Mega Leader

In a shrinking world, where are the leaders who will lead us into the future?

by Katherine Guckenberger

In an Old English poem, the mythic hero Beowulf leaves his homeland of Geats (located somewhere in Sweden) to kill a ferocious man-eating monster who is terrorizing the people of Denmark. Beowulf the hero is subsequently crowned king of Geats and rules for 50 years. Not surprisingly, his death leaves his people feeling vulnerable and uncertain.

In the introduction to his recent translation of the epic, poet Seamus Heaney likens a woman’s song of grief at Beowulf’s funeral pyre to a modern news report from the likes of Rwanda or Kosovo:

“Her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future.”

These heart-wrenching feelings of loss and fear are timeless, as is the need for leaders to guide, lead, and protect their citizens. While warriors like Beowulf may not be what contemporary people yearn for, as societies across the world draw ever closer together, it becomes ever more challenging — and more important — for individuals to distinguish themselves with a vision of leadership for the global community.

New Landscape

In 1994, New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman was assigned to cover a new beat: the intersection of foreign policy, culture, and international finance. Friedman realized he would need, not only to consider, but also to incorporate the power and influence of information technology and environmental development. “I believe that this new system of globalization — in which walls between countries, markets, and disciplines are increasingly being blown away — constitutes a fundamentally new state of affairs,” he writes in his bestseller, The Lexis and the Olive Tree. “And the only way to see it, understand it, and explain it is by…assigning different weights to different perspectives at different times in different situations, but always understanding that it is the intersection of [dimensions] together that is really the defining feature of international relations today. And therefore being a globalist is the only way to systematically connect the dots, see the system of globalization, and thereby order the chaos.”

What the Times and Friedman understood was that a new international system had taken shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new system gave rise to new governing bodies, which reflected the unprecedented expansion of transnational links. In addition to the already established international monetary institutions and the United Nations, along with its organizations and agencies, an explosion of non-state actors, multinational corporations, NGOs, as well as international regimes, treaty organizations, and supranational institutions, joined the global stage.

Previously, global leaders, from warriors like Beowulf to popes to colonial monarchs, emerged from imperial bases and derived their legitimacy from positions of power and territorial domination. Today a new breed of leader is needed, not simply because the sun does set on the British empire but because an increasing number of transborder issues — from nuclear proliferation to global warming — demand a coordinated global response.

Indeed, one of the realities of globalization is that its effects are felt globally, from the drug trade to terrorism to organized crime, not to mention economic crises, from Thailand to Mexico to Russia, the degradation of the environment, and the spread of infectious disease, paranoia, pollution, and fundamentalism. These problems challenge the national security of states and can’t be solved by nations alone. “There is a lack of overarching leadership today,” says Barbara Kellerman, executive director of the Center for Public Leadership. “Crises of leadership are generally thought of in national terms, but the problems we’re facing are transnational.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, to find that the global leaders who have emerged come from unexpected places. They don’t necessarily hold official offices or formal positions of authority. They work for all sorts of organizations, from private corporations to NGOs to international networks and organized-crime operations, and for all sorts of reasons, from making money to discovering vaccines to heeding ideological callings.

“They are people who make a global difference,” says Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “And they can be measured by the impact they have on people around the world.”

Ideally that impact is a positive one, but that’s not always the case. If the spectrum of talent includes the creator of the World Wide Web and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on one end, then it also includes the creator of the Big Mac and Muslim fundamentalist Osama bin Laden on the other.

Global leaders must contend with (and understand) the forces of globalization and rapid change in order to be effective. Those same forces afford the global citizen unprecedented opportunities. The information revolution has transformed the global leader’s scope and reach. With computers, cellphones, satellite and broadband technology, would-be leaders around the globe have the ability to communicate at an unprecedented rate with an unprecedented number of people, and they can do it on the cheap.

“Reduction in cost of communications which the Internet represents allows more people to participate in the game,” says Kennedy School Dean Joseph Nye. “They don’t need a large bureau or state.” Nevertheless, a telecommunications capability does not a global leader make. In the first place, it’s hard to make yourself heard; the easier it is to access people over the Net, the more competition there is to be heard. For many activists this can be a problem. As Nye points out, “It’s hard to stand above the background noise.”

Nye divides those who do stand out into two groups: “Those who have the bully pulpit are in part people who have the power to run a state or derive authority from where they are placed” and “those who through their actions capture our imaginations and have a powerful moral authority.” Leaders are either given or take the power to act; global leaders do the same, on a global scale.

In the first category, institutions provide the bureaucratic or organizational platforms that encourage (or discourage) leadership. As Jack Galvin, the former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, said last year, “You lead because you are designated the leader, but you also lead because people believe in you as the leader.”

Nye singles out Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, whose can-do attitude as the UN high commissioner on human rights has, among other victories, secured China’s recent agreement to cooperate in the field of human rights. He also names Annan, who consistently points to the alleviation and elimination of poverty, protecting the environment, and fighting AIDS as global priorities. In Nye’s opinion, Annan is “the best secretary general since Dag Hammarskjold.”

Others tout Jimmy Carter, who used his political clout as president (and former president) to make an undeniable difference in the human rights field. Carter’s career as peace broker, builder of democracy, and protector of human rights — which he has long supported as a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy — has earned him respect as one of the most visible and effective former U.S. presidents in history. And he’s not done yet. Today Carter remains a relentless advocate of a universal system of human rights to which sovereign governments, including democracies, including our own, would be subject.

“In Jimmy Carter’s constant and consistent reference to human rights, he was acting the role of a global leader,” Kellerman said. “And that is to find an issue that’s global and forge some kind of consensus.”

Leaders of large corporations, who have been forced to deal with global issues, shouldn’t be discounted. Nye points to Sir John Browne of BP Amoco, labeled a “maverick” by the Financial Times, whose focus on environmental affairs and belief that business has a commitment to sustainable development have shaken the corporate world.

In the second category are leaders whose moral causes are strengthened by personal endurance. Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in South Africa jailed as a political prisoner before serving his country as president, is perhaps the most obvious example. Mandela’s vision of a multiracial and democratic South Africa cut across racial and national lines, inspiring people the world over as his authority and gravitas snowballed at every hurdle.

The winner of last year’s U.S. Medal of Freedom, Aung San Suu Kyui, might also fall into this category. Suu Kyui, the Burmese democratic opposition leader who has been under house arrest for six of the last eleven years, has seen her cause taken up by disparate groups around the world. Her wave of support includes a bipartisan group of U.S. senators, who lobbied President Clinton to ban clothing imports from Burma in order to pressure the brutal Burmese military junta into dialogue with Suu Kyui’s opposition party.

Super People

Technology has played a critical role in enabling individuals to harness international power and to make a difference on a global scale. Friedman calls global leaders who manage to emerge from the fray “super-empowered people.” Activist Jody Williams, who helped launch the transnational anti-land mine campaign and became the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, is often cited as one such individual; whether we like it or not, Osama bin Laden, who leads a global constituent of Muslim fundamentalists, is another.

An additional category might be called “people with vision and enormous wealth.” George Soros, whose Open Society foundation promotes the development of democracy and civil society in 30 countries around the world, is regarded as the epitome of the nonstate leader, where development of transnational institutions are concerned. CNN’s Ted Turner has taken a different approach, donating huge sums of money to the United Nations. Turner gave an unprecedented $1 billion to create a foundation dedicated to UN causes, then he made headlines at the end of 2000 for breaking the 27-year stalemate over the United States’ failure to pay its UN dues by donating $34 million to cover the difference between what the United States owed and what it was willing to pay.

Finally, there’s Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated tens of millions of dollars to AIDS, malaria, and TB research, drawing attention to the sustained burden of infectious disease in the developing world and highlighting the need for a coordinated international response.

But are global leaders meeting global needs? Kellerman argues that surprisingly few public officials have made sustained attempts to “move beyond the nation-state,” including the presidents of the United States, who arguably have the best platform from which to spring.

“Given the magnitude of the concerns that transcend national boundaries, it seems remarkable that by and large we leave it to multinational corporations and international organizations to do the collaborative work,” she says in her book Reinventing Leadership. “But in the case of the former, the interest is in profit rather than in the public good; and in the case of the letter, the demand far outstrips the supply. With the debatable exception of the United Nations, international organizations are generally inadequately structured, staffed, and equipped to meet the challenges that confront us even now. What is clear, in any case, is that, overwhelmingly, world leaders remain convinced that all politics is local.”

Might that be changing? The number of organizations that provide platforms from which to lead are growing in number and prestige. The UN, WTO, World Bank, and national governments rely more and more heavily on cooperation with nonstate actors; NGOs and social movements can no longer be separated from the realm of global governance. Indeed, Kofi Annan insists that NGOs are the “indispensable partners” of the United Nations.

At last year’s commencement address, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney told Harvard graduates: “Remember that the anchor of your being lies in human affection and human responsibility, but remember also to keep swimming up into the air of the envisaged possibility. And also, try to keep on finding new answers to the question that [Benjamin] Franklin said was the noblest in the world, the question which he himself framed, and which asks: ‘What good may I do in the world?’” The generation coming of age in this era of globalization understands how to operate on the global level and within the context of the global forces that shape the outside world. They might also have new answers.

Katherine Guckenberger is a new media editor at The Atlantic Monthly.