churches in places like Arizona and Kansas than in the elite
universities.
As for the decline in student activism (and reading, and academic
work), that’s not students—that’s the society. The Robert Putnam
study we discussed earlier found about a 50% decline since the
1960s in any form of interaction—visiting your neighbor, going to
PTA meetings, joining a bowling league. (There’s debate about his
conclusions, but something of the sort seems to be correct.)
What about the nonaligned movement?
In the 1950s, several Third World leaders tried to establish a
form of nonalignment, which decolonization and the conflict
between the US and the USSR made possible. By now, that
movement has pretty much disappeared, both because of enormous
changes in the global economy and because the end of the Cold War
eliminated the superpower competition and the deterrent effect of
Soviet power, which allowed for a degree of independence. The
West doesn’t have to pretend anymore that it’s interested in helping
anybody.
The decline of the nonaligned movement and of Western social
democracy are two parts of the same picture. Both reflect the
radicalization of the modern socioeconomic system, where more
and more power is put into the hands of unaccountable institutions
that are basically totalitarian (though they happen to be private, and
crucially reliant on powerful states).
Is the nonaligned movement completely gone?
As recently as the early 1990s, the South Commission, which
represented the governments of nonaligned countries, came out
with a very important critique of the antidemocratic, neoliberal
model that’s being forced on the Third World. (The commission
included pretty conservative people, like Indonesia’s development
minister.)
They published a book that called for a new world order (they
introduced the term before George [H. W.] Bush did) based on
democracy, justice, development and so on. The book wasn’t
obscure—it was published by Oxford University Press. I wrote