The End of Power Read online

  The key is this: When people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control.

  The exercise of power in any realm involves, fundamentally, the ability to impose and retain control over a country, a marketplace, a constituency, a population of adherents, a network of trade routes, and so on. When the people in that territory—whether potential soldiers, voters, customers, workers, competitors, or believers—are more numerous and in fuller possession of their means and functioning at ever-greater levels of ability, they become more difficult to coordinate and control. The former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, reflecting on the drastic changes in the world order since he entered public life, put it bluntly: “It is infinitely easier today to kill a million people than to control them.”8

  For those in power, the More revolution produces thorny dilemmas: How to coerce effectively when the use of force gets more costly and risky? How to assert authority when people’s lives are fuller and they feel less dependent and vulnerable? How to influence people and reward them for their loyalty in a universe where they have more choices? The task of governing, organizing, mobilizing, influencing, persuading, disciplining, or repressing a large number of people with generally good standards of living requires different methods than those that worked for a smaller and less developed community.

  THE MOBILITY REVOLUTION: THE END OF CAPTIVE AUDIENCES

  Not only are there more people today, more of whom live fuller and healthier lives: they also move around a lot more. That makes them harder to control. It also changes the distribution of power within and among populations, whether through the rise of ethnic, religious, and professional diasporas or as individual vectors of ideas, capital, and faiths that can be either destabilizing or empowering. The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants across the globe, an increase of 37 percent in the last two decades. In that same period, the number of migrants grew by 41 percent in Europe and by 80 percent in North America. We are experiencing a Mobility revolution, in which more people are moving than at any other time in world history.

  Consider, for example, the effect that accelerated global mobility has had on the US labor movement. In 2005, a half-dozen unions defected from the AFL-CIO to form a competitor federation called Change to Win. The breakaway unions included the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the garment industry union UniteHere; both count among their ranks a higher proportion of low-wage immigrant workers, whose interests and priorities are different from those in the old-line manufacturing and industrial unions like the Teamsters. The impact of the split spilled over into national politics. As Jason DeParle, a reporter at the New York Times, put it: “Change to Win unions played an important (some have argued decisive) role in the early stages of Mr. Obama’s first presidential campaign.”9 And in his bid for reelection in 2012, Hispanic voters proved determinant. In this unexpected way, international mobility helped to shape political outcomes in the United States—as it is doing everywhere.

  Under the terms of the 2009 Sudanese Referendum Act passed by Sudan’s legislature, voters from the Sudanese diaspora, including the 150,000 or so in the United States, were empowered to vote in the 2011 referendum concerning South Sudan’s decision to become an independent nation. Some members of Colombia’s senate are elected by Colombians living abroad. Political candidates for state governor or president from countries with large emigrant populations—for example, for state governorships in Mexico or for president of Senegal—often travel to Chicago or New York or London, or wherever their compatriots have put down roots, to raise votes and money.

  By the same token, immigrants are changing the businesses, religions, and cultures of the countries they settle in. In the United States, the Hispanic population grew from 22 million in 1990 to 51 million in 2011, such that now one of every six Americans is Hispanic; they accounted for more than half of the growth in US population in the past decade. And in Dearborn, Michigan, the world headquarters for the Ford Motor Company, 40 percent of the population is Arab-American; its Muslim members have built the largest mosque in North America. Such enclaves are bound to transform coalitions and voting patterns as well as business strategies and even the competition for members of churches. Political parties, politicians, businesses, and other institutions increasingly face competitors that have deeper roots and a better understanding of this new population. The same is happening in Europe, as governments have proven unable to stem the tide of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and indeed other, less wealthy European countries. An interesting case in point: in 2007, a Nigerian-born man was elected in Portlaoise, Ireland, a commuter town west of Dublin, as that country’s first black mayor.

  Even efforts to restrict this new mobility can have powerful unexpected consequences. Jorge G. Castañeda, a former Mexican secretary of foreign affairs, and Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton sociologist, explain that in response to the harsher treatment and unwelcoming environment for immigrants in some American states, “many Mexican permanent residents made an unexpected choice: Rather than leave the United States because they felt unwelcome, they became citizens—a practice known as ‘defensive naturalization.’ In the decade before 1996, an average of 29,000 Mexicans were naturalized each year; since 1996, the average has been 125,000 per year, yielding two million new citizens who could then bring in close relatives. At present, nearly two-thirds of legal permanent residents from Mexico enter as relatives of U.S. citizens.”10 These new citizens are, of course, also voters—a fact that is reshaping the election landscape.

  Immigrants also send billions of dollars in remittances to their home countries, promoting economic growth and development. Worldwide, they wired, mailed, or carried home $449 billion in 2010. (In 1980 remittances totaled just 37 billion.)11 Nowadays, remittances are more than five times larger than the world’s total foreign aid and larger than the annual total flow of foreign investment to poor countries. In short, workers who live outside their home country—and who are often very poor themselves—send more money to their country than foreign investors, and more than rich countries send as financial aid.12 Indeed, for many countries, remittances have become the biggest source of hard currency and, in effect, the largest sector of the economy, thereby transforming traditional economic and social structures as well as the business landscape.

  PERHAPS THE MOST AGGRESSIVELY POWER-TRANSFORMING ASPECT OF the Mobility revolution is urbanization. What was already the fastest process of urbanization in history is accelerating, especially in Asia. More people have moved, and continue to move, from farms to cities than ever before. In 2007, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. Richard Dobbs describes the immense scale of this transformation as follows: “The megacity will be home to China’s and India’s growing middle classes—creating consumer markets larger than today’s Japan and Spain, respectively.”13 The US National Intelligence Council reckons that “every year 65 million people are added to the world’s urban population, equivalent to adding seven cities the size of Chicago or five the size of London annually.”14 The consequences of this revolution for the distribution of power are just as intense internally; indeed, an increasing number of people are spending and investing in two (or more) countries at the same time. Internal migration—especially population shifts from farms to cities—can be as disruptive to power as is international migration.

  Though less broad-based than urbanization, a newer form of mobility is also reshaping the landscape of power: brain circulation. Poor nations tend to lose many of their skilled and better-educated citizens to richer countries, which attract them with the expectation of a better life. This well-known “brain drain” deprives nations of nurses, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who have been expensive to train—departures that obviously lessen the countries’ endowment of human capital. In recent years, however, increasingly more of these professionals have been returning to their count
ries of origin and upending business as usual in industries, universities, the media, and politics. AnnaLee Saxenian, the dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that Taiwanese, Indian, Israeli, and Chinese immigrants who worked in California’s Silicon Valley often became “angel investors” and “venture capitalists” in their old countries, starting up companies and eventually either moving back or traveling often between their old and new countries (that is why Saxenian calls it brain circulation). In so doing, they transfer the culture, approaches, and techniques they learned in the United States. Inevitably, in the case of the entrepreneurs, the dynamic, competitive, and disruptive business culture common in entrepreneurial hubs clashes with the monopolistic and traditional ways of doing business often found in developing countries with dominant, family-controlled business conglomerates. This is another example of the surprising ways in which the Mobility revolution is altering the acquisition and exertion of power in traditional but fast-changing societies.15

  This movement of temporary and permanent migrants is occurring in the context of a vast increase in the movement of goods, services, money, information, and ideas. Short-term travel has quadrupled: in 1980, the number of international tourist arrivals accounted for just 3.5 percent of the world’s population, compared to almost 14 percent in 2010.16 Every year, an estimated 320 million people fly to attend professional meetings, conventions, and international gatherings—and their numbers are steadily growing.17

  The trade in goods was barely slowed by the recession that started in 2008. In 1990, the world’s total exports and imports amounted to 39 percent of the global economy; by 2010, they had risen to 56 percent. And between 2000 and 2009, the total value of merchandise traded across borders nearly doubled, from $6.5 trillion to $12.5 trillion (in current dollars), according to the United Nations; total exports of goods and services in that period jumped from $7.9 trillion to $18.7 trillion, according to the IMF.

  Money has also become unprecedentedly mobile. The stock of foreign direct investment measured as a percentage of the world’s economy jumped from 6.5 percent in 1980 to a whopping 30 percent in 2010, while the volume of currency that moved internationally every day grew sevenfold between 1995 and 2010. In the latter year, more than $4 trillion changed hands across international borders daily.18

  The ability to move information around has vastly expanded as well. How many people do you know who don’t own a cellphone? Very few. This answer holds true even in the poorest and most dysfunctional nations. “Somali Mobile Phone Firms Thrive Despite Chaos” was the headline of a 2009 Reuters dispatch from that ravaged country.19 Somalia epitomizes the concept of “failed states,” societies in which citizens lack access to basic services that most of us take for granted. Yet, even there, twenty-first-century mobile telephony is widely available. The expansion of mobile telephony is as surprising for its speed as for its novelty. In 1990, the number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people worldwide was 0.2. By 2010 it had exploded to more than 78 subscribers for every 100 persons.20 The International Telecommunications Union reports that in 2012 subscriptions to mobile telephony exceeded the 6 billion mark—equivalent to an astonishing 87 percent of the world’s population.21

  And then, of course, there is the Internet. Its expansion and the surprising new ways in which it is used (and abused) don’t need much elaboration. In 1990, the number of Internet users was insignificant—a mere 0.1 percent of the worlds’ population. That number rose to 30 percent of the population worldwide in 2010 (and to more than 73 percent in developed countries).22 By 2012, eight-year-old Facebook was on its way to having more than 1 billion users (with more than half of them accessing it via their mobile phones and tablets), Twitter (launched in 2006) had 140 million active users, and Skype—the voice-over-Internet service created in 2003—boasted almost 700 million regular users.23

  The Twitter and Facebook revolutions in the Middle East and the impact of social media on politics are much discussed, and we examine their role in the decay of power. But in terms of this initial discussion of the Mobility revolution, we should also consider the impact of another tool that does not get the credit it deserves for changing the world: the prepaid phone card. Web users need electricity, a computer, and an Internet service provider, things that most of us take for granted but that are too expensive for most of the world’s population. Calling-card users need only a few cents and a pay phone to connect with the rest of the world regardless of how isolated or remote their own location. The growth of calling-card usage and global reach leaves the Internet’s growth in the dust. Prepaid phone cards were invented in Italy in 1976 as a response to the shortage of metal coins and to curb pay phone theft and vandalism. The new product took off and in 1977 was also launched in Austria, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and, five years later, in Japan (also prompted by a coin shortage). But truly explosive growth took place once prepaid calling cards became popular among the poor of the world. Driven by gains in the poorer countries, industry revenues skyrocketed from $25 million in 1993 to more than $3 billion in 2000.24 Now prepaid calling cards are giving way to prepaid mobile phones. In fact, prepaid cellphones have displaced those that require a long-term subscription and bound the user to a service provider through an elaborate contract.25 The less-well-off who choose to leave home for better, or merely some, work far away no longer face as stark a choice between staying close to their families and communities and improving their fortunes.

  Two characteristics shared by all of these mobility-enhancing technologies are the speed and extent of the drop in costs of moving goods, money, people, and information. Airline tickets that used to cost thousands of dollars can now be had at a fraction of their prices twenty or thirty years ago, and the cost per mile of transporting a ton of cargo today is ten times lower than in the 1950s. Wiring money from California to Mexico in the late 1990s cost about 15 percent of the sum being transferred; today it is less than 6 percent. Mobile-phone platforms through which money can be transferred from one cellphone to another will make remittances almost cost-free.

  And what exactly do all these revolutionary changes in mobility and communication mean for power? The Mobility revolution has a profound effect that can be just as intuitively grasped as that of the More revolution. Exercising power means not only maintaining control and coordination over a real or figurative territory but also policing its borders. That is true for a nation-state, but also for a corporation that dominates a given market, a political party that depends on a geographically bound constituency, or a father who wants to keep his children within reach. Power needs a captive audience. In situations where citizens, voters, investors, workers, parishioners, or customers have few or no alternative outlets, they have little choice but to consent to the terms of the institutions they face. But when borders become porous and the governed—or controlled—population more mobile, entrenched organizations have a harder time retaining their dominance. The most radical example is migration, whereby people simply remove themselves from one distribution of power to another, thus putting themselves in a position they believe will give them better options.

  Inevitably, the ease of travel and transportation and the faster, less costly ways of moving information, money, or values make life easier for challengers and harder for incumbents.

  THE MENTALITY REVOLUTION: TAKING NOTHING FOR GRANTED ANYMORE

  In the late 1960s, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington famously argued that a fundamental cause of social and political instability in developing countries—which he preferred to call “rapidly changing societies”—was that people’s expectations expanded much faster than the capacity of any government to satisfy them.26 The More and Mobility revolutions have created a new, vast, and fast-growing middle class whose members are well aware that others have even more prosperity, freedom, or personal fulfillment than they do—and who hope and expect to catch up. This “expectations revolution” and the disconne
ct it breeds are now global. They affect both rich and poor countries alike; indeed, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population lives in what could now be called “rapidly changing societies.” The difference, of course, is that whereas in developing countries the middles class is expanding, in most wealthy countries it is shrinking. And both growing and shrinking middle classes fuel political turmoil. The embattled middle classes take to the streets and fight to protect their living standards while the expanding middle classes protest to get more and better goods and services. In Chile, for example, students have been rioting almost routinely since 2009, demanding cheaper and better university education. It doesn’t matter that a few decades ago access to higher education was a privilege reserved for a tiny elite and that universities are now flooded with the sons and daughters of the new middle class. For the students and their parents, access to higher education is no longer enough. They want better and cheaper education. And they want it now. The same is happening in China, where protests over the poor quality of new apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools are now common. Here, too, the argument that a few years ago those apartments, hospitals, and schools didn’t even exist does not placate the ire of those who want improvements in the quality of the medical and educational services being offered. This is a new mindset—a change in mentality—that has profound consequences for power.

  A profound change in expectations and standards has come about, and not just in liberal societies but even in the most hidebound ones. Most people look at the world, their neighbors, employers, clergy, politicians and governments with different eyes than their parents did. To some degree, that has always been the case. But the effect of the More and Mobility revolutions has been to vastly broaden the cognitive, even emotional impact of more access to resources and the ability to move, learn, connect, and communicate more broadly and inexpensively than ever before. Inevitably, this sharpens the intergenerational gaps in mentality—and in worldview.