The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [20]
A further complication: when I write of the rise of nationalism, I am describing a broader phenomenon—the assertion of identity. The nation-state is a relatively new invention, often no more than a hundred years old. Much older are the religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups that live within nation-states. And these bonds have stayed strong, in fact grown, as economic interdependence has deepened. In Europe, the Flemish and French in Belgium remain as distinct as ever. In Britain, the Scots have elected a ruling party that proposes ending the three-hundred-year-old Acts of Union that created the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Wales. In India, national parties are losing ground to regional ones. In Kenya, tribal distinctions are becoming more important. In much of the world, these core identities—deeper than the nation-state—remain the defining features of life. It is why people vote, and what they die for. In an open world economy, these groups know that they need the central government less and less. And in a democratic age, they gain greater and greater power if they stay together as a group. This twin ascendancy of identity means that, when relating to the United States or the United Nations or the world at large, Chinese and Indian nationalism grows. But within their own countries, sub-nationalism is also growing. What is happening on the global stage—the rise of identity in the midst of economic growth—is also happening on the local stage. The bottom line: it makes purposeful national action far more difficult.
As power becomes diversified and diffuse, legitimacy becomes even more important—because it is the only way to appeal to all the disparate actors on the world stage. Today, no solution, no matter how sensible, is sustainable if it is seen as illegitimate. Imposing it will not work if it is seen as the product of one country’s power and preferences, no matter how powerful that country. The massacres in Darfur, for example, are horrific, and yet military intervention there—the most effective way of stopping it—would succeed only if sanctioned by the major powers as well as Sudan’s African neighbors. If the United States acted alone or with a small coalition—invading its third Muslim country in a decade—the attempt would almost certainly backfire, providing the Sudanese government with a fiery rallying cry against “U.S. imperialism.” The Bush administration’s foreign policy record offers a perfect illustration of the practical necessity of legitimacy. And yet, beyond Bush’s failures, the dilemma remains: if many countries need to cooperate to get things done, how to make this happen in a world with more players, many of them more powerful?
The Fastest Race Car in the World
Rising nationalism, environmental degradation, and commodity-rich parasite nations are problems the world will grapple with for decades to come. The Great Expansion has more immediate consequences, too. The aftermath of the global economic crisis is still with us.* The crash of 2008 was the world’s worst financial collapse since 1929, and ushered in the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression. While they have been chronicled elsewhere in great detail, it’s worth remembering how unprecedented the events of 2008 and 2009 were: the destruction of approximately $50 trillion in assets in the global economy; the nationalization of America’s largest mortgage lenders; the largest bankruptcy in history (Lehman Brothers); the disappearance of the investment bank; bailouts and stimulus packages around the world adding up to trillions of dollars. They were events that will be recounted and studied for generations.
The rupture of 2008 was, like rising nationalism, a