Each age of globalization has given rise to new tensions and wars. In the Paleolithic Age, Homo sapiens drove to extinction the other hominins, Neanderthals and Denisovans, they encountered. In the Neolithic Age, migrating herdsmen and farmers replaced the hunter-gatherers they encountered, perhaps violently, in competition for scarce resources. In the Equestrian Age, horsemen from the steppes raided and plundered the temperate-zone societies of Eurasia. In the Classical Age, great land empires battled for domination of Eurasia. In the Ocean Age, European conquerors largely replaced the indigenous populations of the Americas, who were driven to near elimination by disease and subjugation. In the Industrial Age, European imperialists fought their way to political rule over most of Africa and much of Asia. Today we are again in flux, as the Anglo-American-led world gives way to something else yet to be determined.
Each age has also invented new forms of governance, and that can give us hope. The Paleolithic Age forged the strong bonds of local nomadic clans. The Neolithic Age brought village life and local politics. The Equestrian Age brought the first states. The Classical Age brought the first multi-ethnic empires. The Ocean Age brought ocean-spanning global empires. The Industrial Age brought the beginnings of global governance, including the birth of the United Nations, as well as two hegemonic powers, the United Kingdom and the United States. Now, the Digital Age calls on us to invent more effective ways to govern a globally interconnected world.
In the previous chapter, I outlined three enormous challenges for the Digital Age: rising inequality, massive environmental degradation, and the risks arising from major geopolitical change. These daunting challenges could overload our political institutions and provoke a devastating conflict. Such has been the pattern of the past. Surely the prime task of our age is to resist a slide toward war, as our capacity for mutual destruction exceeds any past limits of history. And while maintaining the peace, our goals must also include keeping the planet habitable and our societies inclusive and just.
More than ever, we need to manage globalization with these large goals in mind. Several concepts can help us. The first is sustainable development, meaning the holistic approach to governance that combines economic, social, and environmental objectives. The second is the social-democratic ethos, meaning an inclusive and participatory approach to political and economic life. The third is subsidiarity, meaning that we solve problems at the proper level of governance. The fourth is a reformed United Nations. The fifth is a world safe for diversity.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith largely defined the ethos of the Industrial Age: the quest for national wealth. Since the early nineteenth century, sovereign governments have competed for wealth and power through industrialization and technological advancement. A global-scale market economy emerged in which privately owned companies aggressively pursue profits on a global scale. The result has been two centuries of economic growth, albeit punctuated by wars and economic crises. The world economy today is at least one hundred times larger than at the start of the Industrial Age. With annual growth in world output averaging around 3 percent, the world economy continues to double in size roughly every twenty years, that is, in a single generation.
This economic growth has produced startling gains in living standards and has brought the end of extreme poverty within reach. But it has also generated two stark results. First, inequalities of income and wealth are intense and increasing. Not only do we still have extreme poverty in the midst of global wealth; we also have rising inequalities within rich societies that threaten to become much worse in the age of smart machines. Second, we have violated the planetary boundaries with human-induced climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pervasive pollution that threaten the wellbeing of billions of people and the survival of millions of species.
The key to wellbeing, therefore, is a combination of objectives—not just the pursuit of wealth, but the combination of prosperity, lower levels of inequality, and environmental sustainability. The triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental objectives is the concept of sustainable development. It must be the essential vision for our time. The equivalent of Adam Smith’s text for this century should be “The Sustainable Development of Nations.”
Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, prime minister of Norway in the 1980s, brought the new concept of sustainable development to the world’s attention through the Commission on Environment and Development that she chaired. In the commission’s 1987 report, Our Common Future, sustainable development was defined as development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”1 The new concept was adopted by the UN member states at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, otherwise known as the Rio Earth Summit.
At the time, the Rio Earth Summit was heralded as a definitive breakthrough for global governance. It produced three major environmental agreements—on climate change, biodiversity conservation, and the fight against the spread of deserts. The UN member states adopted the concept of sustainable development and a road map for its implementation known as Agenda 21. Yet the follow-up results were distressingly small. The environmental treaties were not effectively implemented. Human-induced global warming continued unabated; the destruction of biodiversity accelerated; and the spread of degraded lands and desertification in the world’s drylands continued apace.
At a follow-up conference in 2012, on the twentieth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, the world’s governments reconvened and surveyed the global landscape with dismay. Environmental degradation was running out of control, and Agenda 21, the purported guidebook for sustainable development, had fallen into the void. The concept of sustainable development was more urgent than ever, but new means had to be found to bring it to the forefront of public policy. In that context, the governments decided to launch a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to bring sustainable development to the forefront of daily politics, civil-society activism, and the strategies of the business sector.
Between 2012 and 2015, the UN member states negotiated the SDGs, which culminated in adoption of the seventeen SDGs shown in figure 9.1 as part of an agreed 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The concept of sustainable development was somewhat recast from its original formulation. Now, instead of emphasizing the harmonization of present and future needs, as in the Brundtland Commission report, sustainable development is now described as meeting the triple bottom line of economic prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability.
9.1 UN Sustainable Development Goals
Source: United Nations Department of Global Communications. “Sustainable Development Goals.” 2019.
The seventeen goals, and the accompanying 169 detailed targets, are time-bound and quantifiable objectives (mostly) for the year 2030, embodying various economic, social, and environmental objectives. The main economic objectives are to end extreme poverty (SDG 1) and hunger (SDG 2), ensure universal health coverage (SDG 3) and schooling (SDG 4), and provide access to safe water (SDG 6), electricity (SDG 7), decent jobs (SDG 8), and modern infrastructure (SDG 9). The social objectives include gender equality (SDG 5), reduced inequality of income (SDG 10), and peaceful, lawful and inclusive societies (SDG 16). The environmental objectives include sustainable cities (SDG 11), sustainable production and consumption (SDG 12), control of climate change (SDG 13), and the protection of marine ecosystems (SDG 14) and terrestrial ecosystems (SDG 15). The final goal, SDG 17, calls for a global partnership to accomplish the first sixteen SDGs.
To find the ways to achieve these seventeen goals, we need to look to the future in a systematic and rational manner. Most importantly, we need a kind of dynamic and adaptive planning—that is, planning with an explicit account of uncertainty that allows for updating of policies and strategies along the way. Because we do not know with precision what the technologies of the future will offer, we can plan ahead but not rigidly. In this regard, we should consider the very wise statement of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as the supreme allied commander in World War II. Eisenhower liked to say that “plans are useless, but planning is everything.” He meant that specific plans will not be followed in practice because unexpected circumstances will surely arise, yet planning—the logical process of looking ahead in a systematic manner—is crucial for success.
Part of successful planning will be multidimensional systems thinking. We have to integrate our understanding of agriculture, healthcare, land use, carbon management, energy systems, and biodiversity conservation. For example, we will have to reconsider land use in order to accomplish several simultaneous objectives: food security, biodiversity conservation, the biological storage of carbon to fight climate change, and economic wellbeing of rural communities. This will require multidimensional systems thinking.
To plan successfully, the world will need an active interchange of ideas, global cooperation in research and development, and the rapid dissemination of best practices across countries. At a time when there are so many centers of excellence in learning, there will be huge advantages of global knowledge networks on the various dimensions of sustainable development. The global research agenda should adopt the concept of directed technical change, meaning that R&D efforts should be targeted toward goals of high priority, such as low-cost and plentiful zero-carbon energy, biodegradable waste products, food crops that are resilient to environmental stresses, more efficient means of irrigation, and better climate modeling and forecasts.
Governance for sustainable development will require a tremendous amount of consensus building. That will be hard work. Vested interests and diverse perspectives and cultures often make it difficult to achieve a national much less a global consensus on how to make needed changes—for example, on energy systems, land use, and urban planning. Multistakeholder deliberations and consensus building efforts will be needed to implement the good ideas that arise through research and development.
We will also need to hold governments and businesses accountable for their commitments to the SDGs. That kind of accountability will depend on accurate and timely metrics to track progress on the SDGs. Investors too will need to be held accountable for directing new investment funds toward sustainable projects. Fortunately, “ESG Investing,” meaning the use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators in investment allocations, is on the rise. In fact, all investments in the future should satisfy ESG standards.
Finally, we need excitement and inspiration. Sustainable development must be our generation’s moonshot—a galvanizing adventure that draws forth the talents, resources, and energies to get the job done. I can recall from my youth the thrill of the moonshot, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy called on Americans to back a space adventure of high risk and daring. In May 1961, President Kennedy declared, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before the decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Those riveting words set the United States on the path to the moon. President Kennedy’s goal was accomplished a mere eight years later.
The future trajectory of the world’s population will also make a difference. According to the most recent UN forecasts, the world population in 2100 might be anywhere between 7 billion and 16 billion people, depending on the future path of fertility rates (figure 9.2). Sustainable development will be vastly harder to achieve if the world population soars to 10 billion or more. The low-population trajectory, fortunately, is the one we would expect if we honor the commitments to healthcare for all (SDG 3), education for all (SDG 4), and gender equality (SDG 5). That combination would mean that both girls and boys will stay in school longer, marry later, join the labor force in greater numbers, and voluntarily choose to have smaller families, while investing more in the health, nutrition, and education of each child. That so-called demographic transition would lead to a peaking of the world population in this century of perhaps 9 billion, a faster reduction in poverty, and far less adverse stress on the natural environment than if the world population continues to rise throughout the century to more than 10 billion.
9.2 Low, Medium and High Fertility Projections
Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Population Prospects 2019, Online Edition
The 193 UN member states are pursuing sustainable development with widely varying degrees of consistency and commitment. Some countries are on track to achieve most or all of the SDGs, including the decarbonization of their energy systems and reduced levels of inequality. Others continue on the path of highly polluting fossil fuels and growing inequality. An examination of the relative progress and commitment of different countries can provide evidence of “what works” to achieve the SDGs.
The countries in the global forefront of achieving the SDGs are the countries of northern Europe. In 2019, the ranking of countries according to SDG progress showed that the world’s top five countries were Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Austria.2 Interestingly, the 2019 rankings of countries by their self-reported levels of life satisfaction (“subjective wellbeing”) were similar: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands.3 Indeed, when we compare the full rankings of SDG achievement and the rankings of life satisfaction, we find a strong degree of correlation, with the countries of northern Europe at the top of both sets of world rankings.
The key to this dual success in sustainable development and life satisfaction is a long-standing style of governance and social ethos in the northern European countries. The top-ranked countries all share a philosophy of “social democracy,” including long periods during the past century in which social-democratic political parties led the governments of these nations. In this context, a social-democratic ethos signifies a set of ideas for organizing politics and the economy. These include a commitment to a market economy with private ownership combined with a high level of worker unionization, labor rights, a healthy work-life balance (including paid family leave and ample vacation time), and the universal provision of public services, including quality healthcare and education financed by the budget. This strategy has sometimes been called “the middle way” between free-market capitalism on one side and state ownership of industry on the other side. By all accounts, this middle way produces the most successful combination of prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability of any political-economic system on the planet today.
The social-democratic ethos will become even more important during the Digital Age as more and more jobs are displaced by smart machines. Workers with more job skills, typically requiring more education, will find that their jobs are empowered by the smart machines, while workers with lesser skills will be displaced by the machines. The result will be a further increase in earnings inequality and economic insecurity for lower-skilled workers. In order to ensure that all parts of society benefit from the ongoing technological advances, public policies will have to tax the “winners” and use the proceeds to ensure universal access to quality healthcare, education, and social protection as a matter of human right—the core idea of the social-democratic ethos.
A key to good policy making is the distinction between private goods and public goods. Private goods are goods that the marketplace efficiently provides under the incentives of profit maximization. Public goods are those that the marketplace underprovides because the profit motive will send the wrong signals. Public goods include quality education and healthcare for all, new scientific knowledge, access to new technologies, protection of the environment, and infrastructure such as highways and long-distance transmission lines for electric power. Private goods (such as housing, furnishings, automobiles, personal appliances, tourism, etc.) operate mostly on a market basis, with households generally spending their own incomes to purchase goods from profit-oriented businesses. Public goods, by contrast, are typically provided through public budgets, with government revenues covering the costs of public investments and services.
A major policy challenge is to set the right boundaries between the private and public sectors, and between the public sectors at varying political scales. Some public goods are local, meaning that they can be effectively provided by local governments, such as cities or towns. Schools, clinics, police protection, and local roads are all examples of local public goods. Other public goods are national in character, such as national defense or a national highway system. Still other public goods are transnational or regional, including at least two countries, such as the management of a river that runs through several countries. Matters such as the diversion of river flows, flood control, hydroelectric power, and navigation rights along the riverway are all public goods that should generally be handled by a transnational authority with representatives from all of the affected countries. Still other public goods are continental in scale, such as major transport systems (highways and railways throughout Europe and Asia), long-distance power transmission lines, transboundary pollution control, and the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems shared by many nations (such as the Amazon Basin, with nine countries having territory in the basin). A growing number of public goods are global in nature, such as the end of human-induced climate change, the control of epidemic diseases, development assistance for the poorest countries, the crackdown on international tax evasion, and nuclear non-proliferation.
The doctrine of subsidiarity provides an important framework for the provision of public goods. It holds that the provision of public goods (and services) should be managed at the lowest scale of governance feasible for the particular goods and services in question. When the goods and services can be effectively left to the marketplace, it is good to do so. For those goods that are inherently public in nature, it is best to provide them at the most local level of governance feasible. National governments could in principle be put in charge of operating schools and clinics, for example, but there is usually no compelling case to do so, as schools and clinics can be provided effectively by local governments taking into account the specific needs of each local community. Local governance enables more local participation in decision making by the people directly affected and more attention to local conditions. At the same time, it does not make sense to assign local governments to provide services or solve problems that can only be addressed at a larger geographical scale, such as rivershed management or the control of transboundary pollution. Those problems require transnational authorities. Similarly, it would be impossible to control human-induced climate change by the disaggregated efforts of individual cities or even nations, without the benefit of an overarching global framework, namely the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Climate Agreement, both of which include all nations of the world.4
The failure to understand the subsidiarity doctrine leads to endless confusion in public policies. Some free-market ideologists, for example, object to the government’s role in the economy without appreciating the difference between private and public goods. Advocates of local governance often fail to realize that certain public goods cannot be provided by local governments alone. Nationalists who are opposed to global treaties and UN regulations often assume that all necessary public goods can be provided by national governments, without reflecting on the realities of transboundary challenges such as transnational infrastructure and global environmental management of challenges such as climate change.
In the twenty-first century, many dimensions of sustainable development will require public goods on a multi-country or global scale. Rivers, ecosystems, pollution, climate control, international financial flows, the Internet, power transmission, highway systems, railroad networks, and aviation all require strong regional and global cooperation. None can be managed effectively at the level of a single country. Regional groupings of nations, such as the European Union, the African Union, ASEAN, Mercosur, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (in Asia), and others, will be even more important in the future than they are today.
China has been promoting large-scale transnational cooperation in infrastructure in two major initiatives. The first is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to provide land-based infrastructure for the “belts” connecting Asia and Europe, and for the sea “roads” connecting Asia, Europe, and Africa through the Indian Ocean. The second is the Global Energy Interconnection (GEI) initiative led by an organization called GEIDCO (Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization). GEI aims to connect high-quality sites of renewable energy (wind, solar, and hydro) around the world through long-distance power transmission. Both BRI and GEI are creative approaches to governance of transboundary infrastructure for the twenty-first century. Indeed, the two initiatives should be combined, since the BRI should be based on renewable energy if it is to serve the true interests of the countries involved and of the world. Figure 9.3 shows a map of the existing and planned infrastructure the Belt and Road Initiative entails.
9.3 Map of Belt and Road Initiative
Source: Map adapted from Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), May 2018
As regional public goods rise in importance, regional groupings such as the European Union, the African Union, and ASEAN will become even more important than they are today. We can imagine that twenty-first-century governance will increasingly involve cooperation among multi-national groups rather than between individual nations. We can suppose that there will be eight major regional groupings: North America, South America, European Union, African Union, South Asia, East Asia, Commonwealth of Independent States, and Western Asia. These eight regional groupings could begin to constitute the core of global diplomacy. Currently, the UN is an organization of individual member states, now totaling 193 countries. With 193 countries, there are more than 18,000 pairwise combinations of countries. With eight regions, there are only twenty-eight pairwise combinations of regions, a much more manageable number for effective international cooperation.
As historian Mark Mazower describes in his important intellectual history Governing the World, the idea of global governance first took hold among the intellectual leaders of the European Enlightenment.5 The German philosopher Immanuel Kant foresaw a “perpetual peace” on the basis of a global confederation of republics. After the Napoleonic Wars, the conservative states of Europe entered into the Concert of Europe to try to maintain peace and stability, and especially to avoid revolutionary ideas such as parliamentary democracy and republicanism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the European powers collaborated to avoid conflicts among themselves as they incorporated large swathes of Africa and Asia into their respective empires. They also established new international institutions to govern the increasingly interconnected world, including the International Telegraph Union (1865) and the International Postal Union (1874).
The first comprehensive attempt at global governance among the world’s nation-states came in the wake of World War I with the establishment of the League of Nations, heaquartered in Geneva, in 1920. The League was a remarkable breakthrough in concept, giving representation to nations in order to maintain the peace. There were forty-two initial members, later joined by another twenty-one countries. Though the League was established at the behest of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the United States itself did not join because of opposition in the Senate. Without the United States, and in the face of unremitting financial and political turmoil in Europe and neighboring Western Asia and Africa, the League proved unable to respond to the growing geopolitical and socioeconomic crises of the 1930s. With the outbreak of World War II, the League’s technical staff mostly transferred to the United States. The League itself was dissolved in 1946, its functions taken over by the new United Nations.
The term United Nations was originally applied to the anti-fascist alliance in World War II led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. It then became the appellation for the successor body to the League of Nations. The new United Nations organization was established in 1945 under the UN Charter and assumed its home in New York City the following year. The moral charter of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was adopted in 1948.
As I recounted briefly in the previous chapter, the UN represented the internationalist side of post–World War II U.S. foreign policy. The United States strongly supported its creation from the 1940s through the 1960s, for three main reasons. First, it could be used as an instrument to advance U.S. foreign policy—for example, in the Korean War, where the United States and its allies operated as a UN-mandated force. Second, the UN offered an effective way to create a global agenda for economic development under the aegis of the United States. Third, the UN offered an important venue for the United States to compete with the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds” of the newly independent postcolonial states.
As the power, voice, and influence of the developing countries increased at the UN, and as the competition with the Soviet Union waned toward the end of the Cold War, the U.S. attitude toward the UN became ambivalent and at times hostile. When the developing countries called for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s, the United States opposed the NIEO and instead demanded that the countries fall into line with the U.S.-led global capitalist system. Since the 1990s, the United States has become increasingly resistant to ceding authority to UN initiatives, and a growing number of UN treaties have been left unsigned or unratified by the US.
As of today, there are 193 UN member states, covering nearly the entire world population. Yet in important operational ways, the UN remains a twentieth-century institution guided by rules laid down by the United States in 1945. Most importantly, at the end of World War II, the five victorious allied powers (the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and United States, together with France and China) were given special status as the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. These P5 countries not only were granted permanent seats on the Security Council but were also accorded a veto over its decisions and over subsequent changes in the UN Charter.
The problem, of course, is that the world has changed significantly since 1945, when the United States reigned supreme. The P5 countries are no longer the decisive forces in geopolitics, and no longer the obvious candidates for extraordinary privilege in global governance. One way to see that is in table 9.1, which measures the “size” of countries according to their share of world population and world output. For purposes of the calculations, a nation’s share of world output is defined as the simple average of two measures: its share of world output measured at market prices and its share measured at purchasing-power-adjusted prices.
Table 9.1 Largest Countries Ranked by Population and Output, 2018 (percent of world total)
The table shows the ten largest countries as of 2018. While all of the P5 countries are among the ten largest countries, three of the P5—the UK, France, and Russia—are in fact smaller than five other countries: India, Japan, Germany, Brazil, and Indonesia. The allocation of permanent seats on the Security Council represents decisions taken in 1945 rather than today’s realities. Note that three of the five large countries without permanent seats are in Asia: India, Japan, and Indonesia.
The UN Security Council currently has fifteen members, the P5 plus ten rotating seats with two-year terms and no veto power. The rotating members are elected by five regional groupings: Asia (two seats), Latin America (two seats), Africa (three seats), Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) (two seats), and Eastern Europe (one seat). Thus, combining the permanent and rotating members, Asia currently holds three seats, or a mere 20 percent of the Security Council, despite having 60 percent of the world’s population and accounting for nearly 50 percent of the world’s GDP. The underrepresentation of Asia on the UN Security Council is one of the most glaring weaknesses of the UN system today. The UN was designed for North Atlantic leadership, yet the global center of gravity of population, economics, and geopolitics is shifting toward Asia and Africa.
Table 9.2 presents a reform proposal that would help to rebalance the UN Security Council. In my proposed reform, the Security Council would expand to twenty-one members, with Asia holding six seats, or around 30 percent. Six new permanent members would be added, the large five underrepresented countries mentioned above (Brazil, Germany, India, Indonesia, and Japan) plus Nigeria, Africa’s largest country. The problem of course is that even this modest change would involve a relative diminution of power of the United States and the other P5 countries, which they can block by veto. In fact, reform of the UN Security Council has been stymied for many years by exactly this problem, the opposition of the P5 to needed reforms. And with its relative weakening in the global scene, the United States may well seek to hobble rather than reform the UN in the years ahead. Reform will come when the United States and the other P5 members finally appreciate that a healthy and vibrant UN is essential for global peace and security, including of the P5 countries themselves.
Table 9.2 Proposed Reform of the UN Security Council
In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote:
Interdependence obliges us to think of one world with a common plan. Yet the same ingenuity which has brought about enormous technological progress has so far proved incapable of finding effective ways of dealing with grave environmental and social problems worldwide. A global consensus is essential for confronting the deeper problems, which cannot be resolved by unilateral actions on the part of individual countries. Such a consensus could lead, for example, to planning a sustainable and diversified agriculture, developing renewable and less polluting forms of energy, encouraging a more efficient use of energy, promoting a better management of marine and forest resources, and ensuring universal access to drinking water.6
The challenge of globalization from the earliest days of humanity has been the lack of consensus. Our species, exquisitely evolved for cooperation within our clan, is equally primed for conflict with the “other.” In a world that has the ability to “end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” as President John F. Kennedy eloquently stated in his Inaugural Address, can we actively find a consensus for a common plan?
To take up Pope Francis’s challenge and explore the possibilities and limits of consensus, I recently co-led in a multifaith effort to find the common basis for global action for sustainable development. Religious leaders and practitioners across the world’s major faiths—Christianity, Shia and Sunni Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and First Nation beliefs—as well as secular philosophers, gathered over two years seeking Ethics in Action for sustainable development. We asked ourselves: Is there a common framework that could engage communities across the divisions of faith, culture, race, and ethnicity?
Our answer, tentatively, is yes. The religious leaders repeatedly chastised politicians for misusing religion in their cynical quest for power. Religious beliefs are frequently misused and misquoted by politicians in order to stoke fear and division. In fact, the religious leaders readily found common ground on the key precepts of sustainable development. The challenge, then, is not an unbridgeable divide of human belief but rather the clash of interests and ambitions. The problem is one of politics rather than irreconcilable human differences.
The faith leaders and ethicists identified three moral precepts common to all of the world’s faiths. The first is the Golden Rule, the principle of reciprocity: Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you. The Golden Rule is found in the teachings of Confucius and of Jesus, in Hindu texts, and in Kant’s categorical imperative. The second principle is the preferential option for the poor—that is, giving due attention to the poorest members of society. Ethics consists in the protection of human dignity, and human dignity requires that each person in society have the economic means to meet basic needs. In United Nations parlance, it is “to leave no one behind.” The third precept is protection of creation—the physical Earth on which our own survival, and that of millions of other species, depends. These principles can be the building blocks of a common global plan for sustainable development, if politics does not get in the way.
Politics, indeed, has two faces. For the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, politics is the quest for the common good of the citizenry, the members of the polis (the political community). Aristotle defined this as a quest for eudaimonia (a flourishing life). For the Renaissance-era political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, by contrast, politics is the struggle for power by the prince. Kant believed that global peace would be possible when princes could no longer march their citizens off to war. Kant described war as a plaything of princes who are not accountable to their subjects:
In a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.7
One hundred fifty years after Kant, an evil and cynical Nazi war leader, Hermann Goering, while imprisoned at Nuremburg for Nazi war crimes, described how demagogues can use propaganda to launch wars—even, alas, in democracies. Interviewed in his jail cell, he told his interviewer:
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.8
“There is one difference,” Goering’s interviewer pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.” Goering replied:
Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
We are left, in the end, with a need, a hope, and a conundrum. The need is to steer the new age of globalization so that our energies are directed toward ending human poverty rather than human life. The hope is that across the world’s societies and religions there are common ethical underpinnings. The conundrum is how easily we nonetheless fall prey to our small differences, which can be stirred into virulent hatreds by demagogic leaders in their quest for power.
I have mentioned many times one modern leader whose leadership I admire and whose words continue to inspire. President Kennedy lived through the closest brush with global nuclear annihilation that we have ever experienced: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of that horrifically close call, Kennedy urged peace between the United States and the Soviet Union and achieved a first step toward that peace by negotiating the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In making the case for peace rather than war, Kennedy explained our common human interests in words that still guide us today in managing our interdependent world:
So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.9
Globalization reflects the fundamental fact that the human journey, from our common roots in Africa until today, has always been a shared one. Our reality as a global species was not self-evident through most of our history, because life seemed to be local and because other tribes, races, and empires seemed to be implacable foes. Yet the great religions portrayed a common origin and destiny of humanity, and today we can envision our common fate more clearly than ever before in the images sent home daily by orbital satellites mapping the Earth. Our common fate does not mean homogeneity and an end of differences. It means a global society strengthened by distinctive cultures in a world made safe for diversity.
We are, as throughout our species’ long saga and adventure, facing the interactions of geography, technology, and institutions. The great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson is no doubt correct when he notes that we have stumbled into the twenty-first century with our “Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” We are out of synch, out of kilter. Yet we also have our capacities to reason and to cooperate, formed on the African savanna more than a hundred thousand years ago. We have a much clearer understanding today of our common interests. Our greatest hope is to use the lessons of history and of our common human nature to forge a new era of cooperation at the global scale.
