Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [30]
Yet the most impressive new truth about natural resources in the era of McWorld is that even here debate about national interest or national independence is increasingly irrelevant. To be sure, economic self-sufficiency has been a dream of all peoples from the outset of their collective histories, especially those with democratic aspirations. Economic dependency meant political servitude internally as well as externally. In classical republican theory from Pericles to Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the free society was the society sufficient unto itself in food and resources. Democrats thus dreamed of utopias whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence, what they called autarky. It was not so much the free market but the independent market that would secure freedom for the city-state. However, the Athenians were not able to achieve autarky: human nature, it turns out, is dependency, perhaps because human needs and the escalating psychologies by which they are determined are by nature insatiable.
The dream of autarky had a brief reign in nineteenth-century America as well, when the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural resources, and the natural barriers of an island continent walled in by two great seas together created a magical interlude in which many could believe that America might actually become a world unto itself. This has imprinted the American mind with an illusory sense of self-sufficiency and has nurtured a spirit of isolationism that has periodically led to a withdrawal from world affairs. For nations, however, no island is ever really an island. And though it has been hard for Americans to accept the inevitability of interdependence, not even our continental cornucopia has been immune to depletion. Elsewhere, the maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on an unjustly created planet leaves even the wealthiest societies ever more resource-dependent and relegates many other nations to the permanent despair of the Terminal World.
For nations like Japan and Switzerland, modernized and progressive but resource poor, autarky has never been an option. Either through military dominion over their better-endowed neighbors (Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” as its iron-handed pre—World War II empire was known) or extensive trade and prudent foreign policy (Switzerland’s neutrality is the preferred example), such nations have had to forge relationships with others that made a virtue of their dependency. Japan’s military grip on East Asia was a stern discipline for the Japanese too, requiring a large imperial army, permanent occupation, and constant surveillance. Japan’s postwar economic miracle, while it allowed it to reacquire dominion, has made it even more dependent on its trading partners than it once was on its colonies.
Nations whose geography is more promising have fared little better. Potential agricultural behemoths like Russia and India sometimes seem hard-pressed to feed themselves: certainly the Soviet Union failed to do so, compounding the circumstances that sealed its doom. Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has. Many nations have almost nothing they need. The erosion of American autarky in natural resources over the last one hundred years stands as an exemplar for dozens of progressive nations, its story more dramatic than most, but finally all too familiar.
As recently as 1960, the United States imported only a handful of minerals such as aluminum, manganese, nickel, and tin. Today we look abroad for zinc, chromium, tungsten, lead, and of course oil. And soon copper, potassium, sulfur, and even iron will become weighty items in our negative balance of trade. Domestic production of coal and shale will take us into the century after next, and the exhaustion of our agriculture