Religion and Globalization – by Kathryn Poethig

“I thought you might be interested in this,” It was an email from Valentina, a smart Global Studies major who had immigrated from Bulgaria after the Soviet disintegration. She’d embedded a link to Dmitry Orlov’s  “Five Stages of Collapse” recalling the Soviet breakup of the 1990s and prognosticating the inevitable collapse of the US economy.  It was late 2008, and the markets were in free fall.  Orlov’s thesis must have gone viral among Bulgarian immigrants. After one collapse you can read the signs of another.

It reminded me of the months before 1980’s now fabled People’s Power in the Philippines. I was working at a transit camp for Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian refugees enroute to the U.S.  As tension built towards a Marcos-Aquino showdown, rumors circulated around the camp that the US 7^th Fleet, stationed at the nearby Subic Naval Base would evacuate the American staff and refugees. Many Vietnamese had feverishly packed for transit. One collapse can misguide your sense of others.

This is the first week of Advent, and I’ve been thinking about those who have lived and are living through collapses (I think of Syria, Greece, elsewhere). I’m musing about our own times. Are we are in such a global transition? Who can read the signs of the times.

Twenty years ago, Anthony Giddens called high modernity a juggernaut, a force pushing into the future–overwhelming all in its path. Now in globalization circles, we talk about a “hydra headed crisis,” a convergence of economic and financial, security, environmental, governance crises. David Held  has argued that we face three core sets of problems:

those concerned with sharing our planet (global warming, biodiversity and ecosystem losses, water deficits), sustaining our humanity (poverty, conflict prevention, global infectious diseases) and our rulebook (nuclear proliferation, toxic waste disposal, intellectual property rights, genetic research rules, trade rules, finance and tax rules).  In our increasingly interconnected world, these global problems cannot be solved by any one nation state acting alone.[1]

We’re caught up in a global convergence of ‘wicked problems,” a term that urban planners Rittel and Webber coined for problems that elude conventional attempts to resolve them.[2] A current sampling of crises are the  anticipated inaction at the climate change conference in Durban, the Pakistan-US showdown, sovereign debt crises in the EU and  the potential collapse of the Euro, and our own inability to address our deficit.

Any of these issues are singularly difficult. But wicked problems are entangled; there is no correct depiction of the problem since every stakeholder has their own version and set of values. They are a social mess and a ‘struggle of narratives” that might be better depicted through visualization techniques such as The Climate Policy Labyrinth Info-Mural. Wicked problems are an interlocking set of problems with no “stopping rule” (a reason to end a process); every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem. And there is great resistance to change.

How do we read the signs of the times? How do you know if the worst is over or still on its way?  What does “the worse” mean for those who are already living it?

There are many signs that our world is shifting from old formations. Economists who measure the global economic center of gravity note that in 1980’s the economic center was in the mid-Atlantic. Thirty years later,  this global economic center is 3000 miles to the east near Helsinki and Bucharest. By 2050, Quah predicts it will settle near India and China.

The world is literally shifting out from under us.  And in this financial flux, post-Bretton Woods modes of financial governance such as the IMF, World Bank and little known Basel Committee on Banking Supervision are being challenged. The latter, a global institution that sets banking regulatory standards has not adjusted membership since the 1970’s.  China’s and Brazil’s banks play a prominent role in this crisis, and it is inevitable that they will press for increased participation in financial regulation. There is a fundamental rebalancing of the world economy.

Financial crisis has had little effect of military spending, though the Cold War model national security is now also considered anachronistic.  If there is a wicked problem we cannot find a way to manage, it is this death machine. The world military expenditure in 2010 reached $1630 billion.[3] The U.S. accounts for 43% and in second place, China accounts for a puny 7.3 percent.[4] This bloated figure indicates massive increases. From 2001-2010 China increased military spending by 189 percent, and US military spending increased by 81 percent due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.[5]

There may be wars and rumors of wars, but there are actually fewer conflicts than there were in the mid-1990’s. Kaldor, known for her work on new wars  and human security, [6] argues that current armed conflicts are no longer inter-state. They are set in insecure spaces inside national territories. The victims of these conflicts are civilians who are killed, kidnapped, robbed, expelled and lack access to meet basic needs.  In Collier’s “greed vs grievance” [7] argument, these armed conflicts are fought by greedy warlords, drug kings, jihadists, pirates and mercenaries against (or within) weak, corrupt and inept states. The aim is not territory, but the profit of cross-border shadow economies that traffic goods to the developed world (drugs, diamonds, rare earth, humans). These insecure zones are ungovernable. [8]

Natural disasters can turn a chronically insecure zone into a “complex emergency.” Famine in Somalia, earthquakes in Haiti, floods in Pakistan – a disaster imaginary compelling enough to draw international media, raise donations, call in the international community replete with search and rescue teams.  Some zones are quickly forgotten; some zones become extended humanitarian regimes when local governance is unable to manage reconstruction. It has been noted, for example, that many Haitians prefer rent-free tent camps with subsidized assistance to gang-patrolled Port-au-Prince slums.

In light of these crises, “what is needed” posit the authors of the Hydra Headed Crisis are not increased national arsenals but “global security forces, much like emergency forces within a well-governed state – combining medical, fire fighting and policing capacities.”

And new systems of regional and global governance that take seriously our  hopeful and terrible interdependence.

What is the sign?  If wicked problems have entangled us in this world’s mess, they also indicate what Quaker Barbara Deming quite simply reminds us: We are all a part of one another.  That is ultimately what Orlov wants to tell us. To survive, don’t isolate. Build community, share resources, conserve energy, remember that we are the world we live in.

Around the world we see people like ourselves in tents, on prayermats, in public squares calling out to the angels of our better nature.

Grace Paley also nudges at me. She reminds me that our kairos moments might teach us different ways to face hard times. In a poem of her Jewish Russian family, two grandmothers a decade apart reflect on their experience of war. For the 82 year olds who grew up in 1914. “This is what they knew/ War World War War.”

The ninety-two-year-old people remember

it was the year 1905

they went to prison

they went into exile

they said  ah  soon

When they speak to the grandchild

they say

yes     there will be revolution

then there will be revolution     then

once more     then the earth itself

will turn and turn and cry out   oh I

have been made sick

then you     my little bud

must flower and save it[9]

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[1] David Held, The changing Face of Global Governance: between past Strategic Failure and Future Economic Constraints, Social Europe Journal, http://url4.eu/14rSE, accessed November 27 2011,  see also Jean-Francois Rischard, High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, (New York, Basic Books, 2002)

[2] Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber,  “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,”  Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155-169.

[3] SIPRI Yearbook 2011: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, Stockholm: SIPRI, 157.

Five countries account for 61 percent of this budget.

[4] Ibid 183

[5] Ibid, 159.

[6] Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press,  1999), see also Global Civil Society: An Answer to War ( Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)

[7] Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler ‘Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars’, Oxford

Economic Papers 56(4), (2004): 563-595

[8] But this greed vs grievance argument has also been used as an excuse for direct “humanitarian” intervention that keep ‘failed states’ from collapsing.  See S.M. Murshed and M.Z. Tadjoeddin, Reappraising the  Greed and Grievance Explanations for Violent Internal Conflict, MICROCON Research Working Paper 2 (Brighton: MICROCON, 2007).

[9] Grace Paley, People in My Family, Begin Again: Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001).