翻译文本

There are very diverse points of view on the extent to which our present world is truly interacting, globally, and the extent to which some of the emerging democracies of Europe, Asia, and Latin America will survive. Some of the most negative scholarly comments are to be found in an article entitled “Global Integration: The Apparent and the Real”in the September, 1990, issue of The Stanford Magazine. The argument is made that the global statistics are misleading, and that true trade and the investment has yet to regain the levels it achieved before the advert of World War I. Stephen Krasner, chairman of Stanford”s Political Science Department also states that much of the new “global consciousness”is largely an American phenomenon. He adds that “America has changed from a political and economic giant dominating the world arena to one nation competing among many. The system hasn’t changed; the United States has just gotten weaker.” The article goes on to state that we now find ourselves forced to compete with the rest of the world, just as everyone else has always found it necessary to do.

An issue of greater concern to the entire world is the possibility of increasing divergence among ethnic, language, and cultural groups, even as we are pleased with the diminishing importance of national borders and clashes between economic ideologies. The

rebalkanization of the Balkans, the ethnic originated clashes in the Soviet Union, and the conflict between fundamentalism and other forms of the Moslem religion are excellentexamples. Former Secretary of State, George Shultz, now a professor in Stanford”s Graduate School of Business says, “Today, ideas, information, pollution, and drugs go across borders, and government can’t do much about it. Borders mean less but the ideas of national governments and ethnic identity are more important then ever.”Some of the Stanford concerns are nevertheless very real and are shared to a degree by Naisbitt and Aburdene, as they speak of the cultural and ethnic backlash and “cultural nationalism” as in the case of Iran. What few would argue is that as trade does become freer, prosperity increases and expands the income of poorer countries if they participate in such trade with the net result of fewer possibilities for military conflict.