Normally, I’d hardly have noticed the variety–in New York, we don’t even think about the fact that everyone is from somewhere else. A few feet from my office, I have colleagues whose parents or grandparents come from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Russia, India. I was born and raised in the United Kingdom; the mother of my friend and colleague Mark Whitaker, the editor of NEWSWEEK’s American edition, grew up in France. The web of personal contacts that shape our views and beliefs–the phenomenon that I once christened “the diplomacy of the heart”–spreads far from the glistening city on the Hudson. For us, it’s hard to think of globalization as threatening; globalization is a constant in our lives, as little noticed and commented upon as the Eiffel Tower is for Parisians.
Of course, not everyone works for an international magazine; and not every city is like New York. For millions, globalization is a process that transforms what is familiar in ways that can be deeply unsettling. And even for those who think that they live the global life, nagging questions of loyalty and identity come unbidden to the mind, like sea-monsters surfacing from the vasty deep. I’ve been musing on all this of late having just finished reading two tremendous books on our new world–“A Future Perfect,” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, which will be published next month, and “The Global Soul,” by Pico Iyer. (All three authors, I should confess, are good friends of mine.)
The books have very different agendas and come from very different pens. Wooldridge and Micklethwait are about as British as you can be, albeit well traveled and with a keen and sensitive eye for other cultures. Iyer was born in Britain of Indian parents, educated in the United States and spends most of his time in Japan. “Future Perfect,” at its heart, explains and defends globalization as an economic process driven by technology; “The Global Soul” speaks of “our dreams, of disconnection, of displacement, of being lost within a labyrinth of impersonal places.” For Iyer, the great truth about globalization is a deeply personal one; immersion in cultures others than those we were born into allows us to see the world through fresh (though not all-seeing) eyes. For Micklethwait and Wooldridge, heirs to the particular tradition of 19th-century English political economy, globalization is a process that expands prosperity and choice, and hence liberty.
At their heart, however, the books have a common message. Both works recognize that there are costs to the deepening integration of the world’s economies. Wooldridge and Micklethwait aren’t simple cheerleaders for global capitalism; they know very well that for many in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds–for those in Brazil’s favelas as much as for automobile-plant workers in Michigan–new patterns of trade and investment have bred new insecurities. For Iyer, the central, profoundly disquieting, question of our age is one that he, I and others discussed at a memorable dinner at Davos last year hosted by the film producer David Puttnam: in a world of jet travel and the Internet, with friends and family spread all over the planet, where do we belong? Where is “home”?
At the same time, all three authors are bold enough to sing the praises of our new order. Globalization is not simply an inevitable, irreversible force shoved down the throat of a resistant world that can do little more than learn how to live with it. On the contrary: empirically, globalization is nothing more (or less) than the accretion of countless millions of individual acts by people who have availed themselves of the potential granted them by technologies that shrink the planet. Our humanity is enriched when we do the mundane things that are now possible–eat new foods, cheer sports heroes from unlikely places, visit towns and villages that but a generation away seemed as close as the far side of the moon, understand at least the surface of unfamiliar faiths. Looked at in that way, globalization is not something of which one should despair; but rather an excuse for celebration. Global is good.
That seems a decent enough message with which to end this little homily, and this phase of my professional life. Though I hope not to be a total stranger to these pages, this is the last column that I shall write as editor of NEWSWEEK International. I’m off to take my chances in cyberspace, as editor-in-chief of an Internet start-up that I hope will explain and explore all aspects of globalization and the global economy. I’ve had a wonderful 4 1/2 years at NEWSWEEK International, working with a dedicated staff both in New York and in our offices thousands of miles from 57th Street and Broadway. And my time has been enriched by a constant flow of letters and e-mails from every country imaginable. I’ll now become one of you; a devoted reader of the best newsmagazine in the world. There are worse fates.
