Move, page 7
The situation is similar in South Korea, where 83 percent of men say they would dodge conscription if they could. Poor retention has shrunk the army to just eighty thousand. Older South Koreans are prone to viewing North Korea as an existential threat, while the younger generation supports President Moon’s agenda of reunification. Indeed, one of the government’s motivations in opening North Korea is to create jobs for legions of unemployed young South Korean males who would be sent to North Korea not as soldiers but nation builders. Seoul has recently dabbled in trying to recruit more women—something men also strongly support, as revenge for the country’s strong #MeToo movement. Given their low fertility rate and trending #NoMarriage meme, women can’t use family life as an excuse. The same is true in Japan, where the fertility rate is so low that the Self-Defense Forces have tried appealing to women, to little avail.
How about China? Chinese youth are constantly exposed to nationalistic dogma, but overall they’re far more materialistic than militaristic. They know China may have to fight America to expel it from their neighborhood, but wouldn’t want such a conflict to disrupt their comfortable existence. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, China expanded its one-year military service program in the name of building nationalism. But soon after, it was reduced to two weeks of lectures and fitness training at the beginning of the first year of university.
Why have militaries at all? Countries such as Mexico are weighing disbanding their armies, replacing militaries with stronger national guards focused on fighting drugs and crime—and controlling migrants. Washington compelled Mexico to deploy more robust forces to block Central Americans from reaching the Rio Grande, resulting in hundreds of thousands more Guatemalans and Hondurans staying within Mexico’s borders. Officially, the country has less than 2 million foreign-born residents; the unofficial figure is twice that. Brazil, too, faces no international military threat; its largest military deployments have been to protect the Amazon. Meanwhile, Kenya and Ethiopia are marshaling their air forces to combat swarms of billions of locusts rather than each other. Across the world, militaries played a crucial role in combating the coronavirus as warships became hospitals and armies erected medical tents.
America’s military also needs to refocus on existential domestic missions. As ever more bases, from Florida to Nebraska to Alaska, are threatened by floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, the armed forces are spending more time and money simply keeping themselves operational.9 After an embarrassingly and deadly year of Covid-19 mismanagement, it was the capable and disciplined Defense Department that accelerated Operation Warp Speed in support of vaccine manufacturing and deployment. Perhaps nationalism should be redefined as recognizing that we are often our own worst enemies and doing something about it.
Most countries can and should have a one-year national service requirement for both men and women, to take care of urgent contributions to social cohesion and civic culture such as elder care, migrant assimilation, and helping unfit people get into shape. Bill Clinton made national service a centerpiece of his presidential campaign in 1992. Thirty years later, America still has no such mandatory program. Teach for America is both competitive and respected, but it’s also small and underfunded. There are countless ways to blend patriotism with pragmatism. Societies with national service have more solidarity—and without that, nationalism ultimately means nothing.
What about religion?
If nationalism is overstated as an animus today, then so too is religion. Religious identity is by definition stateless. Christians and Muslims can be considered the largest communities in the world with an estimated 2.2 billion Christians and 1.8 billion Muslims spread across the planet. In practice, however, most Christians and Muslims (or adherents of any other faith) identify as or more strongly—or weakly—with their nation as with their religion.VI What nationalism and religion hold in common is that for most people they are spectator sports—and most people actually devote far more time to actual sports (whether playing or spectating). This helps explain why ever more young Arabs have taken refuge in Malaysia and Indonesia, where they can be practicing Muslims without the oppressive politics.
It has been demonstrated time and time again how weak religion is as a geopolitical agent. The most obvious example is the plight of the Palestinians, who despite all rhetoric evoke far more sympathy than action from their fellow Arab Muslims. Their feeble response to Jewish territorialism has had grave consequences for Palestinians, with both Muslims and Christians seeking refuge abroad. And as Israel annexes the Jordan Valley while explicitly denying its residents Israeli citizenship, ever more Palestinians will move to Jordan itself, already home to more than 2 million of their refugee diaspora. Nor have Muslim states made anything other than perfunctory statements of concern about China’s internment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. In fact, in 2019 many signed a declaration supporting China’s tough stance against the risks of religious extremism—something they fear as much as China does.
Religious majoritarianism is a very useful tool to mask what are more secular and territorial agendas. Religious persecution has driven large numbers of Christians out of India and China as well, eliminating what is much more a political than a spiritual nuisance. More than 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya have been expelled from Myanmar and live precariously as refugees in Bangladesh. There and in Sri Lanka, militant regimes have persecuted ethnic and religious minorities not because their faith poses a threat but because of the land and resources on which they sit.
The coronavirus pandemic also forced religion to take a backseat to secular priorities. From South Korean churches to mosques in Pakistan to temples in Israel, religious sites were superspreaders of disease. Saudi Arabia was even forced to close Mecca to Muslim pilgrims. Buddhists view the pandemic as one of several varieties of scourge including poverty, war, greed, and drought. In the face of the apocalypse, will people return to religion, praying that each season doesn’t bring even greater calamity? Some certainly might, and it will surely make the news. Most people, however, will save themselves in a more tried and tested way: They’ll move.
I. In total, half the world’s population lives in countries falling within this so-called “fertility trap” of sub-replacement birth rates (anything less than two children per mother).
II. The Global Talent Competitiveness Index ranks countries by their ability to attract skilled workers and retain them. Its top performers include Switzerland, Singapore, the US, Britain, Sweden, Australia, and Canada, with all the other top scorers being European.
III. In the three years after 9/11, international student applications to the US dropped by 30 percent, and a decade later net enrollment of foreign students had fallen by 2.4 percent. Burton Bollag, “Foreign Enrollments at American Universities Drop for the First Time in 32 Years,” Chronicle, November 10, 2004.
IV. This has already impacted regional migrations: Those Hindus who remained in Pakistan after Partition have been returning to India in record numbers—doubling every year to more than twelve thousand in 2018.
V. Veterans, including those who have served over the past twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, constitute their own social class of families, settled perhaps not far from the bases they served at, their families dependent on social services and welfare provided by military benefits.
VI. This is in itself evidence that identities are multiple and overlapping. It’s ironic, then, that nationalists accuse many ordinary religious people of being extremists when they are in fact most familiar with the challenge of holding manifold identities. It’s nationalists who are the extremists, prisoners of the simple-minded mentality of a singular identity.
CHAPTER 3 GENERATION MOVE
The first global generation
Exactly twenty-five years ago I was a card-carrying intern in the United Nations Youth Unit—and the only actual youth on the team. Most of the unit’s budget was spent on convening and training young activists to lobby their governments to include their views when making social policy. Those millennials have gone on to become progressive mayors and ministers, “cause-mopolitans” running social justice groups, managers at multilateral humanitarian organizations, and corporate “intra-praneurs” advancing stakeholder engagement, sustainable supply chains, and impact investment funds. So many youth want these jobs that business, law, and policy schools have undergone massive curricular upgrades to cope with the demand.
One unshakable observation I recall from those youth-focused internships in the 1990s was that even though each delegate was focused on national change at home, their camaraderie was generational. The same is true of political identity: It is now more generational than national. As Karl Mannheim explained in the 1920s, generations are not just biological but also sociological: shared experiences shape their psychology.1 But only in the past thirty years have truly global events served as generational milestones: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the financial crisis of 2008, and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. During this same time frame, migration exploded, mobile phones and the Internet reached universal scale, and climate change became an existential planetary threat. The late sociologist Ulrich Beck was correct that technology has enabled self-awareness beyond geography and class. The 1968 student demonstrations were neither as global nor as inclusive as today’s #MeToo, climate action, and racial equity movements.
In fact, today’s youth hold common views across geography far more than they do with older people in their own countries. We tend to think of nations as having a common mindset, but millennials and Gen-Z share values on a global scale—especially the right to connectivity, mobility, and sustainability.2 For no previous generation could we so confidently pinpoint these or other common traits as we can for billions of young people today. The great divide in the world is therefore not East versus West or North versus South but young versus old.
I have great sympathy for the youth predicament. Over the past twenty years, I’ve queried countless entrepreneurs and activists, students and professors, politicians and journalists, fixers and translators about what life is like for the young in their countries. During the past two years of research and workshops, I’ve had the chance to speak with hundreds of young professionals in small group discussions. What I found is that almost nothing looks the same through their eyes: geopolitical rivalry (irrelevant), financial capitalism (hate it), electoral democracy (nonessential), home ownership (a drag), marriage (later, if ever), or even a college education (too expensive).
The best form of government…?
Younger generations have been increasingly disillusioned with democracy; millennial respondents exhibited the lowest level of satisfaction with their government.
In all these sessions, the one question they always ask me is: What is the one skill most essential for their success? More than ever, my answer is: Whatever skill you have, make sure it’s portable. Be ready to move. I suppose I might know a thing or two about moving. On average, I’ve moved every three to four years of my life. My family moved around regularly even when we didn’t have a powerful passport (Indian). Every move I’ve made since my teenage years, between the US, Europe, and Asia, has reinforced the intellectual and professional benefits of shifting geographies.
We underestimate people’s willingness to leave their home country, perhaps out of some unconscious bias that others may be as comfortable in their homes as we are in ours. It’s true that, historically, people have tended to settle near their national tribe; even many who ventured abroad returned to care for elderly parents or to start a family. Overseas Chinese, for example, speak of such “cultural recognition” or “searching for my roots” that lures them back home. But youth who don’t have children don’t need to go “home” to raise them a particular way, nor do they need their parents to help out. In any case, today’s grandparents don’t expect their children to return, so they’re moving into professional care centers and can’t be full-time babysitters. Perhaps most of all, today’s world is full of places where youth can co-create their social milieu rather than submitting to a predefined culture.
Even across countries with very different standards of living, youth face similar economic challenges. For example, American wages have stagnated since the 1990s while home prices have doubled, healthcare costs have risen by 280 percent, and college tuition by 500 percent. American millennials and Gen-Zers owe about $1.5 trillion in student debt and even more in credit card debt. A 2019 Federal Reserve report states that millennials “are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.”3 Despite its military might, deep financial markets, innovative talent, and entrepreneurial dynamism, America is also a nation of listless youth with low savings and weak confidence in the future.
By contrast, Chinese youth are far better off than even their parents could ever have imagined. The 1980s reforms of Deng Xiaoping rapidly elevated China into the factory floor of the world and the fastest growing economy, achieving the most extensive mass poverty alleviation in history, with the bottom 50 percent seeing their incomes quadruple. Yet overall they share the same daily concerns over the lack of quality jobs and rising living costs as Americans.4 The only affordable homes in Beijing are outside the city’s fifth ring, and a thirty-year mortgage takes a whole extended family to pay off. Chinese loan sharks have also exploited a cash-strapped generation, plunging millions into debt as they borrow from one digital lender to pay off the others.
For the young, urban, and skilled, China remains a land of opportunity. Educated and childless millennials can spend their money anywhere here; their vast domain is (like America) one enormous domestic market. They bounce from job to job among China’s megacompanies or startups without hesitation. But they’re also willing to decamp from first-tier cities if need be. China has so many growing cities that youth arrivals turn second-tier cities into the next first-tier cities. Changsha, Kunming, and Chongqing are becoming like Austin, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta—except more than ten times bigger. Chinese youth prize the national stability that enables this physical and professional mobility. That’s why, according to Oxford historian Rana Mitter, many of them have been drawn to Maoism—millennial socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Millennials worldwide also report being overworked by the grind of the gigonomy. Journalist Malcom Harris describes this young American precariat as “buzzing clouds of freelance servants, always in motion.”5 Many are bowing out and starting over at a slower pace somewhere else. Those that are unemployed have even less to lose by moving to cheaper places. Similarly, China’s iconic mogul Jack Ma has glorified working “9 9 6”—meaning 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week—while millions in China’s “ant tribe” can’t find good jobs to match their education, so they eke out a minimum wage existence on the margins of city life. Even in Japan, where century-old companies have long dominated the rigid labor market, 35 percent of youth are now temps farmed out part-time so that big firms can pare down overhead costs. Korea’s “dirt spoon” youth (as opposed to wealthier “golden spoon”) have suffered rising inequality despite promises of greater social mobility. No wonder Bong Joon Ho, director of the Oscar-winning film Parasite, has said, “Korea seems glamorous, but the young are in despair.”6
Sluggish economies, corporate downsizing, and automation have resulted in self-employment becoming the norm for Gen-Z. A career is nothing more than an assemblage of gigs and fees, whether delivering food or running errands for rich people. From San Francisco to Jakarta, “wealth work” apps pair people who are money rich and time poor with those who are money poor and time rich. Being a gigonomist becomes tedious after a decade, but that doesn’t mean full-time work will offer itself to everyone. No wonder youth blogs repeat the worn phrase “The only certainties in life are uncertainty and death.”
Most American youth have yet to start saving meaningfully for retirement—but they will have to move to more affordable places in order to ever retire at all. Many millennials who are earning decently and saving aggressively are moving out of expensive states such as California to cheaper ones such as Oregon or Arizona. Being mobile—and having few possessions and no children—is the surest way to stretch one’s savings.7 For Gen-Z, stability is even more elusive. Even before Covid, they were fated to lag behind millennials and Gen-X in net worth and housing assets. The coronavirus has made their situation unfathomably worse. No wonder so many Gen-Zers have sought psychological counseling or turned to drug abuse. When I asked a friend where he thinks his Gen-Z kids would be a decade from now, his deadpan answer was “Rehab.”
Globalism without apologies
Where do today’s youth belong? Where can they feel like citizens, not only in the sense of legal membership and obligations, but pledging allegiance irrespective of their actual nationality? Can one be a “global citizen” or “citizen of the world”?
The terms are related but distinct. The phrase “global citizen” generally refers to one’s identification with our common humanity and concern for global interests such as human rights or the environment. Today there are many organizations and movements bearing the name “Global Citizen,” from NGOs combating poverty to youth leadership training programs that advocate for more civic engagement.I From Montessori nurseries to elite international schools, youth are being raised to think of themselves as global citizens through the growing number of schools teaching “global citizenship” classes and the increasingly popular international baccalaureate (IB) curriculum being adopted in high schools around the world.8 The United World College (UWC) movement has more than one dozen IB schools around the world, with thousands of students who are self-aware of their membership in a larger community. Being mission-driven becomes part of their identity. They are taught not just to “be” but to “do.”
