Posted on: Sunday, September 30, 2001

Terrorists draw attention to dark side of globalization

Associated Press

As momentous events swept across a troubled planet, a few unexceptional things unfolded at the margins.

David Phillips of Albany, N.Y., checked his e-mail at the Surf & Sushi Internet Cafe in Berlin.

Simone Williams of Australia, backpacking across Europe with her boyfriend, flew from Malta to Rome. Amanita Lucido, a Hong Kong maid, sent $98 home to Manila using an electronic fund transfer.

Open communications networks, easy access to international travel, the movement of money between nations with the push of a button — these are the routines of a world united by technology and economics. And these are some of the apparatus used in the plot to terrorize America.

The tools of progress, wielded against the toolmakers. And since Sept. 11, the realization that the global village has dark, unsavory alleys is producing an unnerving question: Have the very pathways that energized economies and drew millions together in an Information Age also made the Earth more vulnerable?

"It's the dark side of globalization," says Shaul M. Gabbay, a University of Denver scholar who examines how humans interact around the world. "It used to be that people had to be together to develop these fringe ideas. Today, with technology, they don't have to be together anymore."

Globalization's role in the terror attacks is everywhere. Clues stretch from the mountain passes of Central Asia to apartments in Hamburg to remote Philippine islands to an Oklahoma flight school. Suspects hid in plain sight in Muslim communities around the Western world. The government is investigating whether terrorists tried to profit from stock and options trading timed to the Sept. 11 attack.

In March 2000, CIA director George Tenet told the Senate that Osama bin Laden's group was "embracing the opportunities offered by recent leaps in information technology," including e-mail and file encryption. Even the global corporate model has been invoked: Last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell called bin Laden's al-Qaida network a "holding company of terrorism."

And though investigations indicate the terrorists also used many low-tech methods, their operation across international borders has come as a shock to many.

The question, as many who study globalization see it, is not whether it will continue unabated. Of course it will, they say; it's a cultural and economic force too powerful, too organic to be stopped by public fears or the most stringent counterterrorism efforts.

"We are just too interdependent. The idea that we can only look to our own nation for economics, for information technology, that's gone," says William Brustein, director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

But no longer will the march toward a united world be quite as starry-eyed. No longer will the untempered optimism of technology-oriented TV commercials — monks checking e-mail, executives in high-rises teleconferencing with colleagues on distant beaches — be globalization's dominant image.

Instead, images of the burning, collapsing World Trade Center — and, to a lesser extent, violent anti-globalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, Italy — will now surface in discussions of whether a stitched-together world makes humanity stronger.

The immediate backlash to globalization could include anything from the obvious — air travel problems because of fear, increased security and poor airline economics — to broader effects like corporations scaling back business in countries suspected of sponsoring terrorism.

The United States grew increasingly isolationist after World War I and even more so when it tumbled into the Depression and individual states erected protective economic barriers. But after World War II, a reinvigorated economy embraced free trade, and barriers fell once again.

The inseparable relationship between technology and open, connected societies that emerged during the past generation makes isolationism more unlikely than ever. Most people, after all, want to be connected.

Two indications of that: According to the research firm IDC, the number of e-mail addresses in the world — 505 million last year — is expected to rise to 1.2 billion by 2005. And the business statistics firm eMarketer says the world will have 1 billion mobile phone users by the end of this year.

So while the globalization debate will be framed differently, many say there are few indications that the connectedness most of the world has embraced will change dramatically.