At the dawn of the railroad age, empires and nations were still fragmented by the “tyranny of distance”—the time and trouble of traveling and communicating by land and sea. Until the mid-nineteenth century, people who did not live in the same village or town could not communicate with each other save by messages traveling at the speed of horses or sailing ships, journeys that might take weeks or months to reach the addressee and bring back a reply.8 Thereafter, telegraph lines began to spread across Europe and the United States, and in 1866 even across the Atlantic Ocean. Such communications networks called for some international cooperation. In 1864 Napoleon III organized a conference among European governments to create an international telegraph system, which led to rules on codes and message routing. Political decisions were also required to synchronize time, within nations as well as worldwide. This had become urgent because the railroads, telegraph, and telephone all transcended the old mosaic of unregulated time zones. The task was accomplished by the United States and European governments between 1883 and 1912.9
By the end of the twentieth century, the impediment of distance for communications had been essentially eliminated, and for travel it had shrunk ten- to a hundredfold. In 1946 the cost of transatlantic air travel (economy class) was nearly ten times higher than it is today. For long-distance communications, the extra costs of spanning distance have been totally erased by the Internet and other new technologies. A map that reflects social interactions at the beginning of the twenty-first century would bear little resemblance to the natural topography of the world. If such a map were scaled to represent travel times between cities, it would shrink the whole planet into a little web resembling a road map of Western Europe. If this map were drawn to show the time (or cost) of communicating between governments, businesses, and homes it would make our world look like an ink blot.
Many scholars and pundits believe the shrinking of distance greatly enhances political and economic interactions throughout the world that are beneficial for all mankind. This might well be true for some individuals and groups—business elites, Internet entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations, intellectuals who embrace multiculturalism. Thus, for these sectors of society, the message of Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, justifies its captivating title. But our world is not “flat” for nation-states that act as the ultimate arbiters of the political order and disorder on our planet. Most of these influential nations gained their strength and cohesion in the railroad age and must now cope with political problems that stem from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fought-over fragments of the Ottoman Empire—Iraq, Syria, Palestine—come to mind, or the unsettled relationship between China and Taiwan. Nothing “flat” about this world.
Widening Divergence
Ever since mankind’s cultural split, science and the political order have been marching to different drummers. This divergence will widen because the scientific-technological sphere has acquired its own dynamic with which the political order cannot keep up. Nourished by an apparently unlimited succession of discoveries, science advances at an accelerating pace. Of course, scientific theories remain subject to revisions, and acquired knowledge may later be lost in the welter of competing ideas. But from decade to decade, modern science produces new knowledge and technological advances that seem destined to accumulate without end. It has become a self-sustaining force that sets it apart from all other fields of human endeavor.
No such momentum is discernible in the sphere of society, government, and international affairs. Developments in this realm travel a zigzag course, wherein improvement is often followed by deterioration, strife by pacification, rise by decline—all akin to the rhythms of history that prevailed for millennia. The power of governments grows and shrinks, their ability to control violent crime and corruption improves and deteriorates, the freedom of citizens expands and contracts, the same lessons have to be relearned from one century to the next. Man as a political animal moves on an erratic course. Man as the modern scientist moves onward, not without setbacks, but without ever changing the overall sense of direction.
Chastened by a quarter century of wars following the French Revolution, the world’s leading powers—all European—created an international order in 1815 that avoided wars or kept them localized. They succeeded in maintaining this order for a hundred years. Yet after this long period of relative peace, there were two enormously destructive global wars within three decades. This phase in turn was followed by more than half a century during which wars again were averted or kept limited and localized. Manifesting a somewhat similar rhythm of gain and loss, the beginnings of constitutional democratic government in the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were followed, a hundred years later, by new tyrannies in Russia, Germany, and other nations. And then, after the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, these tyrannies were followed by a restoration and expansion of democracy.
Even the political enfranchisement of women, a seemingly irreversible development that began in the nineteenth century, has not followed a steady course. While it has spread all over the globe, it has suffered significant reversals recently in nations where a change of government led to the imposition of Islamic restrictions—the worst example being provided by the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In fact, the ups and down of religious tolerance have been an important reason for the erratic patterns of political development around the world. In some countries, diverse religious groups have lived together peacefully for generations, then suddenly became enmeshed in violence and civil war. In Bosnia, for instance, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics had enjoyed neighborly relations in the same towns and villages for generations. Then abruptly, in the 1990s, after Yugoslavia had
