The World Is Flat (55 page)

“We're trying to accomplish two things with this program,” explained Rick Klausner, a former head of the National Cancer Institute who now runs the global health programs for the Gates Foundation. “The first is [to make] a moral appeal to the scientific imagination, [pointing out] that there are great problems to be solved that we, the scientific community, have ignored, even though we pride ourselves in how international we are. We have not taken our responsibilities as global problem solvers as seriously as our self-identity as an international community. We wanted the Grand Challenges to say these are the most exciting, sexy, scientific things that anyone in the world could work on right now... The idea was to fire the imagination. The second thing is to actually direct some of the foundation's resources to see if we could do it.”

Given the phenomenal advances in technology in the last twenty years, it is easy to assume that we already have all the tools to address some of these challenges and that the only thing lacking is money. I wish that were the case. But it is not. In the instance of malaria, for example, it isn't just the drugs that are missing. As anyone who has visited Africa or rural India knows, the health-care systems in these areas are often broken or functioning at a very low level. So the Gates Foundation is trying to stimulate the development of drugs and delivery systems that presume a broken health-care system and therefore can be safely self-administered by ordinary people in the field. That may be the grandest challenge of all: to use the tools of the flat world to design tools that work in an unflat world. “The most important health-care system in the world is a mother,” said Klausner. “How do you get things in her hands that she understands and can afford and can use?”

The tragedy of all these people is really a dual tragedy, added Klausner. There is the individual tragedy of facing a death sentence from disease or a life sentence of broken families and limited expectations. And there is the tragedy for the world because of the incredible lost contribution that all these people still outside the flat world could be making. In a flat world, where we are connecting all the knowledge pools together, imagine what knowledge those people could bring to science or education. In a flat world, where innovation can come from anywhere, we are letting a huge pool of potential contributors and collaborators slip under the waves. There is no question that poverty causes ill health, but ill health also traps people in poverty, which in turn weakens them and keeps them from grasping the first rung of the ladder to middle-class hope. Until and unless we can meet some of these grand challenges, much of that 50 percent of the world that is still not flat will stay that way-no matter how flat the other 50 percent gets.

Too Dlsempowered

There's not just the flat world and the unflat world. Many people live in the twilight zone between the two. Among these are the people I call the too disempowered. They are a large group of people who have not been fully encompassed by the flattening of the world. Unlike the too sick, who have yet even to get a chance to step onto the flat world, the too disempowered are people who you might say are half flat. They are healthy people who live in countries with significant areas that have been flattened but who don't have the tools or the skills or the infrastructure to participate in any meaningful or sustained way. They have just enough information to know that the world is flattening around them and that they aren't really getting any of the benefits. Being flat is good but full of pressure, being unflat is awful and full of pain, but being half flat has its own special anxiety. As exciting and as visible as the flat Indian high-tech sector is, have no illusions: It accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India. Add those Indians involved in manufacturing for export, and you get a total of 2 percent of employment in India.

The half flat are all those other hundreds of millions of people, particularly in rural India, rural China, and rural Eastern Europe, who are close enough to see, touch, and occasionally benefit from the flat world but who are not really living inside it themselves. We saw how big and how angry this group can be in the spring of 2004 Indian national elections, in which the ruling BJP was surprisingly tossed out of office-despite having overseen a surge in India's growth rate-largely because of the discontent of rural Indian voters with the slow pace of globalization outside the giant cities. These voters were not saying, “Stop the globalization train, we want to get off.” They were saying, “Stop the globalization train, we want to get on, but someone needs to help us by building a better stepstool.”

These rural voters-peasants and farmers, who form the bulk of India's population—just had to spend a day in any nearby big city to see the benefits of the flat world: the cars, the houses, the educational opportunities. “Every time a villager watches the community TV and sees an ad for soap or shampoo, what they notice are not the soap and shampoo but the lifestyle of the people using them-the kind of motorbikes they ride, their dress, and their homes,” explained Indian-born Nayan Chanda, editor of YaleGlobal Online. “They see a world they want access to. This election was about envy and anger. It was a classic case of revolutions happening when things are getting better but not fast enough for many people.”

At the same time, these rural Indians understood, at gut level, exactly why it was not happening for them: because local governments in India have become so eaten away by corruption and mismanagement that they cannot deliver to the poor the schools and infrastructure they need to get a fair share of the pie. As some of these millions of Indians on the outside of the gated communities looking in lose hope, “they become more religious, more tied to their caste/subcaste, more radical in their thinking, more willing to snatch than create, [and] view dirty politics as being the only way to get mobility, since economic mobility is stalled,” said Vivek Paul of Wipro. India can have the smartest high-tech vanguard in the world, but if it does not find a way to bring along more of those who are unable, disabled, undereducated, and underserved, it will be like a rocket that takes off but quickly falls back to earth for lack of sustained thrust.

The Congress Party got the message, which was why as soon as it took office it chose as its prime minister not some antiglobalizer but Manmohan Singh, the former Indian finance minister, who in 1991 first opened the Indian economy to globalization, placing an emphasis on exports and trade and reform wholesale. And Singh, in turn, pledged himself to vastly increase government investments in rural infrastructure and to bring more reform retail to rural government.

How can outsiders collaborate in this process? I think, first and foremost, they can redefine the meaning of global populism. If populists really want to help the rural poor, the way to do it is not by burning down McDonald's and shutting down the IMF and trying to put up protectionist barriers that will unflatten the world. That will help the rural poor not one iota. It has to be by refocusing the energies of the global populist movement on how to improve local government, infrastructure, and education in places like rural India and China, so the populations there can acquire the tools to collaborate and participate in the flat world. The global populist movement, better known as the antiglobalization movement, has a great deal of energy, but up to now it has been too divided and confused to effectively help the poor in any meaningful or sustained manner. It needs a policy lobotomy. The world's poor do not resent the rich anywhere nearly as much as the left-wing parties in the developed world imagine. What they resent is not having any pathway to get rich and to join the flat world and cross that line into the middle class that Jerry Yang spoke about.

Let's pause for a minute here and trace how the antiglobalization movement lost touch with the true aspirations of the world's poor. The antiglobalization movement emerged at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999 and then spread around the world in subsequent years, usually gathering to attack meetings of the World Bank, the IMF, and the G-8 industrialized nations. From its origins, the movement that emerged in Seattle was a primarily Western-driven phenomenon, which was why you saw so few people of color in the crowds. It was driven by five disparate forces. One was upper-middle-class American liberal guilt at the incredible wealth and power that America had amassed in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dot-com boom. At the peak of the stock market boom, lots of pampered American college kids, wearing their branded clothing, began to get interested in sweatshops as a way of expiating their guilt. The second force driving it was a rear-guard push by the Old Left-socialists, anarchists, and Trotskyites-in alliance with protectionist trade unions. Their strategy was to piggyback on rising concerns about globalization to bring back some form of socialism, even though these ideas had been rejected as bankrupt by the very people in the former Soviet Empire and China who had lived under them longest. (Now you know why there was no antiglobalization movement to speak of in Russia, China, or Eastern Europe.) These Old Left forces wanted to spark a debate about whether we globalize. They claimed to speak in the name of the Third World poor, but the bankrupt economic policies they advocated made them, in my view, the Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor. The third force was a more amorphous group. It was made up of many people who gave passive support to the antiglobalization movement from many countries, because they saw in it some kind of protest against the speed at which the old world was disappearing and becoming flat.

The fourth force driving the movement, which was particularly strong in Europe and in the Islamic world, was anti-Americanism. The disparity between American economic and political power and everybody else's had grown so wide after the fall of the Soviet Empire that America began to-or was perceived to-touch people's lives around the planet, directly or indirectly, more than their own governments did. As people around the world began to intuit this, a movement emerged, which Seattle both reflected and helped to catalyze, whereby people said, in effect, “If America is now touching my life directly or indirectly more than my own government, then I want to have a vote in America's power.” At the time of Seattle, the “touching” that people were most concerned with was from American economic and cultural power, and therefore the demand for a vote tended to focus around economic rule-making institutions like the World Trade Organization. America in the 1990s, under President Clinton, was perceived as a big dumb dragon, pushing people around in the economic and cultural spheres, knowingly and unknowingly. We were Puff the Magic Dragon, and people wanted a vote in what we were puffing.

Then came 9/11. And America transformed itself from Puff the Magic Dragon, touching people around the world economically and culturally, into Godzilla with an arrow in his shoulder, spitting fire and tossing around his tail wildly, touching people's lives in military and security terms, not just economic and cultural ones. As that happened, people in the world began to say, “Now we really want a vote in how America wields its power”-and in many ways the whole Iraq war debate was a surrogate debate about that.

Finally, the fifth force in this movement was a coalition of very serious, well-meaning, and constructive groups-from environmentalists to trade activists to NGOs concerned with governance-who became part of the populist antiglobalization movement in the 1990s in the hopes that they could catalyze a global discussion about how we globalize. I had a lot of respect and sympathy for this latter group. But in the end they got drowned out by the whether-we-globalize crowd, which began to turn the movement more violent at the July 2001 Genoa G-8 summit, when an antiglobalization protester was killed while attacking an Italian police jeep with a fire extinguisher.

The combination of the triple convergence, the violence at Genoa, 9/11, and tighter security measures fractured the antiglobalization movement. The more serious how-we-globalize groups did not want to be in the same trench with anarchists out to provoke a public clash with police, and after 9/11, many American labor groups did not want to be associated with a movement that appeared to be taken over by anti-American elements. This became even more pronounced when in late September 2001, three weeks after 9/11, antiglobalization leaders attempted a rerun of Genoa in the streets of Washington, to protest the IMF and World Bank meetings there. After 9/11, though, the IMF and World Bank canceled their meetings, and many American protesters shied away. Those who did turn up in the streets of Washington turned the event into a march against the imminent American invasion of Afghanistan to remove Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. At the same time, with the triple convergence making the Chinese, Indians, and Eastern Europeans some of the biggest beneficiaries of globalization, it was no longer possible to claim that this phenomenon was devastating the world's poor. Just the opposite: Millions of Chinese and Indians were entering the world's middle class thanks to the flattening of the world and globalization.

So as the how-we-globalize forces drifted away, and as the number of Third World people benefiting from globalization began to grow, and as America under the Bush administration began to exercise more unilateral military power, the anti-American element in the antiglobalization movement began to assume a much louder voice and role. As a result, the movement itself became both more anti-American and more unable and unwilling to play any constructive role in shaping the global debate on how we globalize, precisely when such a role has become even more important as the world has gotten flatter. As Hebrew University political theorist Yaron Ezrahi so aptly noted, “The important task of enlisting the people's power to influence globalism-making it more compassionate, fair, and compatible with human dignity-is way too important to be wasted on crass anti-Americanism or left in the hands of only anti-Americans.”

There is a huge political vacuum now waiting to be filled. There is a real role today for a movement that could advance the agenda of how we globalize-not whether we globalize. The best place such a movement could start is rural India.