The End of Power (12 page)

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.

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.”
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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.

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.”
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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.”
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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.)
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 countries 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.
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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.
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Every year, an estimated 320 million people fly to attend professional meetings, conventions, and international gatherings—and their numbers are steadily growing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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