The Twenty-First Century—A World at War with Itself

Although globalization is the talk of the town, especially among economists in the so-called developed nations, there is another world-wide movement which could render globalization talk nugatory. And, for the most part, this movement is neither recognized nor understood even though its consequences are enormous. If you look closely, you will see that the world is coming apart at the seams.

Africa, where tribal antagonisms have produced a wave of genocides, is almost too horrible to even mention. And even when the rest of the world takes notice of what has been going on there, efforts to do something about it have been feeble at best. The Western world rejoiced when the Soviet Union disintegrated, but the resulting antagonisms are dire. The civil war in Chechniya, and the electoral abuses in Tajikstan are but the most prominent examples far reaching antagonisms. The Czechs and Slovaks could not keep Czechoslovakia together. Peoples in the Eastern and Western Ukraine are almost at each other’s throats. The Baltic states have disintegrated after years of ethnic cleansing.

India has always been a hotbed of sectarian violence and continues to be so. England during its imperial hegemony could never quell it. Spain has never assimilated the Basques; Ireland is at war with itself even though a truce currently holds, and the sectarian violence America has provoked in Iraq threatens the entire Middle East. Even Lebanon, which was once a somewhat unified and prosperous nation is now fractured. The optimistic atmosphere that accompanied the Syrian withdrawal last spring appears to have been replaced by increasing sectarian tensions and political uncertainty. The Lebanese all are disappointed because they haven’t built the Lebanon they dreamed of one year ago. They may never be able to build it.

And even here in the United States of America, disparate groups have hardened their views, provoking attitudes that mimic deep hatred. Where we once had a government that viewed compromise as the art of government, we now have polarized groups that make compromise almost entirely impossible.

Globalization, on the other hand, requires political and legal stability, and I see no certainty that that exists anywhere in today’s world, not even here in America.

The world, as we have known it, made up of artificial national states created by conquest during the age of imperialism may be moribund. The glue that has held it together may be loosening. Military power may no longer be effective. We should all learn from what happened to the French in Algeria, the United States in Viet Nam, the English in Ireland, the Russians in Afghanistan, and what’s happening today to the United States in Iraq, that armies, no matter how well equipped or how large, can no longer put down a people’s insurgency. And as the glue that now binds nation states loosens, the world that may emerge may consist of sectarian blocs with absolutist views that harbor disdain for others, pursue the interests of their own peoples only, and have no interest in cooperating with others in any way whatsoever, even trade.

Some may consider this trend a temporary realignment of peoples, but that’s not at all certain, since the peoples seeking realignment hold absolute values that each considers the one and only truth, who are unmoved by evidence no matter how overt, and who seem to have no concern whatsoever for the welfare of mankind as a whole. And although I regret having to say it, our current president seems to fit this characterization to a T. And what he and his supporters are doing to the people of Iraq, could just as easily be done to opposing groups of Americans.

Although it may not seem likely to most Americans, the United States could disintegrate just as easily as Iraq has. Victory by the North in the Civil War never fully overcame the disparate values held in the North and South, and those disparate values are the cause of much of what is happening in America today. We are democrats who never fully committed ourselves to democracy, believers in equality who have never promoted it, and proponents of peace, but only if it’s on our terms.