Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 17

One last fundamental alteration in capitalism's environment is something we would describe as a phase change. After centuries of becoming increasingly international, the context of trade suddenly has become truly global. Picture an historical map of the world, with pinpoints of activity in the earliest commercial centers. Now think of how those points of commerce began to interact regionally, the lines between them multiplying and broadening to the point that they became saturated splotches of trade. Now consider the current economic interdependence of the world; the pinpoints and lines have filled the screen to the point that there is no white space remaining. When the scope of one's economy grows from the tribe, to the village, to the city, to the nation, to the sphere of influence, and finally to the planet, that is not simply a linear progression. Rather, the world is reordered in important ways.

We're just now teetering on the point of that phase change. As we write, in the summer of 2011, the Greek debt crisis has placed the future of the euro in some doubt. The debates raging in European capitals make it clear that we're still at the point of tension between nation and sphere of influence, held back by the strictures of nations. But at the same time, the reality of one global economy is dawning.

That's a new reality that will certainly force capitalism to adapt. For one thing, we predict it will create the stage for multinational corporations to rise in global influence. We should note that multinationals will no longer be a Western club; the United Nations reports that there are now 21,500 of them based in the emerging world. Wherever they hail from, we'll see multinationals routinely achieve scale larger than many political entities. As early as 1992, former Citibank chairman Walter Wriston predicted what he termed the “twilight of sovereignty.” His book by that name portrayed a world wherein a new electronic network—made of advancing information and communications technology—had unified the world into one global market of ideas, data, and capital, all able to move with lightning speed to any corner of the globe. International financial markets, he noted, had outpaced the ability of governments to control national economies and old political borders. A “global conversation” was now possible that could, among other things, advance civil and democratic rights.

More recently, and far more darkly, Prem Jha (in his similarly titled book, The Twilight of the Nation State) describes globalization as “a sudden explosive expansion of capitalism, one that is now breaking the container of the nation state to encompass a large part of the globe.” For good or for ill, in a planetary economy many former functions of the state will be exercised de facto by multinationals; at the same time, certain regulatory functions—police, health, and monetary authorities among them, we hope—will feature international governance. We'll spend more time contemplating the evolving role of the state in chapter 8.