Larry Diamond, Stanford University, June 15, 2008
Good afternoon, and to our graduating seniors, congratulations. You have fulfilled the requirements for a demanding major at one of the world’s greatest universities, and you have done amazing things along the way, both in the classroom and outside it. In the study and research you have done outside the U.S., you have helped to globalize Stanford University, and it is only by becoming a truly global university that Stanford can retain and enhance its leadership in this new century. Your families and friends—and not least, your professors—rightly feel immensely proud of you.
As International Relations majors, you have gained special insights into the rapidly changing shape of our world, as it grows smaller, faster, smarter, richer, and more densely connected. I want to ponder with you five big changes that are transforming this world—changes you will need to confront, and I hope re-shape.
First there is the phenomenon of what Thomas Friedman calls the “Flat World,” one in which state borders are receding and becoming more porous, as supply chains for services and manufacturing rapidly become globally integrated, and as the world economy becomes more fiercely competitive. This is a bracing world of dizzying technological innovation and diffusion and of increasing returns to knowledge and creativity. For the first time, we are seeing the emergence of a truly global economy and even of a global merit-based society. There is no more vivid exemplification and harbinger of the latter phenomenon than a leading international university that admits undergraduate students from anywhere in the world on a purely need-blind basis, and that is what Stanford has set as its goal.
But there are dark elements to the flat world. As competition becomes more global, it becomes more fluid and intense. As barriers to competition fall away, and as the returns to human capital intensify, more people fall at risk of economic and social insecurity, more people have to adapt, more rapidly, and with less state support, and inequality everywhere widens, often savagely. No society has figured out how to combine the competition and innovation that create vast new wealth with the needed mechanisms to help people retool, and to relieve the suffering and anxiety of the less fortunate. That task will fall to you.
Related to this is a second global trend that will both enable and test you. Technology is leaping forward at a breathtaking pace. In the space of your young lives, we have gone from a world where I did not have a computer on my desk to one where every serious professional needs information technology on her desk, in her briefcase, in her car, and in the palm of her hand. Who can know what this world of computing and communication will look like in ten years, not to mention 20 or 30? We will see awesome breakthroughs that change the way we communicate, move about, manufacture, treat disease, and promote health and well-being. During your lifetimes we will probably see average life expectancy rise above 90 years and large numbers of people living quality lives into their nineties.
But every exciting development has its threatening corollary (and vice versa). We will need to figure out how to harness technology for good, how to temper it so that the obsession to be connected all the time, faster and faster, does not destroy our capacity for spontaneity, joy, empathy, and reflection. As societies age, we have to find ways to keep them youthful, imaginative, and fair, balancing the quest for continuing economic productivity and artistic creativity with the special needs and rights of the elderly.
It is a good thing that the flat world has such vast capacity for technological innovation. We need it urgently to address the unparalleled global crisis of climate change. That is the third trend. You know it well, and you know that human activity, in the form of carbon emissions, is largely the cause. By some scientific assessments, average temperatures are rising faster than the most pessimistic projections of a decade ago. Some scientists privately believe that it may be too late to prevent catastrophic change that will play havoc with long-established patterns of agricultural production and human settlement. We are in a race against time to contain the problem and prevent the most cataclysmic and irreversible outcomes.
To address the crisis of climate change—diminish or preempt it to the extent we can, and prepare for it to the extent we must—we will need a level of international cooperation and mobilization unprecedented in human history, for this is the most serious challenge ever to confront human civilization. It will require everything we have: crash programs to invent, adapt, and manufacture alternative forms of energy; mobilizing our social and moral capacities for solidarity and sacrifice for future generations; reforming political systems and constructing new political coalitions to slash carbon emissions and speed clean energy technologies; and reinventing norms and institutions of global governance, to forge a truly shared response. None of you can avoid being profoundly affected by this crisis, and each of you can contribute something to its relief.
The fourth big change is that the United States will have less power to shape this world than at any time since World War II. The unipolar moment that dawned when the Cold War ended has now drawn to a close. As Fareed Zakaria writes in his new book, The Post-American World, states like China, India, and Brazil will matter much more, as economic, cultural, and geopolitical power becomes much more diffuse. No single country will be able to manage or lead the way the United States led the “free world”, the Soviet Union the socialist world, and then the U.S. the post-Cold War world. From terrorism and nuclear proliferation to global warming, rising food and energy prices, humanitarian emergencies, and the defense of human rights, we need new institutions to involve the rising powers of the world as responsible partners in addressing our great global challenges. And, we need to rethink how we can strengthen and encourage democratic institutions within national borders to forge fair and effective policy responses.
Of course, the United States must continue to play a global leadership role, while adapting gracefully and innovatively to a changed world that we can no longer dominate. We will need the active involvement of a new generation that has come of age in a multipolar, multicultural, fast and flexible world: In other words, you. Those of you who have come to study here from another country have a special role to play. You have come to know some of the best of the U.S.—including its best university, its best weather, and some of its best people. You have seen our strengths, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, but I hope as well our generosity of spirit and our great possibilities for global collaboration. I hope you will help provide a bridge of understanding that calls forth our better instincts while tempering the shallow reflexes of anti-Americanism.
Finally, you are entering a world that is still all too traditional in many ways. No period of rapid growth, integration, and innovation has yet managed to eliminate the baser instincts of humanity, toward group pride, fear, envy, and prejudice. Even in this flat world of eroding borders, people still look to their own group, be it the nation, the religious community, or the ethnic clan, for comfort and support in times of peril and uncertainty. Competition breeds anxiety, and heightened competition is bound to heighten anxiety. In a world of nations, that anxiety still is vented in part as nationalism. Mix anxious, bruised or disrespected nationalism with environmental stress, social disruption, economic rivalry, and rapid technological change, and you get a very dangerous brew indeed.
Technologies are value-neutral. The flat world can radically enhance efficiency and connect people worldwide to chat online, exchange goods, or produce and share knowledge instantly. But it can also enable terrorists to organize, and, to quote Tom Friedman again, it can “superempower” them. The flat world that turns the I-Pod into an I-Phone and then I-can-hardly-imagine-what-next can also turn a suicide bomber into a suicide mass bomber. It can give those who are left behind or radically alienated the means, the method, and the networks to level a major world capital with a nuclear bomb.
I am an optimist. The world you are entering could be the most exciting, empowering, and gratifying of any era in human existence, offering the greatest portion of humanity the best quality of life ever. But it will try our capacities for cooperation and problem-solving like few in world history. I would like to urge you to take the time you need to experiment, travel, relax, reflect, see the world, and find your soul. And in the near future, well… at least in the next few months, I hope you will do that.
But on a number of fronts, the flat world is racing toward a rendezvous with destiny, and we really need you on the front lines as soon as you can get there.
Thank you and good luck.
Submitted by Larry Diamond on June 15, 2008 - 4:06pm