When the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) got ready to publish its latest annual report, it chose for a title Globalism with a Human Face. The terms globalism and globalization are on everyone's lips these days: the process of globalization, according to every indicator we choose to use, is both unstoppable and moving fast. The only question, as the UNDP report implies, is what kind of globalization we want and can achieve, and who will benefit from it. Variations on this question increasingly occupy the attention of opinion makers all across the world-and not just economists and political experts, but historians, philosophers, cultural and literary critics, and numerous others.

The idea of globalization is hardly new. The historian William McNeill (1986) suggests that from the be inning of civilization 9 people have lived in ethnically diverse communities. Over the centuries, and despite occasional counter- currents, the contact has increased, helped along by trade and conquest, and by technology-iron, navigation, printing. Major technological changes have brought abrupt increases in the scale of human interaction-a process that has continued down to today. Such changes of scale alter the relationship of people to their environment, as Marx and Engels made clear in the mid-nineteenth century when they pointed out how the major industries had created a worldwide market, eliminating smaller businesses, and creating a new context, with "new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes."

THE FIRST GLOBALIZATION

Marx and Engels lived in the age of industrialization, a period in which the relationship between ruler and ruled changed fundamentally in most countries of Europe, the scale of international interactions vastly increased, and capital flows were transformed. The capital thus released gave new impetus to overseas empires, sources of raw materials for the new mass-production factories. Western explorers had essentially filled in the map of the world by the end of the eighteenth century, thereby producing a unified and "Objective" world picture that could be consulted by all nations, and supported by the worldwide exchange of goods. French philosophers and American pragmatists proclaimed the triumph of human reason-and (some would say) lit the fires of revolution to impose it on their compatriots. The invention of steamships and locomotives radically reduced transportation costs, shrinking distances. The economy was strengthened by the growth of democracy, or rather by the readiness of rulers to share part of their power with broader levels of their citizenry. Some people argue that this expansion set in motion both the triumph and ultimately the extinction of the power of individual states by gradually integrating people first into a sense of nationhood in the nineteenth century and then into a single transnational society at the end of the twentieth. Marx and Engels explored the notion of the "alienation" of the individual resulting from the vast increase in the size and reach of industry. They anticipated the extinction of the state, too, but in a communist, rather than a capitalist, utopia.

In some countries, Britain among them, the notion took hold that one could create a self-governing free market independent of government intervention. This was one of the elements that had stimulated the American Revolution, fought by people profoundly suspicious of the power of the state. Behind the nineteenth-century politics of laissezfaire, as the British scholar John Gray explains (1998:17), is the notion that 11 market freedoms are natural, and political restraints on markets are artificial." When the implementation of such freemarket policies brought exploitation on a scale unimaginable in earlier days, governments recognized the need for intervention, and in the second half of the nineteenth century minimum standards were set for employment, education and wages. At the same time governments recognized that the wealth produced by capitalism could finance the growth of institutions for the common good-universities and hospitals, for example-and support technological and scientific progress. Ordinary citizens were encouraged to participate in the work of democratic institutions and to improve their situation through education.

Building on this optimism, but in reaction to the persistence of the most savage and irrational injustice, people dreamed of the creation of world institutions. Mechanisms for world order seemed increasingly necessary: world population had reached a billion people at the beginning of the Industrial era, and now, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was approaching two billion. Bauman (1998:59) reminds us that "universalization' was a common watchword of the age, conveying "the hope, the intention, and the determination of order-making ... on a universal, truly global scale." The goal was "to make similar the life conditions of everyone and everywhere ... perhaps even make them equal." The Universal Postal Union, a thoroughly practical undertaking, was founded in 1874 as the first worldwide 'governmental organization.

But when governments intervened, a century or more ago, to protect their citizens against uncontrolled capitalism, they also intervened to secure for themselves a competitive position among the nations and to expand their own influence internationally. One perhaps unintended outcome in the twentieth century was the waging of world wars equipped with the most modem technology of mass destruction. The scale changed-in this case the scale of destruction. But this era, too, when a few despots could mobilize millions of people to set in place their own version of globalism, in defiance of a weak and fragmented League of Nations, seems to have passed. Today, behind the notion of globalization lies an unsettling belief-that no one is in charge, no one leads. As Czech President Vaclav Havel put it recently, "We live in an era in which everything is possible and nothing is certain."

Following the nationalism of the early years of this century, and the World War that followed, a renewed optimism about the possibility of world order emerged, this time with the participation of those parts of the world that in the first period of globalization had been exploited as colonies. World population was approaching its third billion. The idea of universalism was not dead: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. New regional economic systems began to emerge during this period, and, under the influence of a new leap forward in technology, new forms of globalization.

THE SECOND GLOBALIZATION

The present era of globalization is different from the earlier one primarily in its scale. "What is new today," writes Thomas Friedman in the introduction to his recent commentary on the subject, "is the degree and intensity with which the world is being tied together into a single globalized marketplace. What is also new is the sheer number of people and countries able to partake in this process and be affected by it." The earlier age of globalization, if we can give this title to the industrial era, depended chiefly on the fall of transportation costs, along with the advantages attendant on communication by telegraph and telephone. The present era depends on the fall of information and communication costs, along with the ease and low cost of transportation by air. The earlier age produced a new, widely distributed middle class. This class, profiting from the new means of transportation and from its new education, created the modern metropolis (clearly something quite different from a mere agglomeration of factories and workers' housing) as one of the first expressions of modernism, and developed a new and partially internationalized culture. The present era is once again rapidly expanding the number of people who are able to communicate with one another across distances, and who little by little are forming a new internationalized class.

The most striking manifestation of this international culture is in international business and finance-in the norms and genres that are rapidly coming into being through the social interaction of those who work in this globalized setting. It extends also to the cultural elements of travel-the operations and physical layout of hotels, airlines, airports. Standardization and convergence are also occurring in such areas as product marketing, the norms and practices of buying and selling, styles of dress, the nature and content of child-rearing, and a whole collection of other matters. The more this globalized class behaves in a globalized fashion, the more the environment in which it operates tends to converge. Such conformity carries with it both prestige and financial advantages which in turn make it stronger still. It is interesting, though, that the novels that this class reads, and in some measure the films it watches, constantly hark back to the lost values of the premodern period: we might describe this phenomenon as the commodification of nostalgia.

The basic principle behind this international culture is simple: if you create more wealth, and if you have a democratic system in which the winning of votes depends on broad distribution of such wealth, the result will be expansion in the membership of the club. These new members will then invest their newly acquired wealth within the system to create still further wealth.

THE GLOBALIZATION CLUB

Unfortunately, membership in the club- whether the two percent who currently have (according to the estimates) easy access to computers, or the twenty percent who, according to Robert Reich and Lester Thurow, enjoy the advantages of the new prosperity- easily creates the illusion that the entire world consists of club members: the prosperous few live economically, culturally and linguistically isolated from the impoverished many. But the non-members are more numerous than the members: literally billions of people do not share in the advantages of the new technology and lack the resources to benefit much from the new world order. Of course, some are aspirants to membership- consumers of the largely American mass- produced popular culture, and of globally marketed products, which offer a certain image of a new world no longer associated with the poverty of the local environment and hold out the promise of a kind of new freedom, be it real or merely the product of skilled marketing. Such aspirations help drive the system, but unfulfilled expectations can create a resentment, whose dimensions we are ill-equipped to measure.

And even as membership in the club expands, the explosive increase in the world population continues, primarily among the poor, the nonmembers World population reached its first billion, as we have already noted, in 1804. The second came in 1927, the third in 1960. By 1974 we reached the fourth; the fifth followed in 1987; the sixth has been reached this year. Although demographers anticipate some slowing down in the rate of increase, they predict the seventh million by 2013 and the eighth by 2028. The total world population at the end of World War II was about the same as the current total population of the three largest countries today--China, India, and the United States. If, at the time of the French Revolution, the entire world population had moved to India, they would not have equaled India's population today.

Meanwhile, global capital flows increase in volume and intensity. Many experts believe that the big international corporations no longer belong to specific countries, nor are they controllable by them: they have become independent actors on the world scene. Individual governments increasingly resemble a supporting cast: the significant roles are played by the corporations and the capital behind them. Curbing these vast enterprises, even if we wished to do so, would be extremely difficult. Redistributing their wealth would be even more so: they form the backbone of a single globalized economy, supported by electronic communications, stock markets, and international distribution networks. The political equivalent of this globalized economy would be a functioning legal and political system overlaid on existing national sovereignty and respected by all persons and states-but such a thing does not exist. In fact the great powers, led by the United States, have for the most part dismantled the existing system. Today the United Nations, to a degree more acute than ever, has authority only when the great powers lend it some of theirs, and international law has become, at best, a tattered remnant of the postwar consensus that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There is a further, even more important difference between the present process of globalization and that of earlier centuries. Until relatively recently, there was still space for human expansion, and adequate raw materials, and such basic necessities as water, air, cultivable land, and so on. Today, our expansion has finally circled the globe, and we are beginning to consume our own birthright: we are now using up, definitively, the resources of the planet and not just oil or gas or arable land (we can always hope for new sources of energy, or for further agricultural progress), but the truly basic necessities, beginning with the air we breathe. If we do not soon cease this mortgaging of the future of humanity, we will not have the resources even to pay the mortgage.

Simple arithmetic tells us that while the world's population is expanding, geographical limits stay the same. Already we lack the simple physical resources needed to allow everyone in the world to enjoy the advantages that we Americans, as members of the elite, so happily enjoy. The land surface of the planet is not enough, at least under present conditions, to satisfy the needs of even half of the world's population, were they to live at the level at which we live. Each individual uses a finite amount of raw materials and industrial products in a given time-in the form of food, housing, clothing, books, cars, energy. Two scholars, William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, have contrived a way of calculating how much land and water a given individual needs to live at a given economic level, to provide for that persons needs, waste-disposal, and so on. They call this a person's "ecological footprint." For example, the average coffee drinker in an industrialized country uses about 25 square meters of coffee plantation per year. Those who drive cars, heat their houses, use electric light, and so on, require between two and three hectares of forest per person to absorb the gases produced by their fossil-fuel emissions. The average consumer in an industrialized country requires between four and nine hectares to satisfy his or her consumption. One does not have to be a disciple of Malthus to recognize that profligate and unchecked spending of natural resources reduces the options of those who come after us and perhaps puts their very survival in danger.

We have, then, created for ourselves a system nurtured and driven by trans- border capital and capital flows. We have done this even while depriving ourselves of the political capability to redirect or modify this system--despite the fact that its apparent goal (under the best of constructions), namely to create prosperity for all of humankind, is easily shown to be unattainable. This system is popularly identified with the United States, whose national ideology and technical capability have certainly molded and fashioned it, but it is supported by leaders of other states, who have accepted its principles with enthusiasm and see in it their future prosperity. As the financier George Soros puts it in his recent book (1998:xx), as long as capitalism remains triumphant, the pursuit of money unfortunately outweighs all other considerations, and economic and political arrangements remain in disequilibrium. "The development of a global economy has not been matched by the development of a global society," he writes.

Soros is among those searching for a different path-not to eliminate the global financial system (something impossible to do, even if one wanted to do it), but to set it in the framework of broader, more humane principles aimed at nurturing human values and curbing human greed. Following Karl Popper, he calls his vision of a functioning world order "the open society," a society where we all recognize that no one has a monopoly on truth, indeed that such truth is unattainable, but we all work together to maximize the totality of achievable good. Totalitarianism and naked power are the enemies of this open society.

IN SEARCH OF ALTERNATIVES
If globalization is a process that cannot be halted, the question, then, is how best to adapt to a globalized society, using its advantages and creating a globalized ethic, while at the same time preserving one's individuality. Are there ways in which a society can preserve its own separate characteristics, its own traditions and beliefs, without turning into North Korea or Myanmar? Is it possible, to use Friedman's terminology, to combine the virtues of the Lexus-that is, material prosperity-and the olive tree beside the door, namely human values?

We all know that our new world what Benjamin Barber calls McWorld is merging and homogenizing itself at alarming speed. Its cultural products reflect the profile of global capital: the world seems to be dominated by the likes of McDonald's, Disney, and Coca-Cola. In fact this global culture does consist of several subcultures, among which the transnational intelligentsia is one of the most important. Intellectuals take pleasure in denouncing homogenized global culture, yet not only do they use the products, they own the shares. If belief in the market triumphs, it brings along with it scholars and other intellectual consumers from all across the world; and if McDonald's, Disney, and their cultural products rule, and if a kind of rootlessness becomes the social norm, along with this globalism comes the ability, through the discoveries of science and the use of our computers, to visit the very frontiers of human knowledge. When our poets complain that their hearts are breaking, modem surgery can always arrange a transplant; when we aspire to the music of the spheres, there are compact discs to help. Armed with our stock options, we can readily travel to see the world's great masterpieces of art, or conjure them up on our monitors. We could say that every McDonald's hamburger box holds a free gift, called Beethoven, or a good gym, or the complete works of Shakespeare, or a hepatitis injection, or a week in Florence, things less easily enjoyed before McDonald's and Disney existed. A paradox of globalization is the fact that the apparent erosion of independent thinking resulting from worldwide mass production also feeds our thoroughly human desire to learn about our world and to experience it to the maximum. Those who oppose this new world should remember that simple isolation, simple avoidance of external influences, does not necessarily lead to higher thoughts than those afforded by McDonald's, nor to life principles more socially dynamic than those of Disney.

How alarmingly striking are the changes in our own lives, and how selfsufficient is our technological cocoon! Messages delivered in other forms-the simple larynx of a simple worker in a simple country-often fail to penetrate our deafness. But if we cease listening to those other voices, we will not succeed in adapting adequately to changing conditions: the great error committed by every ruler is the belief that when he came to power, politics stopped changing. In reality, and as we have learned to our peril, globalization also produces fragmentation, producing ethnic and religious isolationism among those who are excluded, and making it easier for disaffected elements to communicate with one another rapidly and effectively by using technology for their own ends.

Globalization is, in short, many-sided and profoundly ambiguous: every good that it brings is accompanied by some evil; every disadvantage is dispelled by some advantage. The era that I have called the first globalization brought not only modern war but also efforts at international order-not only new cruelties, but also new hope. The challenge of the moment, then, is to learn how to use the currents of the present globalization to establish a more humane, more egalitarian, and more secure, yet prosperous, world.

MANAGING DIVERSITY

Simple communication does not in itself create understanding. One-direction communication, in which given states or interests or economic classes thrust their cultural products on others, is not enough. In this model, the only element of two-directionality is the fact that consumers are occasionally consulted on what poison to swallow. Nor is communication based on the extraction of information from people in order to analyze and use it for social or commercial manipulation adequate. What matters is not just that communication take place, but that it be based on reciprocity and common interests. Such common interests, paradoxically, include respect for the lack of commonality.

A potential consequence of globalization is of course the loss of cultural differences. A huge number of languages are today in danger of extinction. Along with each language goes a unique way of looking at the world, a unique repertoire of human relations. We cannot say with any certainty that the world loses this or that specific advantage through the loss of the languages of small peoples, but we do know that cultural homogenization erases those characteristics whereby people identify themselves in the crowd and protect themselves against absorption into other people's cultures. The worldwide spread of English, for all its advantages, is a threat to small communities, and it creates an imbalance in which native speakers of English are advantaged over everyone else. Such advantage, in this as in other matters, creates resentment: it is important that we listen to the dissenting voices that express such resentment, so that we can assess our standing in the world. We lose much if we stay within the boundaries of our globalization dub and if we listen only to the messages packaged for us in our English language.

Furthermore, given the ease of travel in the modern world, and the extent to which people can be linked with one another both in person and through technology-given also the sheer ethnic diversity in our crowded planet, we must learn to manage our differences, looking constantly for the right balance between sameness and difference, homogeneity and diversity. Arguably, the most important single element in the maintenance and strengthening of peace in the coming century will be the effective management of difference.

It has been said that "peace is and has always been the principal wish of human beings." I am less optimistic. If peace means sitting comfortably in the shadow of free markets, and if it means accepting the accompanying ideology and working productively to bring it about, then yes, most people in this troubled world want peace. But the person who, seeking to preserve his or her own culture, or moved perhaps by less noble motives, chooses to threaten this prosperity, will soon learn that peace is not the principal wish of the leaders of the freemarket club, or even of its ordinary members: their principal interest is material prosperity. This wish for material prosperity, and the competition that accompanies it, distorts to an ever greater extent the basic principles of international life. "I needed some time to come to the full realization," wrote Boutros Boutros- Ghali in the recent memoir of his years at the United Nations (1999:198), "that the United States saw little merit in diplomacy; power was enough. Only the weak use diplomacy."

Globalization at any cost will not produce or guarantee peace. As Peter F. Drucker recently points out (1997:171), convinced as he is of the fact that an integrated international financial system inhibits war and helps preserve peace, whenever in the last 200 years political passions and nation-state politics have collided with economic rationality, political passions and the nation-state have.

As technology advances, the whole commercial paratus of the modern capitalist world moves with it. But we should understand that this apparatus was made by humans and is based on specific ideologies: it is not some wholly natural phenomenon, but made by art. There are other ways of organizing society. After all, those who want something to stay call it natural; those who want to get rid of it call it artificial.

But the distinction between what is natural and what is artificial may not apply very well in international affairs. We cannot afford a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to the future of our world. A planet so full requires a kind of globalization to manage itself globally: as citizens in our own societies we have a requirement and a responsibility to insist on the moral and equitable management of the new global order gradually coming into being. Peace is not like rain: it does not simply fall out of heaven when the good Lord wants it to. It is more like a house: it has to be built, renovated, kept in good repair. It is not natural, but made by art-and there is an art to peace that we must all diligently pursue.

ADAPTED FROM AN ADDRESS TO THE 84TH WORLD ESPERANTO CONGRESS, BERLIN, AUGUST 1999