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The other map is one in which the global civil society that has emerged with the information age in all the major city-regions links together across fadin national boundaries to balance the myopic commercialism of the merchant class with a global social contract. Much like the New Deal in America or the social welfare policies in Europe devised earlier in this century, that contract would stabilize the world system by incorporating the lumpenplanet through a redistribution of wealth. Instead of a world where the purely competitive or merely fortunate are forced to hole up in gated city-regions for fear of the crime and pandemonium all about them, the order based on a global contract would give rise to a vital, multicultural civilization on a planetary scale. A kind of plural, global agora rather than the medieval would symbolize this new civilization. This agora, or global civil society, would be the interlinkage between local territoriality and the conciousness of the first planetary generation, the first generation with a global dimension. The first scenario is most likely in the immediate future; the second must inevitably arise on the agenda over time. The present trends of widespread privitization, deregulation of national safety nets and the globalization of production, trade financial services and capital markets are clearly leading to the model suggested by the first map. However, in 20 years time, some semblance of the model suggested by the second map must emerge because, for all its undisputed dynamism, the gloabal feudalism of the first model is not sustainable over the long term any more than the feudalism of the middle ages. For now, the global merchants seeking consumer markets and production sites to garner the highest return on their capital - together with accomodating metropolitan governments seeking local jobs and tax revenues - are linking up the world's major city-regions in one giant web of low orbit satellites, electronic networks such as the Internet, seaports, airports and tax-free industrial parks. As a result, the hierarchy of city-regions that will dominate the world by 2025 - let's call them the CR-30 that will replace the G-7 leading industrial democracies as the core entities of the world system - is already being established. NEXT PAGE: The CR-30... |
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