Chapter 1: The Rise of the Rest (and what's that mean for us?)

One only has to quickly glance through the pages of the last few decades of history to see that the world as we know it in almost every sense, whether it be political, economical, cultural, militarily or what have you, has been organized in a uni-polar heirarchy and perched at the dominant position at the top of that order has been the United States of America. It is rather intriguing then, that in a book whose title suggests a world where America is no longer the dominant force, the be-all end-all and whose title would then imply that there has been a decline from that position of top-dog, that the subject matter of the book is really "not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else."

The rise of everyone else? What does that even mean? In order to begin to even understand how a term like this applies to our world, we have to understand, in brief, how our world came to be and how the current balance of power was established.

Fareed identifies three great tectonic powershifts that have occurred in the last 500 years that have had a critical impact on our world order [1]. First, we have the Rise of the West, which occurred during the 1500's and accelerated dramatically through to the 1800's and pushed Western Europe to become the dominant force in world affairs. The second power shift was the rise to dominance of the United States, an extension of the first power shift. It took place towards the end of the 19th century and propelled the United States to become the most powerful nation since Imperial Rome. The third of these great shifts is something that we are currently living through and while it is often discussed, Fareed argues that it is a powershift that is poorly understood; This is the Rise of the Rest and the purpose of this book.

Fareed goes on to discuss the far reaching impacts of these powershifts. He credits the Rise of the West with producing "modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerece and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions (...) the prolonged political domination of the nations of the West" [2]. In a sense, everything as we know it goes back to this pivotal powershift. The second shift is credited with allowing the United States to become the dominant force in the world and a force that has been completely unrivalled in the last twenty years, an unprecedented phenomenon in modern history.
"Hey, wait a minute," you might say. "The US is still number 1 and if you don't like it, you can ggggggggggggget out!" While it is true the United States is still a dominant force in the world, the red-state mentality displayed above serves to highlight the fact that the third shift, the Rise of the Rest, is still very poorly understood and Fareed has identified a unique series of points that serve to reinforce the opinion that the tides of change are indeed upon us [3]. A number of icons that are normally associated with the West and by extension, Americanism, are no longer Western icons. The worlds tallest building is currently the Taipei 101 in Taiwan and soon to be the BurjDubai, located in the Arab Emirates. At the time of publishing (May, 2008) the world's richest man was a Mexican (Carlos Slim Helú) although Bill Gates has reclaimed that spot (the fact that he lost this position, however, remains significant.) The largest publicly traded corporation at time of publishing was Chinese, however the recession has helped the west reclaim this position as well (HSBC Holdings in the UK) The worlds biggest plane is built Russia and the Ukraine (Atonov 225) and the largest refinery in the world is under construction in India (commissioned by the Reliance group and located in Gujarat.) Additionally, the world's largest factories are located in China (of course), London is becoming the leading financial sector and the United Arab Emirates is home to the largest endowed investment fund (The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, with 2009 assets worth $875 billion US dollars.) More distinctly American icons have also been annexed from the United States, with the world's largest Ferris wheel now located in Singapore (165 meters tall!) Macao has overtaken Las Vegas in gambling revenues and is also home to the largest casino, and India's Bollywood has over taken Hollywood in terms of both movies made and ticket sales. Even shopping, which Fareed notes as "America's greatest sporting activity" (lol) is no longer an American icon, with the world's largest mall located in Beijing (The Golden Resources Mall.)

Okay, so what? Fareed had some spare time to kill and made up a list of points that nobody cares about...big whoop. Well, actually, it is a big whoop. Each of these points and titles are symbols of American ideals...capitalism and consumerism, Friedmanism and Conservative Economic policy, Free Markets, and so on. The key is that these symbols of western ideals are not just appearing in the non-western world, but appearing on a supersize scale and in large numbers. Their existence, when considered in conjunction with the fact that only 10 years ago, America was at the top of each point of this list, serves to reinforce the fact that the world is changing, globalizing and that economic, cultural, capitalist and political dominance is shifting away from the United States of America.

The big question Fareed is asking is what will it be like to live in a post-American world? The icons that Fareed focused on earlier (giant shopping malls and buildings, investment funds and so on) all deal with economic prosperity and he points out that it may seem strange to focus on prosperity when there are still huge numbers of people living in desperate poverty. Fareed states that as a direct consequence of the Rise of the Rest, "The share of people living on less than a Dollar a day plummeted from 40% in 1981 to 18% in 2004 and is estimated to fall to 12% in 2015" [4]. In the majority of the worlds countries, especially within developing areas such as Turkey, Russia, Chile and Brazil the poor are being absorbed into a productive middle class and contributing to economic growth. From this, it is important to note that while the gap between the rich and the poor is growing in many countries, the middle class is still absorbing many people from the lower rungs of society and we can conclude that the general trend is that poverty is in decline for much of the developing world and this is a result of truly global growth, something we've never witnessed before in modern history.

Fareed concludes the chapter with a statement about some of the many obstacles that this truly global order will face, including the development of many more powers and voices (as a result from the shift of influence away from the west and to the rest of the world) and the impact that will have on traditional methods of "getting things done." We're left to ponder what it would be like in this post-American world and where America will fall within the new global order.

It is my own personal opinion that the Rise of the Rest is a 'market-correction,' a return to normalcy within the world. The dominance of the West and of the United States is an anomaly in world history, a uni-polarity the likes of which have never been seen before. Even Imperial Rome faced opposition, which at one point nearly saw the Western Roman Empire crumble under pressure from Attila and if we look later into history, the Second British Empire had faced strong opposition from Napoleonic France. We just don't see the kind of sole dominance we've been living under for the last 100 or so years anywhere else in history.

It is also important to note the changes in the Icons that Fareed mentioned earlier in the chapter. Since the time of publishing, we've experienced a number of changes in the 'ownership' of those Icons, with the West reclaiming the title of "richest man" and "largest publically traded company." Of course, there may be many factors affecting this but we can probably attirubte most of them to the world-wide economic recession. We can take from this the idea that, due to years of dominance, the economic foundations of the West are much stronger than the rising economies of the Rest. Extreme growth rates don't mean much when the foundations that they're building upon are shaky and not thoroughly modernized (a historical example of idea would be Japan in the 1980's, whose economy was growing at an extreme rate, yet the foundations of this economy and institutions within the country (government, etc) were not fully modernized which directly contributed to the 15 or so year recession in the country and in part, the Asian Financial Crisis in the mid 90's.)
It is important to analyze the ideas behind post-Americanism in the context of the world-wide recession (something that was not totally applicable at the time of writing) and from this analysis, we can speculate that while growth rates are undeniably positive and the Rest are indeed rising, their rise will be much more vulnerable to trends (both positive and negative) within the world economy for quite some time. The trends of the current recession originated in the West but have had drastic impacts abroad as well, severly slowing the growth of the Rest and having drastic impacts on their economies (An example being Russia, whose stock markets have lost over $1 Trillion in value and brought economic growth to a halt (the only saving grace being the oil and gas wealth of the country [5]))

References:

F. Zakaria, The Post-American World, New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2008
[1] Pp 1
[2] Pp 1
[3] Pp 2-3
[4] Pp 4
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Russian_financial_crisis The link serves as a general information source, however there are much more specific sources within the article itself.