The Nation of Humankind: The Nation as Protector and Nurturer
After years of policies and behavior that encouraged self-centeredness, arrogance toward the less fortunate, and disregard for our global environment, the current world-wide economic crisis is serving as a wake-up call not only towards our economic policies but our priorities as well. We are undergoing a period of reflection and questioning that stretch from to the most personal questions of how we wish to be spending our time as well as our treasure to the largest issues of international cooperation. As people around the globe look to their public institutions and officials for solutions and leadership there is a deep sense that unlike economic crises of years past, the current situation cannot be addressed in any meaningful way by a single nation, no matter how powerful or privileged. Political borders cannot contain the crisis any more than they can contain the challenges humankind faces with air quality, disease, the supply of safe water, predictable energy, or even safe skies. It can be argued that there were times in history when families, then tribes, then confederations of tribes and finally nation states, were reasonable units of safety and sustenance. For many people, this does not seem to hold any longer. It is apparent there is significant disparity from region to region and community to community in every nation of the world, in the essentials of employment possibilities, wages, educational opportunity, and the quality and availability of health care. Some nations have made a valiant effort to smooth out the peaks and valleys of opportunity while others have only exaggerated the disparities. Today, nations by themselves have less ability, and perhaps less inclination as well, to provide opportunity and security for every class and faction, than they once did. America, the most powerful nation on the planet, is still uneasy that its institutions could not only not protect its citizens from attack, but could not even respond effectively to a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. Today, many citizens of this and many other countries we are looking at the very concept of “nation” with new eyes.
Interdependence and the desire for exemplary leadership
Having worked overseas for many years, I have come to understand that much of the rest of the world is ahead of us in realizing our interdependence. At the same time, many people are suspicious of claims of interdependence. In the developed world, there is a widespread sense that aid to the less fortunate in the world only trickles down because of the gross government corruption, greed, and mismanagement in many parts of the underdeveloped world. Still, many ordinary people in the developing world want and desperately need help and collegial leadership on the great problems facing their countries despite the less than democratic regimes or less than able leaders in their home countries. They also want all seven billion of us global inhabitants to work together to address the challenges which confront a single, complex world.
Suddenly the privileged nations of the world have discovered the immense challenges in our world. These are magnified many times in developing countries where problems are related to declining resources, leadership know how, demoralization, lack of incentive for the privileged to support change and the easy ability of groups within old cultures to exploit others. {quotes}Developing nations are handicapped in many ways while all nations are challenged by the complexity of the interrelated nature of life in this century.{/quotes} Still, people throughout the world are hopeful and look with idealism for non-patronizing leadership. Communications that friends in some of the poorer nations continue to send me indicate that people want examples of fair and just governance kept on display. Those examples are too often in short supply or seem to get tarnished quickly. Allow me to address the leadership and just governance issue by quoting from letters of foreign colleagues, received right after the recent national election in the U.S. Long-term colleague, Dr. Mansoor Ahmed, who is president of a university in Bangladesh, wrote, {quotes}“The hope is that this election will usher in a kinder and gentler America and that it will see that its own future and well being are tied with the rest of humanity.{/quotes} Will it give a lead in restructuring the international and political order — working with the UN system for the benefit of all humanity? Will it lead the world towards sustainable development which means rethinking patterns of consumption and life styles, especially in the rich countries?”
Good friend Lois Sebatane, who teaches at the National University of Lesotho in Southern Africa, wrote, “The election is truly going to change the image of what people think is America.” My friend Ms. al O’ran who is a business manager in Jordan wrote, “Above all the election was a brilliant example of a healthy democratic process — silencing the cynics.” And congruent with needing models of caring leadership and just governance, old friend Professor Siddiqur Rahman, who leads a huge national development program in Bangladesh, wrote, {quotes}“We want leadership for change related to the fate of millions of underprivileged peoples.”{/quotes}
The understanding that thorny problems cannot be dealt with by individual nations alone but that they require true collegiality, good faith, and concern beyond borders, is held in rich countries as well. Inez Gibbons, a Canadian consultant wrote, “As it stands now, most of your oil comes from Canada and NAFTA gives the U.S/ priority to the oil supply over Canada’s needs. Many in Canada would not want NAFTA reopened but would appreciate more control over our oil supply.” However, the communication from Inez perhaps also indicates some of the conflict that people in many places are feeling about interdependence: that identity and independence have sometimes been sacrificed to globalization. “There is some concern that the new president, like most Americans, may see us as an extension of themselves, but not unique or individual in any way.”
Canada of course, has long experience with tensions within its own borders such as the long standing Quebec separatist movement. They also have experience with tensions across the border through its joined-at-the-hip relationship with the United States. To paraphrase former Prime Minister Trudeau, “Living next to the United States is like sleeping with an elephant.” Realizing the benefit of example and the hope in a new brand of leadership, long-time colleague and Malaysian management expert Dr. Honchan Chai, wrote, “The new presidency will likely bring about far reaching change, not just in the U.S. but around the world. The breakthrough will also be an example to countries where racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and ethnic and class discrimination are endemic.”
The approach to reform and development in the world is not always peaceful of course. When it is not, it can engender a different sentiment. I well remember being with professional colleagues in south Asia when the war in Iraq started. Suddenly good friends felt distance from each other. One government minister worriedly put the change in feelings into words, “Will we ever be able to work together again?” His question turned us serious and silent. Events can jeopardize the very thing nations need greatly now — trust generated through cooperative effort across borders and traditions.
Taking Their Cut: Self Ahead of the Commons
When there is entrenched privilege and power, nations often fail to provide justice and economic opportunity for their citizens. This failure is manifested in grossly inequitable opportunity, wasteful appointments, and inefficient operations. In this situation, government operations tend to be unprofessional, corruption is pervasive, and authority is misused. People of the middle and lower classes feel powerless. Particularly skilled and well-educated people often find the system gives them little opportunity to use their skills and education. In turn, the very people who have the most to contribute to solving their nation’s problems become demoralized and disinterested.
I remember being incredulous in one developing country assignment as I gradually became aware that things like teacher’s certificates and college grades were for sale. Teachers were routinely coerced into doing political canvassing. There were phantom payrolls in government departments and civil servants found placements with favored ministers regardless of their actual skills. Unqualified but well-connected people were selected for scholarships, while other well-connected people in critically needed positions in health care and education would show up for work only when it suited them. Political dissidents were routinely arrested and, in the most hopeless of these situations, violence was widespread.
This is not to say that rich nations have no corruption. Indeed the rich probably put petty crooks in the third world to shame. But ordinary people suffer more quickly and severely in poor countries when the nation’s leadership takes its cut.
All the King’s Horses, All the King’s Men – Nations More Fragile than We Know
Let us take the case of Nepal. Long-standing and unfortunate social conditions festered into bloody civil war there a few years ago. It is finally coming to an end. Peace in Nepal will open the door — however slightly —for humanitarian relief and to the rebuilding of individual confidence, family cohesiveness, community cooperation, renewed government services, national infrastructure, business, and employment. Peace will not automatically eliminate lingering grievances and without the skillful repair of fundamental conditions, things will eventually come apart again or at least not work very well. The end of war in Nepal will leave social marginalization, economic disparity, gender discrimination, illiteracy, disease, landlessness, malnourishment, orphan hood, and homelessness in place. President Eisenhower was prescient when he said, “Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.” Somehow in Nepal, people’s fear and distrust of each other, caused by years of killing, torture, kidnapping, property destruction, and detention, will have to be addressed if neighbors will ever be able to face each other, communities ever able to work together, or children ever able go to school together again. Displaced people and alienated groups will have to be brought together as part of the repair and redevelopment in Nepal. Otherwise any accomplishments will be window dressing. They will be shallow, partial, and temporary. The abundance of cynicism, fear and fatalism that has accumulated will make any “lay it on” approach by government, or by outside helpers, suspect. People sent by assisting nations and agencies to work in Nepal on the vast array of broken services will have to work shoulder to shoulder with individual citizens trusting and respecting their insights and integrity. Redevelopment objectives will have to be based on locally-identified needs and values. If they are not, then cynicism will return and nothing will be accomplished. If there are hints of cultural imperialism in such a sensitive situation, resources will be wasted and work initiatives will fail to achieve their goals.
All this is not to say that all well-meaning assistance from outside has not produced substantial victories throughout the developing world. However, the western way of doing business can make people suspicious that outsiders look down on foreign cultures. For example, people wonder if they are actually independent when the extent of the conditions (“conditionality” in international development parlance) demanded by the World Bank and others becomes known to the public. When aid comes with too many strings attached the questions invariably arise, “Who is pulling the strings and who is really the beneficiary of the programs?” When the government of a poor country decides that in order to advance the well-being of its own people that it must comply with the conditions of foreign donors, that same government can come in for severe criticism from ethnic and other groups that are struggling to affirm their ethnic, cultural, and national identity and independence. Often opposition political groups can use such criticism as a tool to challenge power.
That of God in Each of Us
The nineteenth-century hymnist William Merrill wrote, “Keep her faith in simple manhood, strong as when her life began, till it finds its full fruition in the brotherhood of man.” As noble as this sentiment is, it is hard for us to accept now that we have discovered just how astonishingly varied our world of seven billion people is. We are confronted with the realities of just how different are the cultures, religions, and traditions of other people. Cultures that were of interest only to scholars and academics are now “in our faces” through globalization, the internet, and the free flow of people across vast distances natural barriers and that were once all but impenetrable. In our new awareness of other peoples and cultures, are we prone to see a clash of civilizations or a parity of cultures? Do we see a multi-polar world as an increased risk or do we see an opportunity for increased understanding? Will emerging global challenges contribute to a sense of common interests or will it lead to new attempts to wall off our share? There are many kinds of walls of course, from laws, to discrimination, to actual physical walls. Such questions are not just between long-established states. They arise within rapidly changing states as well in an ever-changing regional and global pattern.
Unsettling the Collective: Instability in Complexity
People in most of the world are experiencing great change. If this is disconcerting in a developed and privileged country, how much more so might it be in a nation on the edge of economic or environmental existence? In places I have worked in Africa and Asia, the people are struggling with the most basic day-to-day challenges of feeding their family at the same time that their country is struggling with the complex macro issues of existing in an interdependent world. In some countries one sees shoeless pedestrians navigating their way between cars whose passengers move slowly through polluted streets on their way to offices where they will conduct business via computers, the internet, and international phone conferences. The current unraveling of the economy is a frightening lesson to North Americans and Europeans about how very complex our systems have become. Would it not stand to reason that many people in developing settings find the interrelated parts of modern economic existence so foreign that life seems disordered and even out of control? Don’t we all sense that the most complicated things — from our DVD players to our global economy — are at risk of collapse from failure of some obscure part? Don’t we have the feeling, even if not supported by fact, that the more complex the less stable?
Need to Belong All Over Again
It is said that people need to feel a sense of belonging, need to be secure in terms of basic life necessities, and need to feel safe, before they can concentrate on higher order matters. Millions of people today are unsatisfied with their level of belonging and connectedness by their present community, state, and nation. Certainly there is a lot of looking for identity with a group on any number of shared values including language, history and origin, religion, or nationality. Identity often crosses political borders. Sub-national groups of one sort or another are no longer passive. “Out of sight out of mind,” does not work so well these days. The legitimacy of established authority is being questioned and there are examples of intense striving for new types of autonomy and a reassertion of cultural distinctiveness.
People seek to regain control over their lives in terms of physical safety and emotional well-being, by aligning themselves with smaller groups with which they can more clearly identify a shared feature of “our own kind.” Some distrust complex government under which they live. Others have come to the conclusion that life is actually in the hands of huge multi-national commercial organizations that operates across borders, and which for most practical purposes, have become the state that controls life and determines the future. Thus for an increasing number of people the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural group with which they identify, have trust in, and to which they have loyalty, has become their preferred nation.
The Greater Whole – A Debilitating Vacuum
The downside to this growing loyalty to smaller and more self-contained groups is that it makes it more difficult to build the consensus necessary for effective and democratic action. The capacity to mobilize a significant majority of a society around a national cause becomes increasingly difficult.
There is a parallel problem at the opposite end of the spectrum from this focus on turning to small groups for support and identity. As national leadership tries to create a national focus to bear on a problem, there will be other parties promoting the view that national affinity is not broad enough to bring about solutions. There are many who maintain that the critical issues of peace, security, economic and social justice, human rights, and ecological protection are planetary in nature and that purely national efforts cannot deal adequately with the real issues. This point of view maintains that there is a vacuum of vision, leadership, and commitment at the global level and that the promise of the civilized world in so many treaties, resolutions, and declarations is unfulfilled. Many people appreciate that they are a part of a greater whole, but that our tools for dealing with global issues are still boxed in national-territorial spaces.
A Convergent Framework in Mutual Interest
It can be argued that if sub-national groups are to be respected, protected and enjoy rights and justice – the nation of humanity must somehow create a framework for them, protecting them from exploitation by governments and commercial interests. But while many believe in a nation of humanity, it is quite undefined as of now. It can also be argued that for the nation of humanity to function justly, effectively and efficiently – sub-groups within, have to continue to exist and participate. Let us take an example. In the first part of this paper, I quoted communications received from overseas friends immediately following the U.S. presidential election. Let me quote from one more, this from Dr. Madhu Ghimire who is a physician in India. “Sandwiched between China and India with their rapid technological growth, the intoxicating theosophy of ancient Tibetan life lives on.” Even under political suppression and the intrusion of modern secularization, Tibet is as conceptually vibrant as ever. However, its future would be more predictably just if the nation of mankind were better organized. And the nation of mankind would be healthier if the wisdom of places like Tibet were kept from extinction.
The New Nationhood: An Intellectual, Moral and Cultural Climate Change
In conclusion, mankind is finally demanding leadership that recognizes the life and death challenges of the planet- challenges not restricted by political borders, challenges that must be addressed by embracing all identities, making use of every ingenuity, empowering all levels, insisting on justice and opportunity and preserving treasured identities and traditions. Challenges that require leadership and a collective that is sincerely receptive and trusting, which honors every history and solidly displays respect for the worth of all.
