When we started the research for this extensive overview of all aspects concerning the World History of Globalization, a poll of 1,000 adults in the United States was conducted for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling company, from July 5-10 and another  poll of 1,045 eligible voters in Japan was conducted for Kyodo by the Public Opinion Research Center from July 1-3. What was interesting to me is that it showed six in 10 Americans  consider World War III Likely. "I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y. (See: http://wid.ap.org/polls/japanus/index.html)

The Japanese were less likely than Americans to expect a world war, less worried about the threat from North Korea and less inclined to say a first strike with nuclear weapons could be justified.

When I read this I couldn’t help recalling how a series of novels with God as the active hero - the Left Behind series – last year was the best-selling American fiction of all time: twelve volumes, fifty-eight million copies. (New York Times, 2 September 2004, A22.)

Almost more important than God in the books is Satan, who can be recognized because he speaks more than one language, is noticeably urbane and wants to unite the world. To be perfectly clear: the antinationalist position is presented as satanic.

But then this was already so in the old Europe as pointed out in 1960 by the social scientist Elie Kedourie who, among others, viewed nationalism as a secular version of millennial `political religion', and went on to trace the origins of nationalism to a distant medieval source. Nationalism, he argued, is found to be the secular heir of Christian millennialism and proclaims the same apocalyptic message. More recently this approach was taken a step further by Anthony D. Smith (a Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism) in "Chosen Peoples", 2003.

Humans tend to see themselves as living in a civilization. And they understand civilization to be centred on a shared destiny, often called the public good.You find that identification in The Epic of Gilgamesh written over a thousand years before both Homer and the Old Testament. Or in Confucius. Or in the Koran. In Western civilization this idea has evolved in an unbroken line from the twelfth century.  When you look carefully you find that the debate is always about seeking an equilibrium between societal obligations and individual rights. Repeatedly we are brought back to the natural relationship between the two - what I call responsible individualism. At the heart of that idea of civilization lies the certainty that responsible individualism implies the existence of real choices in the shaping of our destiny.

Of course there is also God’s, willingness to make regular appearances on the side of various participants in the so called civilizational clashes.  There is nothing new of course about the political God still so actively supporting the nationalist cause. He has been active throughout the post-Napoleonic period.  In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Russian czar Alexander I was in direct contact with him and received instructions to shut down most political and social reforms in favour of clear monarchical authority. God convinced him to act as he did because his enemies were driven “by the genius evil.” (Édit de Nantes: “[Ô]ter la cause du mal et troubles qui peut advenir sur le fait de la religion qui est toujours le plus glissant et pénétrant de tous les autres.”)
Some kings heard a very different voice. In 1599 Henri IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes to try to deal with the Catholic-Protestant divide. He wanted “to remove the cause of evil and of the troubles that can appear because the religious slope is always the slipperiest and can penetrate all the others.” The purpose of the Edict was to remove religion, and God with it, from the political debate. When the Edict was revoked eighty-six years later, God reappeared in politics.

More recently star appearances in massacres all over Africa . He has been wandering the Afghan mountains with Taliban and Al Qaeda guerrillas. He has broken down temples and led riots in India . He has supported anti-immigrant campaigns in Europe . In his spare time, he inspires the rhetoric of those who want more of the death penalty, and more virgin brides, more flags of specific colours flown. He accompanies American presidents, and for that matter most American elected representatives, on all public appearances. In the 2003 State of the Union speech, there were twenty-two religious references.
That is the context in which to understand the statement in 2004 by then attorney general of the United States , John Ashcroft, that his country had been spared a second attack since September 11, 2001, because the government had been assisting “the hand of Providence .” There was a competitive air to his claim. (International Herald Tribune, 22 October 2004, p.8.)

It must also be said that in many places, God takes on a very different voice. This is a voice that can be heard via people organizing slums in Bangkok or Nairobi. These people are often the driving forces behind hospitals and schools. They speak for the God who never went away.

But also came Huntington ’s 1996 bestseller/analysis, of the world as a clash of civilizations. Rational, people now understood what was happening around them, why things were not working out as expected. As for the specific case of the United States , its survival was dependent upon “Americans reaffirming their Western identity.” The broad welcome this argument received revealed how confused and obscure the vacuum is. But it also told us how people have become frightened in the growing disorder of the Globalist era, how uncomfortable they are with the broad global sweeps of inevitability. After all, only a few years ago economic inevitability was on every tongue.  Abruptly, the same people or their friends are insisting that exclusive culture is the key.

Perhaps we are living the beginnings of a major rebalancing in which other cultures, with more complex ideas of what makes up a society, are coming to the fore. The reality that large numbers of people are moving between  places at astonishing rates. This fluidity is perhaps unprecedented. It is certainly one of the most complex periods of human migration, because unlike the nineteenth-century version or those of other eras, it has no set pattern.

The questions this will raise about social habits and beliefs will take a great deal of our time. Developing education that will work in such a complex situation will require a great deal of imagination, and a broad, inclusive approach. We have been promised or threatened with an era dominated by English. For technical and contractual purposes, this dominance will probably remain true. But if you look beyond the tech­nical and the contractual, we are probably entering a period of multilingualism supported by all of the cultures that go with the languages.

There is no particular culture unsuited to what is happening. There are only unsuited political movements.

Yet in reaction to Islam, the religion that most concerns’ the West’ (although East and West exist simultaneously in any single place, meaning in reality there is no such divide) these days, there is also a growing desire among citizens for their democracies to' take the lead on issues of justice and inclusion. And that desire no longer comes in the standard nineteenth-century packages of left and right.

Fact is however that the more complicated our national and international relationships are, the more all of us will need to use our most complicated sense of belonging both to feel at home and to find multiple ways to be at home with the widest variety of people and situations. Thus the common call today is for an examination of values. I am not clear what this means. It has a slight ring of nineteenth-century self-serving nationalism. It would be better to concentrate on something more real, such as serving the public good.

Early twentieth centuries did not think their situation was particular. They thought it was universal. They believed this with as much conviction and sophistication as people do today. If anything, they were more sophisticated about the world and how it works.

The true believers in today's chorus forget that nineteenth-century European free trade was double buckled by enormous empires, which held the world as one in a manner we can no longer imagine.

That pre-1914 naively contented middle class was obviously a much smaller percentage of society than those who today are convinced that they are not naively contented, but are the clever beneficiaries of global economic destiny. For a reminder of reality, those clever beneficiaries might think of Keynes's five words describing open borders – without passport or other formality. Today only some European countries (given the fact that France in the wake of the London bombings returned back to border controls last week) has managed to remove the border barriers that didn't exist at all last time around. Elsewhere, it is not uncommon for travellers to be half stripped in airports. Looking at the steady evolution of security over the last thirty years - not just since September 11- it is possible that this tendency will intensify.

Gouverneur Morris, American representative in France , July 14, 1789: "Yesterday it was the fashion at Versailles not to believe that there were any disturbances in Paris ." In truth, also today there are signs everywhere of intellectual and ethical disturbance.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist,  sees "the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before." (Friedman, cited in Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization , 2004, p. 2.) Businessmen who have become critics , like for example  George Soros, say it is all about the creation of uncontrolled Global financial markets, the growth of transnationals and of "their increasing domination over national economies." (Soros, On Globalization, 2002, p.1.)

Others, spooked perhaps by the growing criticism of these non-economic projections, now protest that to claim "deeper economic integration would enfeeble national governments is a formula sold mainly by opponents of the liberal international order." (William Watson, "Globalization: Resting, But Not Dead," Literary Review of Canada, June 2004, p. 9.)

The general tenure of these dozens of definitions is that "international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that ... political and military power can in reality do nothing.." But of course that was written in 1911,(Norman Angel writing in 1911) just before political and military power destroyed the reigning economic order.

Truth is we've had every form of political, military and religious arrangement. And international trading arrangements, even international production integration systems, have always existed. Rome had all these for centuries across a territory so large that it included most of Europe as well as today's Islamic world, with the exception of the Asian part.

The last time free trade was tried - from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War – people were able to combine the dropping of commercial barriers in Europe with the astonishing reach of those same European countries around the world. The British, French, Dutch, Italian, Belgian, German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, with the new American empire joining in at the end of the nineteenth century, were able to apply their political, legal, social and economic methods to the entire world. Along with those methods came a complex maze of regulations. As a that time leading economist Keynes, pointed out, raw materials, manufacturing and goods flowed in every direction. And the  assertion that all civilizations from now on were going to be led by commerce  grew.

However, Globalization isn't in trouble. India and China are there to prove it. Two gigantic developing countries - one socialist and bureaucratic, the other communist - have embraced the theories of liberal economics and trade. What's more, it is bringing them happiness: So much so that their exports are exploding, high-tech jobs are flowing their way, poverty is shrinking and the middle class growing.

All of this is in some ways true. The question is whether their success is about Globalism or something quite different. Take the 1997 Asian meltdown. Neither India nor China melted. In fact, they did better than average during the crisis. Why? They had capital controls and various other limitations on movements and investments. In general, they have done well out of economic modernization by not following the economic principles of Globalization.' Whatever market reforms there have been, they have come in the context of nation-state interests.

Part of the explanation is that both countries do see modernization from a national - indeed, nationalist - point of view. The Chinese government still controls half the country's industrial assets. It invests heavily in infrastructure, shapes much of the development. The Indian government does less, but it is still very much involved.

The principal Chinese obsession is neither free trade nor free markets. It is dealing with internal poverty, which is a political time bomb. We hear a great deal about new model cities built around high-technology factories. But China also has the most dangerous mining industry in the world, with some five thousand accidental deaths a year. These are real challenges for a gigantic and contradictory economy. In such a context, global theories of economics are quite silly. India has the same tensions and complexity, and an identical poverty time bomb. China 's view of economics "is flexible enough that it is barely classifiable as a doctrine.... [P]ragmatic and ideological at the same time, a reflection of an ancient Chinese philosophical outlook that makes little distinction between theory and practice. [G]roping for stones to cross the river."

The Indian government defeated at the polls in 2004 had tried to embrace much of the global economic ideology. The result was a sharp increase in the tension between rich and poor. When the elections came, the rural poor threw them out. The new government, although led by a modern, efficiency-minded, market-reform technocrat, is clearly driven by the central national question. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: "Economic growth is not an end in itself. It is a way to create employment, to banish poverty, hunger and homelessness, to improve the lives of most of our people. [The direction] is equality and social justice." Translated from Le Monde ( Paris ), 26 June 2004,p. 4; "La croissance [économique] n'est pas une fin en soi. C'est un moyen de créer des emplois, de bannir la pauvreté, la faim et l'absence de toit, d'améliorer les conditions de vie de la masse de notre peuple." "Cap sur l'équité et la justice sociale."
These two approaches come out of extremely experienced civilizations. India is not, as some English are fond of saying, an invention of the British Empire . In the sixteenth century, two Mogul emperors, Babur and in particular Akbar, created and administered highly sophisticated systems that dealt with productivity, commodity pricing and balanced taxation. By the time the British began to take over, this system had been radically decentralized and regional princes had become dominant.

This rich and complex culture in good part explains why Natwar Singh, wrote before he became Indian foreign minister in 2004: " India never subscribed to the assumptions of the cold war. India was not interested in either the theory of balance of power or the domino theory, which became a part of American diplomatic mythology during the 1960s and early 1970s. We have never believed in spheres of influence, nor have we subscribed to any other concept so dear to European and American thinkers and intellectuals." (Singh, Heart to Heart, p. 164.)

As for China , it was experimenting with its own market approaches long before the Europeans knew there was something to experiment with. These two countries have two of the world's most powerful armed forces and armaments industries. India is the world's third importer of arms. China is number one.
In turn on the basis of this false populist agitation, the BJP won power at the national level and held it until 2004. Indeed, it was a classic case of false populism in which reality is swept aside and replaced by a sort of dream world - or nightmare world - in which 82 percent of the population are meant to be frightened by 12 percent.But, the new government has a strong, non-sectarian core and is concentrated on an egalitarian, inclusive nationalism.

One of the unexpected comic turns that began to develop in the early twenty-first century was an uncontrollable fear among Western market leaders of the Chinese capacity, and eventually the Indian capacity, to buy large chunks of Western industry. For a quarter-century the same Western business leaders and economists had assured citizens and governments that the geographic location of ownership was unimportant. To worry about it was old-fashioned economic nationalism. Suddenly it appears that they meant it didn't matter inside the West. Their intent was that Western investors should be able to buy and sell anywhere in the world. Seen in that way, their Globalism has its roots in the old trading and industrial-trading models of the sort that led to the limiting of movement for Indian cloth from the eighteenth century on and the obligation to buy theory that led to the Opium Wars against China . Globalization, looked at from a Chinese or Indian perspective, was always about Western-centred regionalism.

In 2004, Beijing introduced its New Security Concept: "No hegemonism, no power politics, no alliances and no arms races." It is a formula designed neither for a global, shapeless world nor a U.S.-led world. It is all about the traditional Chinese view of regionalism based on geography, combined with China 's contemporary view of shared concepts with different regions of the world.

Meanwhile, the two new economic stars of Asia - India and China - are being presented in the West as rivals. Looked at from an Asian point of view, they are building a complex economic relationship based on large and relatively equal capital flows. Their mutual trade is soaring. China is now India 's second-largest trading partner.

But where in the first publication of Davos January 1971, it was declared that "Nationalism is economically indefensible." (Business International, S.A. , Managing the Multinationals, p.26.) Now the two leaders of global economics - are strong, classic nationalists.

As for the recent move by the Chinese to revalue their currency, this changed little to nothing, except maybe takes off some protectionist pressure. And over time, the dollar will fall, against the yuan.