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Is all for the best in this best of all possible worlds? If you're looking for an upbeat assessment of recent global trends, check out the essay by Kishore Mahbubani and Larry Summers (" The Fusion of Civilizations") in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. Instead of a world of dysfunctional democracies, violent extremism, eroding institutions, and incipient Sino-American rivalry, they depict a globe where once-disparate civilizations are increasingly connected by shared values and constrained by a rules-based international order.

In contrast with the dark and violent "clash of civilizations" anticipated by the late Samuel P. Huntington, Mahbubani and Summers believe cultural groups are melding rapidly and creating "areas of commonality." Extreme poverty is on the wane, a global middle class is growing, and the "march of reason" that began with the Enlightenment is supplanting superstition and spawning "problem-solving cultures" around the world. Western symphony orchestras are wildly popular in China, Asian flavors are infiltrating Western kitchens, American universities are opening franchises in the Middle East and Asia, and global diasporas are helping knit previously distinct cultures together. In their words, "the world is actually coming together, not falling apart."

Many readers will surely see their article as a welcome corrective to the doom-and-gloom that politicians, pundits, intelligence officials, and cable news companies purvey on a daily basis. Several of the trends they identify - such as the recent decline in global poverty - should be noted and celebrated. And we should all hope the 21st century is as benign as they predict.

Unfortunately, in challenging the "glass-half-empty" view of contemporary world affairs, Mahbubani and Summers have swung too far in the opposite direction. They correctly identify a number of positive trends, but their article offers no theory that explains why these developments will ward off interstate competition. Indeed, the various developments they highlight have little to do with the prospects for peace.

For starters, does a rising middle class make states less likely to compete with one another and less prone to use force? It would be nice to think so, and I can think of various reasons why this might be true. But history is at best ambiguous on this point, and scholarly efforts to explore the links between economic inequality and interstate conflict have been inconclusive. Europe's middle class grew dramatically between 1850 and 1914, for example, but that development did not prevent the continent from plunging into World Wars I and II, two of the bloodiest conflicts in recorded history.

Mahbubani and Summers's faith in human reason is even more puzzling. The Enlightenment occurred in the 18th century, and dozens of wars have taken place since then. Moreover, countries where Enlightenment values were embraced and extolled, such as revolutionary France, were involved in many of those fights. If human reason and pragmatic cost-benefit analysis were a reliable barrier to war, then surely the past two centuries would have been far more peaceful than they were.

In fact, as James Fearon pointed out in a famous article, even perfectly rational states could fail to resolve disputes peacefully because they have private information about their relative strength and resolve as well as incentives to misrepresent that information. War is also possible due to the "commitment problem": There is no central authority that ensures states keep any agreements they do make. Post-Enlightenment "reason," in short, is a weak reed on which to base our hopes for future peace.

Recent events reinforce the point. Ancient superstitions and clashing cultures did not lead the United States into war in Iraq in 2003; on the contrary, the people who conceived and sold that war were the products of America's finest universities and were presumably well schooled in post-Enlightenment rationalism and basic cost-benefit analysis. Yale- and Harvard-educated George W. Bush was even lauded as "the MBA President," and he was surrounded by people with similar pedigrees. Yet these highly educated, rational individuals still blundered into an unnecessary and disastrous war. Even a cool pragmatist like Barack Obama has admitted doing "stupid stuff" while in office, further underscoring the limits of human reason in the political realm.

Mahbubani and Summers do recognize trouble may still arise, saying "the possibility of an aggressive, militaristic China cannot be ruled out," and warning that demagogues may exploit popular fears "even in the advanced industrial world." But they are plainly just hedging their bets, for they conclude by predicting "the progressive direction of human history ... is set to continue."

Again, let us hope they are right. What's missing from their upbeat story, however, is a sound understanding of the forces that have led to international conflict in the past and are likely to fuel it in the future. Mahbubani and Summers reject Huntington's gloomy forecast of civilizational clashes, but their argument adopts the same flawed "civilizational" template and its corresponding emphasis on culture as the main driver of international behavior. Because they assume conflict arises primarily from cultural differences, they believe cross-cultural "fusion" will remove this source of trouble and ensure a tranquil future.

But as I noted when Huntington's book first appeared, civilizations are not actors and they do not make decisions for war or peace. Even now, the main actors in world politics are states and the most powerful political ideology in the world is nationalism. Nationalism explains why the number of countries continues to rise, why supranational institutions like the European Union are in trouble, and why China and its neighbors are increasingly at odds over seemingly minor chunks of territory in the open seas. And in China, nationalism and the middle class seem to be on the rise simultaneously. The power of nationalism and other forms of local identity helps explain the stubborn and bitter resistance the United States has faced in the Middle East (and elsewhere), and it is the real reason why Huntington's original thesis was wrong. Ironically, his data showed that clashes within civilizations have been and remain more common than conflicts between them, and the vast majority of these conflicts arose not from cultural differences but from familiar security concerns.

In a world where states remain the primary actors, and where there is no central authority to protect or prevent them from fighting, powerful countries will watch one another carefully, keep a wary eye on the balance of power, and do whatever they can to minimize their vulnerability to outside pressure. That is why Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to derail the relentless extension of Western influence into Russia's traditional sphere of interest, and that is why China's rise has raised concerns throughout Asia and led the United States to "rebalance" toward that critically important region. None of the favorable trends highlighted by Mahbubani and Summers are likely to arrest these tendencies.

Furthermore, events in the past month have not been kind to their basic thesis. A couple of weeks after their article appeared, the Chinese government "passed a new law restricting the work of foreign organizations and their local partners, mainly through police supervision," a move designed to curtail the cross-cultural influences the authors extol. Similar measures have been implemented or proposed in Russia, Egypt, Israel, and several other countries in recent years. A few days ago, the increasingly popular far-right party Alternative for Germany called for a ban on minarets and burqas in Germany, an overtly anti-Muslim stance that echoes French restrictions on headscarves and the rightward shifts in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland. Cultures may be blending in some ways - just as they have in the past - but a lot of people don't like it as much as Mahbubani and Summers do. And one of those people may be the next U.S. president.

Lastly, let us not forget that countries don't just exchange recipes, musical scores, and technological know-how; they sometimes converge in more disturbing ways. Doctrines like communism and fascism crossed cultural borders in the past, and today extreme ideologies can be disseminated at the click of a mouse. Nuclear weapons technology has spread to nine countries over the past 60 years, and 19 states have followed the United States's lead and acquired their own fleet of armed drones. If a Chinese exchange student learns about the Monroe Doctrine in a course on American history, is it possible she might see this idea as an appealing blueprint for China's position in Asia? And so forth. Globalization may bring the world closer together culturally, but the blend is bound to include both the good and the bad.

Don't get me wrong: I like living in a world where diverse cultures interact in manifold ways. As I've written before, all societies evolve in response to outside influences and the willingness and ability to learn from others is a valuable source of social and economic vitality. The United States has long benefited from its openness to immigration and other outside influences, and states that try to block out the world are more likely to end up a failed hermit kingdom like North Korea. In short, Kishore, Larry, and I agree on the sort of world we'd like to live in, and I won't mind at all if their optimistic vision proves correct. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Photo credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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Is all for the best in this best of all possible worlds? If you're looking for an upbeat assessment of recent global trends, check out the essay by Kishore Mahbubani and Larry Summers (" The Fusion of Civilizations") in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

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When I was a little kid, I was told that America was the "melting pot." I learned this during discussions of "diversity" in elementary school, discussions made somewhat abstract by the lack of racial, religious, and even most socioeconomic diversity in my own tiny, rural Midwestern hometown.

The idea sounded so appealing to me as a kid, though. Look at America, bringing together so many different types of people and blending them into something strong and beautiful. I pictured molten metal being poured into molds.

Later, in college, I would hear discussions of how the "melting pot" metaphor for American identity was inadequate. We weren't actually all blended together into a homogenous, glowing mixture. We maintained our unique cultural identities but were stitched to one another into a brightly colored, multi-faceted whole. America, I was told, is a patchwork quilt.

By this point in my personal experiences, I had been pushed out of the homogeneity of my hometown both physically and mentally. As an English major, I was taking classes in African American literature and reading Chicano and Native American works. I was learning about feminist theories and generally recognizing that the world was much more diverse and much less at harmony than I had previously thought. The melting pot metaphor certainly didn't fit. We don't all blend together into one harmonious substance and, furthermore, we shouldn't try! My liberal arts education had me embracing the expressions of a wide array of cultural experiences, and the patchwork quilt metaphor captures that spirit. It is the brightness and uniqueness of our own cultural heritages that make the quilt of American culture complete.

That metaphor, too, has fallen flat as time has gone on. The melting pot metaphor and the patchwork quilt metaphor each represent extreme views for cultural diversity.

On the one hand, the melting pot metaphor suggests complete assimilation. We see the less friendly-sounding outputs of its core values in "English only" language movements, those who aim to remove minority literature classes from course catalogs, and a general insistence that the right way to be "American" is by taking on the attributes of the white, middle class hegemony. (It might, for instance, manifests itself as a group of online bigots outraged that a Mexican-American boy sang the national anthem at a televised sporting event or in policies that remove Native American children from their families.)

It's easy to see why the melting pot metaphor is problematic. Even though it sounded great to me as a child (why shouldn't we all want to become one, great, strong substance working together?), the realities of political power mean that we must all become the standard, and the standard is entrenched in privilege and prejudice. The racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and virtually every other type of -ism wrapped up in the melting pot essentially means that those with less power "melt" under the pressure of the norms around them, vanishing from the fabric of American identity. In the case of the English-only movement or the removal of minority literature courses, they are literally silenced. The melting pot aims to remove the markers of diversity and in doing so aims to erase the experiences of the people who represent it.

So the patchwork quilt is the answer, right? If the melting pot ignores diversity, then the patchwork quilt is the way to embrace it. By recognizing that we all inhabit our own little squares of identity, we ensure that diversity is not erased. We are each able to contribute our own experiences and voices to the mix, and those experiences are seen as equally important and valid to the overall American identity.

This notion has been the driving force behind movements to preserve cultural heritage. It's why we have things like Black History Month and Native American Heritage Month. Driven by the urge to recognize, validate, and then disseminate the accomplishments and contributions of groups that are traditionally marginalized, we are pointing to the patches on the quilt. America is a diverse country built upon the sacrifice of many minority groups, often at the violent hands of those driven by the melting pot ideology.

America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.

The problem with the patchwork quilt analogy is two-fold. In the first place, the patches of a quilt are not integrated. Each exists in its own separate space, connected to the others only by the stitches that bind the quilt as a whole. There are many people who inhabit multiple spheres of identity. Using Jackson's examples, what happens if you are a young, gay businessman? What happens if you are an old, lesbian Latina? We do not stay neatly in the boxes placed before us, and attempting to corral people into a single box of identity is damaging to their personal sense of self and to their ability to connect with others and thrive. The patchwork quilt metaphor fails to take into account that we do, in fact, blend.

Secondly, the patchwork quilt metaphor does not address the need to mix and the responsibilities we have to one another beyond our own square of cloth. Celebrating Native American Heritage Month but refusing to address the problems facing the Native American community on a daily basis ( or even removing an offensive, derogatory mascot) does little to actually address diversity; it merely pays lip service to it.

From this tension, we can find a third metaphor for American identity: the salad bowl. In a salad, the different ingredients are distinct and bring their own unique flavor and contribution to the whole. They are, however, coexisting. The flavors of one will impact the flavor of another. They work together or, sometimes, fail to meld in an effective way.

It would seem that the salad bowl metaphor addresses many of the issues that come out of the patchwork quilt analogy, but there is still something missing.

The melting pot is obviously a troubling metaphor. It ignores the diversity in American history and present American demographics. It is rife with bigotry, privilege, and cruelly-wielded power. But it gets something right that both the patchwork quilt and the salad ignore: violence.

There is violence in American identity. It is a troubling, tension-filled thing to find a way to belong in a heterogeneous society. To ignore that is to ignore the very real struggles that people undergo every day as they work to find a sense of self.

I was prompted to think about these metaphors when I was reading Victor Villanueva's Bootstraps, a book in which he explores his own attempts to assimilate to white expectations as a Hispanic American. Despite his efforts to embrace the melting pot, he eventually recognizes that his identity will always be that of a minority, especially in his role as a university professor. He is seen as the go-to person for "minority" issues, and his work is always read through the lens of a the "minority perspective."

Out of these experiences, Villanueva suggests a new metaphor for American cultural identity: a stew.

Villanueva explains that the stew metaphor "maintains the violence of the melting-pot metaphor while suggesting some of the ingredients do not lose all of their original identity, though altered, taking in the juices from the other ingredients of the pot, adding to the juices; all of us this one thing, Americans, and all of us some things else" (20).

While imagining American identity as a patchwork quilt or a salad might be appealing because it suggests a sense of harmony and tolerance, it ignores the very real power structures at play when we craft our sense of self.

We can't craft it alone. We are pushed and pulled by those around us as we develop a sense of self. We are melted, melded, and combined. We do not stay neatly in any one box, and we may lose some of our flavor to an overpowering majority. The stew metaphor captures these nuances in a way that the salad metaphor misses. When we're all cooked together, there is a violence to the stewing that cannot be ignored, and the impact that violence has on the way identities are shaped must be part of the conversation about diversity.

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Blogging to My PhD: Melting, Mixing, and Patching American Dreams

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When I was a little kid, I was told that America was the "melting pot." I learned this during discussions of "diversity" in elementary school, discussions made somewhat abstract by the lack of racial, religious, and even most socioeconomic diversity in my own tiny, rural Midwestern hometown.

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The Immigration History of the United States

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(45sec)