Sometime in the late 1990s, when I was doing my study of the work of newsmedia foreign correspondents, I spent a morning with Bill Keller at the Manhattan headquarters of the New York Times. Keller was then the foreign editor of the paper, had made his name as a correspondent in Moscow during the perestroika and in Johannesburg during the South African transition from apartheid, and later served for several years as the paperâs executive editor before returning to writing, as a columnist. 1 At the time, we talked about the strategic placing of foreign correspondents in what seemed likely to become important news sites. Keller mentioned that he had recently for the first time posted a correspondent in Istanbul. Turkey was an increasingly interesting meeting point between East and West, he said, although âyou donât have to believe this stuff about a clash of civilizations.â
That conversation, and that particular remark, offered me one window toward the way our contemporary understandings of the world are shaped, and toward the geocultural imagination. Kellerâs rather skeptical mention of âthis stuffâ referred to an argument which had already caught my attention some years earlierâto begin with, that day in 1993 when in one of the American newsweeklies I came across a story on a new, or new-old, view of the world that was attracting notice. Samuel Huntington, well-known Harvard University professor of political science, had just published an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, under the title âThe Clash of Civilizations?â That sounded interesting, so had I made my way to the original article. With major conflict over political ideology now gone, I found Huntington arguing, the most important cleavages, and the coming battles, would be between the large-scale cultural blocs of the world. There were seven or eight civilizations in the world now: Western, Latin American, Slavic Orthodox, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, Japanese and African. About the civilizational status of Africa he was not really quite sure. But in any case, while states remained the major actors in the international order, the important thing about civilizations in Huntingtonâs view was that they are very durable, and that they tend again and again to determine who goes with whom in wider configurations of conflict. In Huntington´s worst case, it would be the West against the Muslims and the Confucians. And in a four-word formulation that would get particular attention, âIslam has bloody borders.â
The Huntington thesis has indeed provoked considerable debate since then, and gone through its ups and downs. But it was possible at the time, in the 1990s, to see it as one belonging with a number of other pronouncements about present and future states of the world. Even before Huntington, the historian Paul M. Kennedy, reaching further into the past and not so very far into the future, had portrayed the overreach and subsequent decline of Spanish, French and British empiresâcould the United States be next in line? Then there had been Francis Fukuyamaâs remarkable suggestion that the world might have reached âthe end of history.â One journalist, Robert D. Kaplan, already well-known for his reporting on troubled regions, warned in a magazine article for the Atlantic Monthly that the world now faced a âcoming anarchy.â And then, in a book on the transformative power of liberated and electronically empowered markets, it was another foreign affairs writer, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who noted that, together with the work of Kennedy, Huntington, Kaplan and Fukuyama, his own book could actually be seen to belong in a genre. Friedman identified the genre as âThe One Big Thing.â
What had happened was that toward the end of the Cold War, and even more after it, people habituated for more than a generation to the metaphor of the Iron Curtain and the reality of the Wall could imagine their world anewâindeed asked, with relief or anxiety, what might happen next. And this small but lively intellectual industry had risen to the challenge, creating scenarios for a born-again world, suggesting what would be the coming big thing.
We entered an age of futures. As the world turned, there would be more of these scenarios. By the time the 1990s came to an end, the onrush of interpretive schemes may have slowed down a bit, but then there was 9â11, and another wave of global commentary. If the first wave had retrieved an old notion of civilizations to fit into a clash scenario, now âempireâ was also back as a keyword in a number of writings, frequently as a suggestive way of referring to the uniquely powerful position of the United States in the world order or disorder. (Wars in Afghanistan, and particularly controversially in Iraq, contributed to this.) And especially since 2008, with economic upheavals spreading rather unevenly over the world, shifts in the global centers of gravity have become more conspicuous than they were beforeâmostly from West to East, to a degree from North to South. This again generates more scenarios. As the comment by Bill Keller suggests, too, the scenario formulations could move out from the original texts into wider fields of debate.
These are indeed global scenarios, or world scenarios, because they attempt to offer a Big Picture of global conditions and affairs. There were times, not so long ago, when futurist scenarios may have referred to the world in a vague, general sense, or to modernity or what would come after it, but often they were implicitly inclined to be ethnocentrically Western. Consider a famous book from a couple of decades earlier: Alvin Tofflerâs Future Shock (1970). The index here offers two page references to Asia, and three to Africa, in some 500 pages. Look up one of these, and you find that it only suggests a need to help âincipient futurist centers in Asia, Africa and Latin America,â while another argues that âa professor who has moved seven times in ten years, who travels constantly in the United States, South America, Europe and Africa, who has changed jobs repeatedly, pursues the same daily regimen wherever he is.â And so it goes: there is no actual discussion of differing characteristics among parts of the world, mostly a globetrotting mention to provide some rhetorical flourish.
The scenarios of the more recent period are not necessarily free of regional bias, but at least they seem more often to involve a fairly explicit sense of the world as a single place, interconnected but internally diverse. To some extent, at least in that first âOne Big Thingâ phase, that may have been because they were engaged in mapping the way things would be after the Cold War, as that had indeed been a confrontation which manifestly drew in much of the world in one way or another. But then the shift is also a response to the way that globalization became a central understanding, a key concept, in the last decade or so of the twentieth century. Even if the term has mostly been used so as to involve some regions much more than others, there is now less of the utter disregard of other parts of the world that the West could get away with in earlier eras.
Since the end of the Cold War, we have now seen about a quarter-century of global scenarios. It would be hazardous to try to predict the future of the genre. (One thing one can learn from it is precisely that predictions are difficult.) This book is rather more of a critical report on the products of that period, on a changing landscape of texts. From the original set of authors, there have been more books: children and grandchildren perhaps of âOne Big Thing.â But more writers have also joined them. In this chapter, we will first have a look at that initial âOne Big Thingâ quintet of Thomas Friedmanâsâcomposed of himself, Huntington, Fukuyama, Kaplan and Kennedyâand their most prominent texts. But we will also proceed to identify some of those other writers who have contributed significantly to the scenario genre.
Samuel Huntington: Modernization, Clashing Civilizations, and a Domestic Culture War
Of those five pioneers, only Samuel Huntington is no longer alive. He died on Christmas Eve, 2008, and earned many respectful newspaper obituaries in the days and weeks that followed. His Foreign Affairs article had grown into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), and it was for this work that he was now most widely remembered.
But this had come fairly late in a long career. Particularly among his political science colleagues he was already very well known. His first book, almost forty years earlier, had argued for a professionalized military, and he had then turned more generally to problems of modernization. The early post-World War II generation of American modernization theorists in the social sciences had tended to see all the features of modernization as occurring in one happy bundle. 2 Huntington had objected that they could be in conflict, and that without political order, the rest of it might not follow. Later he had emphasized the religious underpinnings of a continued spread of democracy in the Christian Westâhere one might already have spotted the early steps toward his view of civilizational differences.
And then several years later, his last major book, Who Are We? (2004), had also become a focus of controversy. It had been clear already in his âclash of civilizationsâ writings that the argument involved a sort of large-scale identity politics, and that Huntington was a partisan in the domestic American culture wars of the period; since it was important for the West to stick together, he argued, there could be no room for multiculturalism. That theme was elaborated in the later book, critical particularly of the impact of Mexican immigration on the fabric of life in the United States, but also of an American elite which he found insufficiently patriotic. In Chap. 4, we will come back to this as well.
Francis Fukuyama: No More History?
In contrast, Francis Fukuyama was hardly so well known as he launched his contribution to the âOne Big Thingâ set of scenarios. His essay âThe End of History?â (1989) appeared in the journal The National Interest, but it, too, was soon expanded into a book. Fukuyama was a third generation Japanese-American. His grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. West Coast in the early twentieth century, he was born in the Midwest when his father was a sociology student at the University of Chicago, and then he grew up in large part on Manhattan. He went to Cornell University for his undergraduate studies (partly under the conservative philosopher Allan Bloom, with whom he remained in contact), then began to study literature at Yale, and went to Paris to acquaint himself more with the thinking of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Apparently disappointed, he discovered the late Hegelian Alexandre Kojève instead. Then he earned his doctorate at Harvard, studying under Huntington.
But by the time he became famous, Fukuyamaâs work had taken a different turn. After a period at RAND Corporation, the think tank, he had moved on to the U.S. State Department. In his âend of historyâ essay, he raised the question whether the ideological evolution of humankind was about to reach its end point, as liberal democracy became universalized, in combination with the market economy. This was world historyânever mind âwhat strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso,â or what challenges to the triumphant ideology might be promoted by âevery crackpot messiah around the world.â Fascism, which had been one of the twentieth-century alternatives, was long gone, in Europe as well as Asia. True, when Fukuyamaâs essay was published, the Berlin Wall still stood, and Gorbachev vas still in increasingly shaky power in the Kremlin. Yet in the Soviet Union as well as in the Peopleâs Republic of China, Marxism-Leninism had in fact been abandoned. And while the leadership of these great powers was showing signs of coming to terms, however ambiguously and reluctantly, with the decli...