Global Outreach: Speaking to the Awakening World
While presidential candidates pick fights over polarity—which countries are gaining power and which are declining—they are missing the most dramatic shift in foreign policy in centuries: the rise of individuals within each country vis-à-vis their governments.
In previous centuries, kings made the foreign policy for their realm, without consulting powerless peasants. True, businesses such as the British East India Company conducted some policy, but only after being granted a direct charter by the monarchy to act on its behalf. The eighteenth century saw the rise of democracy. But citizens could only elect their leaders, not conduct foreign policy. Governments still dealt with other governments. For much of the twentieth century, an individual could affect foreign policy only by joining the government, or maybe by holding one of the very few positions of influence that then existed outside government.
But in the latter half of the century, this model began to break down. Multinational businesses, wielding immense resources in otherwise weak countries, began to have policy influence. Financial flows resulting from thousands of traders’ individual decisions became big enough to influence other nations’ currencies and to create economic pressures that affected policy. Groups of citizens also started to make their voices heard internationally. Amnesty International became an influential global player; the International Campaign to Ban Landmines won a Nobel Prize as much for its organizational model as for its cause.
