In opening this penetrating and incisive survey of the state of the world at the dawn of a new millennium, Prof Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics lists five reasons for optimism: the receding of the nuclear threat; the web of co-operation linking states; unprecedented economic growth; the end of ideological division and the advance of science and technology. However, he spends the rest of the book systematically unpacking each of these and sounding a wake-up call for radical global action.
Complacency is a much used word in this book. On one side he is sharply critical of the complacency of global political and economic elites who believe economic growth and technological innovation are producing a better world for all. On the other side, he denounces those critics of the present world order who offer little basis for an alternative and whose "ethical over-simplification combines with an analytic one".
This book therefore challenges all sides, probing for conceptual precision on such widely used terms as globalisation, and submitting the "common sense" of left (liberal) and right (to razor-sharp) investigation. For example, he characterises as "hegemonic optimism", the dominant view in the developed world, which finds expression in "the house journals of global hegemony": the Economist, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times. Yet, among anti-imperialist critics, he finds "rather too comfortable global rejectionism".
Much of the book examines some of the main issues facing today's world, with chapters on the recurrence of war; on globalisation and its discontents; on the fragility of democracy and on the unaccountable hegemon (the United States). Halliday is concerned that "the current process of globalisation is a profoundly unequal and destabilising one", and he warns that "a globalised resentment threatens to create a rancorous world that US power will be unable to control". On democracy, he calculates that some 40 states out of 195 are democratic in any real sense. Within these democratic states he concludes that if such present trends as electoral abstention and the distortion of electoral politics by corporate lobbying and funding continue "the edifice could be very shaky indeed by 2050". He worries that "the potential for authoritarian and racist politics under capitalism remains".
Turning to the question of war, he wonders whether future observers may not accuse us contemptuously of "living in a fool's paradise". Alongside what he calls the "debellicisation of modern society", he finds emerging in the Balkans, central Africa and Colombia, a virulent strain of internal conflicts lacking the controls or ideology of earlier conflicts and an international system less willing to mobilise against them. He identifies the Far East (China, Taiwan, Korea), South Asia (India and Pakistan) and the Persian Gulf as areas of potential major conflict.
Halliday combines his depth and breath of scholarship with the journalist's eye for detail and the telling phrase. He writes that Marx's and Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party, with its emphasis on markets unifying the world, "reads at times like publicity material for the World Bank". "All orthodox religions, all deities known to man, are in violation of UN human rights conventions," he provocatively declares, while, on facing the challenge of environmental pollution, he believes that "when a society treats car advertisements in the same way it treats those of cigarettes, this may be an index of resolve". SUCH trenchant style and firm judgment inevitably invites disagreement on certain topics. In a chapter entitled `Delusions of Difference', he writes that concentrating on culture may divert attention from political and economic inequalities, as indeed it may. However, he misses the very important phenomenon, so ably documented in Naomi Klein's book No Logo, that culture, in the form of branding, has become a means by which the economic is colonising not only the political but more intimate life spaces also.
Throughout the book, his treatment of the state, circles around, but fails to focus on, the way in which states are being reformed to serve global market forces over the needs of their own citizens. On a related issue, he passes rather too swiftly over the potential of the better NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, Amnesty are the ones he mentions) to pioneer imaginative and badly needed global reforms.
In his concluding chapter, Halliday reminds us that 1900 was characterised by a faith in the ability of human beings to transform their world, whereas 2000 is marked by a belief in the potential of science and technology to do so - "the market, the microchip and the genome". He warns, however, that none of these discoveries will answer moral questions and their benefits are often confined to those who can pay.
Worrying about the "almost wholly impoverished (and) simplified landscape of public debate" and the role of the media in shrinking horizons of public curiosity, Prof Halliday reminds us that it is not history, or fate, or structures, or science that is going to shape the world at this stage: "it is conscious, responsible, organised individuals". In challenging us all to action, this little book packs a remarkable and urgently needed punch.
Dr Peadar Kirby is a senior lecturer in the School of Communications, DCU, lecturing on the MA in International Relations