Human tribes, in contrast, tend to coalesce over time into larger and larger groups. Modern Germans were created from the merger of Saxons, Prussians, Swabians and Bavarians, who not so long ago wasted little love on one another. Otto von Bismarck allegedly remarked (having read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) that the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the human.10 The French were created from the merger of Franks, Normans, Bretons, Gascons and Proven?als. Meanwhile across the Channel, English, Scots, Welsh and Irish were gradually welded together (willingly or not) to form Britons. In the not too distant future, Germans, French and Britons might yet merge into Europeans.
Mergers don’t always last, as people in London, Edinburgh and Brussels are keenly aware these days. Brexit may well initiate the simultaneous unravelling of both the UK and the EU. But in the long run, history’s direction is clear-cut. Ten thousand years ago humankind was divided into countless isolated tribes. With each passing millennium, these fused into larger and larger groups, creating fewer and fewer distinct civilisations. In recent generations the few remaining civilisations have been blending into a single global civilisation. Political, ethnic, cultural and economic divisions endure, but they do not undermine the fundamental unity. Indeed, some divisions are made possible only by an overarching common structure. In the economy, for example, division of labour cannot succeed unless everyone shares a single market. One country cannot specialise in producing cars or oil unless it can buy food from other countries that grow wheat and rice.
The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms: establishing links between distinct groups, and homogenising practices across groups. Links may be formed even between groups that continue to behave very differently. Indeed, links may form even between sworn enemies. War itself can generate some of the strongest of all human bonds. Historians often argue that globalisation reached a first peak in 1913, then went into a long decline during the era of the world wars and the Cold War, and recuperated only after 1989.11 This may be true of economic globalisation, but it ignores the different but equally important dynamic of military globalisation. War spreads ideas, technologies and people far more quickly than commerce. In 1918 the United States was more closely linked to Europe than in 1913, the two then drifted apart in the interwar years, only to have their fates meshed together inextricably by the Second World War and the Cold War.
War also makes people far more interested in one another. Never had the US been more closely in touch with Russia than during the Cold War, when every cough in a Moscow corridor sent people scrambling up and down Washington staircases. People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.
The Medieval Olympics
The world of the early twenty-first century has gone way beyond forming links between different groups. People across the globe are not only in touch with one another, they increasingly share identical beliefs and practices. A thousand years ago, planet Earth provided fertile ground to dozens of different political models. In Europe you could find feudal principalities vying with independent city states and minuscule theocracies. The Muslim world had its caliphate, claiming universal sovereignty, but also experimented with kingdoms, sultanates and emirates. The Chinese empires believed themselves to be the sole legitimate political entity, while to the north and west tribal confederacies fought each other with glee. India and South East Asia contained a kaleidoscope of regimes, whereas polities in America, Africa and Australasia ranged from tiny hunter-gatherer bands to sprawling empires. No wonder that even neighbouring human groups had trouble agreeing on common diplomatic procedures, not to mention international laws. Each society had its own political paradigm, and found it difficult to understand and respect alien political concepts.
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.