Fukuyama's Dream, Huntington's Nightmare and a Grassroots Reverie[1]

David Skidmore

For more than a decade now, various thinkers have sought to define the nature of the post-Cold War international order. What is its structure? What are the characteristic lines of conflict and cooperation? What are the driving forces of change? Much of the ensuing debate has focused on the phenomenon of globalization. While no consensus view has emerged, one thing seems clear: the convergence of the Cold War's demise with the growing political, economic and cultural integration of the world has touched off a struggle among varied actors, including states, global corporations, terrorists, international drug cartels and transnational social movements, over who gets to define the terms of a new global order. More difficult to foresee is where this struggle will lead - toward a world of greater peace, justice and cooperation or one of violence, inequity and conflict.

This essay discusses and critiques three positions in the recent debate: liberal universalism (Fukuyama's dream), cultural dystopianism (Huntington's nightmare) and grassroots globalism (a grassroots reverie). Each represents both a vision of the future and a blueprint for action. Each perspective is rooted in a longstanding tradition of thought and action. Each will be analyzed here with respect to a representative text.

Liberal Universalism

Perhaps the best-known representation of the liberal universalist vision is Francis Fukuyama's widely discussed essay, "The End of History," which appeared in 1989 and was later expanded into a book (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992). Although the fall of the Berlin Wall was still months away, Fukuyama anticipated the end of the Cold War and sought to understand its meaning. For guidance, he looked to the 18th and 19th century German philosopher Geog Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel. Hegel believed that history was driven by the clash of ideas. The search for a social order structured around the principles of pure reason provided a deeper meaning to the disordered jumble of daily events. For Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War represented the final destination in that search for universal reason. The victor in the Cold War was not the United States, but the ideals represented by liberal democratic capitalism. In Fukuyama's own words: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War ... but the end of history as such; that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government (Fukuyama, 1989)."

As a blueprint for social order, liberalism rests upon two pillars: democracy in the political sphere and market capitalism in the economic sphere. Democracies offer the benefits of popular sovereignty, individual rights, rule of law and representative government. Markets offer the most efficient mechanisms for allocating resources toward human wants. Fukuyama argued that the combination of democracy and market capitalism had, over the course of two centuries, proved superior to and overcome a series of competing social orders. Feudalism, fascism and communism had each in turn been vanquished by liberalism and its defenders. With the end of the Cold War, there remained no competing ideology of universal scope to challenge the hegemony of liberalism. Although the everyday flow of human events would continue, History with a capital H as the human search for the most ideal social order had reached its end.

The consequences of this development for international relations would be profound. Following earlier thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (1983), Norman Angell (1972) and Woodrow Wilson, Fukuyama argued that liberalism offered a solution to the age-old problem of war.[2] In a liberal world, commerce replaces conquest as the surest route to prosperity. Sharing common norms and institutions, liberal democracies resolve conflicts through diplomacy, a growing body of international law and the establishment of multilateral institutions. Fear and rivalry give way to trust and cooperation. A liberal world would be a peaceful world. This is Fukuyama's dream: the universal victory of a rational liberal social order.

Cultural Dystopianism

In the wake of 9/11, Fukuyama's assumptions about the universal appeal of liberal ideas might now appear more like wishful thinking than a realistic appraisal. In fact, as pundits sought to make sense of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., many turned to another thinker whose perspective on the post-Cold War order serves as a polar opposite to that of Fukuyama. In 1993, political scientist Samuel Huntington published an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations." This rather terrifying label aptly characterized the pessimistic prophesies that Huntington offered within his article and subsequent book (Huntington, 1993, 1996a, 1996b). Yet the phrase itself was borrowed from historian Bernard Lewis, who wrote of a coming "clash of civilizations" in his essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage" that appeared in 1990.[3] Both Huntington and Lewis hark back to an older tradition associated with thinkers such as Oswald Spengler (1991) and Arnold Toynbee (1987) who each viewed history through the prism of the rise and decline of competing civilizations.

Huntington's dystopian vision posits that the principle political cleavages of the post-Cold War world will center along the fault lines dividing civilizations from one another. Although states will remain the central actors in world politics, the alliance behavior of states will be largely dictated by civilization politics. Similarities and differences in core cultural values will serve as the main litmus test for distinguishing friend from foe. Unity among countries sharing the same overarching cultural values and commitments will rise while conflict across civilization boundaries will grow. Fault-line wars along the borders where civilizations come into contact will threaten to expand through "kin country rallying."

            While the clash of civilizations will be multifaceted, the most important dividing line will separate Western societies from the competing civilizations that Huntington identifies. Western cultural penetration and political domination has prompted both resentment and heightened attachment to non-Western cultures in other parts of the world. At the same time, the declining relative economic and demographic power of the West will bring growing political challenges to Western hegemony on the part of rising states representing rival civilizations. The result will be heightened civilization-consciousness among non-Western societies. The continued pursuit of technological and economic modernization will be accompanied by efforts to resist cultural Westernization and restore traditional values.

Huntington's thesis can best be characterized as "The West against the Rest." Most significantly, Huntington predicts a future anti-Western alliance uniting the growing power of China with the rising fundamentalism of the Islamic world. Huntington rejects the idea that globalization will lead to cultural convergence and holds out little hope that cultural conflict can be dampened through multiculturalism or other efforts to foster mutual understanding. The best hope for peace is the possibility that a stable balance of power among the major civilization blocks might deter aggression. For this to happen, however, the states and peoples of the Western world must recognize and unite together against the external dangers that they face. Thus Huntington offers us a stark nightmare: a violent world of seething cultural conflict and hatred.

Grassroots Globalism

Our third global vision, which I label grassroots globalism, rests upon a distinction between globalization from above and globalization from below. According to this view, globalization has thus far been a top down process managed by corporate elites and their political allies. The results have been predictable: a proliferation of third world sweatshops, corporate pillaging of the environment, the growing international indebtedness of poor states, a weakening of social safety nets and the creation of increasingly powerful global regulatory institutions that serve the interests of capital without democratic oversight (Brecher and Costello, 1998; Greider, 1997).

The antidote, from a grassroots globalist perspective, is globalization from below. This project involves forging ties of transnational solidarity among citizens of different countries to serve as a counterweight to the power of corporations and states. The ultimate objective is the creation of a global civil society based upon voluntary, transnational networks of individuals and groups seeking to realize common interests and values (Brecher, Costello and Smith, 2000).

The best discussion of this vision can be found in a book by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink titled Activists Beyond Borders (1998). Keck and Sikkink trace the historical development of transnational social movements back to their origins in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when causes such as opposition to slavery, the struggle for women's voting rights and the campaign to end foot-binding in China brought together reformers from various countries. More recently, the social and cultural changes of the sixties served to launch the contemporary peace, environmental, human rights, women's and indigenous people's movements. Over the past two decades, lowered barriers to communication and travel have allowed these nationally-based social movements to link up with one another while globalization and the increasing significance of international institutions have provided the necessary incentives to do so.

The result has been the emergence of a potent transnational force for global reform. Grassroots globalists seek not to reverse globalization, but to redirect it along lines that are more democratic, more inclusive and that serve a broader range of interests. Grassroots globalism offers a vision of bottom-up, multicultural populism.

Critique of Fukuyama

Which of these global visions holds the most descriptive and explanatory power as we try to understand the present and future evolution of the international system? Fukuyama's liberal dream certainly seems plausible. History itself has shown the advantages of liberal democratic capitalism over fascism or communism. Globalization has been driven by the rush of countries everywhere over past two decades to privatize state-owned industries, deregulate their economies and remove barriers to trade and investment. A truly global marketplace appears within reach. The recent wave of democratization has spread across Latin America, the former Soviet bloc and parts of Africa and Asia. From a handful of countries fifty years ago, more than sixty percent of the world's people now enjoy democratic government - the highest proportion ever (Diamond, 1993). Research into the so-called democratic peace thesis has confirmed that democracies rarely if ever go to war with other democracies. Scholars have also found support for the claim that higher levels of economic interdependence are associated with a lower incidence of war between nations.[4]

And yet, from our vantage point a decade after Fukuyama's book appeared, it is difficult to sustain his optimistic perspective on liberal universalism or his estimate of its staying power. Critics have pointed to many shortcomings of the liberal worldview, including the wretched environmental consequences of the liberal faith in unlimited economic growth and the threat that commercialism and westernization pose to cultural diversity. Perhaps most damning, however, is evidence that the globalization of market capitalism is producing growing economic inequalities within and among nations while concentrating political power in the hands of those who control a small group of global corporations. This reality threatens to produce rising social instability while corrupting democratic processes of government. In response, new forms of resistance to globalization and its inequitable consequences have arisen, as evidenced by the street protests first witnessed at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and since then at virtually every major global meeting of political and economic leaders. This populist backlash against globalization and its consequences is already forcing a rethinking of liberal assumptions and values.

The reconcentration of wealth and power at the national and global levels began in the late 1970s. Figures for the United States illustrate a pattern that is beginning to emerge in other developed countries. In his book, Wealth and Democracy (2002: xiii, 114, 125, 137, 153), Kevin Phillips cites the following data:

A similar pattern is evident at the global level. The gap between the rich countries of the North and the developing world has grown over the past two decades (Milanovic, 2002b). The major exceptions are in Asia, where China and a handful of other countries in the region have experienced rapid growth rates. Even here, however, the catch-up effects are mitigated by the facts that internal inequality has grown rapidly in China during this same period, while the 1997 Asian financial crisis and its after-effects have stolen back some of the earlier gains made by a number of Asian developing countries. The United Nations Development Programme reports that "The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74-1 in 1997, up from 60-1 in 1990 and 30-1 in 1960 (Human Development Report, 1999: 3)." Over a longer time period, the growing gap between rich and poor nations is captured in the fact that in 1870 average GDP per capita in 17 wealthiest countries was 2.4 times that of combined average for all remaining countries; by 1990, the ratio had grown to 4.5-1 ("Survey of the 20th Century," 1999: 27).

Whether in absolute or relative terms, the global gap in income, wealth and standards of living is alarming:

·      Among 4.4 billion people in developing world: 3.5 billion live in communities lacking basic sanitation; 1/3 lack access to safe drinking water; 1/4 lack adequate housing; 1/5 are undernourished (Speth, 1999: 14).

·      In the past 15 years, per capita income has declined in more than 100 countries and individual consumption has dropped by about one percent annually in more than 60 (Speth, 1999: 13).

Why has inequality increased so much in recent years and what are the possible consequences? To answer these questions, we have to examine how globalization has historically altered the balance of power among various social forces in the global economy. Ours is not the first era of globalization. The free market liberalism of the late 19th century produced levels of international economic integration rivaling those of today. Yet the laissez-faire policies of that period were accompanied by growing inequality, imperialism, the concentration of industry and intense class conflict. This first liberal order proved unsustainable and ultimately collapsed, ushering in a half century of war, revolution, nationalism and economic instability. 

A second liberal international order emerged from the ashes of World War II. Its architects sought to avoid the mistakes of the 19th century. The great social theorist Karl Polanyi (1944: 249) attributed the collapse of the first liberal order to "the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life." Liberals of the post-World War II era had no intention, of course, of abandoning the market or international economic exchange. They did, however, seek to circumscribe the social space in which markets, both domestic and international, operated and to embed the market in a social compact among the state, capital and labor. Capitalism had to be tamed to render it compatible with social peace and international stability.[5]

            Domestically, the post-war order was built upon social democracy, which entailed Keynesian macroeconomic management, the creation of the welfare state, progressive taxation, public ownership of key industries, regulation of big business and recognition of labor unions and collective bargaining. Internationally, a commitment to multilateralism and the gradual lowering of trade barriers was coupled with mechanisms designed to insure against the transmission of negative economic shocks from one nation to another, including exchange controls, protection for strategic and politically sensitive sectors, restrictions on international capital flows and safeguards against import surges that threatened established national producers. These arrangements created the basis for a substantial degree of class peace, social stability, economic growth and the consolidation of liberal democracy in the advanced industrial world.

The post-war order depended, however, on the maintenance of some degree of national economic autonomy, particularly in terms of financial flows. The economist John Maynard Keynes argued that social democracy was compatible with free trade, but not with the uncontrolled flow of capital across national borders, which undermined state control over a country's macroeconomic fundamentals.[6] Yet large corporations and banks chafed at the restrictions on their freedom to invest abroad. When the economic troubles of the 1970s hit, business argued that it was time to unleash capital from the confines of the national market and loosen the regulatory grip of states.

The elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s ushered in the transition from social democracy to neo-liberalism. Under neo-liberalism, the role of the state has shrunk and national economic autonomy has given way to globalization.

The political effect of this development has been to disrupt the social pact that lay at the core of the social democratic order (Ruggie, 1994). The balance among the state, labor and capital has shifted decidedly in favor of the latter. With capital controls and other sorts of restrictions lifted, capital has become internationally mobile to a greater degree than ever before. The same is not true of labor, whose movement across national borders remains heavily regulated, or of states, which remain territorial entities. The unilateral capacity of capital to exit the national economy produces an asymmetry. As capital is a key ingredient of economic growth, business can pit workers and states in different countries against one another in a bidding war for investment. As a result, labor movements everywhere have lost clout and the ability of states to regulate capital in the public interest has been compromised (Andrews, 1994).

In the United States, for instance, organized labor today represents only about 14% of the labor force as compared with 35% in the mid-1950s. A Cornell University study recently found that 62% of labor organizing drives prompted threats by business owners to relocate production to low wage countries (Phillips, 2002: 264). The threat of exit has also allowed corporations to win concessions from governments. Across the industrialized world, average tax rates on capital declined from 42% to 33% between 1986 and 1995 while taxes on the income of middle class workers grew dramatically ("World Economic Survey," 1997: 33). In the United States, the share of federal revenue accounted for by corporate taxes fell from 26.5% in 1950 to 10.2% in 2000 (Phillips, 2002: 149).

It is not surprising then, that the current era of neo-liberal globalization has seen the returns to capital rise and those to labor decline, producing unprecedented levels of inequality, both within particular nations and globally. Between 1987 and 1995, for instance, average productivity in the American economy grew by 15%. Yet during the same period, pre-tax corporate profits grew 80% while hourly wages in private industry grew by only 3% (Phillips, 2002: 156). Increased inequality might be tolerable if it were accompanied by increased rates of overall economic growth. In fact, however, economic growth rates have been lower over the past two decades than in the preceding two decades almost everywhere.[7] Financial liberalization has also produced greater economic instability, particularly in developing countries, where repeated financial crises have rocked the economies of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The spread of democracy over the past two decades has been a welcome development, but some have described the new political regimes that have arisen in many developing countries as "low intensity" democracies. In Latin America, for instance, not only have neo-liberal reforms enfeebled the state, but perpetual debt problems have forced states to place themselves under the effective control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Crucial economic decisions are dictated not by the preferences of electoral majorities at home but by technocratic elites at international agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization which are, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, "dominated not just by the wealthiest industrial countries but by commercial and financial interests in those countries (Stiglitz, 2002: 18)." Indeed, the growing power of such international economic institutions reflects in no small degree a desire to create new global rules that will safeguard the interests of capital as it ventures beyond the relatively safe confines of home markets in the industrialized world.

If these trends continue, it does not take a crystal ball to foresee a terrific social and political backlash that will bring an end to the end of history. Unless brought under the control of democratic forces, today's neo-liberal international order may prove no more sustainable than its 19th century predecessor, transforming Fukuyama's dream into a nightmare.

Critique of Huntington

Or is the nightmare already here in the form of Huntington's clash of civilizations? Any assessment of Huntington's thesis must ultimately turn on the question of whether globalization produces convergence or divergence across various cultures or civilizations. Huntington, of course, argues that globalization accentuates conflict by bringing people of fundamentally differing values into more frequent contact with one another. Moreover, he argues that non-Western civilizations view globalization as a Western scheme to control their economies and marginalize their traditional religious and cultural ideas.

These conclusions rest upon two crucial assumptions: 1. That members of each civilization respond to globalization in a uniform way. 2. That the dominant response to new cultural practices and ideas is rejection. Neither of these claims can withstand scrutiny.[8]

Each major religious or cultural tradition has historically included some elements that tend toward pluralism, inclusiveness, tolerance and openness to the broader world and other elements that tend toward orthodoxy, insularity, intolerance and closure toward outsiders. And in each case, both the balance and the intensity of conflict between these tendencies have varied over time. In general, the tendency toward insularity is strongest when a society faces external threat and the tendency toward openness is greatest when cooperation with others offers rewards and opportunities.[9]

The central reality of globalization is that it presents a threat to some and an opportunity to others. Within each civilization, there are those who possess the right skills and assets to gain from globalization and others who will be further marginalized. The most important effect of globalization, therefore, is not to pit united civilizations against one another, but to deepen divisions within each civilization between those who favor openness and cultural pluralism and those who favor insularity and cultural uniformity. It is from among the latter group, those marginalized by globalization, that we find the raw material for the rise of fundamentalist religious and cultural movements, whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic or Hindu.

While Huntington is correct, then, to note a rise in cultural conflict, he errs in portraying the primary cleavage as dividing one civilization from another. Instead, the crucial clashes are occurring within civilization clusters between those who are open to cultural exchanges and cooperation and those who reject them.[10]

This is evident, for instance, if we examine the Islamic world, which is portrayed by Huntington and others as united in its hostility to the West. Islam as a religion is not inherently insular or xenophobic. The Holy Koran teaches Muslims that "We created you from a single pair of a male and female and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other, not that you may despise each other (Koran, 49:13)."

Huntington offers the Bosnian war as a prototype for the clash of civilizations. Yet it is worth noting that among the three combatants in this conflict, it was the Bosnian Muslim government that most clearly defended the values of tolerance, democracy and ethnic and religious pluralism. As an example of "kin-country rallying," Huntington cites Saddam Hussein's appeal to Islamic solidarity against Western imperialism on the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Yet Huntington neglects to mention that this cynical bit of propaganda failed miserably and that the majority of Arab states, as well as countries representing each of the other major civilizations, supported coalition efforts to reverse Iraqi aggression against Kuwait.

While Osama bin Laden and the Taliban claimed to speak on behalf of the entire Islamic world in their denunciations and attacks upon the West, less noted is the fact that a majority of Afghanis welcomed the overthrow of the Taliban and the ousting of Al Qaeda from their country. It is true, of course, that anti-Americanism runs strong on the streets of the Arab world. Yet surveys in the Arab countries show that majorities reject the notion that Islam and the West are engaged in a clash of civilizations. Consider, for instance, a recent survey of 5,000 young people aged 15-25 in nine Muslim Arab countries who were asked to name "the country you think most highly of." The most frequent response by far was the United States (The British Council, 2002). Another survey of Muslims in nine Middle Eastern nations found that large majorities had favorable views toward American culture, but seven out of ten disapproved of American policies toward Arab countries (PEW Research Center, 2002). Whatever Osama bin Laden's own motivations, anger toward the United States among average people in the Arab world stems from what we do, not who we are. [11]

None of this is to deny the fact that there exist minorities in the Islamic world who seek to impose a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam on their fellow citizens and to use violence to combat unwanted external political, economic and cultural influences. Under conditions of economic stagnation, extremes of inequality and repressive political regimes, it is perhaps not surprising that such movements would arise. Less noted in the West is that there also exist in that part of the world popular movements that are pushing for greater democracy and openness, as, for example, in Iran. Unfortunately, these movements have received little support from the United States government, which has overlooked the undemocratic character of many of its allies in the region as long as they pursue pro-American policies. In sum, the processes of globalization and modernization are creating intense and conflicting pressures within the Islamic societies of the Middle East. This complexity defies the simplistic "clash of civilizations" thesis offered by Huntington.

In answer to the question of whether globalization produces cultural convergence or divergence across civilizations, we must say that both phenomena are occurring simultaneously. Each civilization contains elements that are open to cultural exchange with others as well as elements that seek to preserve cultural purity. Globalization intensifies the internal conflict within each civilization between these two sets of forces.

Grassroots Globalism

If cultural fundamentalism represents one form of response to neo-liberal globalization, then grassroots globalism represents another.[12] The principal agents of this vision are transnational non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace. The growth of transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) over the past two decades has been impressive: from 1,000 in 1980 to 5,500 in 1996 (Simmons, 1998: 89; also see Mathews, 1997). So too has been their impact on international politics. Transnational advocacy networks have played a major role in laying the groundwork for a number of important international agreements, including the Kyoto global warming treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Landmine Ban treaty and recent multilateral debt relief initiative for poor countries. NGOs have also pushed, with some success, for international financial institutions and global corporations to adopt reforms designed to address the problems of poverty, worker's rights and the environment.

Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank economist, has argued that "it is the trade unionists, students, environmentalists - ordinary citizens - marching in the streets of Prague, Seattle, Washington, and Genoa who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world (Stiglitz, 2002: 9)."

NGO campaigns are typically organized through decentralized cooperation among hundreds of independent groups. The non-hierarchical structure of transnational advocacy networks is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, dispersed networks possess enormous surge capacity. Over the short to medium term, NGO networks can mobilize considerable information, expertise, money and labor once a shared objective has been identified. Networks are flexible, resilient and efficient.

On the other hand, the shifting coalitions of NGO politics do not allow for the accumulation of long-term power in institutionalized form. Once an immediate objective, such as passage of an international treaty, has been realized, coalitions typically disband or re-form in different configurations around new goals. Groups often differ over ideology, goals and tactics and also compete with one another for money, volunteers, media attention and government favor. These organizational realities can detract from the effectiveness of the movement - particularly since the credibility of groups that base their appeal on the commitment to high moral principle can be easily compromised by public displays of narrow and self interested behavior (Cooley and Ron, 2002). Diversity and decentralization also make it possible for governments or other power-holders to divide popular coalitions through strategies of co-optation.

Grassroots globalism also faces contradictions at the level of overarching objectives. The goal of creating a global civil society in which strong communities of identity transcending national borders become an everyday reality for most people remains a distant dream. Beyond a small but significant body of core activists and their close sympathizers, most people in most societies continue to privilege various local identities over global ones. This is why transnational movements are most effective when they can forge plausible connections between global issues and diverse sets of local problems that engage the active concerns of average people.

Perhaps the most important overarching objective of grassroots globalists is to re-embed the global marketplace within a framework of democratic accountability. Yet the pursuit of this goal presents a paradox. States have historically served as the principal institutions for exercising democratic forms of governance. Yet in a global economy, capital has partially freed itself from the control of national authorities. The obvious solution is to create new forms of regulation at the global level. Yet this requires successful collective action among a group of almost 200 states, each of which will face incentives to attract renegade capital by cheating or defecting from any system of global regulation. Multilateral governance also faces resistance from the world's most powerful state, the US government, which has recently embraced a unilateralist foreign policy that is openly hostile toward the construction of strong global institutions.

Moreover, there presently exists no system for the direct representation of popular interests at the level of global institutions, which are the creations of states and have to date proven more responsive to corporate and elite interests than to popular pressures. Proposals to democratize global institutions by giving direct representation to NGOs face the problem that such groups themselves are seldom democratic. Most NGOs lack internal systems of democratic representation that would hold leaders accountable to those on whose behalf they claim to speak. How to overcome this democratic deficit in the creation of global institutions remains an unresolved puzzle.

The alternative to global regulation is to reassert control over capital at the national level by reconstituting the power of individual states. While there surely exists considerable scope for action at the national level, this solution also presents problems. States acting alone run the risk of capital flight and retaliation from other states whose interests might be harmed by re-regulation. Widespread but uncoordinated movements to reassert national level controls could carry enormous costs by tearing at the essential fabric of global commerce that has been created through the mechanisms of globalization. 

Most likely, re-embedding the global economy in systems of democratic accountability will require a multi-level approach: the vigorous engagement of civil society in monitoring corporate and state behavior, revitalized state controls at the national level where feasible and architectural innovation at the global level to create a denser set of institutions that are more open, inclusive and democratic in nature.

In principle, glassroots globalism promises to reestablish a balance among contending social forces through globalization from below while providing a multicultural alternative to nationalist, ethic and religious fundamentalism as responses to the pressures of globalization and modernization. Clearly, this is the most hopeful vision of the three reviewed here, but just as clearly its realization will require a long and difficult journey.

Conclusion

Running through all three visions is an attempt by various authors to come to grips with the complex and multi-faceted consequences of globalization and modernization. Globalization is, at heart, tied up with the expansion of capitalism. In contemporary discourse, when we use the term capitalism, we tend to think about the market - which conjures up benign images of voluntary exchange among equals. But this formulation obscures the continuing class character of capitalism. Those who own and control the means of production are given a privileged place in capitalist society. As a result, capitalist orders typically produce a concentration of economic and political power.

But the hegemony of capital has never gone unchallenged. Popular movements have always sought to counter the power of capital, largely through collective self-organization and the fight for democracy. After more than a century of struggle, the social democratic governments that emerged in North America and Western Europe after World War II served as relatively successful vehicles for taming the abuses of capitalism and creating a fairer, more balanced societies.  

Globalization has now freed capital from the social compacts that constrained its power during the post-war era. As a result, we are passing through a period of relatively untamed capitalist expansion. This too has not gone uncontested. Popular movements against globalization have taken two characteristic forms: fundamentalist cultural movements seeking insularity and transnational social movements seeking more democratic control over capital at both the national and global levels.

One thing seems evident. A globalization project based upon the subordination of all competing human values to market imperatives is not sustainable. One alternative would be the continued growth of nationalist, ethnic and religious fundamentalist forces, leading to a violent dismantling of the globalization project in ways reminiscent of the first half of the 20th century. The surest way to avoid this nightmare is to stop dreaming and get on with the task of building a more just and democratic global order based upon globalization from below. We must, in other words, begin to think of ourselves as global citizens who are individually and collectively responsible for our shared future.

References

Andrews, David, "Capital Mobility and State Autonomy: Toward a Structural Theory of International Monetary Relations," International Studies Quarterly, June, 1994.

Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Social and Economic Advantage, Garland, 1972.

Barber, Benjamin, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, New York: Times Books, 1995

Brecher, Jeremy and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up, Cambridge: South End Press, 1998.

Brecher, Jeremy, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity, Cambridge: South End Press, 2000.

British Council, "Connecting Futures Research," 2002. Available at: http://www.connectingfutures.com/research/ (accessed September 21, 2002).

Broad, Robin, Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just World Economy, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

Brown, Michael, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven Miller, Debating the Democratic Peace, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Cox, Robert W. (ed.), The New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order, New York: St. Martins Press/United Nations University Press, 1997.

Cooley, Alexander and James Ron, "The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action," International Security, Summer, 2002.

Diamond, Larry, "The Globalization of Democracy," in Robert O. Slater, Barry M. Schutz and Steven Dorr (eds.), Global Transformation and the Third World, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993.

Doyle, M., "Liberalism and World Politics." American Political Science Review, December, 1986.

Fukuyama, Francis, "The End of History?" The National Interest, Summer, 1989.

Fukayama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Avon, 1992.

Greider, William, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997

Huntington, Samuel P., ëThe Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Fall, 1993.

Huntington, Samuel P., "The West: Unique, Not Universal," Foreign Affairs, November/December, 1996a.

Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996b.

Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, translated by Ted Humphrey, London: Hackett, 1983.

Kaplan, Robert, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, New York: Random House, 1996.

Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998.

Lewis, Bernard, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1990.

Mathews, Jessica, "Power Shift," Foreign Affairs, January/February, 1997.

Milanovic, Branko, "The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It," manuscript, 2002a (downloadable at http://www.worldbank.org/research/inequality/pdf/naiveglob1.pdf).

Milanovic, Branko, "True World Income Distribution: 1988 and 1993: First Calculations Based on Household Surveys Alone," Economic Journal, January, 2002b.

Moggridge, D.E., Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, London: Routledge, 1992.

Oneal, John R. and Bruce Russett, Bruce, "Does the ëWar Against Terrorism' Prove the ëClash of Civilizations' Right? Some Evidence," in Peter Herrmann and Arno Tausch (eds.), Dar al Islam: The Mediterranean, the Conflict Potential and the Social Development Performance of the Islamic Periphery and the Keys to the European House, Hauppage: Nova Scotia Publishers, 2003.

PEW Research Center for the People and the Press, "PEW Global Attitudes Project," Preliminary Project Analysis released on April 29, 2002. Available at: http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=46 (accessed September 21, 2002).

Phillips, Kevin, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, New York: Broadway Books, 2002.

Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation:The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944.

Program on International Policy Attitudes, "Americans on the War on Terrorism," survey dates: November 1-4, 2001. Available at: http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Terrorism/questionnaire.html (accessed September 21, 2002).

Ruggie, J. G., "International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," in Stephen Krasner (ed.), International Regimes, Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Ruggie, John G., "Trade, Protectionism and the Future of Welfare Capitalism," Journal of International Affairs, Summer, 1994.

Russett, Bruce, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Simmons, P.J., "Learning to Live with NGOs," Foreign Policy, Fall, 1998.

Skidmore, David, "Huntington's Clash Revisited," Journal of World Systems Research, Fall, 1998.

Smith, Jackie, Charles Chatfield, Ron Pagnucco and Cheryl Chatfield (eds.), Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics: Solidarity Beyond the State, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Speth, James Gustave, "The Plight of the Poor," Foreign Affairs, May/June, 1999.

Stiglitz, Joseph, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

"Survey of the 20th Century," The Economist, September 11, 1999.

Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, abridged version of volumes I-VI, 1987.

United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1999, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

"World Economy Survey," The Economist, September 20, 1997.


[1] This essay is adapted from the 2002 Stalnaker Lecture, delivered by the author on September, 25, 2002 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, USA.

[2] See Doyle (1986) for a discussion of the liberal tradition in international politics.

[3] Robert Kaplan (1996) offers a somewhat similar vision, arguing that the forces of fragmentation are likely to overcome the forces of integration in world politics. Benjamin Barber (1995) contrasts "Jihad" versus "McWorld," while emphasizing the interrelated nature of the two sets of forces.

[4] The literature on this topic is large, but Russett (1993) and Brown, Lynn-Jones and Miller, (1996) may serve as representative examples.

[5] This paragraph and the next two draw upon arguments found in Ruggie (1983).

[6] Once the Second World War was concluded, Keynes feared that: "Loose funds may sweep round the world disorganizing all steady business." To obviate this possibility, Keynes felt that: "Nothing is more certain than that movements of capital funds must be regulated; - which in itself will involve far-reaching departures from laissez-faire arrangements." Cited in Moggridge (1992: 673).

[7] Milanovic (2002a: 14-15) notes that out of a group of 124 examined, 95 experienced higher rates of economic growth during the period of 1960-1978 than during the two decades of 1978-1998.

[8] For a more extended critique of Huntington's thesis, see Skidmore (1998).

[9] This theme is emphasized and illustrated in essays on diplomatic traditions in three major civilizations by Hassan Hanafi (Islamic world), Satish Chandra (India) and Hongying Wang (China) in Cox (1997).

[10] This may help explain Oneal and Russett's (2003) findings in this volume that conflict within civilization clusters is often more frequent than conflict across civilizations.

[11] Note that a large majority of Americans interviewed in one post-9/11 survey also rejected the notion that the West and the Islamic world were locked in a "clash of civilizations." 67.6% agreed that it was possible for America and the Islamic world to find "common ground," while only 26% agreed that "violent conflict" was inevitable because Islam is "intolerant and fundamentally incompatible with Western culture (Program on International Policy Attitudes, 2001)."

[12] For additional background on transnational social movements such as those discussed in this section, see Smith, et. al. (1997) and Broad (2002).