In Whose Hands: The Question of “Global Primacy”
After watching Tom Friedman of the New York Times discuss with Charlie Rose the updated version of Friedman’s book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” I have been thinking more about the tension between the ideas of “The Decline of the American Empire” and “The Rise of China”. President Obama’s recent trip abroad to seemed to bring these two entirely separate conversations into one coalescing stream. Indeed, as Friedman noted, the media lens cast upon much of the US diplomacy was one invoking that specific power-balance gaze. An attractive and simple contrast to support reporting, over-simplifying the rise or fall of either power into a winner-take- all kind of dualism fails to account for the vast spectrum of issues each nation addresses at both domestic and foreign policy levels.
Similarly, Josef Joffe’s recent article, “The Default Power: The False Prophecy of America’s Decline” in Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct 2009) reminds us that the declaration of the death of “US” primacy on the global level may be too loud and strident when compared to the statistics at hand. He, further, gives a kind of historiography of this myth, with hard and fast stats to back up his doubts as to this most recent iteration of the death knell. Thus, as Friedman responded to Charlie Rose with a “maybe” when asked whether or not China was going to jump onstage as the “next great superpower,” Joffe provides further supporting evidence to question the assumption that the US is incontrovertibly on the way down as “China rises”.
Without laundry-listing the various terms and political circumstances to which Joffe points, he sums up this attitude and its variants with the notion of “declinism” and “declinists”. One might add another concept here as a reason the US culture tends to engage in such self-abrogating woes. The word? “Apocalypse”. Or, an even better eyeball twister: “eschatological” (the end of times). Both terms gain much of their current meaning from strains of Judeo-Christian theology. Let’s face it, it is common for folks in the US to somehow backload reason with a haunting notion one day all will come tumbling down as it so often does in nursery rhymes from London Bridge to Humpty Dumpty. Thus, even if we consider the evidence before us today in the United States of financial shifts and economic stress, “declinism”, according to Joffe, remains part of the very mythic fabric of our national self-image.
What might we call into question when talking about the global balance of power? Beyond the immediate financial and military issues, we must also look a bit further at those freedoms related to political expression, religion, and the access to well-being for those who are not among the most elite. For, when we begin to think about which powers may or may not increase their relative “gravity” on world affairs, we simultaneously crack open the door to that power’s motivations, beliefs, etc. We do well to consistently assess, as humans have for centuries, the nature of both the positive and negative aspects of any culture. To the extent that any nation can be viewed in three dimension, not simply as an “enemy” all parties involved benefit.
In forthcoming posts, we will pull this thread further, taking a look at how globalization affects human rights, freedom of expression, and faith practices.
c. Allison Addicott 2009
Recent Comments