21 Lessons for the 21st Century(34)
Today, in contrast, a single political paradigm is accepted everywhere. The planet is divided between about 200 sovereign states, which generally agree on the same diplomatic protocols and on common international laws. Sweden, Nigeria, Thailand and Brazil are all marked on our atlases as the same kind of colourful shapes; they are all members of the UN; and despite myriad differences they are all recognised as sovereign states enjoying similar rights and privileges. Indeed, they share many more political ideas and practices, including at least a token belief in representative bodies, political parties, universal suffrage and human rights. There are parliaments in Tehran, Moscow, Cape Town and New Delhi as well as in London and Paris. When Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, Kurds and Turks compete for the favours of global public opinion, they all use the same discourse of human rights, state sovereignty and international law.
The world may be peppered with various types of ‘failed states’, but it knows only one paradigm for a successful state. Global politics thus follows the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way, by missing this or that ingredient of the dominant political package. The Islamic State has recently stood out in its complete rejection of this package, and in its attempt to establish an entirely different kind of political entity – a universal caliphate. But precisely for this reason it has failed. Numerous guerrilla forces and terror organisations have managed to establish new countries or to conquer existing ones. But they have always done so by accepting the fundamental principles of the global political order. Even the Taliban sought international recognition as the legitimate government of the sovereign country of Afghanistan. No group rejecting the principles of global politics has so far gained any lasting control of any significant territory.
The strength of the global political paradigm can perhaps best be appreciated by considering not hardcore political questions of war and diplomacy, but rather something like the 2016 Rio Olympics. Take a moment to reflect on the way the Games were organised. The 11,000 athletes were grouped into delegations by nationality rather than by religion, class or language. There was no Buddhist delegation, proletarian delegation, or English-speaking delegation. Except in a handful of cases – most notably Taiwan and Palestine – determining the athletes’ nationality was a straightforward affair.
At the opening ceremony on 5 August 2016 the athletes marched in groups, each group waving its national flag. Whenever Michael Phelps won another gold medal, the Stars and Stripes was raised to the sound of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. When Emilie Andéol won the gold medal in judo, the French tricolour was hoisted and the ‘Marseillaise’ was played.
Conveniently enough, each country in the world has an anthem that conforms to the same universal model. Almost all anthems are orchestral pieces of a few minutes in length, rather than a twenty-minute chant that may only be performed by a special caste of hereditary priests. Even countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Congo have adopted Western musical conventions for their anthems. Most of them sound like something composed by Beethoven on a rather mediocre day. (You can spend an evening with friends playing the various anthems on YouTube and trying to guess which is which.) Even the lyrics are almost the same throughout the world, indicating common conceptions of politics and group loyalty. For example, to which nation do you think the following anthem belongs? (I changed only the country’s name into the generic ‘My country’):
My country, my homeland,
The land where I have shed my blood,
It is there I stand,
To be my motherland’s guard.
My country, my nation,
My people and my homeland,
Let us proclaim
‘My country unite!’
Long live my land, long live my state,
My nation, my homeland, in its entirety.
Build its soul, awaken its body,
For my great country!
My great country, independent and free
My home and my country which I love.
My great country, independent and free,
Long live my great country!
The answer is Indonesia. But would you have been surprised if I told you that the answer was actually Poland, Nigeria or Brazil?
National flags display the same dreary conformity. With a single exception, all flags are rectangular pieces of cloth marked by an extremely limited repertoire of colours, stripes and geometrical shapes. Nepal is the odd country out, with a flag consisting of two triangles. (But it has never won an Olympic medal.) The Indonesian flag consists of a red stripe above a white stripe. The Polish flag displays a white stripe above a red stripe. The flag of Monaco is identical to that of Indonesia. A colour-blind person could hardly tell the difference between the flags of Belgium, Chad, Ivory Coast, France, Guinea, Ireland, Italy, Mali and Romania – they all have three vertical stripes of various colours.
Some of these countries have been engaged in bitter war with one another, but during the tumultuous twentieth century only three Games were cancelled due to war (in 1916, 1940 and 1944). In 1980 the USA and some of its allies boycotted the Moscow Olympics, in 1984 the Soviet bloc boycotted the Los Angeles Games, and on several other occasions the Olympics found themselves at the centre of a political storm (most notably in 1936, when Nazi Berlin hosted the Games, and in 1972, when Palestinian terrorists massacred the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympics). Yet on the whole, political controversies have not derailed the Olympic project.