Is Toynbee Relevant for the Twenty-First Century?

books:


	• The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order Parag Khanna Random House, 2008 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Tried & true maybe?

I watched an interview with the author of this book on PBS with Charlie Rose. He was knowledgeable and interesting so I bought the book. Most of what he writes about is still in the proving stage, time will tell how correct he is.

Is Toynbee Relevant for the Twenty-First Century?

Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler are no longer part of any academic curriculum, and for good reasons: they were racists and imperialists, and the worldviews that they inspired were at the origin of some of the past century's worst catastrophes. Professional historians consider their work as metaphysical speculation dressed up as history, and the huge popularity that they attracted in their lifetime is now perceived more as a symptom of the early twentieth century's zeitgeist than as a contribution to the accumulation of knowledge. Today their volumes accumulate dust in public libraries, and nobody would claim their authority to describe a world that stands almost nothing in common with the age of empires that they chronicled.

It is therefore astonishing that a young author would pack his suitcase with Toynbee's East to West and Spengler's Decline of the West while embarking on a travel to more than a hundred countries. It is even more surprising to discover that Parag Khanna is also familiar with the modern literature in international relations, which he quotes abundantly in erudite endnotes and in a bibliography that includes every work of significance published in the past ten years. What made him look at the world through such antiquated lenses, and what insights did he get from the patronage of such outdated authors?

The first reason for referring to those authors is that Parag Khanna sees the dawn of our new millenium as an age of empires, with the United States, the EU, and China as the three dominant superpowers dominating the geopolitical landscape. Like their predecessors, modern empires are subject to the laws of evolution that leads them through a cycle of rise, flowering, and decline. To the deterministic view of Oswald Spengler, who viewed the rise and fall of world civilizations as a natural phenomenon obeying historical laws, Khanna prefers the challenge-and-response framework of Arnold Toynbee, who granted more space to human agency. But he shares the pessimism of the author of The Decline of the West when he assesses the present condition and the future prospects of the American empire.

The second reason for invoking such patronage is that Khanna wants to give a new lease of life to an old body of knowledge, geopolitics, which he defines as "a discipline that looks backward explicitly for the purpose of looking forward", or alternatively as the art of "winning allies and influencing countries". Although he is well-versed in modern international relations theory, he raises questions and addresses problems that contemporary scholars have long discarded as irrelevant or obsolete. Should the center of gravity of global power be located in the Eurasian heartland, as Sir Halford Mackinder proposed, or around the rimland of the Eurasian coastal region, as argued by Nicholas Spykman, or should one consider with Alfred Thayer Mahan that "the empire of the sea is doubtless the empire of the world"? Do empires expand along an horizontal axis, as seemed to be the norm with the British empire on which the sun never set, or along a North-South vector, as the case of the three modern empires vying for supremacy seems to indicate? Viewed from such global perspective, history runs the risk of losing contact with facts and become mere speculation.

There is however an advantage in choosing a distant benchmark to assess the changes and mutations that the new international system has experienced. Imagine someone who forgot to check on the past quarter century or even the last ten years, and who suddenly discovers a world that offers little resemblance to the one he has left. Such a careless observer will be struck by four factors that he could not have anticipated based on past observations: the rise of China, the affirmation of the European Union as a global actor, the emergence of countries which stood at the periphery, and the corresponding decline of countries which formerly stood at the top. Each of these major trends is tracked across the five continents and form the common thread of a narrative that I found easy to read, but also easy to forget.

for more information click here

A stellar view of the future

"The Second World" is a beautifully written view into the future of world politics and economics. It provides a comprehensive overview of cultural dynamics with very focused analysis of regional and evolving national characters. The author's vocabulary is stunning. Have a dictionary nearby.

The Geopolitical Marketplace

Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation draws his inspiration from Arnold Toynbee's 12-volume history of the world. Toynbee wrote his books first, and then embarked on a trip around the world to check the acurracy of his work. Khanna, however, did it the other way around: he spent two years travelling to forty countries, talking to people and getting a first-hand look at the facts on the ground, then writing this book. The result makes this volume a very pleasurable read, mixing policy recommendations, historical analysis, and traveller's eye for local color.

Khanna argues that there will be three superpowers in the 21st century - China, the European Union, and the United States. He sometimes calls them empires as in the subtitle of the book, but that term is confusing since the Big Three will not resemble the empires of old. These superpowers will have their own unique approach for extending their power and influence. The main objectives of the Big Three are essentially the same: they want to be in the good graces of energy- and resource-rich second-tier countries such as those of the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Khanna calls this the second world. And as more and more countries become nuclear, military muscle becomes less of a tool. The superpowers are developing non-military means to win allies and influence. According to Khanna, winning in the 21st century will not take place in the battlefield but in the geopolitical marketplace.

Of the three, Khanna finds the European model the most attractive. The European practice of offering the prospect of membership in the world's richest market is a very powerful incentive for countries to reform themselves and comply with EU standards. Europe has successfully assimilated many countries on its periphery. Khanna, however, glosses over Europe's problems, such as an ageing population and unassimilated minorities.

Khanna also speaks glowingly of the rising influence of China. By the shear thrust of their economic growth, China has been able to buy friends and influence in the second world. And with their indifference to human rights, they acquire some very unsavory friends. This practice however, is now backfiring as people everywhere are rallying for Tibetans as the Olympics approach. Khanna's praise for "Asian values" amounts to accepting enlightened despotism.

The most scorn, however, is reserved for the United States. With the war in Iraq in its fifth year, America is starting to look like an overstretched empire and an object of global resentment. He excoriates America for neglecting its poor as well as its physical and financial health. This may hold some truth at the present, but Khanna has forgotten that America is resilient and has a great capacity to renew itself.

Critics of Khanna, however, should not write him off as anti-American or a pessimist. At the end of the book, he has a long list of recommendations for transforming the military-industrial complex into a diplomatic-industrial complex. He would like to see the resources that we now invest in the Pentagon go to the State Department. A new muscular foreign service is needed to further American interests and make globalization work for us. If this book sounds like it's written by an international relations graduate student, that's because it is.

for more information click here

Naive, Short-sighted and amateurish

Khanna -- all of 30 years old worth of wisdom -- has a view that the United States, the current hegemon, is destined to become a regional power that would best focus its efforts on Central and Latin America. The USA is essentially destined to become a second world, Latin American country, per this book.

The problem with the thesis is that it vastly understates the importance of military power -- not relevant for Europe any longer, but pretty relevant for everywhere else still as James Sheehan points out in his recent and wonderful "Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?" -- while vastly overstating the relative influence of China, the EU and the US. These are three very different animals, each of which expresses power uniquely. The U.S. will no more be confined to a Latin American sphere of influence than China will expand its military influence into Europe.

The book is wildly pessimistic about American power and its proper exercise. This is an exercise in anti-American wish thinking from someone who would like to see American power constrained. Read this with a rather large grain of salt.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Grand explanations of how to understand the complex twenty-first-century world have all fallen short?until now. In The Second World, the brilliant young scholar Parag Khanna takes readers on a thrilling global tour, one that shows how America?s dominant moment has been suddenly replaced by a geopolitical marketplace wherein the European Union and China compete with the United States to shape world order on their own terms.

This contest is hottest and most decisive in the Second World: pivotal regions in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia. Khanna explores the evolution of geopolitics through the recent histories of such underreported, fascinating, and complicated countries as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Libya, Vietnam, and Malaysia?nations whose resources will ultimately determine the fate of the three superpowers, but whose futures are perennially uncertain as they struggle to rise into the first world or avoid falling into the third.

Informed, witty, and armed with a traveler?s intuition for blending into diverse cultures, Khanna mixes copious research with deep reportage to remake the map of the world. He depicts second-world societies from the inside out, observing how globalization divides them into winners and losers along political, economic, and cultural lines?and shows how China, Europe, and America use their unique imperial gravities to pull the second-world countries into their orbits. Along the way, Khanna also explains how Arabism and Islamism compete for the Arab soul, reveals how Iran and Saudi Arabia play the superpowers against one another, unmasks Singapore?s inspirational role in East Asia, and psychoanalyzes the second-world leaders whose decisions are reshaping the balance of power. He captures the most elusive formula in international affairs: how to think like a country.

In the twenty-first century, globalization is the main battlefield of geopolitics, and America itself runs the risk of descending into the second world if it does not renew itself and redefine its role in the world.

Comparable in scope and boldness to Francis Fukuyama?s The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel P. Huntington?s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Parag Khanna?s The Second World will be the definitive guide to world politics for years to come.

?A savvy, streetwise primer on dozens of individual countries that adds up to a coherent theory of global politics.?
?Robert D. Kaplan, author of Eastward to Tartary and Warrior Politics

?A panoramic overview that boldly addresses the dilemmas of the world that our next president will confront.?
?Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor

"Parag Khanna's fascinating book takes us on an epic journey around the multipolar world, elegantly combining historical analysis, political theory, and eye-witness reports to shed light on the battle for primacy between the world's new empires."
?Mark Leonard, Executive Director, European Council on Foreign Relations

"Khanna, a widely recognized expert on global politics, offers an study of the 21st century's emerging "geopolitical marketplace" dominated by three "first world" superpowers, the U.S., Europe and China... The final pages of his book warn eloquently of the risks of imperial overstretch combined with declining economic dominance and deteriorating quality of life. By themselves those pages are worth the price of a book that from beginning to end inspires reflection."
?Publishers Weekly

for more information click here

hot