Route to Global Renewal

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Employees of the China Petroleum Engineering & Construction Corp. work on a multinational oil-exploration venture near Mehut, Sudan

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Environmental turbulence is contributing to this cartographic adjustment. Water-starved climate refugees in Africa spark migration waves that stress borders in countries like Chad and Kenya. Control over Himalayan headwaters in Kashmir and Tibet is stoking friction among China, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The melting of Greenland's glaciers and the promise of vast natural gas and minerals are thrusting it away from its status as a neutral protectorate of Denmark toward an independent nation militarily allied with the U.S. and Canada against Russian encroachment on the North Pole.

In a world that has market failures and government failures in equal number, we cannot count on traditional leadership to set us on the right track. The G-20 has hardly proved to be a "steering committee for the world": its Western and Asian members are unable to agree on a road map to rebalance the global economy. Nor does anyone listen to the U.N. It has convened a megaconference on every imaginable issue poverty, human rights, climate with few appreciable results. And the Obama Administration has failed to restore U.S. global leadership. Without enforcement, diplomacy among governments is mere conversation.

From Globalization to Globalism
Yet centuries ago, the European medieval world blossomed into the Renaissance. How did it manage to do so, and what lessons can we learn today? Two ingredients were essential: a technological revolution and a psychological one. Then, it was Gutenberg's printing press and the Protestant Reformation; today, we have the Internet and creative capitalism.

The transition from Europe's Middle Ages to the modern era began with the existential calamity of the Black Death. Soon thereafter, the Medici family of Florence came to be counseled by the founding father of secular rational governance, Machiavelli, and sponsored two of history's greatest artists and inventors, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. In the 14th and 15th centuries, cities like Bruges and Venice spun the webs of markets and exchanges that became the global economy. These models were gradually disseminated by explorers like Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan. China too launched great naval expeditions led by admiral-diplomat Zheng He, whose massive ships reached the Strait of Hormuz and Kenya.

Similar developments are afoot today. Arab traders travel to China's Wuxi while Chinese businessmen fan out across Africa, together resurrecting the old Silk Roads of land and sea. Building postmodern connections among cities rather than defending borders is the way to rekindle the new Silk Roads for the 21st century. Commercial connectedness could inspire political reconciliation. Despite the prevailing currents of holy war and the Crusades, centuries ago two travelers symbolized a new kind of bridge between East and West. The great Arab pilgrim Ibn Battuta wandered and sailed from Morocco to Hong Kong, while his European counterpart Marco Polo made parallel voyages along the Silk Road. Both marveled at the grandeur of other civilizations, celebrating each other's richness rather than vulgarity.

The first great European universities Bologna, Paris, Oxford were founded in the Middle Ages, turning education into a professional guild. Just as these medieval universities recovered classical wisdom, 13th century philosopher Roger Bacon recognized the importance of Islamic scholarship on Western thought and appealed to Pope Clement IV to pursue global learning rather than crusade. Later on, humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam and Pico della Mirandola eloquently articulated a world in which faith and reason existed not in tension but peacefully within each of us. Pico's lesson for today's age is that our fruitless debates between the West and Islam should instead become a more inclusive discourse on achieving spiritually and morally informed governance. Another parallel: it is universities again carrying forward this mission. Georgetown, Weill Cornell Medical College, Carnegie Mellon and New York University have branched out to Doha and Abu Dhabi in the heart of the Middle East to promote liberal arts and science, and women's rights in the process.

This reminds us that when it comes to who to count on to achieve lofty goals like averting a clash of civilizations and ending poverty, it's not up to governments alone to deliver the goods. Bill Gates outspends the world's governments on public health, George Soros supports human-rights crusaders worldwide, and Richard Branson dangles millions to inspire budding companies' efforts to promote green technologies. These are the modern-day Medicis, patrons of global society who attack borderless problems on behalf of humanity. They intuitively know that public and private power could forever compete but for society to advance, they have to work together. The new Medicis have rapidly emerged to define the next global order faster than anyone appreciates. The public-private partnership model pioneered by the Gates Foundation isn't some alternative to the mainstream of policy; it is the way of doing policy in the 21st century.