In those days, only an international merchant class existed, not a global civil society with a world-wide perspective. Second, in part as a result of the global civil society, we are aware of the limits of global growth, of the ecological unsustainability of the endless exploitation of natural resources by a vastly expanding world population. We are also aware of the social unsustainability of a divorce between different parts of the world weaned on the same idea of progress and propagandized in the mass media by the same material ideals.

The competitive strategies of China's coastal cities present, perhaps, a metaphor for the development of the whole planet. City regions like Dalian or Shanghai somehow believe they can best become prosperous by exporting textiles or trinkets to the Toys 'R Us chain stores in the United States and not sharing the wealth with China's 800 million peasants living inland.

That is crazy. In two decades time they will be sumerged by the hinterland. Already a slow motion sumbersion is underway with an estimated 100 million Chinese peasants uprooted from their old communes by market-Leninist reforms, floating around in the cities looking for food and work.

In some ways, as this very article illustrates, the struggle is already on between the global civil society and the worldwide merchant class to draw a new map of the world for the next century. The more successful the merchant class is in drawing the boundaries of the new order over the coming decade, the more difficult it will be for the global civil society to alter that map. That is the danger now.
 

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