 - Last login: 6 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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United States - International Diplomacy - Economic Trends - World Economy - Politics - New York Times
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Jan 27, 4:19pm
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•http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/mag...
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Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
in the NYT Magazine by PARAG KHANNA
The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an "East-West" struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
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The Big Three are the ultimate "Frenemies". Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell's 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China.
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The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity - pro or anti. As Europe's and China's spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America's spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become "responsible stakeholders", in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.
 Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
What PARAG KHANNA illustrates is one moment (nowadays) within a process of economic globalization that rebounded as a consequence of:
1. China's entry into modernity after the end of the cultural revolution that unleashed its opening up and its economic reform package (privatization of agricultural activities in the eighties, industrial realignment in the nineties and conquest of foreign markets after 2000).
2. Europe's slow entry into postmodernity as a rejection of the barbarity that the second world war inflicted on European nations. The process of unification that started in the fifties between Germany and France (coal and steel) dragged slowly into an institutional centralization of an increasing number of political competencies while an increasing number of nations were absorbed in what developed into the EU. The next steps will transform the EU from a bureaucracy of technicians into a permanently growing supranational institution based on the principle of negotiation between its constituent parties.
We are indeed at a juncture of human history when modernity is:
1. absorbing the whole world into its worldview (logic of capital, rationalism, industry, science and technology). The completion of modernity signals that we are in its late stages...
2. the European experiment at unifying nation states signals the early stages of, what follows modernity, a postmodern area for which we still don't have a word.
The sheer size and speed of the changes happening at this juncture between modernity and postmodernity dwarfs anything humanity has experienced at any other time.
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