Guest blogger - Brooks Rosenquist
Brooks Rosenquist is a doctoral student in Education Policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennesee. He has lived in Taiwan and Spain, and is looking forward to his next international adventure.
“Some of the houses in this neighborhood are FIFTY years old!” That’s how I remember a quote from Steve Martin’s character in LA Story. Growing up in California, my sense of history of place didn’t go back too far. I was surrounded by relatively new buildings and the car and commuter culture they were built around. Although on our fourth grade field trips, we did visit some of the few oldest local historic sites, such as those associated with the Gold Rush of 1849. When it came time to go to college, this young man headed east, to Washington DC, and my sense of history of place was forced back a few centuries. Then, junior year, I headed even further east, for a semester abroad in Salamanca, Spain. For me, this required a quantum leap in my sense of history of place: in Salamanca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, they have two cathedrals, and the one they call “the new cathedral” dates back to the 1500s.
When I am lucky enough to travel abroad for any period of time, I’ve learned I have to try to do at least a little background on the place, the language, the customs, the cuisine, the geography, and the history. I remember living in Taipei, seeking out books on Chinese history in one of the few small bookstores that specialized in English language books, hoping to teach myself something about the sequence and characteristics of the more than twenty dynasties and five thousand years of history in order to put in context some of the ancient treasures I saw on display at the National Palace Museum,. Then again, instead of just reading about the raw facts of history from one era, country, or culture, you sometimes need a book that really puts it into perspective for you, providing the big picture and showing you how its patterns and lessons are applied in our world today.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to read Parag Khanna’s book “The Second World”, where he describes his travels though the world while presenting the argument that, after the Cold War, there is substantial shift of power to the middle-income countries and emerging economies, as the powers of Europe, China, and the US court these countries for access to markets and natural resources. While others have expounded variations on this theme, Khanna does so particularly coherently and convincingly; the book reads like a travelogue, so that you can read it straight through or skip around to the sections on the countries that interest you most, enjoying the author’s mix of political analysis and entertaining details and observations. I was in college with Khanna, and after this book was published, he really started to get some of the acclaim that, when I met him, was just limited to the college campus. It was really cool to see my old classmate on TV doing interviews with Charlie Rose and on CNN with Farheed Zakaria.
Khanna is coming out with his second book later this month, and this time, he is really taking a broad, sweeping, historical approach to his analysis. With a decline of influence of the world’s superpowers, political, economic, and even military power is devolving not only to emerging market governments, but also to corporations, armed resistance groups, and non-profit, philanthropic, and other international organizations. In this book, called “How to Run the World: Charting a Course for the Next Renaissance,” Khanna draws upon history to construct a comparison with another time in global history when power was also widely dispersed in this way: the Middle Ages.
For example, while Europe struggled to find it’s way and even lost some of the technological know-how developed by the Romans, empires in China, India, and the Arab world flourished. The Byzantine Empire, based in modern day Turkey, served as a stable link between the East and West. Khanna sees a reflection of many elements of the Middle Ages in our own times, with the US playing the role this time of the multicultural Byzantine Empire, linking East and West. While those with a Euro-centric vision of history think of these centuries as a time of stagnation, it was in many ways a high point for much of the rest of the world. When the knowledge retained and developed in the East was reintroduced to a stabilized Europe, the continent experienced a cultural Renaissance.
From his title, it seems like that is a vision of the world which Khanna would like to encourage: a world with stable and widely distributed economic and political power, which is so interconnected on multiple levels that it avoids war and instead allows for the development of art, commerce, dialog, and travel. Hopefully, those that are in the position to make a difference on a global scale will read Khanna’s book and start to make this vision a reality. For those of us who intend to go or continue to “go global,” this dynamic and interconnected vision of the world is an enticing one, indeed.
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