Robert D. Kaplan
Contributing Editor, Atlantic Monthly
I’ll start by posing this scenario. If I were standing before you one hundred years ago, in 1898, at the close of the Spanish-American War, I would have a lot of reason for optimism, just as most of the commentators and lecturers at that time, at the turn of the twentieth century in America, were full of optimism. America had just won a war; we had an overseas empire of sorts in the Philippines and Cuba; we were establishing what, at that time, were considered great new trade links in the Far East. We were becoming a big international power, after about two decades of the highest economic growth we had ever seen, with the exception of a short depression between 1893 and 1895. I would have been very optimistic because three words did not yet exist in any dictionary: fascism, totalitarianism, or inflation. The point I am trying to make is that the evils of the next century may not even have names yet. Only in the most vague sense do we have a concept for them.
What I would like to do is discuss why democracy and technology are not going to be our saviors and, from that, discuss some of the things that I am afraid about, some of the things that really trouble me about what could lie ahead in the next thirty or forty years. Obviously a lot of wonderful things will happen that we also may not have names for yet. But the good things can take care of themselves. The bad things are what we need to focus on because, as I will mention again at the end of the talk, the best defense we have against evil is to always maintain a sense of the tragic.
Before World War I, European society had just gone through a century, one hundred years, from 1814 to 1914, without one major war, with the exception of the ninemonth-long Franco-Prussian War. It had been a fairly peaceful century for Europe. By 1914, many European societies had experienced unprecedented growth for many previous years. They had lost the sense of the tragic. They thought peace was a permanent position, and that is why they rushed into World War I, into the battlefields of Flanders in leaps of joy, because they thought it was going to be a short war. That is the problem with peaceful, prosperous eras. They strip us of our defensive mechanisms, tragically, and that is where the problem starts.
Democracy and technology do not make the world better; they do not make the world worse. They are valueneutral. They complexify the world. They magnify good; they magnify evil. But they don’t lead to a better world, and let me give you some examples. I will start with democracy and then move on to technology.
First of all, states are not formed by elections or democracy. States, around the world, 190 of them, have been formed by settlement patterns, migrations, wars, ethnic cleansings; they are never formed by elections. In every place where democracy tends to make a society more stable or better, there is usually already a middle class that pays income tax, and, more important, the main issues of the society have already been solved: where the borders are; what ethnic groups, if any, control what territory; what system of government to have. There are already civil institutions in place. The bickering democrat can then argue about secondary issues, like the budget, or gun control, or whatever else they argue about. In other words, the things that affect our Congress, that affect our society, we think about as primary issues, but they are not; they are secondary issues. The primary issues have already been decided upon, and that is why our democracy works, or has worked up until now.
But in many parts of the world, there are no civil institutions; there are no strong, functioning institutional bureaucracies because a functioning bureaucracy does not take one but often takes several generations of literacy to function well. Also, in many parts of the world, it is unclear where the borders are. The middle class may be growing, but it is still a small percentage of society. So, you have a very weak, fragile system, and, when you impose democracy upon it, you further weaken the system by dividing the elite.
Put it this way: if you have a society where everyone is a peasant, or ninety percent of the country are peasants, and you hold elections, the only way the voting public can be divided is by region or ethnic group because there is no class structure developed. In that case, democracy really institutionalizes and hardens already existing ethnic division. This is the case in many parts of Africa and elsewhere.
The key issue in the world is not really democracy. The key issue is the middle class. I think everyone agrees on this but just has not thought about it in this way. How do we expand the middle class? Countries that have a really large, sizable, feisty middle class are stable; we accept them as stable. We do not worry about what they are going to be like next year. We are not really concerned about who is going to be in power next year. We know that whichever party is in power, it is a stable place and a good place to go on vacation and a good place to invest money. The real question is, how do you increase the size of the middle classes? That is what really brings stability and peace, and dilutes evil.
The problem is that, so far in history, democracies almost never create middle classes. Middle classes have almost always arisen under some form of autocracy or another, whether benign or unbenign. If the middle class gets large enough and confident enough that at some point it grows out of the very authoritarians who created it in the first place, then that’s when you have a democracy. In other words, democracy is a capstone to several other forms of social and economic development. It is the icing on the cake. It is what comes last; it is not what comes first.
The problem is that ninety to ninety-five percent of the births in this world are occurring in the poorest countries or in the poorest sections of wealthier countries. While the middle class is increasing in absolute terms, it is decreasing in percentage terms. While fertility rates are dropping, absolute birth rate and the percentage of those birth rates among the poorest sections of the planet are increasing. The middle class is going to be even a smaller sliver of the global reality than it is now, and that will only make democracy even more difficult (to get established) and make it have even less meaning.
Let me give you some examples. I was one of the last reporters to interview the democratically elected president of Azerbaijan. This was in the spring of 1993. He was democratically elected, but it was a country of urban peasants and rural peasants. The country was in chaos. A hundred yards from his office there were soldiers who were shaking people down for cigarettes. There was a curfew at night. There were gangs operating. A few weeks after I interviewed him, he was overthrown in a military coup by former communist and KGB officers. Azerbaijan has had a tyranny ever since, and its economy, lo and behold, is developing very rapidly. It is far more stable, far more at peace, than it was under democracy.
An irony? Not really, if you look at other places. Consider China, where sixty million people are middle class out of a billion people. It is riven by mountain ranges and divided ethnically, if you take into consideration the Uigher Turks in the west. It is very unclear whether, if the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 had succeeded, China would be in better shape now or far, far worse shape now. Democracy would have led, I think, to instability not only in the Muslim west of the country but in other areas too. You have this vast country with only a sliver of a middle class and no civil institutions.
In the Balkans, democracy has not only failed once, but has failed thrice. The war that started in 1991-92 was basically perpetrated by an elite that had all been democratically elected. In 1991, when Yugoslavia collapsed, there were elections in all the republics, and everywhere they brought to power the people who would perpetrate crime. In 1995, a democratic process basically institutionalized in power the very people who had committed crime between 1992 and 1995. And just recently, earlier in 1997, in recent municipal elections, the most extreme people, who were on the Hague’s list of wanted war criminals, did very well in elections. What the former Yugoslavia lacked before the breakup of the country is what many countries in the third world lack, a sizable enough middle class. It was not only ethnic hatred; it was ethnic hatred married to the fact that, between 1945 and 1990, Yugoslavia, because it was communist, saw a lite-beer version of communism; this denied the possibility of a growing middle class like so much of Western Europe had.
Instead of stability and civility in the next twenty or thirty years, what is emerging is a world of democratic heresies, a world of neo-authoritarian heresies, that have emerged out of a kind of monochrome democracy. In my article in the Atlantic “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” (December 19, 1997), I make the comparison between early Christianity and democracy. I say that when Christianity emerged, the elite thought this would lead to a more stable, more peaceful world because the elite throughout Europe, throughout the Mediterranean littoral, finally had united around a belief system that stressed the sanctity of the individual far more than any previous belief system. But what happened was that, as Christianity spread, it divided up. It was divided up by geography, by culture, into rites and sects and heresies, and thus you had a whole new layer of complex divisions. The fifth century was far more violent than the fourth century, when Christianity had spread. I think you can draw a parallel with democracy.
I want to use an example of the Middle East to explain what I think is going to happen, and then I will move on to technology. If you think about it, many of us like to believe that because we have been alive the last few decades, we have seen a lot of important, dramatic Middle Eastern history. I would argue, however, that very little has happened politically in the Middle East in the last forty years. The same one-man governments are still in power today, as they were forty years ago, in many countries. But at the same time, we have seen vast economic and social change. Countries that, from Morocco to Iran, used to be rural are now heavily urbanized. You can go into a mud-brick hovel where someone is working a television off a car battery and watching an Italian soap opera. The world is coming to the Middle East. You can go up to villages in Syria where, two decades ago, all the products in the stores were either Syrian-produced or they were produced in Jordan, and they were low-quality. Now you find canned food products from all over the world. The international economy, information, and urbanization have all created dramatic social and economic changes in the Middle East. But there has been very little political evolution, and history shows that the one usually catches up to the other. And the longer the drag time, the more violent it is when it happens.
To sum up, Middle Eastern populations are far too sophisticated for the one-man governments that they have inherited and that are still in place. The next generation of autocrats in the Middle East is not going to be able to rule as autocratically as Hafez al-Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and so on. While autocracy will weaken, that does not mean that Middle Eastern societies are prepared for stable, parliamentary democracy. I think what there will be—and I am using the Middle East only as an example for much of the rest of the world—are very many, messy Mexico-style scenarios, all the way across the Middle East, where you will have dynamic industrializing countries with weak institutions and weak leadership. There will be lower-level officers and corrupt, feuding politicians who will not be able to govern as coherently as the people we deal with now. This will be a far, far cry from a civil society or anything approaching civility.
Right now, we are in the last stages of a very convenient situation. If we are concerned with the geographical state that is called Jordan, or the geographical state that is called Egypt, we have only one address and only one fax number we have to go to. We can in a sense tap into that big geographical space and have influence through one person. It is very direct; it is very efficient; it is very neat. But in future years, we may have ten or twelve factions we will have to deal with in those geographical spaces. That is why I worry that we will look back upon the neat, simple, bipolar Arab-Israeli conflict era as a sort of sepia-toned, romantic age of the Middle East, when our problems were very simple, compared to the problems we will inherit. It will all be because of democratization, because democratization, in the real world, will lead to many diseased variants of democracy.
Iran, from 1978 until recently, has been a diseased variant of democracy. Power was divided up into different power centers. It had a parliament in Teheran that, for a decade now, has been far more free than many parliaments elsewhere in the Middle East. But did that make the situation more peaceful in the world, more amenable to us, more civil? No, it didn’t. To sum up, democracy is not going, in any way, shape, or form, to lessen the evil in the world.
Now when it comes to technology, again, if I were standing before you in 1898, and I were a very clairvoyant person, and I were able to at least focus in on what would be the evils and the dangers of fifty years ahead, I would worry about how the industrial revolution was concentrating power and making central government in dynamic, newly-cohering nation-states, like Japan and Germany, that much more powerful. I would worry about the kinds of connections between industrialization and societies that were very dynamic because they came together rather late as official nation-states, as Germany did. In other words, the Holocaust, Stalin’s death camps, the kind of evils that we associate with the twentieth century, were a sort of byproduct of industrialization. Industrialization did not cause those evils, but it was the backdrop for them. You needed rail systems, big bureaucracies, the ability to have huge networks of buildings, factories, rail networks, and prison camps operable from one central forum, and that would be impossible without industrialization. Industrialization was about business, and from that business we got big, blunt evils like mass murder, genocide, the ability to kill large numbers of people by coming up with lists. Bureaucratization.
The industrial revolution’s keyword was bigness. It was about aircraft carriers, factories, missiles, big things, and, in an age of bigness, it favored the winners, those people who were able to win control of significant geographical spaces. You could not take advantage of the industrial revolution if you were an out-of-power guerrilla group because you couldn’t have your own aircraft carrier, your own tank brigade, all of that. That’s what the industrial revolution offered. The industrial revolution was stabilizing in the sense that only the winners could utilize it.
What about the postindustrial revolution? What is that all about, what is its key element, and what kind of evils will that lead to? Now, I’m thinking out loud. The postindustrial revolution is about smallness, about concealment, about miniaturization, about the conquest of matter and of geography. That obviously has benefits to the winner. The people who control big geographical spaces have the money to invest in computers and all this. But it also has advantages to the losers, those people who cannot control geographical spaces but who may only be able to control a few apartment houses. But, because of the new technology, that is all they will need to wreak a lot of havoc. This is because concealment favors the losers, the people who—if they cannot win in geographical space—can at least pour some chemicals into a water system.
Smallness and concealment also mean a number of other things. I think miniaturization favors terrorism, and I think that, in turn, favors the importance of the intelligence-gathering of intelligence agencies. It is very ironic that the media have focused on the obsoleteness of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Central Intelligence Agency has its problems; it may need reinventing. I do not want to get into that debate tonight. But the reason I find that very ironic is that I believe the new technology means, without a doubt, that we are entering a golden age of intelligence agencies, a golden age of spying, of concealment, of intelligence and counter-intelligence, because the technology will provide all different advantages and opportunities for both gathering information surreptitiously and also countering that gathering. I think an age of smallness in technology will also favor small corporate groups, and I think that when you put together a larger and larger role for intelligence agencies, and a larger and larger role for terrorist corporate groups, you start to get the outline for new kinds of warfare and new kinds of evil.
I was in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, not too long ago, to observe the Army Special Forces. These are not typical commandos. These people are in ophthalmology, dentistry, foreign languages, how to use weapons (obviously), all kinds of signals and communications. They are learning how to be diplomats and spies, how to conduct negotiations, how to dig water wells in a third-world village that they find themselves in, and how to treat the sick cattle of that village in order to win hearts and minds the right way. In other words, what the army is groping for is a sort of new corporate force that collapses many specialized categories. The army said to me that this is something new, and I said no, this is something old. This is the old British East India Company. All that has happened is the modern age of specialization, which lasted about two hundred years, where you had your intelligence agency (the CIA), you had your standing army, your this, your that. These are all now in the early stages of collapsing, as we need to create smaller, corporate units of people who are civilians, who can do everything at once.
If you look around the world at the most effective military, peacekeeping-force in a specific situation, the one you would find is a group called Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone, which restored peace and stability to sub-Saharan Africa’s arguably second and third most troubled, unstable, chaotic societies. This is saying a lot. It ensured so much peace and stability that a democratic election process was actually established and carried out. It did pretty well for a few months until Executive Outcomes left and the whole country collapsed again.
What was Executive Outcomes? It was a corporate mercenary force put together by South African mining interests. It is the British East India Company all over again. The deal was that if they helped stabilize Sierra Leone, then the companies they represented were in a better position to exploit Sierra Leone’s rich diamond reserves and other minerals. I think that this perhaps is the point to which armies and militaries, etc., might be headed.
This goes together with what I call a newly emerging world government. You may be thinking: “World government? Is he crazy?” Something as big as a world government is not created overnight by postwar, triumphalist fiat, like the United Nations was created. It is something that can only emerge naturally and organically over time. I think the closest thing to a world government that is emerging is the increasingly intense concentration of world financial markets. That has an increasingly more powerful effect on the internal politics of more countries in the world than any other institution. In almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, the leaders of those places have one goal in mind, and one goal only if they are rational: to make their geographical space physically safe enough, stable enough, in other words attractive, so that corporate investors will come in, build factories, and employ the formerly unemployed male youth in their countries who, if they stay unemployed for too much longer or if they grow in number, will lead to political instability. This is because if you show me a country with a lot of young, unemployed males hanging out at street corners, I will show you a country that sooner or later will have political unrest and violence, and the best example of that in the world, of course, is Algeria. Before the start of the current troubles, which I think have led to sixty thousand deaths in some of the most brutal fashions, Algeria had several decades of not only the highest population growth rates in North Africa but the highest urbanization rates in North Africa.
So it is the job of Nelson Mandela and other people to ask: “How do I make my geographical space attractive enough so that all of these companies will want to build plants?” These big companies and financial institutions are basically determining the financial strategies, the economic plan (whatever you want to call it) of many countries in the world. They will have increasing power, not less power. As I mention in the “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” piece, fifty-one of the one hundred largest economies in the world are not countries but corporations. That percentage will grow, and grow, and grow more.
As for the United Nations, I think it is emerging into a glorified international relief agency and nothing more. When you look at what the United Nations does well, and it does a lot of things well, they all fall into the general rubric of development assistance or relief. Historically, the most successful, efficient United Nations agencies are UNICEF and UNDP, which are completely relief agencies. Whenever the United Nations has gone beyond relief into, for example, Iraq and weapons control and Saddam Hussein or the Korean War or Desert Storm, which were officially United Nations operations, it always had its policies being transparently driven by the United States of America or by this country and two or three other big Western powers. In other words, the United Nations, outside of relief agency work, only is successful when it is being deliberately used as an extension of United States/Western power. The United Nations, left to its own devices, has only worked as a relief agency, and, precisely for that reason, it is only powerful in places that are poor and have very little economic standing in the world.
We are entering an age in which democracy and technology will make the world more complex, more unstable. The world will be driven increasingly by corporations and financial markets. The United Nations will become increasingly marginalized. In that context, let me go through several items that I am scared about.
We are going through an era when armies will become smaller, more corporate, with more of an emphasis on intelligence-gathering and less of an emphasis on big tank brigades, big aircraft carriers, that sort of thing. “Well,” you might say, “that is a good side effect: we can reduce the size of the standing army. After all, we are cutting back military bases, all of this sort of thing; we can concentrate on other things.” However, one thing history shows is that when you reduce the size of the standing army, for whatever reason, you have more and more gang violence, more and more outlawry, more and more organized crime networks.
An Italian political scientist of the early twentieth century named Gaetano Mosca, in his book The Ruling Class, which in Italian is called The Elements of Political Science, has a long chapter on the relationship between reducing the size of the standing army and the growth of crime. This is how he explains it. Do you know what the real purposes of armies are, historically? To catalyze, institutionalize, control, and soften that element of society that, for one reason or another, likes action and violence. You control it; you make it work for you; you forge it into an institution. But when you do not allow those people in society to have that legitimate outlet for a tough life, for violence, whatever, they will find other ways. As for the idea that we would become more peaceful and humane if we reduced our standing army—which we probably will do, and not just because we are progressive but because the technology will make it necessary to do so—we will not necessarily become a more peaceful society. We will have other forms of violence.
The media frightens me terribly. I am a member of the media, and I look at other aspects of the media and, believe me, I am terrified. I see that the media power is becoming increasingly uncivil. Let me give you an example. It is almost as if the anchors, like Barbara Walters during Diana’s funeral, are becoming the brokers of the mob. That is, the mob is condensed in one human being. Whatever the emotions, the attitudes, the opinions of the mob are at that moment, it is expressed through the person of the anchor. The mob has no past, no future. It is totally driven by the present tense, by emotion, by the drama of the moment; it is not about thinking about tomorrow. We won’t remember what has happened next week, what the consequences may be three weeks ahead. Anchors, in their banality, in their gushing drive to capture everyone’s emotions at once, do not necessarily become rational people. They do not necessarily express the best sides of ourselves. Think of that: anchors as the voice of the mob. As I have said, the mob has no memory.
Think of how banal and insipid the major network coverage has become, taking twenty years ago to now. Think of some famous journalists, Diane Sawyer, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, who twenty years ago were doing very serious stories and were capable of doing very serious, intellectual stories. Think of what they are doing now. Think of the trajectory. Think about that trajectory continuing on for a few more decades, at an exponential rate.
Think also of the fact that where power lies is where evil can be applied. For instance, air power became big at the beginning of the twentieth century around World War I. Air power was a big tool in World War I, used for evil by bad people and also used for good by good people. Increasingly, media power, because it has the ability to influence publics in this time of real-time war, is becoming a tool of warfare. In other words, the degree to which one side in a war can influence the media or control the media is becoming increasingly important. The media in the future may have the same kind of war value as air power or tank power. When I put that together with the insipidization of the media, with a willingness of the media merely to express the mood of the mob at the moment, I can see and almost grasp scenarios where the media can turn into a form of evil.
Again, this goes together with a larger issue, which is that what I am really afraid about is not war, but peace. Peaceful times are superficial times. They are times when we are concerned with presentness, with the moment, when we are not thinking about the past and we are not thinking about the future, when we judge a Cabinet secretary not by how well he or she performs but by how well he or she performs at a press conference. The peaceful times never last. At least that is what is in the records of human history for the last three thousand to ten thousand years, and I do not expect it to change. I think that the evils that we will face will be evils of peace.
Let me digress. The Cold War was actually a very convenient situation because, unless you were in the Third World, it was not really a war. Nobody was really being killed, so it was fairly humane. On the other hand, it was enough of a war to build a kind of coherence and discipline in Western society. Societies were able to maintain the sense of the tragic, to have coherence, to have discipline, as if there were a war, yet there was not really a war, at least during most of that time. We had, in this sense, the best of both worlds. We did not have the savagery of World War II, but we did not have the sort of situation that we are drifting into now.
The evil will be increasingly subtle and hard to grasp. For example, information: everyone is screaming about how wonderful the information age is. Not enough people have thought about how the overload of information destroys institutions. Without institutions we cannot have a civil society. There are people in the room, I know, who have been in government before and may know how this works. Someone in a position of power in government ordinarily has eight to twelve or fourteen hours a day, only so much he or she can concentrate on. People in power in institutions, in intelligence agencies, in the State Department, need a wide berth for error because human beings are imperfect, and many policies, even under the most successful of times and under the greatest of presidents, are disasters, failures. D-Day was a success, but the parachute drop over Normandy was an absolute disaster. That is why generals and diplomats need a wide berth for error. But we are in an era that, because of the overload of information that is accessible to everyone and because of an increasingly aggressive media, gives institutions no berth for error, not even a narrow berth of error. Thus, there is less and less of an incentive to work in institutions and to make institutions work effectively. Therefore, I see just the absolute quantity of information having a ruinous effect on institutions and on other aspects of society.
What I want you to take away from this is the idea that some of the things we are most enthusiastic about—democracy, technology, information—are the very things that may lead to the things we fear the most. Joseph Conrad once wrote that the ways of human progress are inscrutable; they always occur ironically, always according to unintended consequences. I am not trying to be a pessimist here, but I am saying that the very things we rely on are the very things that will cause us trouble. Remember that Hitler and Mussolini both came to power through democracy, and, had the Prussian officers staged a coup d’état in 1931, the twentieth century would have been a far more peaceful era.
Don’t assume that the spread of our values, in places where our kinds of institutions are not in place and may never be in place, are going to make for a more stable and peaceful world.
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