East Asia by Sam Crane

Globalization, War and Mencius by Sam Crane

Globalization and War by Simon of Simon World

” Globalization, War and Mencius

by Dr. Sam Crane of The Useless Tree

Over at ZenPundit there is roundtable series of posts and discussion on the broad topic of globalization and war (I will have a post there tomorrow). I want to respond here to Simon’s (of Simon World) post. He focuses on the upcoming WTO talks in Hong Kong and, drawing on various East Asian data, comes to an optimistic conclusion about globalization and war:

Save for the “public fields” thing it sounds downright Smithian to me… “

A DIGITAL DIVIDE?

A good article here on the cultural, educational and organizational implications of information technology “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” (PDF) by Marc Prensky ( Hat tip net-centric dialog. Prensky also has a blog).

Having worked with students on the extreme ends of the spectrum ( both in terms of the Bell Curve and socioeconomic status) during the period where IT phased into schools, universities and the larger society, I have to give an endorsement to Prensky’s observations.

American children today are strikingly different learners in the classroom than those from as little as five years ago because IT and internet access has become ubiquitous. The changes are far more modest at the lower socioeconomic quintiles or at small rural school systems but even there they exist.

Students are more receptive to alinear thinking; they naturally multitask; they automatically incorporate IT into their socialization and autonomy from adult supervision; they have higher expectations for ( and impatience with) teacher-delivery of content; they can produce 4th grade presentations that look more visually appealing in terms of design than what a consultant might have produced to illustrate a proposal for, say, a meeting with a CEO circa 1995.

With that cultural assimilation comes some negatives, including a difficulty with sustained attention to task, particularly reading, though that can hardly be laid entirely at the door of IT. However, the cultural shift toward Toffler’s ” Third Wave” information society would appear to be taking root.

DAY III. GLOBALIZATION AND WAR

Introductory Post by Zenpundit

Today’s featured posts:

“Globalization and War” by Paul D. Kretkowski

“The Democratic Peace” by RJ Rummel

Moderator’s post:

“The Age of Globalization and War” by Zenpundit

Thursday’s posts:

Austin Bay

Sam Crane

Josh Manchester

Wednesday’s posts:

Bruce Kesler

Doug Macdonald

Simon World

GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: ZENPUNDIT

The age of Globalization and War

by Mark Safranski

I can only begin by first thanking the contributors to the roundtable – Bruce Kesler, Doug Macdonald, Simon, Austin Bay, Sam Crane, Josh Manchester, RJ Rummel and Paul Kretkowski – for their time, their effort and the stimulating ideas that they have brought here to the readers. In particular, Josh and Bruce for their ideas and comments as I was in the process of attempting of putting this event together. Your help was most valuable.

I would also like to thank Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye for his tireless efforts in promoting the Roundtable on Globalization and War and his intelligent and perceptive comments on the guest-posts. And to extend my gratitude for the many blogs that linked including Dean’s World, Memeorandum, Winds of Change, The American Future, Coming Anarchy, TDAXP, Grim’s Hall,Regions of Mind, The Duck of Minerva, Live From The FDNF, Phatic Communion, The Small Wars Council, Prometheus6, The Dusty Attic, and last though never least, riting on the wall. You have all helped my readers connect to some very important ideas.

Ideas, which return us to the original premise of the roundtable:the age of globalization and war.
American leaders are encountering a geostrategic situation where the United States has preponderant and often overwhelming advantages in bringing hard power to bear relative to all other states but the environment in which that power is being used is changing rapidly because of globalization. There seems to be a sense of pervasive cognitive dissonance among the bipartisan American elite who continue to speak and act as if the rule-set of twenty years ago still held sway.

Globalization is turning international borders from barriers into mere filters that only marginally impede networking flows of capital, resources, people and knowledge so that it is more accurate to look at any act of war as disturbing a coherent system than as a clash between two isolated opponents. When Bruce Kesler points out that “There is no “foreign policy” separate from domestic policy” he is observing that the luxury that statesmen once had in a less democratic, pre-globalized time to cordon off foreign affairs from internal politics and economic policy is long gone. Politics does not stop at the water’s edge because a global network has no “edge” at which to stop.

War is an ancient art going to the far distant time when the development of language first permitted our stone age ancestors to try to plan an outcome for violent conflict with neighboring tribes. The rise of the state centralized decision-making and staked the claim for sole legitimacy for initiating acts of war; first by Westphalian monarchies and ultimately refined by the mass-production, mass-man, industrial-age, nation-state superpowers. The early Cold War represented the apogee of centralization in warfare as the world began falling into two great ideological camps led by the totalitarian USSR and the liberal democratic United States, to whom lesser ” great powers” ceded their sovereignty as to whether their people’s would endure WWIII or not.

That time too is gone.

War is slipping out of the exclusive grasp of the state and into the hands of transnational and subnational actors, “global guerillas” and even superempowered individuals waging a ” Fourth Generation War”. In 1939, to shatter the established order, Adolf Hitler had to first hijack the state of a great power and then systematically turn a nation into a mighty weapon. Today, the Fuhrer could accomplish widespread ruin with fewer followers than marched with him in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. An interconnected global system, one that did not exist during the 1930’s, is vulnerable to system perturbations that allow the effects of catastrophic attacks on critical nodes to cascade across the planet.

Taking down a region’s financial system may cause more quantifiable damage than the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg and it might be accomplished from a lap-top in a cheap motel room. Counterattacks by the state may now cause more “blowback” than the state can now tolerate. Like Moses we can see the Promised Land even as we dance on the precipice of the Abyss.

That centrifugal diffusion of war powers calls into question whether globalization and the increasing diffusion of liberal, democratic norms as the only legitimate political system will bring RJ Rummel’s ” Democratic Peace” or a situation where state actors are at peace with one another but are struggling ineffectively to contain the forces of disruption and terror in revolt against modernity. Will Dr. Barnett’s Core powers unite to reset the rules to better squelch violent nihilist “warrior” groups that move through the Gap like Mao’s guerillas once did through the Chinese people ? Right now America is not leveraging its advantages in the War on Terror, not even, as Austin Bay pointed out, in the sphere of information and media, a field we pioneered. Our enormous reserves of ” softpower” go untapped or are being turned against us.

What American and Core leaders need to do is to begin thinking in terms of the systemic whole because it is the field upon which all their actions play out. The consequences of decentralization of power and information brought by connectivity to previously disconnected communities will, as pointed out by Doug Macdonald’s Thai example, incite local elites to resistance to defend their often unjustfiable traditional prerogatives. These are forseeable outcomes and more importantly, they are mostly avoidable ones.

The sooner that our leaders understand that they march upon a spider’s web, the better.

GLOBALIZATION AND WAR:PAUL KRETKOWSKI

Mr. Paul D. Kretkowski is a consultant and journalist based in San Francisco who writes on a range of topics including soft power, U.S. foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics and information warfare. His writing credits include, among others, Mother Jones, Wired, Business For Diplomatic Action and SFGate.com. Beacon, Mr. Kretkowski’s blog, is devoted to exploring the concept and applications of ” Soft Power” as articulated by political scientist Joseph Nye.

Globalization and War

by Paul D. Kretkowski

From a soft-power standpoint, the biggest wild card in globalization is that visual communication is becoming universal.

Billions of illiterate or marginally literate people can now receive not just faceless radio broadcasts, but hundreds of commercial and government satellite TV channels from around the world.

People who once relied on rumors or their governments’ views of other countries can now access those countries’ own images of themselves. Entire worldviews can be imported into sod huts via tin-can satellite dishes, as in Afghanistan. http://www.idsnews.com/story.php?id=7382 Where before people thought they “knew” the U.S. because their cousin’s in-laws had a falafel stand in Detroit, they now think they “know” the U.S. because they can see actual Americans at the Oscars or on Baywatch.

The major question today is whether the increasing ability of everyone to see everything will lead to greater understanding—or to revulsion that contributes to increased terrorism and war. What will be the effects as two-thirds of the world realizes that it is shockingly poor?

In China and India the answer seems to be a conversion of those countries’ normal industriousness into a consumer and private-enterprise boom. Other countries may follow suit—but what happens if their booms stall but images of wealth continue to be beamed from abroad?

In other regions, particularly in the Muslim world, the result is bafflement that the West’s apparently godless, chaotic, mercantile societies can be so far ahead in nearly every measure of human development. Responses to this vary from denial and retreat to new attempts to close the gap.

Part of what Beacon tries to do is monitor this ongoing realization of the world’s disparities and suggest how countries, companies and individuals can enhance their soft power in that environment. I welcome others’ input as I continue examining ways to accomplish this task.