The End of Power Read online

  The received wisdom that economic inequality is fated to endure and even get worse makes all of us, in a little way, Marxists. But what if the model of organization that Weber and his inheritors in economics and sociology found to be the most adapted to competition and management in modern life has become obsolete? What if power is dispersing, coming to dwell in new forms and through new mechanisms in a host of small and previously marginal players, while the power advantage of the big, established, and more bureaucratic incumbents decays? The rise of micropowers throws open such questions, for the first time. It holds out the prospect that power may have become remarkably unmoored from size and scale.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOW POWER LOST ITS EDGE

  The More, Mobility, and Mentality Revolutions

  JAVIER SOLANA, THE SPANISH FOREIGN MINISTER WHO IN THE MID- 1990s became secretary-general of NATO and then the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told me: “Over the last quarter-century—a period that included the Balkans and Iraq and negotiations with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian issues and numerous other crises—I saw how multiple new forces and factors constrained even the richest and most technologically advanced powers. They—and by that I mean we—could rarely do any longer what we wanted.”1

  Solana is correct. Insurgents, fringe political parties, innovative startups, hackers, loosely organized activists, upstart citizen media, leaderless young people in city squares, and charismatic individuals who seem to have “come from nowhere” are shaking up the old order. Not all are savory; but each is contributing to the decay of power of the navies and police forces, television networks, traditional political parties, and large banks.

  These are the micropowers: small, unknown, or once-negligible actors that have found ways to undermine, fence in, or thwart the megaplayers, the large bureaucratic organizations that previously controlled their fields. Going by past principles, micropowers should be aberrations. Because they lack scale, coordination, resources, or a preexisting reputation, they should not even be making it into the game—or at least, not making it for long before being squashed or absorbed by a dominant rival. But the reverse is true. Indeed, micropowers are denying established players many options that they used to take for granted. In some cases, the micropowers are even winning the contests against the megaplayers.

  Do the newly arrived micropowers achieve this by overrunning the competition and driving the big incumbents out of business? Rarely. They are not equipped for vast takeovers. Their advantage is precisely that they are not burdened by the size, scale, asset and resource portfolio, centralization, and hierarchy that the megaplayers have deployed and spent so much time and effort nurturing and managing. The more the micropowers take on these traits, the more they turn into the type of organization that other new micropowers will attack with just as much effectiveness. Instead, successful micropowers capitalize on a new set of advantages and techniques. They wear down, impede, undermine, sabotage, and outflank the megaplayers in ways that the latter, for all their vast resources, find themselves ill-equipped and ill-prepared to resist. And the effectiveness of these techniques to destabilize and displace entrenched behemoths means that power is becoming easier to disrupt and harder to consolidate. The implications are breathtaking. They signal the exhaustion of the Weberian bureaucracy, the system of organization that delivered the benefits and also the tragedies of the twentieth century. The decoupling of power from size, and thus the decoupling of the capacity to use power effectively from the control of a large Weberian bureaucracy, is changing the world. And this decoupling invites a disquieting thought: if the future of power lies in disruption and interference, not management and consolidation, can we expect ever to know stability again?

  SO WHAT HAS CHANGED?

  It’s hard to identify the moment when the dispersal and decay of power, and the decline of the Weberian bureaucratic ideal, began—much less to do so in the precise way with which, say, the poet Philip Larkin pinpointed the advent of the sexual revolution: “Between the end of the Chatterley ban” and the Beatles’ first album.2

  Still, November 9, 1989—the date the Berlin Wall fell—is not a bad place to start. Loosening half a continent from tyranny’s grip, unlocking borders, and opening new markets, the end of the Cold War and its animating ideological and existential struggle undermined the rationale for a vast national security state and the commitment of economic, political, and cultural resources that supported it. Whole populations forced to march more or less in lockstep were freed to find their own drummers, an upending of the existing order that found visceral expression in events such as the Christmas 1989 execution of the Ceausescus in Romania and the January 1990 storming of East Germany’s Stasi headquarters—the secret-service organization that represented one of the darker pinnacles of postwar bureaucratic achievement. Economies trapped in a mostly closed system were opened to foreign investment and trade championed by a burgeoning herd of multinational corporations. As General William Odom, Ronald Reagan’s National Security Agency director, observed: “By creating a security umbrella over Europe and Asia, Americans lowered the business transaction costs in all these regions: North America, Western Europe and Northeast Asia all got richer as a result.”3 Now those lower transaction costs could be extended, and with them also the promise of greater economic freedom.

  Slightly more than a year after thousands of Germans took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, in December 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border, sent the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol and a server via the Internet, thereby creating the World Wide Web. That invention, in turn, sparked a global communications revolution that has left no part of our lives untouched.

  The end of the Cold War and the birth of the Internet were certainly factors enabling the rise of today’s micropowers, but they were by no means the only important ones. We often find it hard to resist the urge to attribute a period of great flux to a single cause. Take, for instance, the role of text messaging and social media such as Facebook and Twitter in upheavals around the world. A fierce but ultimately sterile debate has occurred between those who argue that social media have sparked new political movements and those who argue that their effect has been overstated. As elements in the struggle for power, social media have helped coordinate demonstrations and inform the outside world about human rights abuses. But savvy repressive regimes like those of Iran and China have also used these tools for surveillance and repression. And when in doubt, a government can simply turn off national Internet access (at least in large measure, as Egypt and Syria did when their dictators were challenged) or establish an elaborate system of filters and controls that reduces the flow of nonapproved online communication (as China has done with its “Great Firewall”). There are plenty of cases and counter-cases that illustrate the arguments of Internet optimists and techno-futurists like Clay Shirky as well as the counter-arguments of skeptics like Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell. Thus, to understand why the barriers to power have become porous, we need to look at deeper transformations—to changes that began accumulating and accelerating even before the end of the Cold War or the spinning of the Web. The biggest challenges to power in our time have come from changes in the basics of life—in how we live, where we live, for how long and how well. What has changed is the landscape in which power operates.

  This is the terrain of demographics, standards of living, levels of health and education, patterns of migration, families, communities, and, ultimately, our attitudes: the reference points for our aspirations, beliefs, desires, and, indeed, the ways in which we think about ourselves and others. To describe such changes at this deep level and to understand what they are doing to power, we need to break them down into three categories: the More revolution, the Mobility revolution, and the Mentality revolution. The first is swamping the barriers to power; the second is circumventing them; the third is undercutting
them.

  THE MORE REVOLUTION: OVERWHELMING THE MEANS OF CONTROL

  Ours is an age of profusion. There is simply more of everything now. There are more people, countries, cities, political parties, armies; more goods and services, and more companies selling them; more weapons and more medicines; more students and more computers; more preachers and more criminals. The world’s economic output has increased fivefold since 1950. Income per capita is three and a half times greater than it was then. Most importantly, there are more people—2 billion more than there were just two decades ago. By 2050, the world’s population will be four times larger than it was in 1950. Comprehending the size of this population as well as its age structure, geographical distribution, longevity, health, and aspirations is critical for understanding what has happened to power.

  The More revolution is not limited to one quadrant of the globe or to one segment of humanity. It has progressed in the face of all the negative events that make the headlines each day: economic recession, terrorism, earthquakes, repression, civil wars, natural disasters, environmental threats. Without diminishing the urgency and human and planetary toll of these crises, we can assert that the first decade of the twenty-first century was arguably humanity’s most successful: as the analyst Charles Kenny put it, our “Best. Decade. Ever.”4 The data back up this claim. According to the World Bank, between 2005 and 2008, from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America and from Asia to Eastern Europe, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty (those with incomes under $1.25 day) plunged—the first time that has happened since statistics on global poverty became available. Given that the decade was marked by the onset of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929, this progress is even more surprising. Indeed, in the midst of the crisis, Robert Zoellick, the then-president of the World Bank, expressed serious concern about the financial crash’s impact on poverty: the experts, he said, had told him that the number of poor would increase substantially. Fortunately, they were wrong. In fact, the world is expected to reach the Millennium Development Goals on poverty set in 2000 by the United Nations much earlier than expected; one was to cut the world’s extreme poverty in half by 2015, a goal met five years earlier.

  The explanation is that despite the crisis, the economies of poorer countries continued to expand and create jobs. And it’s a trend that began three decades ago: 660 million Chinese have escaped poverty since 1981, for example. In Asia, the percentage of those living in extreme poverty dropped from 77 percent of the population in the 1980s to 14 percent in 1998. This is happening not only in China, India, Brazil, and other successful emerging markets but also in the poorest countries in Africa. The economists Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin have shown that between 1970 and 2006, poverty in Africa declined much faster than generally recognized. Their conclusion, based on a rigorous statistical analysis, is that in Africa “poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experienced reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade. In 1998, for the first time since data is available, there are more Africans living above the poverty line than below.”5

  Of course, billions of people still live in unspeakable conditions. And having an income of three or five dollars a day instead of the $1.25 that the World Bank cites as the extreme poverty line still means a life of struggle and deprivation. But it is also a fact that quality of life has increased even for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable “bottom billion.” Since 2000 child mortality has decreased by more than 17 percent, and child deaths from measles dropped by 60 percent between 1999 and 2005. In developing countries, the number of people in the “undernourished” category decreased from 34 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2008.

  The rapid economic growth of many poor countries and the consequent decline in poverty have also fueled the growth of a “global middle class.” The World Bank reckons that since 2006, twenty-eight formerly “low-income countries” have joined the ranks of what it calls “middle-income” ones. These new middle classes may not be as prosperous as their counterparts in developed countries, but their members now enjoy an unprecedented standard of living. And this is the world’s fastest-growing demographic category. As the Brookings Institution’s Homi Kharas, one of the most respected researchers on the new global middle class, told me: “The size of the global middle class has doubled from about 1 billion in 1980 to 2 billion in 2012. This segment of society is still growing very fast and could reach 3 billion by 2020. I estimate that by 2017 Asia’s middle class will be more numerous than that of North America and Europe combined. By 2021, on present trends, there could be more than 2 billion Asians in middle-class households. In China alone, there could be over 670 million middle-class consumers.”6

  And Kharas is quick to point out that this is happening not just in Asia: “Around the world, fast-growing, poor nations have been constantly adding numbers to their middle classes. I see nothing that indicates that this will not continue in the years ahead despite the occasional bump on the road that may slow down the growth of the middle class in some countries for a while. But globally, the trend is clear.”

  The world’s socioeconomic landscape has been drastically altered in the last three decades. The list of changes—indeed, of achievements—is as long as it is surprising: 84 percent of the world’s population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. University education is up, and even average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down—by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries most hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: since 2000, cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population. Even “rare earths”—the seventeen scarce elements used in the manufacture of cellphones and in fuel refining—are not so rare anymore, as new sources and producers enter the market. Perhaps one reason for all this progress is the rapid expansion of the professional community of scientists: in the countries covered by an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) survey, the number of working scientists grew from 4.3 million in 1999 to 6.3 million in 2009.7 And that tally does not include several countries with large and growing science communities, most notably India.

  Human beings are indeed enjoying longer and healthier lives. According to the United Nations Human Development Index, which combines health, education, and income indicators to give a global measure of well-being, standards of living have risen everywhere in the world since 1970. In fact, you can count on one hand the countries in which it was lower in 2010 than in 1970. And between 2000 and 2010 only one country in the world—Zimbabwe—saw its human development index go down. From poverty and child mortality to educational attainment and caloric intake, the key numbers at the end of 2012 were better than they were in 2000. Simply put, billions of people who until recently lived with almost nothing now have more food, more opportunities, and longer lives than ever before.

  My aim here is not to sound like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, who proclaimed that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Indeed, every one of the aforementioned advances points to glaring challenges and exceptions that often turn tragic. The progress of the poor countries stands in clear contrast to the recent situation in Europe and the United States, where a middle class that enjoyed decades of growth and prosperity has been losing economic ground and shrinking as a result of the financial crash. Nevertheless, the overall picture of humanity living
longer and healthier lives, with basic needs far better addressed than ever, is crucial to understanding today’s shifts and redistributions of power—and to putting into perspective more fashionable explanations of current events. Yes, the Arab Spring and other recent social movements have made often spectacular use of modern technologies. But they owe even more to the rapid rise in life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa since 1980; to the “youth bulge” made up of millions of people under thirty who are educated and healthy, with a long life span ahead of them, yet have no jobs or good prospects; and, of course, to the rise of a politically active middle class. It’s no coincidence that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, the North African country with the best economic performance and the most success in lifting its poor into the middle class. Indeed, an impatient, better-informed middle class that wants progress faster than the government can deliver, and whose intolerance for corruption has transformed it into a potent opposition, is the engine driving many of this decade’s political changes. By itself, the growth of population and incomes is not sufficient to transform the exercise of power: power may still concentrate in few hands. But the More revolution is not just about quantity; it is also about qualitative improvements in people’s lives. When people are better nourished, healthier, more educated, better informed, and more connected with others, many of the factors that locked power in place are no longer quite so effective.