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HOME THE BOOK Praise for Excerpts About the publisher About the editor Buy the book THE AUTHOR REVIEWS CALENDAR |
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Stability, Openness, and Chaos There is a counterintuitive relationship between a nation’s stability and its openness, both to the influences of the outside world and within its borders. Certain states—North Korea, Burma, Belarus, Zimbabwe—are stable precisely because they are closed. The slightest influence on their citizens from the outside could push the most rigid of these states toward dangerous instability. If half the people of North Korea saw 20 minutes of CNN (or of al Jazeera for that matter), they would realize how egregiously their government lies to them about life beyond the walls. That realization would provoke widespread social upheaval. The slightest improvement in the ability of a country’s citizens to communicate with one another—the introduction of telephones, email, or text-messaging into an authoritarian state—can likewise undermine the state’s monopoly on information. Other states—the United States, Japan, Sweden—are stable because they are invigorated by the forces of globalization. These states are able to withstand political conflict, because their citizens—and international investors—know that political and social problems within them will be peacefully resolved by institutions that are independent of one another and that the electorate will broadly accept the resolution as legitimate. The institutions, not the personalities, matter in such a state. Yet, for a country that is “stable because it is closed” to become a country that is “stable because it is open,” it must go through a transitional period of dangerous instability. Some states, like South Africa, survive that journey. Others, like Yugoslavia, collapse. It is more important than ever to recognize the dangers implicit in these processes. In a world of lightning-fast capital flight, social unrest, weapons of mass destruction, and transnational terrorism, these transformations are everybody’s business. |
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