Al Jazeera
Friday, April 23, 2010
The world is not flat By Mark LeVine
It started with an utterly unexpected text message that appeared on my
phone the moment I landed in Rome last Thursday. "Meeting cancelled. Check
your
email."
Six days later and $1,200 poorer, the saga ended when I arrived home after
a three day travel odyssey, only to open my lap top and read that most
airports were reopening-a day before I was originally ticketed to fly
home-because experts had determined that the threat to jet engines posed by the
ash
cloud emanating from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was not as great as
originally assumed.
Despite the hardships and costs, there was an upside to being in the middle
of the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud saga. It offered a unique opportunity to
re-examine many of the commonly accepted myths of globalisation and the
way it has, or in fact has not, changed the fabric of human relations.
Special report (http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/volcanochaos)
My immediate reaction when I read the text message was that something had
happened in Israel or the Occupied Territories to sabotage the meeting
between Israeli and Palestinian experts on the peace process I had come to
Rome
to attend. Or perhaps the funders had gotten cold feet after pressure from
quarters I couldn't determine.
But then my friend Alessandro arrived to pick me up from Rome's central
train station, and after the customary Italian "hello" asked if I'd heard
about the huge volcanic eruption in Iceland that had occurred earlier in the
day. Suddenly the text message made sense, and checking email confirmed that
most of the participants couldn't get to Rome because all flights had been
cancelled.
Well, I thought, this won't last too long. At least I'll get to Sweden for
a big conference on Syria in which I was supposed to participate five days
later at Lund University. But by the next morning most of Europe's airports
were in lockdown, Italian, French, Spanish, and German news channels and
newspapers, as well as al-Jazeera, CNN and the BBC, were reporting that the
eruption could go on for weeks or months, engineers were cropping up on
most every news network explaining how the silicate ash cloud could cause
"catastrophic failure" of jet engines, and I was frantically trying to find a
train ticket up to Copenhagen from Italy.
That proved impossible, as I could only get as far as Frankfurt. Everything
farther north was already sold out.
With Syria suffering the same fate as Palestine, my attention turned to
figuring out how to go west instead of north, and hopefully get out of Europe
through Spain before the cloud covered the whole continent.
Having no meetings to attend, I spent the next two days alternatingly
online, trying to find a flight home, and on line at Rome's Scuderie Papali al
Quirinale museum, trying to see an unprecedented collection of the great
renaissance artist Caravaggio. Sadly, the waiting time was almost as long as
that at the train station, and tickets equally difficult to procure. I
eventually gave up trying to get into the museum; I had no choice-or so I
thought-but to continue trying to get home as quickly as possible.
Flattening out a complex reality
Walking back and forth through the hilly and often labyrinthine Roman
streets, I thought about one of the most celebrated descriptions of
globalisation in recent years, that it has made the world "flat". So argues
best-selling New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his sequel to The
Lexus and
the Olive Tree, The World is Flat.
Friedman's basic argument is that new communications and software
technologies, and the business strategies that have developed along with them,
have
flattened the world, meaning they've created more equal opportunities for
people to compete economically regardless of where they live, and in a
manner that neither governments nor multinational corporations are able to
direct.
Veering off of Via Veneto into a side street that featured an alluring
church facade, Friedman's assessment felt, well, flat. The reality, it seemed
to me, was that world, and globalisation with it, are more like the streets
of Rome-bumpy, windy, sometimes confusing and dirty, and undulating up and
down with the city's topography.
Indeed, the disastrous disruptions to global travel caused by the
Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud demonstrated that in the global era the world
remains as
three dimensional as ever. Events at 30,000 feet can profoundly impact
those at ground level.
Of course, so do events miles below the earth's surface, as the recent
mining disasters in the United States and China demonstrate. After all, most
miners are either digging for the coal that still constitutes the largest
share of rapidly escalating global energy usage, or for the precious metals
without which cell phones and other advanced communications technologies
could not function.
The oceans are equally vital links in the globalised economy; their
intensified use, whether through over fishing or for dumping the innumerable
waste products of the globalised production and consumption, are in fact
producing disastrous consequences for the world's marine life.
Finally, my frequent mobile phone calls home to check if my wife had
managed to find me a new ticket reminded me that globalisation could not
function
without the increasingly crowded orbital satellite system, the nervous
system of contemporary global communications.
A fragile world system
It would seem that the globalised world is in fact multi-planar, with each
level having a direct, but usually underappreciated, influence on the
others. And with this complexity has come fragility.
A few days without regular air travel and supermarket shelves start going
empty, airlines are warning of impending bankruptcy, cargo and freight are
backed up as far away as eastern Asia, and the whole "just in time" system
of globalised production, which depends on the precisely timed delivery of
manufacturing components to build products with the least waste and expense,
no longer functions.
Friedman argues that business-to-business software that allows computers to
coordinate production and transportation is at the heart of the newest
phase of globalisation. But the ash cloud reveals that for humans, it's the
consumer-focused internet and communications technologies-many stranded
travellers were simultaneously web-surfing, texting, phoning, and watching
television in order to find the elusive bit of information that would help them
get home-that is the true engine of globalisation, tying us together across
time and space.
Normally, one of the pleasures of living in Europe is that one can fly from
Copenhagen to Istanbul, or Amsterdam to Rome, in a few hours. But take
away plane travel and we're back to the early 20th century; suddenly, it takes
days if not longer to go from one capital to another (high speed trains
don't help if you can't find a seat).
With neither planes nor trains offering a way out of Italy, I was forced to
contemplate the unpleasant possibility of a multi-day bus ride from Rome
to northern Europe. It seems the globe has not "shrunk" in the era of
globalisation nearly as much as Friedman and other commentators argue, nor has
time and space been irreversably "compressed," as leading sociologists claim.
Europe, it turns out, is still a very big continent.
"Placelessness"
Perhaps Ryan Bingham, George Clooney's character in last year's hit "Up in
the Air," would enjoy being stuck in an airport for days on end. Being
stranded isn't so bad if you can spend the time in the business class lounge,
with its free food, alcohol, showers, wi-fi, and comfortable chairs and
couches.
For everyone else, stuck in coach, the airport can become a pretty
uncomfortable place.
International airports and train stations have become famous for being
"placeless", each one looking and feeling so much like the others that it
becomes very hard to tell whether you've just arrived in Doha or Milan. Along
with shopping malls, their design and décor typically have few if any
connections with the country or culture in which they are situated, creating a
feel of rootedlessness and lack of social meaning that define life under
globalisation.
Many critics of globalisation lament its "placelessness" on these grounds.
The volcanic ash saga reveals another characteristic of such placeless
spaces: how quickly they can become a twilight zone, with those stuck in them
largely isolated from the surrounding societies.
Of course, almost everyone stuck in the airports or train stations were, by
definition, from somewhere else. In the wake of earthquakes or floods,
people will often take in their neighbours or even strangers from the same
town or country, as they share the large bonds of nation and culture. But the
stranded passengers here were "others", not part of the local or national
"us". And so, for the most part, those living in the surrounding communities
had relatively little incentive to come to their aid.
Indeed, as I watched travellers - many with young children, or themselves
elderly -remain day after day at airports and train stations it became clear
that another supposed characteristic of globalisation, that it has
increasingly "made the world one," remains far more a dream than reality.
In a dozen trips to the station in three days I never saw any Romans
offering to take anyone in. And Rome was not the exception. To be sure, there
were scattered reports of good Samaritan behavior in the US and a Europe, but
there was no significant, organised movement by locals to house or
otherwise help the stranded.
Coach potatoes and "couch surfers"
Even if people were sympathetic to the plight of the travelers, most
remained content to participate in the saga passively, by watching the nearly
continuous reporting of its unfolding on television. Few took matters into
their own hands and reached out to those most in need.
It's ironic then, that as I finally boarded a flight from Rome to Barcelona
on Monday-which was almost cancelled at the last minute by the ash cloud's
rapid southward descent towards towards both cities-the first article in
the airline magazine was about the rising phenomenon of "couch surfing," a
movement in which people open their homes, or rather their couches, to
travellers wishing to experience a supposedly more authentic taste of the
cities
they're visiting.
As the movement's main organisation, "Couch Surfing International,"
explains, "We envision a world where everyone can explore and create
meaningful
connections with the people and places they encounter. Building meaningful
connections across cultures enables us to respond to diversity with
curiosity, appreciation and respect. The appreciation of diversity spreads
tolerance
and creates a global community".
This is a laudable goal to be sure, but despite the movement's almost two
million "couch surfers" there was little evidence of the practice when it
was most needed in Rome, Milan, or Barcelona, apparently among the most
active couch surfing cities in Europe.
Sharing destinies, at least for a few days
But if stranded travellers were largely either ignored or, via television,
gawked at like accident victims by those not sharing their fate, inside the
train stations and airport terminals the boundaries of nation, religion
and ethnic identity quickly faded away.
National identities and cultural particularities suddenly don't matter very
much when you're desperately trying to get home. Abandoned by the outside
world, inside the terminals people struck up friendships, encouraged each
other's perseverance, shared food, computers and phones, and gave each other
hints about what airports where open or where to find lodging.
Suddenly, airports and train station became real "places" filled with
social meaning and contact. And the ad hoc rainbow coalitions that formed
within
them revealed the potential for solidarity when more exclusive national or
religious identities are laid aside, and narrow self-interest along with
it. That is perhaps the true potential of globalisation, and it was revealed
precisely when the larger system fell apart.
Time to slow down?
In the midst of all the bad news surrounding the volcanic ash saga, I read
a short article reporting that the massive grounding of planes prevented
the emission of upwards of six millions tons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, an amount that dwarfed the amount of carbon released into the
atmosphere by the volcano's eruption by about a factor of twenty.
Perhaps this is a sign from mother nature-that despite her immense power,
it is humans who ultimately have the upper hand when it comes to reshaping
the world on a planetary scale. In this regard, the explosion of plane
travel has been driven by the same factors as globalisation more broadly: the
revolution in inexpensive computerised technology, the abundant supply of
relatively cheap carbon-based fuel, and a seemingly unquenchable need for
speed.
Its disruption offered an opportunity to pause and consider the
possibilities of living at a slower pace, of buying locally grown seasonal
produce
rather than relying on "fresh" fruit flown in from half a world a way, of
putting more of society's energies into supporting the once pleasurable
experience of traveling by energy-efficient trains rather than carbon-spewing
planes, of becoming couch surfers rather than road warriors. Of turning off
the
news and closing your laptop and letting nature take its course.
If I'd followed that advice, I would have wound up being able to catch my
original flight home, on Thursday, with only minor modifications. In the
meantime, I could have stayed in Rome or taken the train down to Napoli to
visit friends. With time to wait on line and practice my Italian with other
art-lovers, I might have even gotten to see that Caravaggio exhibit everyone
was talking about. Sadly, it will be over the next time I get to Rome.
Mark LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and
author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam, and Impossible Peace:
Israel/Palestine Since 1989. He is also a visiting research fellow at the
Center
for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Lund, Sweden.
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