global role that it is incapable of exerting, the speculation that China before long might be ascending to global primacy, India’s impatient ambition to be seen as a world power and its external as well as internal vulnerabilities, and Japan’s lingering reluctance to translate its global economic weight into political assertiveness collectively reflect the reality of a more broadly based but less cohesive global leadership.
3: THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL POLITICAL AWAKENING
The ongoing dispersal of global power is furthered by the emergence of a volatile phenomenon: the worldwide political awakening of populations until recently politically passive or repressed. Occurring recently in Central and Eastern Europe and lately in the Arab world, this awakening is the cumulative product of an interactive and interdependent world connected by instant visual communications and of the demographic youth bulge in the less advanced societies composed of the easy-to-mobilize and politically restless university students and the socially deprived unemployed. Both groups resent the richer portions of humanity and the privileged corruption of their rulers. That resentment of authority and privilege is unleashing populist passions with unprecedented potential for generating large-scale turmoil.
The universal scope and the dynamic impact of this new social phenomenon is historically novel. For most of history, humanity has lived not only in compartmentalized isolation but also in a state of political stupor. Most people in most places were neither politically conscious nor politically active. Their daily lives were focused on personal survival in conditions of physical and material deprivation. Religion offered some solace while social traditions provided some degree of cultural stability and occasional collective relief from the hardships of fate. Political authority was remote, often seen as an extension of divine will, and frequently legitimated by hereditary entitlement. Struggles for power at the top tended to be confined to a narrow circle of participants, while group conflicts with adjoining communities focused largely on territorial or material possessions and were fueled by instinctive ethnic hatreds and/or divergent religious beliefs. Political conversations, political convictions, and political aspirations were a preoccupation of a privileged social stratum in the immediate vicinity of the ruler itself.
As societies became more complex, a distinctive class of people engaging in political discourse and in struggles for political power emerged at the apex of organized society. Whether in the court of the Roman or of the Chinese emperor, the courtiers or mandarins were active crypto-politicians, though focused more on palace intrigues than on wider policy issues. And as societies evolved even further and literacy increased, more participants entered the political dialogue: the landed aristocracy in the rural areas, wealthy merchants and artisans in the expanding towns and cities, and a limited elite class of intellectuals. Still, the populace at large remained politically disengaged and dormant, except for periodic outbreaks of violent but largely anarchistic outrage, as in the case of peasant uprisings.
The first socially inclusive but geographically limited manifestation of political awakening was the French Revolution. Its eruption was driven by a combination of atavistic rebellion from below and novel mass propagation from above. It occurred in a society in which a traditional monarchy was sustained by a politically literate but internally divided aristocracy and by a materially privileged Catholic Church. That power structure was then challenged by a politically literate but restless bourgeoisie engaged in public agitation in key urban centers and even by a peasantry increasingly aware of its relative deprivation. Historically unprecedented political pamphleteering, facilitated by the printing press, rapidly translated social resentments into revolutionary political aspirations crystallized in emotionally captivating slogans: “
The resulting violent political upheaval produced a sudden unifying surge in collective and self-conscious national identity. Napoleon’s military triumphs in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1789 owed at least as much to the collective fervor of a politically awakened French national identity as to his military genius. And that fervor spread rapidly throughout Europe, with its contagion first favoring Napoleonic victories and then contributing, in a rebound (having aroused Prussian, Austrian, and Russian nationalistic passions), to Napoleon’s defeat. But by the “Spring of Nations” in 1848, much of Europe—notably Germany but also Italy, Poland, and soon Hungary—plunged into an age of fervent nationalism and socially self-conscious political awakening. By then, the more politically conscious Europeans had also become captivated by the democratic ideals of the socially less revolutionary but politically more inspirational humanism of the distant, open, and postaristocratic American republic.
However, less than a century later, Europe fell victim to wars inspired by its own conflicting populist passions. The two world wars coupled with the explicit anti-imperialism of the Bolshevik Revolution, helped make mass political awakening a global phenomenon. The conscripted soldiers of the British and French colonial empires returned home imbued with a new awareness of their own political, racial, and religious identity and of their economic privation. Concurrently, the increasing access to Western higher education and the resulting spread of Western ideas drew the minds of those in the upper strata of the indigenous populations of European colonies to captivating notions of nationalism and socialism.
Nehru of India, Jinnah of Pakistan, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Senghor of Senegal traveled such paths from their own personal political awakening to charismatic leadership in mass political proselytization, culminating in their leadership of respective national emancipations. Japan’s sudden burst into world politics at the turn of the twentieth century also stimulated a parallel political awakening in China, then smarting under the humiliating subordination imposed on it by the European powers. Sun Yat-sen launched his quest for China’s renewal in the early twentieth century having benefited from personal observation of Japan’s self-initiated Western-style modernization; while another young Chinese, Deng Xiaoping, absorbed Marxism as a young student in distant Paris.
One of the most memorable moments in my public career occurred in 1978, when I was in Beijing to initiate secret efforts to normalize US-Chinese relations and to forge a de facto coalition of convenience against the then- expanding Soviet Union. Following the very sensitive and narrowly held negotiations with Deng, I was unexpectedly invited by him to a private dinner. As we sat in a pavilion overlooking a small lake within the Forbidden City and I quizzed him about the evolution of his own political views, he began to reminisce about his youth. Our talk turned to his expedition, as a very young student, from central China (first by a riverboat to the coast, and then by a steamer) to the then-so-remote Paris of the 1920s. It was for him at the time a trip literally into the distant unknown. He told me how gripped he became by the awareness of China’s relative social retardation compared to France and how his sense of national humiliation made him turn for historical guidance to Marxist teachings about social revolution as a shortcut to national redemption. That was when his national resentment, political awakening, and ideological formation fused into one, and came to shape his subsequent participation in two revolutions: under Mao, to break with China’s past, and then (when he became the leader) to shape China’s future. Less than a year after that memorable moment, Deng Xiaoping and his wife—in the course of the Chinese leader’s state visit to America—in a unique gesture, came to a private dinner at my home in the Washington suburbs.
Over the course of two centuries, the revolution in mass communication and the gradual spread of literacy, especially among the growing concentration of urban residents, transformed individual political awakening into a mass phenomenon. Pamphleteering and the emergence of regularly published newspapers during the nineteenth century began to stoke popular desires for political change. As people in the middle and upper classes took on the habit of regularly reading newspapers, their political awareness grew and political dialogue about the state of national affairs became a normal social occurrence. The appearance of radio in the early twentieth century then gave political oratory a nationwide reach (think of Hitler) while giving even distant events a sense of dramatic immediacy, exposing hitherto politically passive and semi-isolated peoples to a cacophony of political clamor.
The recent emergence of global television, and then of the Internet, has in turn connected previously isolated populations with the world at large, and also augmented the ability of political activists to reach out to and mobilize the political loyalty and emotions of millions. The universal connectivity of the late twentieth century transformed political unrest into a worldwide learning process of street tactics in which otherwise disparate and distant political factions can borrow tactics from one another. Slogans quickly spread from Nepal to Bolivia, as have colored scarves from Iran to Thailand, videos of suffering from Sarajevo to Gaza, and tactics of urban demonstrations from Tunis to Cairo—all promptly ending up on TV and computer screens throughout the world.
