Frankensteining Globalization

It is odd given that I was the one who broached Chris about coordinating a review/debate about Thomas Barnett’s new book Great Powers that I should have had such a difficult time entering the dialogue. I have for the past few years been a big Barnett fan, much of my foreign policy perspective has come from reading what I have taken to be Barnett’s wise words on the topic. So too has my optimism around the potential impacts of globalization been greatly informed by reading Barnett’s books and blog over the past few years. And I have extolled the virtues of Thomas Barnett’s cross-partisanship on this very site.

So it was a bit unnerving for me to read through what I think Chris rightly notes is Barnett’s deepest and most important contribution to date with a gnawing feeling in my gut. It was the kind of gnawing feeling that one gets as one comes face-to-face with a fundamental break from an oracle that one has held in extremely high esteem for some time. In some senses, I feel as though I have been losing my religion by reading Great Powers, but not in any kind of violent or rebellious sort of way because I haven’t been seized by sudden urges to hurl the book across a room or found myself yelling at the pages. Rather, there has been the sinking feeling of finally coming to a narrow but deep chasm in the evolution of one’s thought and that of one’s favourite authour.

On some level, this fissure should be cause for a sort of celebration on my end. After all, I have of late been on about the difficulties and importance involved in the development of truly critical thinking. But, of course, the cultivation of those faculties sometimes requires the leaving behind of certain cherished beliefs — or at least  shuffling of them down the shelves of one’s intellectual bookcase — and that process, important as it may be, can often be as much cause for resigned sorrow as it is liberating yawp.

So it has been with Thomas PM Barnett via Great Powers and a sizable proportion of my hesitancy to write on this topic has centered around my tangling with where exactly that break has occurred. Because it is, again, not the case that I am now preparing to terminate my relationship with Barnett’s thinking altogether, but rather I have slowly begun to place my finger on what I take to be a subtle but important oversight in his analysis. Or so this upstart blogger is about to contend.

Part of the challenge has arisen out of the fact that my Battle of Waterloo is located at the pulse of Barnett’s reasoning in Great Powers: that the US presents the DNA or source code for globalization.

When I read or hear Barnett talk about the virtues and potentials of globalization as a phenomenon in itself, I find myself nodding vigorously. Barnett’s notion that the fundamental connectivity of globalization holds the promise of unparalleled cross-pollination, information sharing, and conceptual, cultural, and even political emergence perfectly encapsulates why I have such a hard time firmly ensconcing myself in the localist camp, much as I cotton to many of their cautionary notes and critical analysis. My ruminations around glocalism have had much to do with the idea that those networks of connectivity could just as easily be used to foster a global bolstering of the local and provide an avenue for spreading the values and perspectives of localists in such a way as to take our notions of community in exciting and profoundly important directions.

This notion of globalization as the ultimate social networking project is an idea that I have lifted directly from Barnett’s work and represents for me the most powerful visage of why global interconnectivity on both cultural and economic fronts ought not to be abandoned despite some very real challenges we face. But that vision of globalization as connective force only really has legs for me insofar as our focus is on the act of connecting for the sake of connecting wherein we allow the unfolding fruits of those connections emerge and ripen of their own accord. In short, as I’ve stated before, I believe globalization will reach its full maturity whence we have the courage and fortitude to truly decentralize it and let it operate as a true pooling of all of the participants.

In this regard, while I am happy to recognize that globalization as a dynamic phenomenon has greater and lesser players, have-mores and have-lesses, the goal here is to enable as best we can a truly global Millian marketplace of ideas. This, to me, is the logical conclusion of Barnett’s refrain about making globalization “truly global”.

There is a subtle undermining of this whole conception; however, when the underlying notion is that this process of connectivity is fundamentally based upon the route and emergent pattern of a particular player. Now, I don’t necessarily think that Barnett sees his vision of “closing the gap” to be monolithing of global interconnectivity and it is certainly the case that, as again Chris has pointed out, he looks to enlist as many co-stars as possible in the process. But the concern I have is that by Barnett’s lights, it is the work that the US has undertaken over the past decades in building a “global liberal trade order” that has brought us to this point and it is therefore the prerogative of the US to finish that job.

What’s worse, in my mind, is that one of the reasons that Barnett sites for Americans to be counter intuitively optimistic at this point in time is that despite geo-political turmoil and relatively unheard of levels of anti-Americanism to overcome, there is no one who realistically stands in the way of America’s quest to finish the job it set out to do so many years ago. While realistically that may be true, such reflexive exceptionalism is natural bait for corrupting arrogance (just the kind that Mark has recently identified with traditional American exceptionalism) and lead to the kind of unmitigated disasters like Iraq that walk the whole process back more than a few steps (both Barnett’s idea of qualified connectivity and my own unqualified conception).

Throughout any of his works, Barnett tends to refer to American military might as the Leviathan that holds our newly realized global stability together. Barnett is an unrepentant hawk in that fashion: not only does he see an important role for the American military to play in shaping the world, but he thinks its best if that military is used in as expedient and strategic a manner as possible. Barnett’s writing has over the years also convinced me that there is a role for military might in geo-political affairs and that we are best to put our minds towards the project of most accurately articulating how and in what circumstances that might is to be wielded.

What I think Barnett fails to acknowledge is that the American military isn’t the only Leviathan in play here. When one talks about using the history of the United States as the source code for finishing the construction and expansion of a global liberal trade order, I think one also has to acknowledge that by so formulating your analysis you are tacitly allowing for the entrance of an economic Leviathan of equal reckoning as your military Leviathan.

Now, I’m not trying to wax egalitarian here. As I mentioned above, I’m happy to acknowledge that even in the decentralized and truly global version of glob(c)alization that I envision, there will be the more and the less powerful players. Attempts to completely level the playing field before the match starts will be as prone to failure and unhelpfully meddling as I’m attempting to claim that Barnett’s “US history as globalization’s DNA” theory is. But the idea of having an interconnected world where there is robust trade between different nations and the sharing of ideas and values between different cultures needn’t necessarily require an overarching sovereign. Indeed, I would argue that said system is apt to function best over time if it doesn’t.

What is more troubling to me still is that it strikes me that these two Leviathans tend to operate in fairly synchronous collusion in terms of the fulfillment of a specific set of interests with a potentially devastating arrogance and incompetence, as has recently been demonstrated in both arenas. In fact, in many portions of the book — the creation of AFRICOM in particular — Barnett actively seeks such an integration. I’m not trying in this instance to conjure up the image of some backroom cabal of pin striped suits, cigars, and snifters of scotch. While I’ll acknowledge there are the more and less powerful on the playing field, I also don’t buy into “masters of the universe” conspiracy theories. Rather, what I’m pointing to here is that each of these Leviathan have cultivated institutional interests that they instrumentally fulfill whether the specific orders have been articulated or not. These are not the instrumentally value-free Leviathan of Hobbesian visioning, these are realpolitik and realeconomik Leviathans of the world stage and we have to be careful when start talking about utilizing their realistically massive stores of power towards some grand finale.

Which is not to say that we ought not to strive towards some ultimate conclusion, nor is it to say that we ought not to use those tools that are in our kit. What it is to say is that we need to be supremely cognizant of the potential implications of our grand designs and how those implications might, say, affect the lives of those who lie in the path of strategy’s arc. And so in this regard, Barnett’s idea that the US provides the source code for globalization strikes me as a noble idea from his lips, but a chink in the armor of his grand strategy’s defenses against corruption, especially insofar as that strategy seeks to utilize these two Leviathans to meet its end goals. In the wrong hands — and it would seem that those hands are only too plentiful — those Leviathans become Gollems wrecking great potential harm once unleashed and very difficult to keep under control.

I remain a firm believer in the potential power of global connectivity, especially insofar as those networks carry the potential to forward conceptions of glocalism in real and interesting directions. And I owe much of that vision to the work of Thomas PM Barnett. But I can’t shake the feeling that his underlying thesis winds up ultimately rigging the game in a way that undermines the cultivation of a truly global community, a vision that I think we both still share. And in that regard I find it difficult to sign on to the path that Barnett presents in Great Powers.

Tagged as: glocalism, Great Powers, Leviathan, Thomas PM Barnett