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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For years now, the World Economic Forum's annual meeting at Davos has been the place that tackled the challenge of giving globalization a human face earliest and most seriously. Back in 1996 the theme of the annual meeting was "sustainable globalization," and WEF founder Klaus Schwab wrote about the need to bridge the "shareholder-stakeholder" divide in 1997. Then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided to float the idea of a "global compact" to engage business in promoting human rights and environmental protection at Davos in 1999. Gatherings like Davos, the Clinton Global Initiative and the Skoll World Forum are the places to see this new public-private model in action. NGOs now prefer going to these venues to seek investors and allies rather than to government aid agencies. These are the places where you'll see that mayors, governors, CEOs and philanthropists are pound for pound as important as most Presidents and Prime Ministers. The future of diplomacy will be lots of mini-WEFs tailored to specific issues.

We have seen only the tip of the iceberg of globalization's potential. Globalized countries grow faster than nonglobalizers, and a new wave of countries in Africa and the Middle East is entering the global division of labor today. Google, Kiva, Western Union, Motorola these are just some of the global corporations putting information technology in the hands of the poorest so they can participate and profit from mobile banking and outsourcing. We should be hopeful about this diffuse paradigm for the future because, as the science writer Matt Ridley argues in his 2010 book The Rational Optimist, "everyone is working for everyone else."

This kind of pragmatism can guide us to the next Renaissance. Self-interest is the wrong baseline for a resource-scarce world. We need to find a new global consciousness, and indeed, technology makes us feel that cohesion on a global scale. Half of all Americans contributed to Haiti earthquake relief.

Today's Generation Y the so-called millennials or digital natives is pioneering this new consciousness. More than twice as many American college graduates today (40%) as 20 years ago claim they want "to change the world." And they will do it through a new kind of diplomacy that emerges at the intersection of governments, companies and NGOs. Generation Y doesn't think in terms of state vs. market vs. civil society but rather the union of all three. For them, working for Oxfam or Nokia is as "diplomatic" in nature as joining the Foreign Service. A division of labor doesn't mean that sectors can't support one another; complementarity doesn't exclude collaboration. If Generation Y can leverage megadiplomacy to steer globalization, we'll get out of the new Middle Ages faster than seems likely today.

Webs of Webs
We know from physics and biology that small changes can have large effects in complex systems. Raising capital requirements for banks even slightly can go a long way toward stabilizing the financial sector. Small subsidies for families to buy food and pay school fees have worked wonders in Brazil. A global exception to strict intellectual-property protections on vaccines for the poor could save countless millions of lives. The next Renaissance, then, will be about universal liberation through exponentially expanding and voluntary interconnections. If a new global social contract is to emerge, it will be as a result of the communities of the world whether nations, corporations or faiths sharing knowledge and cooperating but also learning to respect one another's power and values. As they practice the new forms of diplomacy, they will leverage one another's resources and hold one another accountable.

Where does the buck stop in this new new world order? After all, we no longer automatically defer to governments as legitimate. Instead, we hear the phrase good governance more and more. Africa's first self-made billionaire, Mo Ibrahim, a telecom entrepreneur, gives out an annual prize to any well-performing African government and has launched a widely cited index to score good governance. Freedom of the press, accountability, service delivery and protection of human rights are all among his criteria; democracy isn't. Investors increasingly reward countries for investing in people and broadening the economic base by any means necessary. Democracies like Brazil and Indonesia are doing it, but so too are China and Vietnam. Instead of hierarchies of governments, global governance should be like a spider's web: if you poke one, it doesn't fall apart. Interdependence is one of the buzzwords of our age, but it is an observation, not a strategy. Perpetual resilience, not stiff governance, is the strategy that nations, economies and communities must pursue irrespective of their degree of interdependence with the rest of the world. We need risk-management systems more than we need or will ever have powerful global institutions. Our goal should be an autopoietic world: self-regulating and re-creating. We must be vigilant, recognizing the fact that contagions can spread rapidly in networks, so we must code an operating template that builds immunities after failure and learns with each cycle of reproduction. We cannot forget that the Renaissance was a politically volatile era even as it bred some of mankind's greatest cultural accomplishments. Indeed, the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was a gradual one. Therein lies the irony: we won't know that we've reached the next plateau of history until we are comfortably on it. Until that time, we should take no comfort in sweeping platforms for reform that history remembers as failed promises. They are not the answer to how to fix the world. You are.

Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation