 | New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says the U.S. military still sees the world as "built around walls." |
Although the world has changed dramatically since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, globalization continues to thrive, asserted three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman during a Dec. 2 talk on campus.
Friedman addressed an overflow crowd in Horchow Hall as part of the School of Management's (SOM) Leaders Forum.
In introducing Friedman, SOM Dean Jeffrey Garten described his book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" (2000) as "the defining piece of writing on globalization." Friedman's earlier book "From Beirut to Jerusalem" (1989) won the National Book Award for non-fiction. His most recent book, "Longitudes and Attitudes" (2002), is a collection of essays, many taken from his award-winning columns written in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
"Globalization is not a trend and not a fad," Friedman said. "It is the international system that has replaced the Cold War system. Like the Cold War system, globalization has its own rules and logic, pressures and incentives that ... affect everyone's country, everyone's community, directly or indirectly."
The dominant symbol of the Cold War era was the Berlin Wall, he observed, and its counterpart today is the World Wide Web.
"What characterized the Cold War system was one overarching feature, and that was division," Friedman said. "The whole world was a divided place, and in that system, all your threats and opportunities, as a country or a company, tended to flow from whom you were divided from."
Similarly, today, he said, "The globalization system is also characterized by one overarching feature: integration. In this system all your threats and opportunities now flow from whom you're connected to."
A striking example of someone who spans both the old and the new way of looking at the world, asserted the journalist, is Secretary of State Colin Powell, who spent 35 years in the armed services and then served for two years on the board of America OnLine (AOL).
Calling the military "America On Duty," Friedman contrasted it with AOL, contending that the military "sees the world as still built around walls, and it sees the job of America as erecting walls, defending walls or bashing down walls." AOL, in contrast, "sees the world as built around webs, and sees the job of American foreign policy today as sustainable globalization ... extending, widening and protecting the Web."
According to Friedman, the Berlin Wall and the World Wide Web are the two competing paradigms that explain the modern era, and they create a "tension at the very heart of the Bush administration."
Three months ago, Friedman said, he visited the headquarters of Google in Silicon Valley to see for himself how the Internet was faring and whether the security measures that followed the Sept. 11 attacks had altered people's use of the popular search engine. He found that before the terrorist attacks, Google logged about 100 million searches per day; since then, that number has grown to 250 million per day.
"You could say, maybe, that that's just natural growth as people discover the incredible capacity for searches. But here's what's really interesting: Only 35% of them are in English," Friedman told the audience, while 65% of Google searches are in 88 other languages.
"Measured by Google usage, globalization is alive and well," he asserted.
"That's the good news," he continued. "The bad news is what people are searching for." The four most common searches relate to "sex, God, jobs and -- I'm sad to report -- all-star wrestling," he noted, adding that Internet searches are so diverse that these topics "fortunately" only represent about 2% of the total.
Another significant change that Friedman has noticed in recent years involves the creation of what he called a "new bi-polar world."
No longer are the nations of the world divided between East and West as they were during the Cold War, when states formed alliances based on shared political philosophies and economic systems, contended Friedman. Now, he said, the split is between nations that "desire order" and those that promote chaos.
He identified the United States, Europe (including Russia), India and China as "the four main pillars of the world of order, around which many smaller states collect." Although they are not all democratic, they are stable, as opposed to the many "failed and failing" states that had been propped up by the Cold War system, he said. Friedman grouped the latter with "messy states" -- those that are too chaotic to function but too big to fail, like Indonesia -- and "transnational terrorist and criminal networks." These entities comprise "the world of disorder," asserted Friedman, adding that nations belonging to the world of order need to "give a hand up and a hand out to the world of disorder."
Friedman spoke of the importance of the European Union (EU), calling it "the United States of Europe," and asserted that the EU and the United States are the most important political forces in the world today for the promotion of democracy, respect for the rule of law, liberal economics and the empowerment of women.
Challenged by an audience member to defend the rightness of this bi-polar world and the strange alliances it has produced, Friedman said: "I'm standing back and looking, and trying to analyze why I see what I'm seeing in front of me ... I'm not endorsing one position or the other, but saying, 'Here's the way I see the world. I'm not making an advocacy argument, but an analytical argument: This is how I see the world shaping up.'"
-- By Gila Reinstein
T H I S
Friedman says globalization's rules
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