THE GLOBALIZATION OF CULTURE
Progress in international communications that occurred during the Long War—beginning with the radio and culminating in the satellite-borne signals of global television—was decisive for that war. It may be unlikely that forces of the size that invaded Normandy, vastly larger than anything in the past, will ever be marshaled in an amphibious assault in the future, but it is also clear that only modern telecommunications could have made such an enterprise possible. The great naval campaigns of the Pacific were enabled by a communications network of staggering complexity, involving the coordination of distant fleets, air assaults, and landings combining all arms of the American forces. And, too, it is difficult to overestimate the role of Churchill's stirring addresses to the British public or Roosevelt's Fireside Chats in rallying public opinion, which is a crucial element in mobilizing the popular resources of the nation-state necessary to execute strategies of mass warfare and to withstand mass civilian suffering. The most critical role played by these technologies, however, came at the endgame of the Long War. It was the irrefutable comparison between life in the West and in the Soviet bloc, made possible by modern communications, that utterly demoralized the communist leaderships and so alienated their peoples.†
Nor did this communication go in one direction only. Dissident groups in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere were able constantly to expose the actions of the police states under which they labored. The Helsinki Accords gave dissidents an international standard of human rights against which to measure the acts of the Soviet bloc; modern communications made it possible to report these evaluations. An equally important line of communication was the limited travel to the West accorded citizens of the Warsaw Pact states. The bloc actually began to hemorrhage with a mass migration of German citizens through Hungary in 1989.
These two phenomena—immigration and human rights—that are connected to innovations in communication also pose two major challenges to the society of market-states. Immigration on a scale never hitherto seen in peacetime bears a relationship to the market-state different from that it bore to the nation-state. The nation-state could effectively seal its borders because it had the duty of protecting the ethnic nation for whose benefit it was constituted.20 The market-state is more ambivalent about such matters because it can so usefully employ the lower-cost labor of new immigrants to increase the productivity of the society. Moreover, in its multicultural form—like the United States—the market-state must deal with new immigrants who can call upon political groups to whom they are ethnically allied, as well as upon an American political consciousness that is wary of policies favoring exclusion.
It is global communication, both logistically and in images, that drives this immigration. As the market-states of the developed world increase their wealth, they become the target of immigration for peoples of the Third World whose demographic dynamics could quickly overwhelm the capacity of any state to assimilate them. Furthermore, the abandonment of the integrative function of the nation-state, which sought to transform immigrants into versions of the pre-existing national group of the country to which they had come, means that large, unassimilated ethnic groups are now without the resources of the State that would enable them to be assimilated. Maximizing the opportunities of its citizens means that the market-state must leave it to those citizens to determine what cultural attachments they wish to form. Even market-states that do not embrace the multicultural variation chosen by the United States may still face the reality of large knots of unassimilated immigrant communities within their midst, and thus face also the choice of according them full democratic privileges—and risking the loss of civil cohesion—or denying them the right of equal democratic status.
Thus again the ironic intertwining of immigration and human rights: the communications media that bring glamorous images of the developed states to those living in wretchedness also bring to those in comfort images of the suffering and cruelty visited on the less fortunate. Perhaps this latter development is really a benefit: the states of the developed world must welcome the opportunity to deploy their resources in ways that benefit the oppressed and the poor—this, after all, can justify our good fortune. But polities that are emotionally whipsawed by the most affecting shows of suffering are ill-equipped to devise long-term policies to help anyone. One month's poster child gives way to another. The Kurds had languished under oppressive and genocidal rule since the seventh century until CNN* brought attention to their plight in Iraq, but soon thereafter attention shifted to the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia.
Lacking the political focus that enables sustained attention to a problem, the publics of the developed states must soon grow disillusioned with humanitarian efforts altogether. Sooner or later there will be analysts who will explain that any help will create dependency, that aid, however well intentioned, actually makes things worse, and so on. In a world of suffering, the dimensions of which are necessarily beyond complete cure because they are essentially comparative, fed by international communications that so vividly and increasingly display the contrast between rich and poor, the society of market-states is ill-suited for helping. Each state is, after all, competing for the skills of learned castes who, unlike the individual bearers of capital under the nation-state, can take their knowledge with them (or withhold it). To become either the most welcoming refuge for the poorest or the chief ministering angel to the Third World is to consign one's state to a steadily degenerating competitive position vis-à-vis other market-states. We can expect moves among some members of the society of market-states to require others to take immigrants, provide aid, or change their human rights policies, thus breeding conflicts among states.
To simply ignore suffering and the denial of human rights in other states, however, is also destructive, depriving states of their moral basis. Of course it may be that the citizens of such states will wall themselves off psychologically, in much the way they can wall themselves off architecturally, from the unassimilated poor in their own countries. This renders the market-state an attractive target, however, to civil disorder as well as to international terrorism.
There are many other problems created for the State by the explosion in communications technology: the privacy interests of individuals and the protection of the family from offensive intrusion are examples. Immigration and human rights, however, are different because they do not admit of single-state solutions. Only coordinated action within the society of states can treat these particular problems effectively and with an attention to their interconnection. These problems bring unusual strains to market-states because they are called upon to devise cooperative solutions even though the salience of the market—which is indifferent to such concerns and hostile to the transaction costs such solutions impose—is especially high within such states.