Interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter/ YOICHI FUNABASHI, Editor in Chief: Most-connected nations will carry heaviest weight in globalization

Editor's note: This is the ninth installment of an interview series that appeared in the vernacular Asahi Shimbun under the title "Brave, grave new world."

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Which nations will really have the power in a world in which people, products and money increasingly move across national borders? What roles will universities, foundations, nongovernmental organizations and entrepreneurs play in such a global environment? Anne-Marie Slaughter, a key planner of U.S. foreign policy, discusses these issues.

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Question: You argue that the 21st century increasingly looks like another American century. Please explain how you have come to this conclusion.

Answer: The best name might be the "global century," with America still very much at the center, not the only node, but a central node. The idea of an Asian century is still premised on the geopolitical thinking of the 19th and 20th centuries, where international relations consist of big powers jockeying for position.

In those traditional geopolitical terms, then, obviously, Asia is where powers are rising, because their economies and military expenditures are growing, while Europe is declining because its defense spending is declining. By this measure, the United States is in the middle.

But my argument is that that's just not the right way to think about the 21st century world. We are still actually in a world where states are still very important, military power is still very important, and we could still find ourselves in a terrible military conflict.

But increasingly, the defining characteristic of our age is not just interdependence because that means states can depend on each other and still be quite distinct, but interconnectedness, meaning that we are all part of a vast web, so dense that we can't even see all the connections.

In a world that is deeply interconnected, then the right way of thinking about power is who's the most connected, because that's how you make things happen. It's who is the most connected to the actors who can enable you to achieve results. And in that regard, I think the United States is still the single most-connected nation.

Q: Why do you use the word "connectivity" instead of "openness?" The concept of openness has long been in use; the United States has been, perhaps, the most open country in the world, and I think that has been one of the core strengths of America.

A: Well, I would say the two are directly linked, but they're not the same. It's important to clarify that when I say "connected," I mean "globally connected." I don't just mean connected within a country. I mean globally connected, and I mean diversely connected. I also don't just mean just connected online. I really don't. I mean, for instance, human connections. The United States has connections, because of its diversity of its population, to every country in the world.

Indeed, many of the most interesting phenomena or products or innovations result precisely from the juxtaposition or the collision of people in different countries, different cultures, and the ability to find things half the world away, whether those be ideas or products, that they don't have at home.

If you take taxi drivers in any American city, it's a small United Nations, right there. And they are all still connected to their families and communities back home. That diversity has tremendous power in terms of being able to assimilate new ideas, new energy, the ability to get our ideas out, our products out and our people out, but also to bring people back in.

You can only have that kind of connectedness in an open society. You can't control how people connect. Indeed, again, that's part of the dynamic of a connected world. You can't see or control the ways the networks will develop, any more than you can on Facebook. You can't predict which sites are going to suddenly become the sites that everybody goes to.

But it's not all necessarily positive. You also can't predict when a money laundering network and a drug network are going to intersect with a terrorism network. So, it shouldn't be seen as all wonderful, but it does require a degree of openness.

Q: What will be the relationship between a network and the power and influence that would result when some kind of value is added to that network?

A: The central insight of my argument is that, in a connected world, power does not come from hierarchy, because there is no hierarchy; human relations are much more horizontal. The most powerful people are the people who are the most connected and, thus, who can most easily find the people or the knowledge they need to get things done and who can most effectively transmit knowledge to link up or mobilize others behind a certain idea or product or political movement.

So, the connectedness, itself, is a measure of power. Now, whether that's good power or bad power or political power or economic power or cultural power, all of that depends. So, ideology, values, morals, national purpose, leadership--all of that still makes a big difference. If power depends on the size of a nation's army, then the nation with the biggest military is the most powerful. But how it uses its power is a whole different thing. So, similarly, I would say the most connected are the most powerful.

Q: Is this an essential part of what you have called "smart power?"

A: "Smart power" refers to cultural power and economic power and scientific power and diplomatic power and military power, all together. And I would say a key part of "smart power" is understanding how to harness the power of connections. That can be as simple as understanding how to use new media. When Secretary Clinton travels and she has a town meeting that is webcast, and then we send out that interview to different embassies and we allow people to comment on it, you're using technology to connect to audiences you never could have reached before. So that's one way that you harness the power of connection.

Another way is to understand the value of demographics, of understanding that your immigrant populations can be tremendous assets. So the State Department helped to set up the Pakistani-American Foundation for Pakistani-Americans to help the people of Pakistan. You can imagine doing that in many ways, creating ways in which Americans who are first-generation or second-generation Americans can connect back positively to their home country.

Still another way is to build connections across governments and societies by investing a lot of time and effort into developing relationships with powers returning to or rising on the world stage, powers with which the U.S. has not traditionally had close relations.

So we're only beginning to understand and harness the power of connections, but certainly that's a key part of "smart power."

Secretary Clinton feels very strongly, and the president as well, that the power of development, of enabling people, globally, to live up to their potential, to enjoy as many of the opportunities that other people enjoy as possible, is as important to solving national and global problems as traditional government-to-government diplomacy.

So if you think about the Middle East, you're never going to have a long-term solution in the Middle East, even if you get government-to-government agreement, unless you're also providing for the people of the Middle East, the young people, the women, the minorities, different religious groups.

So the idea of building the capacity of states to provide for their people, and building the capacity of people to live to their full potential is a key part of foreign policy.

Whereas before, foreign policy was government-to-government, and "development" was often something done out of charity or out of interest. I mean, you might be doing development to help particular states that you wanted on your side in a larger struggle, but traditional diplomats did not see using their skills and connections to help solve problems that affect ordinary people or provide opportunities for those, as an integral part of what the State Department does.

And now we're thinking that our diplomacy must further our development goals and that development is the only path to long-term stability and security for many countries.

In Japanese terms, I would say this is the full recognition of human security as well as state security. That's not the way we tend to talk about it, but in many ways Japan pioneered that idea.

Q: I have done some research on the evolution of the APEC countries, and the basic thrust of this regional development strategy is focused on liberalization, not development. The United States has traditionally pursued liberalization. They're not too interested in development because they have shown concerns that overemphasis on development could turn APEC into an aid agency or an aid program.

I think it's time, perhaps, for the U.S. to change its view of the regional architecture policy by incorporating a developmental strategy, ranging from education, human capacity-building and even infrastructure, into that mechanism.

A: Well, the first thing to say is that I think there's a widespread recognition in this government that we need to think about trade and development together. That there are, obviously, difficult politics, always, around trade. But to pour assistance into a country while not buying its products is giving with one hand and taking away with another.

So we have been thinking much more from an integrated perspective, in that regard.

I think it's noteworthy that the most interesting political development of the 20th century was the rise of the EU. You took a group of countries who at the beginning of the 20th century were trying to destroy each other and, by the end of the 20th century, they had created a 20-odd-country entity with an economy as large as the United States.

It started with a customs union, essentially a free trade agreement. Economic interests are probably the strongest glue. It is striking, when you look at that and then you look at the way regional trade patterns are developing, particularly in Asia, where intra-Asian trade is actually higher than intra-European trade. That is a stunning statistic.

If you look at the Entrepreneurship Summit, that's exactly what that is. That's bringing together entrepreneurs from all over the Muslim world and elsewhere and connecting them to each other and to American businesses, to venture capitalists, to business schools, to all the different resources and people that are necessary to nurture entrepreneurship. When the summit concluded, the participants went back home, but the the networks that have been created will continue to grow.

The underlying idea is that no amount of assistance is as good as homegrown entrepreneurs who can really create business that can employ local people and can grow. So we're going to support entrepreneurship by convening people and connecting them to one another and to the resources they need to succeed.

Q: On the one hand, you are seeing the first "globals" emerging, and I think it's very encouraging to see this new generation who have family and friends living outside the United States. At the same time, when you read some Chicago Council on Global Affairs opinion polls, they all point out that more introverted, even isolationist tendencies are now emerging in middle America.

A: Well, I'm an optimist and the U.S. history has always had waves of isolationism and internationalism, relatively, and the internationalists have always prevailed because, in the end, we're constantly getting influxes of people from new countries. So as long as immigration continues, I think the internationalism will win out.

Those who are not connected increasingly feel that difference. That there is this globalized, connected society but they've been left behind, they don't have the same opportunities. That creates resentment and backlash against globalization, as well as an intensification of local and national identities.

President Obama understands very deeply that to play the global role we want to play, we have to have a stronger domestic foundation. I mean, that is essential in education, in health care, in rebuilding our economy so that it provides opportunity for a much wider slice of our society.

Q: I found your concept of "overseas Americans" extremely thought-provoking. Could you elaborate a bit further on how to promote this concept of "overseas Americans," particularly as a policy instrument? This is America's case, but you can apply it to any country.

A: We should welcome young Americans going out and making their lives connecting other countries to the U.S. You know there's, very frequently, this sense that we're losing "the best and the brightest" when second-generation Chinese-Americans or Indian-Americans go back to China or India to make their fortune.

I see that as a huge gain. They are still Americans. They grew up here, and even if they choose to live abroad, they'll still send their kids back for camps and schools. They'll go back and forth. They'll build businesses, NGOs, and social and cultural networks connecting their two worlds .

So part of it is just changing our mind-set. We are a country that assumes everybody comes in. So if people are leaving, we think, "Uh-oh!"

My point is, in a globalized world, that is just a great asset. And, living in China for a year, where you saw the value of the overseas Chinese, I thought--we've got overseas Americans in every country in the world. So the first thing is just not to discourage it, to encourage it, to see this as an asset, to make it easy for people to come back and forth.

I think part of it is to be much more relaxed about dual nationality, which we have gradually become. Some people want to be dual nationals. Although, many people may want to become dual nationals, very few want to give up their American citizenship.

Q: I see. Getting back to China, you lived in China for one year. How did you see this sort of tension between the globally connected and globally networked and the globally disconnected or disnetworked within Chinese society?

A: Well, on the one hand, as I said, China already has an extraordinary model of global networks with Chinese who've often left centuries ago, and yet retain a Chinese identity. As I wrote in my article, if you ask them their nationality, they may have grown up in Australia and been educated in the United States, but they describe themselves as "overseas Chinese."

And indeed, we went to a beautiful little museum on the Tang Dynasty near Xian. It's a museum that celebrated the Tang period as a period of being open to the world and bringing the world's riches to China and China's riches to other countries. So today, China sees that the times that it has been most open to the world have been when it has been the most prosperous.

But those times have typically been followed by times of really cutting itself off, much more than the United States could ever do. China is also not an immigrant society. It welcomes many people from all over the world to the big cities to do business, but the Chinese government has spent millennia trying to hold the Chinese people together and defend them against invaders. That is a very different social and cultural self-understanding than a society like the United States, like Australia, like Canada or Brazil, countries that really feel themselves to be made up of many different groups.

Q: While China invented the compass, fireworks, paper and tofu, it appears to have fallen behind the United States in terms of inventions and creativity. What do you think are the reasons for this development? Does it have something to do with DNA or the political system, or something else?

A: No, I think much more the political system. I don't think this is DNA at all. I think any society, and certainly China, given its size and its glorious civilization, can be deeply innovative. So I don't think for a minute it's DNA.

And those who have assumed that there couldn't be indigenous innovation in China are wrong. There's a lot of innovation.

It's striking that a lot of it is in places like Shanghai, which are relatively much more open than other parts of China.

My point was simply that, from my experience, and my experience as a professor, for decades, the single most important ingredient in innovation is the willingness to challenge authority. It's to say, "I don't care if you think the world is all black; I'm going to prove to you that part of it is white."

That's a habit of mind that has to be encouraged, and it's not always comfortable. Some of the smartest students, the most innovative, creative, are the most obnoxious. They're the ones who are always telling you you're wrong! Right? And if you look at the culture of Silicon Valley, what you've got is a lot of people who are nonconformist and they're nonconformist in a particular way. They challenge authority. They go their own way. And you have to accept a lot of discomfort, disorder, and following paths without any clear idea of where they may lead.

And my point was simply that the Chinese educational system has not traditionally cultivated those habits of mind. That will probably have to change for China to build the culture of innovation that it wants.

Q: Perhaps if China really becomes a democracy in the 21st century, then I think we may see a huge competition between China and America for the most dynamic network society. Both of them certainly have so much capability for networking. So the 21st century, perhaps, may not be America's century, but could be China's century if China were to become a democracy.

A: Yes. Although, then, I think we all win. We, the United States, wanted to see the EU become the EU. You might say this entity, which used to be France and Germany and England, all small countries who couldn't challenge you, now, on trade, you've just created an entity of 500 million people and a bigger economy than yours. Why would you want to do that?

Well, the answer is that as long as they're liberal democracies, we all gain. So if China, Japan and Korea were all liberal democracies and were all in the open and engaging with each other, and the United States is across the Pacific, absolutely there'd be a competition. But it's a competition that benefits everybody.

Q: You have mentioned that network connectivity, particularly bottom-up, has really been changing the world. For instance, the anti-land mine movement, as well as the human rights group calling for the establishment of an International Criminal Court. But the United States did not ratify the Landmine Treaty or the ICC.

Why has this been the case? Do you think the United States will change its serious reservations about being part of this global treaty system?

A: Yes, I do. And in the year that President Obama has been in office, we've already concluded the START Treaty; we're trying to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; we support a climate change treaty.

With regard to landmines and the ICC, you have a situation in which one country bears a vastly disproportionate military burden, and so needs things that most other countries don't need, or fears things that most other countries don't fear, precisely because we have a military that is guaranteeing the security of many, many others. So the U.S. position on those two treaties should not be read as a general opposition to a global treaty system. We benefit directly from a strong and sustainable world order.

Q: Among some of the problems people have with American foreign policy is that the U.S., so far, has not been fully committed to the international system. Which issue do you think hurts America's image and standing in the world the most, particularly in terms of its "soft power?"

A: I think the single greatest problem, from a "soft power" aspect, is the inequality. I think that people come here and they see the riches, but they also see people who don't get decent health care at all, or who don't have, really, a basic safety net. Then when you're in a developing country, and you look at China, and you look at how fast it's developed, and you see there are huge inequalities. But you also see a state that is deeply concerned with getting people jobs and, ultimately, taking care of them, versus a society that has some of the richest people anywhere but seems unable to provide that floor. I think that is, actually, our greatest problem.

And for us, again, to be able to play the role globally that we want to, and that I think many nations need us to, it leads nations to start wondering about alternatives to the American political and economic system and to the universal values that the United States is founded on and champions. So we need to fix our domestic foundation. But we're doing it.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter was appointed director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in January 2009, taking two years off as the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is the first woman to assume the post created in 1947.

In her article "America's Edge" that appeared in the January/February 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs, she predicted the United States・unique ability to take advantage of connectivity would make the 21 century an American century.

She earned her Ph.D in international relations from Oxford University. Her article "Transgovernmentalism" in the September/October 1997 edition of Foreign Affairs drew wide attention. It was written on the basis of her research on the transformation of the role of governments and international law in globalization.

She served as president of the American Society of International Law from 2002 to 2004. She was a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies from 2007 to 2008.