Forge intl cooperation less focused on US
Editor’s Note:
“In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power,” said Yuval Noah Harari (Harari), history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and international best-selling author, in his most recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
What are today’s greatest challenges and choices? Is a new world war coming? When data is becoming the most important asset in the 21st century, how do you regulate the ownership of data? Harari shared his views over these issues in an exclusive interview with Global Times (GT) reporter Li Aixin.
GT: US President Donald Trump recently said he intended to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. In your latest book, you said “some world leaders tend to talk loud but are very careful about actually launching wars”. Do you think Trump is becoming an exception?
Harari: I don’t know about Trump in person. I am not specialist on the US. But so far, the world is still in the most peaceful era that we have ever seen. More people die today from eating too much than from human violence, which is an amazing achievement.
But we need to remember that the current era of peace is not the result of some divine miracle. It is the result of humans making wise decisions, especially about greater international cooperation.
If humans start making unwise decisions and if international cooperation deteriorates, war can return and even in a worse form than ever before, especially nuclear war.
By now, many people around the world forget about the danger of nuclear war. But the danger is still there. If we are not careful, the result of greater international tensions might be a worst Cold War or even the eruption of the WWIII.
When it comes to war, there is a built-in imbalance between wisdom and stupidity. It takes a lot of wise people to cooperate to make peace. But sometimes it is enough to have just one fool in order to make war. I am not referring to any leader in particular. The unfortunate imbalance in nature of the world makes it more difficult to have cooperation than war.
GT: Do we have enough wise politicians now?
Harari: Political wisdom now is in short supply, especially because politicians lack a meaningful and positive vision for the future.
When you look at the world today, you see that in many countries, politicians are no longer able to create meaningful visions for the future. Where will we be in 30 or 40 years? Instead, the only thing they offer people is nostalgic fantasies about the past.
They imagine some golden era in the past and promise people that we’ll go back there. This is just a fantasy. Both because the past wasn’t great at all – I am a historian, I can tell you, it wasn’t a lot of fun to live in the past – and because in any case we cannot go back there. New technologies are completely changing the world, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology. We need to build a new vision for the future, which takes into account the new technologies and the new danger of climate change.
Unfortunately too many politicians around the world either don’t understand the new challenges or they don’t know what to do about it. So they retreat to these nostalgic fantasies. This is a great danger.
Unless we are able to formulate a global positive vision for the future, we will not be able to deal with the problems of nuclear war, climate change and technological destruction.
GT: In China, many people are concerned about the trade war between China and the US. Where do you think it is headed?
Harari: At present the trend is greater isolationism and less cooperation, first in trade and then in other fields.
What I find even more peculiar is not the trade war between the US and China, which you can say it’s natural because they are rivals in many ways, but the current US government attacking its own allies. It’s undermining the traditional alliances that the US had with Canada, Mexico, Western Europe, Japan and South Korea.
I really don’t understand why the US government is doing it. But the result is the entire structure of cooperation, that was built over the decades, in the last generations, is being destabilized and undermined. Even if the US government changes its policies now, people are unlikely to trust it again, the way they did before.
Let’s say in 2020, Trump loses the election, the new US president does a U-turn and tries to strengthen ties with Canada, Germany and China. This time, people will not be able to trust the US like before. Because they will say, how can we know what the next president will do? If we have to wait every four years to know what will happen, we cannot build anything long-term.
The basic trust between countries is being undermined, not just between the US and China, but also between the US and Canada, the US and Germany. This is very problematic and I guess one of the ways forward is to forge international cooperation and trust which is less focused on the US. All the other countries don’t wait for the US to lead them and create global consensus, but to build a global consensus that can function no matter who is the president of the US.
GT: Decades ago, people were discussing the advantages of globalization. But now a growing number of divergences among countries across the globe is seen and anti-globalization forces are rising. What has caused such a dramatic change?
Harari: There are too many reasons.
Like every major historical development, globalization is not all good. It
has its down side. Some people lose their livelihood. Once people move from a dream about globalization to the reality, they realize it’s not as good as we thought. There are problems, so opposition is growing. In the 20th century, the leaders of globalization are mostly the Western powers, first and foremost the US, and previously Britain. They gained a lot from globalization, free trade and so forth.
But now they look around and realize, “yes, maybe we gained, but actually other countries like China gained far more, we don’t want it so much”. Now the previous leader of globalization is now becoming the leader of the forces opposing globalization.
But I think in the long run, everybody including the Americans should realize that good global connections serve the interests of everybody. If globalization falls apart, everybody will suffer, including Americans, not just because of economic hardships, but also because the three major problems of the 21st century, our global problems – nuclear war, climate change and technological destruction.
If we don’t have global cooperation, we cannot solve any of these problems. You cannot deal with climate change on the level of a single nation, and also cannot regulate AI and biotechnology just in one country.
GT: But the future outlook of effective cooperation seems to be a bit pessimistic because more and more politicians are advocating “their own country first”. What do you think?
Harari: I think you are right. This is really happening and is very dangerous.
When I say we need global cooperation to solve global problems, it doesn’t guarantee that people will actually do it. You have a lot of examples from history that people behave in destructive ways, in ways that don’t really serve their best interests. So I hope we will be able to overcome this current trend of growing nationalism and isolationism.
This is a part of what I try to do with my books – to change the conversation.
When you have all these nationalist politicians that try to convince people to support them by talking about things like immigration, terrorism, one country losing jobs to another country… I try to change the conversation and tell them, yes, immigration and terrorism are all important problems, but they are not our most important problems.
The most important problems are nuclear war, climate change and technological destruction. The only way to do something effective about theses three problems is global cooperation. So if you vote for some nationalist politicians, who undermine global cooperation, maybe this is effective against immigration and terrorism. But this guarantees that we will not be able to solve climate change and technological destruction.
GT: You mentioned that today the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth. The essence of this problem is inequality, and inequality has existed throughout human history. Is there any solution to this problem?
Harari: Inequality always exists, but not to the same level. When you look at long-term history, inequality goes up and down, it’s not constant. Some societies are far more unequal than others.
We cannot create a perfectly equal world. Maybe we won’t like to live in a perfectly equal world where everybody has exactly the same. But through cooperation, we can create a more equal world and prevent the situation where all the power and all the wealth is concentrated in very few hands.
The key to do that in the 21st century is regulation of ownership of data.
Now data is the most important asset. Thousands of years ago, the most important economic asset was land. Our politics was a struggle to control land. If too much land was concentrated in the hands of aristocracies, you had an extremely unequal society. People found ways to prevent this from happening. In the last 200 years, land became less important. Machines became the most important assets. Over the last 200 years, people found ways to regulate the ownership of factories and machinery, for example, by anti-monopoly action and by raising taxes on some people to provide education and welfare to other people. This can prevent extreme inequality.
Now data is replacing machines as the most important asset of the economy. If too much data is owned by a small number of corporations, or people or even the government, again you’ll have an extremely unequal society. The key for equality in the 21 century is not land, machines, but data. How do you regulate the ownership of data? We still don’t know. This is just a beginning. We have thousands of years of experience in regulating the ownership of land. But we don’t have experience in regulating ownership of data. This is the big challenge now for politicians, lawyers, philosophers to find ways to prevent the concentration of too much data in too few hands.