Us vs them, p.1
Us vs. Them, page 1
ALSO BY IAN BREMMER
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The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall
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Soviet Nationalities Problems
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Portfolio/Penguin
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Ian Bremmer
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ISBN 9780525536451 (international edition)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bremmer, Ian, 1969- author.
Title: Us vs. them : the failure of globalism / Ian Bremmer.
Other titles: Us versus them
Description: New York, New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018002952| ISBN 9780525533184 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525533191 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Anti-globalization movement. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Nationalism.
Classification: LCC JZ1318 .B738 2018 | DDC 303.48/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002952
Version_1
For Elisa, who can’t read this yet
CONTENTS
ALSO BY IAN BREMMER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
WINNERS AND LOSERS
CHAPTER 2
WARNING SIGNS
CHAPTER 3
FAULT LINES
CHAPTER 4
WALLS
CHAPTER 5
NEW DEALS
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Why do Palestinians throw rocks? To attract attention? To improve their lives? To make progress toward creation of a Palestinian state? They throw rocks because they want others to see that they’ve had enough, that they can’t be ignored, and that they can break things. Voting isn’t helping them. Outsiders don’t care. Where are the opportunities to bring about change? There is nothing left but to throw rocks.
In that sense, there will soon be Palestinians all over the world. Workers everywhere fear lost jobs and wages as a shifting global economy and technological change leave them behind. Citizens fear surging waves of strangers who alter the face and voice of the country they know. They fear terrorists and criminals who kill for reasons no one can understand. They fear that government cannot or will not protect them. Gripped by anxiety, they get angry. To make themselves seen, heard, and felt, they start to throw rocks.
Then the call for help is answered. Donald Trump tells an excited overflow crowd that he sees them, that he sees their enemies, and that only he can take them (back) to the promised land. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders tell cheering fans that big corporations and Wall Street banks are robbing them blind. Champions of Brexit tell voters they must reclaim Britain’s borders and reject laws and rules imposed by Europeans. European populists tell followers they will lead the charge of patriots against foreigners and globalists.
These leaders aren’t arguing that government should be bigger or smaller, that it should tax less or spend more. They’re challenging the right of “elites” to make the rules that govern our lives. They tell citizens they’ve been cheated of their chance to succeed, and that the media is in on it. They promise to comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, and burn down the houses of power.
We can attack these populists, mock them, or dismiss them, but they know something important about the people they’re talking to, and they understand that many people believe that “globalism” and “globalization” have failed them. These would-be leaders have a talent for drawing boundaries between people. They offer a compelling vision of division, of “us vs. them,” of the worthy citizen fighting for his rights against the entitled or grasping thief. Depending on the country and the moment, “them” may mean rich people or poor people, foreigners or religious, racial, and ethnic minorities. It can mean supporters of a rival political party or people who live in a different part of the country. It can mean politicians, bankers, or reporters. However applied, it’s a tried-and-true political tool.
This book is not about the rocks or the damage they do on impact. Rocks are expressions of frustration. They don’t solve problems. Instead, we must look more closely at the deeper sources of these frustrations, at how governments around the world are likely to respond to them, and how political leaders, institutions, companies, schools, and citizens can work together to make things better.
* * *
—
There was no wealth where I grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, but from my childhood street you could see it in Boston’s green and gold skyline. I had no idea what went on inside those towers, but they had my attention. How do you get from here to there, I wondered? When my high school offered a program called “Teach a Kid How America Works,” I leaped at the chance to join. We junior achievers put on our coats and ties, headed downtown, up the crowded streets, past the men in suits, through the tall glass doors, up the quiet elevator before gliding to a silent stop, waiting, and stepping into the place where the executives worked. I think it was a bank. It had the deepest carpet I’d ever seen.
Then we were ushered in for an audience with Tim, a man who seemed genuinely glad to meet us. He had a strong handshake, and he looked at me like he was really looking at me. “Would you like to work here?” he asked the group. One of us said yes and the rest nodded in agreement. “Nobody’s stopping you, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you want to be successful, you just have to study hard and work hard. It’s totally up to you.” He believed it, so I did too.
He was right. From the projects, I earned a college scholarship and then a PhD, got an idea, launched a company, made money, got on TV, and wrote books. A kid born on the hard edge of a great American city, the child of a single mother (my dad died when I was four) who, with uncommon singleness of purpose, walked two boys past every trap and pushed us toward success. One small example of the American dream.
As a young adult, the American dream came wrapped in a package of “globalism,” a belief in universal interdependence and international exchange that seemed to provide paths to prosperity for both the poor boy I was and the successful man I hoped to become. Globalism seemed a generous choice; it’s the game everyone can win. Embrace capitalism, lower the walls, hire, build, and expand. People who’ve made it, or who believe they’ll get a fair shot, are drawn to globalism. I devoted my professional life to it. Why not? The system worked for me, and it has lifted hundreds of millions around the world from poverty. Why can’t it one day work for everyone?
It didn’t, and it hasn’t. An early counterexample came with the rioting at the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, where what began as a peaceful, well-organized, pro-labor protest became a magnet for anticorporate, antinuclear, anti-what-else-ya-got anarchist street theater, and then a running battle between kids dodging rubber bullets and cops dodging rocks. Globalists didn’t pay much attention. In retrospect, it was a warning sign.
In 2008, years of deregulation, bad bets, and bad faith brought down some of the world’s biggest banks, sending shock waves around the world. Next came the Occupy Wall Street movement, leaving bankers worried that the vagrants might get violent. The World Economic Forum at Davos that year was fascinating. No one knew how bad things would get for the global economy or what would happen next. But then came the bailouts for banks, which stabilized the markets. China’s leaders injected billions to keep China’s economic engine humming, the world’s elites went back to business, and Wall Street’s occupiers went home.
The Arab world’s aborted revolutions got our attention, and the refugee crises it triggered brought them closer to home, but it wasn’t until Britain voted to leave the European Union that the indictment of globalism became unavoidably obvious. Then Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States.
Today, the watchword is inequality. We have always known the world remained an unfair place, but most of the world’s elites believed, with plenty of evidence, that globalism was the solution, not the problem. But w hile the elites convene for debate, more people are getting frustrated.
Back in Chelsea, in my old neighborhood, people are angry. They no longer believe that hard work and education are enough. They don’t see a path, and they feel they’ve been lied to. For decades. My brother voted for Donald Trump, and if my mother were alive, I bet she would have too. She certainly wouldn’t have voted for anyone who has spent any time in Washington over the past thirty years. The anger is becoming more obvious—in Appalachia, in Gaza, in Latin America, in North Africa, and in Eastern Europe.
Are the globalists scared? Absolutely not. The United States and global economies surged in 2017 and 2018, and there is no looming global revolution, no World War III that will force change on us all. Public anger is a chronic condition we’ve learned to live with because the current system works so well for us. What was it Candidate Obama said? In times of trouble, people who have lost their livelihoods “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Globalists see enough truth in that statement that there’s no need to look more closely at those people’s lives. We don’t see trade and immigrants as they do, and we don’t feel we need to. That’s why this problem of broken promises won’t soon be solved. It’s going to get worse. And not just in the United States.
This book is about the consequences. When human beings feel threatened, we identify the danger and look for allies. We use the enemy, real or imagined, to rally friends to our side. This book is about ongoing political, economic, and technological changes around the world and the widening divisions they will create between the next waves of winners and losers. It’s about the ways in which people will define these threats as fights for survival that pit various versions of “us” against various forms of “them.” It’s about the walls governments will build to protect insiders from outsiders and the state from its people.
And it’s about what we can do about it.
CHAPTER 1
WINNERS AND LOSERS
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
—WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
“It’s time for a local revolution,” the candidate told the roaring crowd. “Countries are no longer nations but markets. Borders are erased. . . . Everyone can come to our country, and this has cut our salaries and our social protections. This dilutes our cultural identity.”1 Marine Le Pen’s four sentences capture every important element of the anxiety rising across the Western world. The borders are open, and the foreigners are coming. They will steal your job. They will cost you your pension and your health care by bankrupting your system. They will pollute your culture. Some of them are killers. Le Pen fell short in her bid to become France’s president in 2017, but her message remains compelling for the twenty-first-century politics of us vs. them.
But this is not a story about Marine Le Pen or Donald J. Trump or any of the other populist powerhouses who have emerged in Europe and the United States in recent years. Spin the camera toward the furious crowd—there’s the real story. It’s not the messenger that drives this movement. It’s the fears, often, if not always, justified, of ordinary people—fears of lost jobs, surging waves of strangers, vanishing national identities, and the incomprehensible public violence associated with terrorism. It’s the growing doubt among citizens that government can protect them, provide them with opportunities for a better life, and help them remain masters of their fate.
As of December 2015, just 6 percent of people in the United States, 4 percent in Germany, 4 percent in Britain, and 3 percent in France believe “the world is getting better.”2 The pessimistic majority suspects that those with power, money, and influence care more about their cosmopolitan world than they do about fellow citizens. Many citizens of these countries now believe that globalization works for the favored few but not for them.
They have a point.
Globalization—the cross-border flow of ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services—has resulted in an interconnected world where national leaders have increasingly limited ability to protect the lives and livelihoods of citizens. In the digital age, borders no longer mean what citizens think they mean. In some ways, they barely exist.
Globalism—the belief that the interdependence that created globalization is a good thing—is indeed the ideology of the elite. Political leaders of the wealthy West have been globalism’s biggest advocates, building a system that has propelled ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services across borders at a speed and on a scale without precedent in human history.
Sure, more than a billion people have risen from poverty in recent decades, and economies and markets have come a long way from the financial crisis. But along with new opportunities come serious vulnerabilities, and the refusal of the global elite to acknowledge the downsides of the new interdependence confirms the suspicions of those losing their sense of security and standard of living that elites in New York and Paris have more in common with elites in Rome and San Francisco than with their discarded countrymen in Tulsa, Turin, Tuscaloosa, and Toulon. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia,” former White House strategist Steve Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter a few days after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. “The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over.”3
In the United States, the jobs that once lifted generations of Americans into the middle class—and kept them there for life—are vanishing. Crime and drug addiction are rising. While 87 percent of Chinese and 74 percent of Indians told pollsters in 2017 that they believe their country is moving “in the right direction,” just 43 percent of Americans said the same.4
In Europe, the European Commission and the unelected bureaucrats who enforce its rules have legislated for its twenty-eight member nations without understanding their varied needs. In recent years, they’ve failed to halt a debt crisis that forced many Europeans to accept lower wages, higher prices, later retirement, less generous pensions, and an uncertain future, all while telling them they must bail out foreign countries that have spent their way into debt. In the migrant crisis, globalist European leaders insisted that all EU members must accept Muslim refugees in numbers determined in Brussels, and barricades and a spike in nationalism were the result (I define “nationalism” as one form of us vs. them intended to rally members of one nation against those of other nations).
Were the wave of populist nationalism sweeping the United States and Europe the only signs of globalism’s failure, it would be bad enough. But there’s a larger crisis coming. Many of the storms creating turmoil in the U.S. and Europe—particularly technological change in the workplace and broader awareness of income inequality—are now headed across borders and into the developing world, where governments and institutions aren’t ready. Developing countries are especially vulnerable, because the institutions that create stability in developing countries are not as sturdy, and social safety nets aren’t nearly as strong as in the United States and European Union. They face an even bigger gap between rich and poor, and the reality that new technologies will kill large numbers of the jobs that lifted expectations for a better life will be much harder to manage. In short, just as the financial crisis had a cascading effect through financial markets and real economies around the world, so the sources of anger convulsing Europe and America will send shock waves through dozens of other countries. Some will absorb these shocks. Some of them won’t. As poorer people in developing countries become more aware of what they’re missing or losing—quality housing, education, jobs, health care, and protection from crime—many will pick up rocks.
It is not rising China, a new Cold War, the future of Europe, or the risk of a global cyberconflict that will define our societies. It’s the efforts of the losers not to get “fucked over,” and the efforts of the winners to keep from losing power. Not just in the United States and Europe, but in the developing world too, there will be a confrontation within each society between winners and losers.
