A modern City of Babel?

Is our highly integrated, interactive and open global village, with its shared economy, common currency and inter-active financial systems, its myriad of international organisations and agencies, global communications networks and open flow of information presently experiencing a City of Babel moment?

In Genesis chapter 11 in  the Bible we read of a period in the history of man when  people believed that everything was under control and that the sky was the limit. Then confusion struck and they no longer understood one another and they stopped building their city.

More recently for two or three decades the expansion of the global village was the international name of the game in which the development of shared technological platforms --  especially international communication networks and open integrated trade and shared production processes -- became common place. It was a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

Nothing probably illustrated better the belief that the sky is the limit and that man can be in full control of his own destiny was the assumption that man can control the global climate, which has been moving through huge cycles since the beginning of time.

Now the efforts to control the cycle of climate change are collapsing as the Chicago Carbon Exchange, the largest in the world, has decided to stop trading in carbon. More importantly the Kyoto and Copenhagen Protocols, which were supposed to facilitate a unified global response to climate change seem to be on the brink of collapse as, under growing economic pressure, countries are increasingly first looking at their own narrow interests. In the words of The Times of India: “Trust breaks down between countries with the Copenhagen Accord being forced through and causing bad blood.”
On the economic/financial front there is increasing talk about the danger of international collaboration making way for protectionism, trade and currency wars and a new financial order.

In the high-tech, integrated global village it has become possible for relatively small and, in conventional terms, weak groups through the strategy of terrorism to pose a major threat to the security of the mightiest world powers and to hold the economic order to ransom and in many ways make conventional warfare almost obsolete.

This situation prompted the new head of Britain’s armed forces, General Sir David Richards to warn on the eve of remembrance weekend (14 November) to warn
that the West cannot defeat al-Qaeda and militant Islam and that the threat meant Britain’s national security would be at risk for at least 30 years.

From Greece, a member of the European Union, there has been a flood of postal bombs aimed at Western leaders, including Germany’s head of government,  dispatched in recent weeks. Two parcel bombs have been sent by air freight from Yemen to destinations in the US. This is not only hugely disrupting for international trade, but is also greatly adding to the cost of security

In Greece, France, Italy and elsewhere in the developed world social stability is increasingly coming under pressure as  countries battle to come to grips with the financial crisis, which started in late 2007. The threat to social stability is even affecting  the US, where some say the American dream has died.

To this one can add the opinion of commentators who say  that the G20 grouping of the world’s most influential nations has become obsolete, that NATO is under pressure, that there is international assault on liberal values of privacy, and a  side-stepping of the rule of law in many so-called developed countries who are battling with new security threats -- and many more.

Is it, under these circumstances, far-fetched to pose the question: Is the global village as we know it, in the process of disintegration?