Quick study: Moisés Naím on power
It ain’t what it used to be
MOSES NAIM is a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. His columns about international economics and politics are published in Spain, Italy and across Latin America. He was editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy for 14 years and has served as Venezuela’s trade minister and as executive director of the World Bank. His new book, “The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be”, is published this month.
You say power has changed. How?
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Power has become perishable, transient, evanescent. Those in power today are likely to have shorter periods in power than their predecessors. I’m talking about military power and power in business, politics, religion. One of the most perplexing arenas in which this is happening is in the world of business where the conversation centres on the concentration of wealth in a few large companies. Of course there are large, powerful companies but a study by NYU professors shows that the probability of a company in the top 20% of the business sector remaining in that category five years hence has halved. The turnover rate of business executives is also increasing significantly. It is far more slippery at the top.
Why?
There is more competition and business models are changing. You no longer know where the company that is going to dislodge you will come from. Recently Kodak—almost a monopoly in photography in the 1970s—went bankrupt. At the same time an app called Instagram with 13 employees was sold for a billion dollars. Kodak could never have imagined that a competitor would come in this form. Challenges and rivals are coming from improbable places. Also, the probability that a company will have a brand-damaging catastrophe has gone from 20% to 82% in two decades.
Suggested Reading: “Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis” by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow (1999)
Because of information technology?
No. The fact that power is easier to get, harder to use and easier to lose is driven by tectonic changes in the nature of humanity today, in terms of demography, where and how we live. Micro-powers are challenging and constraining the mega-players. I’m not saying that a bunch of guerrillas in the mountains are going to win against the Pentagon, but I am saying that they might deny the Pentagon victory. A study by former Harvard scholar Ivan Arreguin-Toft on asymmetric conflicts shows that between 1800 and 1949 the weaker side won 12% of the time, but between 1950 and 1998 the weaker side won 55% of the time. Pirates in the Gulf of Aden in rickety boats with old Kalashnikovs are successfully hijacking incredibly sophisticated ships from the most modern fleets. The Taliban is another example of how the weaker army is able to deny the behemoth victory.
Suggested Reading: “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam” by Barbara Tuchman (1985)
What has changed? Why couldn’t they do this before 1949?
There have been three revolutions. The powerful are shielded by barriers of money, technology, sheer size or whatever. Those barriers are less protective now as a result of three revolutions: the more revolution, the mobility revolution and the mentality revolution.
The more revolution describes a world of abundance. There are more people—2 billion more in the last two decades. There are more young people and they live in cities—65m people a year move to cities and more than half of the human population now lives in urban settings. There are more weapons, more medicines, more political parties, more companies, more NGOs, more religions, more communications. There is also more money—global GDP has increased five-fold and per capita GDP by three and a half times.
People also move more. This is the mobility revolution. The number of people living outside their country of origin has increased 37% according to the United Nations. Therefore, people are becoming harder to govern. As Zbigniew Brzezinski says, it’s easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.
All this change has an impact on people’s mindset. This is the mentality revolution. The number of divorces of senior citizens in India is soaring, mostly initiated by women. They are more affluent, better informed and no longer willing to put up with authoritarianism. This change in cultural norms is corroborated by the World Values Survey which shows a clear movement towards openness, gender equality and increased tolerance of difference.
Suggested Reading: “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
This is generally a good thing?
I celebrate what’s happening. Dictators, monopolies and authoritarian governments are weaker and less able to impose their will. My only point of caution is that there are arenas in which this creates paralysis. Look at the Italian elections; Italy was always an example of the weakening of centralised power, but now the recent elections has taken that to an extreme. There is such a fractured mandate that nobody can form a real government. And the massacres in Syria; the world understands that it needs to stop but nobody has the power to intervene. For 30 of the 34 members of the OECD, the head of state is opposed by a parliament controlled by the opposition.
So what if you have power and want to hang on to it?
In business you need to be obsessive about what you do but you have to be careful not to let your peripheral vision be dimmed. The New York Times and Washington Post could never have imagined that their main competitors would be Craigslist and Google. Beware of situations where everyone has a little bit of power; where everyone can constrain and veto but nobody has the power to get things done. Also, beware of assuming you’re secure. Barclays under Bob Diamond was one of the few banks that thrived in the financial crisis but he lost his job anyway. The world had 89 dictators in 1977, now we only have 23. The world has become a less secure place for authoritarian regimes.
Suggested Reading: “The General in his Labyrinth” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1990)
Book Review: The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moisés Naím
Power is shifting from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, and from presidential palaces to public squares. As a result, writes Moisés Naím, all leaders have less power than their predecessors, and the potential for upheaval is unprecedented. The author’s insights into the halls of power from China to Sweden make this a fascinating read, finds Ainsley Elbra.
The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be. Moisés Naím. Basic Books. March 2013.
Find this book:
Moisés Naím is well placed to discuss global power, having served as Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy, an Executive Director of the World Bank, and currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In his latest contribution,The End of Power, he asserts that “being in charge isn’t what it used to be”, principally due to the “decay of power”. While dispersion of power might be a more accurate reflection, his point is clear: power is no longer located in traditional settings. The aim of the book is to ask readers to question the way we think about, talk about, and ultimately understand, power. His work is timely, and parallels the emergence of powerful fringe parties throughout the Western world and the increasingly powerful role being played by non-traditional military actors as recently seen in North Africa.
Naím makes use of his vast experience, guiding the reader through a nuanced understanding of power and how power “got big”, before outlining his main thesis: that revolutions he categorises as More, Mobility, and Mentality have led to the decay of power. He argues that power is now easier to obtain but harder to keep and to use. Governments, large corporations and established religious organisations are finding that they wield far less power due to the emergence of what Naím defines as micropowers: fringe political parties, activists, hackers and leaderless young people in city squares. Competition between mega-powers is being sidelined by external threats from these micropowers that are increasingly able to “undermine, fence in or thwart megaplayers”.
Before you mistake this for another polemic on the rise of China or the internet’s fundamental ability force change, Naím is careful to ascertain that neither of these oft-quoted shifts are central to his thesis. In fact he suggests that the recent Arab Spring was the result of underlying issues only hastened through communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook, while he also suggests geopolitics is far more nuanced than the oft-quoted rise of China, the emergence of the BRICS or waning European influence.
Following his introduction to power and its recent evolution, Naím grounds his theory in several relevant examples, including the threat of micropowers to established political institutions, traditional defence forces, large corporations, and The Church and philanthropic organisations. The aim of these chapters is to illustrate the author’s theory through familiar examples.
In Naím’s chapter on the decay of political power he effectively argues that traditional political parties, and their leaders, are being threatened by the decay of power. Not only are fringe parties such as the Tea Party in the United States wielding far greater influence over the election strategies of major parties than their vote count would suggest, but an increasing number of individuals are actively participating in the political process. Highlighting the power of primaries, Naím points out that in preparation for the 2012 election, French Socialists embraced participation so wholeheartedly that all eligible voters (not only party members) were entitled to their say over the party’s candidate. For Naím, increased participation is evidence that the status quo is fading, power is decaying and established political institutions such as long-standing parties are being forced to bend to meet the threat of micropowers.
Naim begins his chapter on military power by suggesting that traditional readings on war (thinkSun Tzu) are rendering themselves less useful to today’s leaders. Rather than fighting traditional enemies, or states, weaker powers such as pirates in the Gulf of Aden, Hezbollah or Al Qaeda have been able to inflict significant blows on larger powers. While the author argues that armed militants and guerrillas are nothing new, he notes the unwillingness of large powers to unleash their full military capabilities on these groups. Putting this down to the desire to avoid the political ramifications, the reader is reminded of the author’s earlier argument highlighting the ability of single issue activists (another micropower) to garner significant public opinion on topics such as military abuses or even the birth of new nations such as South Sudan.
The author goes on to point out that not only are traditional armed forces threatened by weaker opponents, they are willingly imparting with their own power by engaging the services of private contractors to fill roles from procurement to prisoner interrogation. Again, Naím comes back to his central argument, while national armies are not about to disappear, their power is being eroded by micropowers. The ability of micropowers to reach more followers through improved communication methods is matched only by their access to remote warfare technology, from the crudest IED to the more recent emergence of drone technology – all of which supports to Naím’s argument that, inevitably, the power of large military establishments is decaying.
While The End of Power is a compelling and thoughtful read, there remain some contradictions in the author’s main arguments. Firstly, Naím observes that while the internet and the proliferation of social media tools that have emerged are undeniably transforming politics, activism and business, he argues they are not behind the decay of power. Instead he suggests their importance is exaggerated and misunderstood. In using the Arab Spring uprisings as an example, Naím is correct in suggesting that demography was behind the sudden surge in educated, unemployed young people rising up against authoritarian regimes. However, it is difficult to deny that their success was not in some part due to social media. While the author offers studies which show most social media support for these causes came from outside affected countries, it can be argued that mounting international pressure (and the withdrawal of international support in some cases) contributed to ongoing revolutions, garnered external support and put the necessary pressure on soon to depart leaders.
In addition, given the examples provided it may be more accurate to argue power is dispersing or diffusing, rather than decaying. In almost all the examples included in the book, power being sacrificed by traditional sources is being acquired by someone else, usually a micropower. This is most evident in the transfer of political power from major parties to fringe groups, from state militaries to terrorist organisations, and from established mainstream religions to smaller, more dynamic denominations.
Overall, however, this contribution is a timely reminder of the changing face of power across many facets of society. The author’s insights into the halls of power, from China to Sweden, make this a fascinating read. While the recent financial crisis may have left us confused over whether companies are too big to fail, or whether we are returning to an era of big government, Naím is clear in his assertions that the powers of governments and corporations will continue to decay, largely due to the influence of a new generation of micropowers.
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Ainsley Elbra is completing her PhD in International Relations at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the role of private governance in Africa’s extractive industries. More specifically, her work examines whether private governance initiatives, such as the EITI, assist in alleviating outcomes commonly associated with the resource curse. Prior to commencing her PhD she worked as a corporate banker responsible for a portfolio of Pacific-Island based clients and mining firms. She tweets at @ainsleyelbra. Read more reviews by Ainsley.
* Book: THE END OF POWER. By Moises Naim.
The End of Power: Review
* Book: THE END OF POWER. By Moises Naim.
From a review by Tom Atlee:
“Moises Naim’s new book THE END OF POWER should properly be called “The Decay of Power”. His thesis is that while it is becoming easier to get power, it is also becoming harder to use it to control others and harder to keep it once you have it.
Naim suggests that globalization, economic growth, a growing global middle class, the spread of democracy, and rapidly expanding telecommunications technologies have changed our world. Together these developments have created a fluid and unpredictable environment which has unsettled the traditional dominions of power.
Three revolutions, he says, “make it more difficult to set up and defend the barriers to power that keep rivals at bay.” He details these revolutions as follows:
* “the More revolution, which is characterized by increases in everything from the number of countries to population size, standards of living, literacy rates, and quantity of products on the market”;
* “the Mobility revolution, which has set people, goods, money, ideas, and values moving at hitherto unimagined rates toward every corner of the planet”; and
* “the Mentality revolution, which reflects the major changes in mindsets, expectations, and aspirations that have accompanied these shifts.”
In other words, says Naim, there is too much going on, too much moving around, too many changing demands and perspectives – and at any time someone new can show up and effectively challenge or undermine your power. In addition, “when people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control.” Among other things, such people value transparency, human rights, and fairness to women and minorities – and they share a sense that “things do not need to be as they have always been – that there is always…a better way” and that they need not “take any distribution of power for granted.”
All this is happening at the very time when large hierarchical institutions are losing their “economies of scale” and becoming increasingly difficult to manage, while smaller, more flexible organizations and networks are proving increasingly successful.
Naim provides compelling evidence that power is decaying in all these ways in all fields – from business, governance, geopolitics, and military affairs to religion, philanthropy, labor, and journalism.
Of course, decay is not the whole picture of what’s happening with power. Naim admits that centers of concentrated power are consolidating in every field. He notes that “the wealthy are accumulating enormous riches, and some are using money to gain political power…[a] trend as alarming as it is unacceptable”. He reminds us that “the same information technologies that empower average citizens have ushered in new avenues for surveillance, repression, and corporate control.” While he celebrates both the new limits on the powerful – “after all, power corrupts, doesn’t it?” – and the blessings of broader access to power, that’s not his focus.
THE DANGERS OF BOTH POWER AND ITS DECAY
The purpose of Naim’s book is to highlight the problems associated with instability of power. He sees power as the primary organizing force in society. He believes that the loss of stable social power portends loss of social order and functional governance. “The more slippery power becomes, the more our lives become governed by short-term incentives and fears,” he claims, “and the less we can chart our actions and plan for the future.”
However, his analysis is unreasonably biased against the small powers (the “micropowers”) and towards the larger powers (the “megaplayers”). Here are some vivid examples:
While noting that as more competing power centers emerge, it becomes harder to coherently address our collective problems and crises at every level – especially global issues like nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and climate change – he barely mentions the roles that concentrated economic, political and media power have played in generating those very problems.
He bewails how “more and more ‘small’ countries veto, foot-drag, demand special consideration, or generally undermine the efforts of the ‘big’ nations in one area after another” but does not talk about how much the ‘big’ nations block viable solutions being pushed by the ‘small’ nations.
He deplores the loss of skill and knowledge that so often accompanies the demise of major cultural, economic and political institutions, but doesn’t note the destruction of cultural, biological and physical resources caused by the exploitative activities of corporations and governments (including the firing of experienced employees in profit-taking mergers and downsizing initiatives). Nor does he celebrate the mind-boggling new knowledge and capacity being created everyday by independent entrepreneurs and grassroots initiatives.
He calls fringe demagogues and extremists “terrible simplifiers” who “seek power by exploiting the ire and frustration of the population and making appealing but ‘terribly simplified’ and, ultimately, deceitful promises” – without acknowledging that this is the stock and trade of many mainstream governments, politicians, corporations, and other major political agents and economic actors as well.
He warns of chaos and potential disaster as more destructive forms of power become increasingly available to smaller and smaller groups of people,* without noting that most of those destructive forms of power were created and have been used by dominant countries, militaries, and corporations.
Naim also warns that the emerging micropowers “are not committed to the general good”. But he doesn’t balance that concern with concern about the megaplayers who are just as likely to harm the general welfare. Governments, corporations, and other established powers have a long history of selfishness, exploitation, and destruction generating widespread suffering and disaster.
NAIM’S BIGGEST BLIND SPOT
But I think the biggest shortcoming of Naim’s otherwise excellent book lies not so much in its elite bias, but in its very foundation – his definition of power. He defines power in three related ways – “the capacity to get others to do, or stop doing, something”; “the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals”; and “what we exercise over others that leads them to behave in ways they would not otherwise have behaved.” Within these definitions he sees four ways to get people to do what we want – coercion, moral codes, persuasion, and rewards.
These definitions lead him to some statements that seem odd to those of us who don’t share his assumptions – for example, “the whole point of branding is to deter competition”. To me, it seems that the whole point of branding is to help consumers know what to expect from what they buy.
In my view Naim’s definitions of power have two fundamental shortcomings that make his thesis gravely incomplete:
First, his power worldview is confined to what many of us would call “power-over” – the capacity to control, manage or dominate. It ignores other forms of power that become visible when we define power simply as “the ability to create effects”. These other forms of power include power-with (the power of cooperation), power-from-within (the power of spirit, belief and motivation), and power-from-among (the power of synergy and collective intelligence).
Second, Naim’s power worldview is confined to the human realm – to social power. It does not acknowledge that there are other sources of and targets for power, notably nature. The power of nature – and our power relationships with nature – are central factors in our sustainability as a species.
Combined, these two defining limitations blind him and his readers to the role of power-over in generating the very problems he frets we won’t be able to solve, like climate change. Self-interested and ideological efforts to dominate nature and people – largely through technologically enhanced economic, political, military and media power (power-over) that is now global – have produced most of our 21st century crises, from climate change and terrorism to resource depletion and economic meltdowns. Furthermore, these emerging crises may well disrupt the conditions – notably the rising global middle class, its mobility and aspirations – that have produced the power-limiting shifts he describes. On the other hand, those crises may also empower the “micropowers” because traditional power centers will lack resources (especially oil) that they need to maintain their global control, resulting in power devolving necessarily (if sometimes painfully) to more local levels where alternative economic and political forms have been evolving, often in more participatory directions.
His two defining limitations – blindness to the full varieties and sources of power – also blind him and his readers to the the role that the other forms of power have played, can play and are playing in creating a more functional and sustainable society. To the extent we practice and develop all these forms of power with people and in human systems – as well as in our interactions with nature and natural systems – we can nurture a self-organized social and natural order that has fewer toxic side effects than those associated with domination and control. Competent partnership skills in a partnership culture can make all the difference in the world.
BUILDING MORE FUNCTIONAL POWER-OVER?
It seems to me that Naim’s solutions are designed primarily to help dominant powers function more benignly. He seems to believe that proper political participation needs to manifest “through more competitive political parties”. He sees participation as happening IN THE PARTIES rather than in society as a whole. He apparently considers the partisan battle for domination as the inevitable and proper form for participation in a democracy. This causes him to offer little insight into our immense and emerging potential for collaboration, common ground, co-creativity, and functional, “leaderful” self-organization, even across the traditional rifts that competitive power dynamics and institutions have bequeathed to us. Such dynamics are, to me, the most promising blessings of the decay of domination. But they are blessings we must work to earn.
In contrast, Naim says we need to develop more trust in our leaders and help political parties “regain the ability to inspire, energize and mobilize people – especially the young.” He suggests making political parties “more flat, less hierarchical” – but primarily to make them more able to “reach new members, become more agile, advance their agendas, and hopefully become better at fighting the terrible simplifiers that seek power inside and outside the party.” He frames leadership accountability, transparency and freedom from “dark or unknown interests” as issues of perception rather than substance. He suggests that political parties “need to elicit” in their followers “the feeling” that their party has integrity without describing how TRUE accountability should and could be established.
Naim tells us that “The exercise of power in any realm involves, fundamentally, the ability to impose and retain control over a country, a marketplace, a constituency, a population of adherents, a network of trade routes, and so on.” From that power-over perspective, the challenge of power is clear: “The task of governing, organizing, mobilizing, influencing, persuading, disciplining or repressing a large number of people with generally good standards of living requires different methods than those that worked for a smaller and less developed community.” That may be true enough for power elites, but is that where most of us want to go?
“INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS”
Ironically, many of the attempts to consolidate power are creating conditions for the decay of that power. Creating educated middle classes in developing countries to staff Western-style governments and corporations generates indigenous aspirations and capacities that lead to upstart challengers and revolutions. Vested interests’ efforts to undermine national governments – from campaign contributions to trade agreements to war – generate populist protests and demands for greater local control. Tools created to enhance corporate collective intelligence get used by groups and communities to enhance their own collective capacities or to undermine centralized authorities. Weapons and civil rights designed to uphold elite privileges get claimed, adopted and used by marginalized populations.
I do not want to suggest that there is no role for power-over. There is much in life that requires control in order to be functional. However, power-over has greater potential for harm than the other forms of power. Much of its seeming efficiencies derive from its tendency to displace or “externalize” those harms and their costs onto other people or systems or into the future. For example, polluting companies externalize the harmful effects and expenses of their pollution onto communities, taxpayers, nature, and future generations, rather than paying the price to be clean.
For this reason, power-over should be practiced within – and constrained by – these more holistic forms of human potency, rather than the other way around. The answer is not simply, as Naim would have it, “to give more power to those who govern us,” but rather to expand and strengthen our ability to govern ourselves and to responsibly oversee those to whom we delegate some of our power.”
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