Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium

6. Rising Entropy at the Macro Level: The World Is Not Flat in Purgatory

6 If the preceding description of the age of entropy were complete, there would be little reason for anxiety about the future. A world of perpetual peace—in which billions of citizens join the Great Power club and prestige can be enjoyed by all—sounds like a good place to live. The discussion to this point, however, focused only on the upbeat attributes of our entropic future. There is much about increasing entropy that will make the world a less than desirable place to live. The age of entropy promises not the hellish world of hegemonic war predicted by the Great Power Conflict scenario or the heavenly one promised by the Great Power Concert alternative but a bleak outlook akin to a permanent state of purgatory . It will be a world of banality and confusion, of anomie and alienation, of instability without a stabilizer, of devolving order without an orderer. Let us now consider these aspects of global entropy. Chaotic Alliance Patterns and Geographic Disorder In the age of entropy, international politics will become increasingly volatile and unpredictable. This turbulence will be strikingly evident in the realm of geopolitics , that is, in the relationship between politics and territory.1 Let me say at the outset that I am not suggesting that territory no longer matters in the modern world, nor am I advancing a “borderless world” argument or arguing that globalization means de-territorialization. Europe’s Schengen Area, which comRising Entropy at the Macro Level The World Is Not Flat in Purgatory Rising Entropy at the Macro Level 95 prises twenty-six countries that agreed to eliminate border controls with each other, does not represent the future of political organization across the globe. Geography remains an important driver of national interests and world events. To be sure, Russia’s obsession with security—its fixation on the control of territory—stems from the inherently exposed nature of its borders, the unremitting grassy steppes that extend from Europe to the Far East with scarcely a mountain range or major forest to hinder an enemy attack.2 Likewise, the successive rises to global hegemony of Britain and then the United States were in no small part due to their fortuitous geographic positions as insular states surrounded by large bodies of water, offering them both a degree of protection that afforded the luxury of idealism and direct access to the commerce of the rest of the world. China, in contrast, is hemmed in on all sides by powerful states (Russia, Japan, India, and the United States), making it doubtful that it will ever rise to the level of world hegemon. In a geographic sense, therefore, the world is certainly not “flat.” Resource scarcity, historical memory, cultural and ethnic divisions, and geopolitical rivalry will continue to shape international and domestic politics, causing conflict and limiting cooperation. Only the most optimistic of observers would suggest otherwise. Contrary to popular globaloney, the world is also far from “flat” and “borderless ” in terms of the depth and breadth of global connectedness. In late 2011, DHL released its first Global Connectedness Index, which measures connectedness according to countries’ participation in ten types of generally beneficial international flows: merchandise trade, services trade, foreign direct investment, portfolio equity investment, international telephone calls, international Internet traffic (as indicated by the proxy of bandwidth statistics), international trade in printed publications, international tourism, international education, and international migration. With respect to the depth of global connectedness—that is, the size of a country’s international flows as compared to a relevant measure of the size of its domestic economy—the measures above range from 2 percent to 30 percent, with most of them falling significantly below 20 percent. In terms of the breadth of connectedness at the global level, 60 percent of trade takes place within continents—56 percent within regions defined more narrowly (based on the World Bank’s classification system); foreign direct investment (FDI) is roughly as regionalized as trade; and nearly half of phone calls and immigration flows occur within continental regions. This underscores the point that even those countries that have achieved the world’s highest levels of global connectedness in relative terms have room to significantly increase their absolute levels 96 Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple of connectedness. The report concludes that the data on global levels of connectedness “clearly demonstrate that we live in a semiglobalized world...