Synthesis: Global Security Policy and The Great Convergence

1. Synthesis: Global Security Policy and The Great Convergence Exam on Wednesday!

2. Agency/Structure • As an individual, I am in full control of my life. • Individuals understand the implications of their actions. • Constraints on individuals play a limited role in decision making. • I live in a world that is not of my own choosing. • We might be able to change small things, but overall, individuals have little impact on the way the world works.

3. Ethics • I should always strive to do what I deem “morally right.” • In most situations, there is a moral “right” and “wrong.” • If is often impossible to tell “right” from “wrong.” • There are some situations in which choosing the morally “wrong” choice is the “right” thing to do.

4. The Great Convergence: Asia, The West, and the Logic of One World By: KishoreMahbubani

5. Quote 1 • “Today, global circumstances have changed dramatically. The 7 billion people who inhabit planet earth no longer live in more than one hundred separate boats. Instead, they all live in 193 cabins on the same boat. But this boat has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive responsibility for one cabin. However it has no captain or crew to take care of the boat as a whole.” page 3

6. Quote 2 • “I suggest simply that the world is becoming a more peaceful and prosperous place because a consensual cluster or norms has been sweeping the globe and has been accepted by policymaking elites all around the world. Policymakers in all corners have essentially developed the same set of perspectives on how the improve and develop their societies.” page 26

7. Quote 3 • “A hundred years ago, or perhaps even fifty years ago, MidhumSalim would not have ventured far away from the village of his birth. Nor would he have gone to university or traveled to developed cities. The new global environment has changed all this. As a consequence, young men, like MidhunSalim, and young women have been swept into the global mainstream improving it as they join it.” page 33

8. Quote 4 • “In short, the absence of a theory of one world prevents world leaders from taking effective global action because they don’t know how to bring their citizens with them.” page 54

9. Quote 5 • “And this is where a good theory of one world would help. If there were universal agreement among 7 billion people that we need to work together to save our precious and fragile planet, then the burden would be fairly and equitably distributed and the burden on each individual would be limited. The most elementary principles of ethics and justice would dictate that the richer countries would have to bear a higher burden than the poorer countries. And we could easily find a formula to spread the burden.” page 63

10. Quote 6 • “These nineteenth-century mental maps again rest on another deeper assumption: that if each nation took good care of its interests and did not interfere in an other nation’s interest, all this would lead to a more stable world order in the political sphere. No one has explicitly suggested that an “invisible hand” would operate in the political sphere just as effectively as it does as it does in the economics sphere, with individuals looking only after their own interests. Yet is is also clear that no one has boldly suggested that the nation-state system, which may have worked will in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is clearly not the best system for the twenty-first century.” page 63

11. Quote 7 • “Indeed, despite the massive economic crisis in both Europe and America, there has been little real backsliding toward protectionism. All sophisticated policymakers know that closing up economies is damaging. Hence the trend toward greater opening will continue. Consequently, interdependence will grow even more. A single global economy will continue emerging. The big question for our time is when theory will catch up with practice.” page 74

12. Quote 8 • “The explosion in the numbers of children going to primary and secondary schools is about the be accompanied by an explosion in the numbers going to universities. What is truly revealing is how the curricula of the best universities all around the world are converging.” page 83

13. Quote 9 • “Against this historical backdrop, it is truly remarkable that few in the West are aware that when it comes to the global rule of law or global institutions, the West has been following the advice of Will Roper, not that of Sir Thomas More. While there may have been a strategic rationale for this policy in previous decades, it has continued on autopilot even after the strategic rationale disappeared. All this creates massive global irrationality.” page 90

14. Quote 10 • “As former Secretary of State Madeline Albright bluntly put it, “Americans tend to dislike the word ‘multilateralism’- it has too many syllables and ends in ‘ism.’” page 93

15. Quote 11 • On the IAEA, “Hence, to serve Western interests of having a strong team of nuclear inspectors, the West should be increasing the assessed contributions, not the voluntary contributions. Instead, amazingly, the West has been doing the exact opposite and thereby shooting itself in the foot. Sadly, this is not the only way the West, especially America, has been infiltrating these organizations with intelligence-gathering spies.” page 106.

16. Quote 12 • “Very few empires anticipate their demise. From the two-millennia-old Chinese imperial system, which vanished without a trace in the twentieth century, to the Soviet Union, which collapsed almost overnight, history is replete with examples of emperors with absolute power who could not conceive of the possibility of their extinction.” page 116

17. Quote 13 • “The only way to understand the reluctance of the West to give up its domination of global institutions is to compare it to the reluctance of reigning monarchs or dictators to give up their absolute powers . . . Against this historical backdrop, we should not once again be surprised if this profound Western reluctance to give up its domination of global institutions leads to global turbulence. Rules who stay on long after their time has run out inevitably lose political legitimacy.” page 121

18. Quote 14 • “Unlike the traditional adversarial history between the West and the Rest, there is no such adversarial history between China and the rest of the world. This is why China needs to reflect deeply about the implications of the discontent at Chinese presence around the world. Even if all overseas Chinese officials and business behaved impeccably and correctly, this sudden upsurge in the Chinese presence is bound to lead to an inevitable rise of resentment.” page 129

19. Quote 15 • “Convergence also creates complexity. In this new world order of ours, no one can claim to be a world thinker if he or she fails to understand the major global contradictions of our time. Nor can he or she make a significant difference to improve our global order without working out how to make complex trade-offs among these global contradictions.” page 141

20. Global Contradictions • Chapter 4: 7 Global Contradictions • Which do you think is the most troubling? Why? Do you think he undersells these contradictions? • Are there problems/contradictions Mahbubani ignores? • Do you think these contradictions are “new”?

21. Why nations should pursue “soft” power? • ShashiTharoor • Indian Minister of State for HR Development, MP from Kerela • UN diplomat • http://www.ted.com/playlists/73/the_global_power_shift.html • How is “soft power” different from “hard power”? • How is his argument similar to/different from The Great Convergence?

22. Global Security Policy? • Do you think these authors detail a version of “global security policy”? • Is there an alternative for “global security policy” that these authors do not consider?

23. Paper Comments • Feel free to come talk to me- but not immediately! Wait until after lunch . Go get some food, then come chat. • I made a good amount of comments on each of your papers- read them. • Pros/cons • You guys did pretty well on the pros, the cons- not so much • *****LOTS of citation issues! • What to cite • Parentheticals