We also have far more power than most Indians or Chinese to select among embryos to avoid disfavored traits and try to give an advantage to the children we bring to term, much to the alarm of conservative social critics who have predicted that a laissez-faire eugenics will result. But there is no evidence yet of any systemic distortions in the children Americans choose to bear: by and large we–like the Europeans–love, or at least live with, the children we have, and we do not try to ensure in the womb that we get children we will love.

What works for us highlights basic differences between the United States and Europe. If the United States were less immigrant-friendly, our native-only demographics would resemble those of France–although our birthrate would still be higher than the French rate and much higher than those of Germany, Italy, and other low-fertility societies. On the one hand, the demographic advantage of immigration rewards an American virtue that many commentators pointed out after last year’s French riots: a flexible and inclusive idea of national identity that makes room for just about anyone who is willing to "act American," which means holding a job, raising a family, participating in consumer culture, speaking English, and expressing patriotism. That is a much looser standard than the language-and-culture essentialism that has replaced blood and soil in European national identity. On the other hand, the contrast with Europe is a reminder that American membership guarantees very little: limited health care, expensive higher education, no permanent support for poor families or the unemployed. As a matter of fiscal accounting, the American friendliness to immigrants comes cheap, welcoming low-wage and usually eager workers with strictly limited rights to social support. An immigrant may take your job, which is the crux of resentment in the rural and working-class populations that are least welcoming to immigrants, but there is not much more he can take from you.

Dysfunctional Globalization–and a Solution
Taken as a whole, global demographic trends portend a dysfunctional world order. The threats to U.S. interests are at least two. The first is a weak and politically fractious Europe, its attention focused inward on fiscal crises and immigration conflicts, its resources drained by pension and health care payments, its population old and tired. If this were 1900, with Europe the world’s main source of instability and imperial adventure and the leading competitor to U.S. power, that might be a cause for relief. In this century, though, despite recent (and narcissistic) attention to trans-Atlantic differences, the United States and Europe are allies almost perforce: Europe is the one other region of the world stably committed to liberal democracy, human rights, and some version of lawful international order. It is also massively weakened in international affairs, relative to its population and wealth, by its relentless attention to internal and neighborhood problems attendant on the ambitious project of uniting the continent.

A Europe that could put its own house more or less in order would be a major force for orderly international relations as it and the United States enter an inevitable decline relative to newly rich and powerful countries elsewhere. A Europe too distracted by its own failures to act effectively abroad would leave the United States alone to try to manage the transition to a multipolar world–a task we have so far engaged in fecklessly and with some disastrous results, such as the Iraq war, which a stronger European partner might save us from repeating.

The other threat is more dramatic. India is now a relatively liberal and stable nuclear power, however unsettling the nationalist undercurrents of its politics. China is a more or less reliable rational actor in international affairs, however shaky its internal ideological consensus. Imagine an India that more closely resembled Pakistan: a country with an illiberal and undemocratic government hemmed in by extremists who, if they came to power, would take its politics in a scarier direction still. India approached that level of domestic repression and international paranoia when Indira Gandhi assumed emergency powers in the 1970s, a time when nationalist forces were much less politically developed than today. If that scenario still seems a stretch, then instead imagine either India or China in the grip of nationalist fervor strong enough to produce disruptive foreign adventures. Those scenarios do not require much imagination: a Chinese government willing to satisfy widespread popular sentiment by invading Taiwan, or an India determined to deal once and for all with Pakistan, is hardly more fantastic than, say, a U.S. government willing to settle old scores and indulge ideological visions by launching a unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq. While the United States undertook its disastrous adventure only when the politics of September 11 and the Bush Administration’s fixation on Iraq combined to overcome popular skepticism about war abroad, China and India may be carried forward on waves of popular sentiment.

Laissez-Faire and the Bargain Model
One element of globalization is the worldwide spread of modernity–mobility, individual choice, uncertainty about what kind of life to lead, and technology that gives new power to human desires. The demographic gap between men and women in Asia arises from the technology of modernity operating in the absence of the cultural values that modernity has brought in the North Atlantic: above all, egalitarian individualism, in which men and women share in reproductive decisions and, much of the time, women make the final choice. Instead, the power to control reproduction now operates in settings where women are devalued and profoundly disadvantaged. How people use the technology reflects these inequalities. The problem of missing women and surplus men comes from an uneven spread of freedom, in which women exercise new choice in hierarchical and oppressive situations–choices made in corners, you might say. The more real control women exercise over all dimensions of their lives, the more likely it is that they will raise daughters in place of sons, pushing the demographic balance back into place. There is even evidence that the more power women have, the less likely a society is to tilt toward authoritarianism. In this respect, if there is a paradox in modern freedom, the answer is to become even freer.

But how do we get from here to there? The problem is familiar: globalization increases overall wealth and overall choice, but often in ways that produce social and economic disruption, political conflict, and terrible paradoxes like the missing women. Some of this is inevitable in an imperfect world; but part of the reason we have politics, rather than only markets, is to try to manage the gains, harms, and dangers of sweeping change. Is there a way to balance the effects of globalization without curtailing its benefits? And does biopolitics suggest part of an answer?

Take Europe’s demographic, fiscal, and immigration crises as a starting point. Two major features of globalization, capital movement and labor migration, are partly responses to differences in wage rates across nations. Those rates reflect, among other things, the ratio of capital to labor in each economy, with employers in high-capital countries paying more for relatively scarce labor and plentiful labor taking low wages in low-capital countries. In a borderless world where the cost of migration were zero, workforces would rearrange themselves–as capital has begun to do–until a single, global wage prevailed in each industry. If Europe did liberalize immigration, that move would enable workers in low-wage countries to take advantage of high European wages. Immigrant workers would drag European wages down somewhat, but with the offsetting benefit of increasing the working population paying into pension systems.

But Europe is not likely to liberalize immigration radically, and if it did, the political results might be ugly. Is there is a way to get some of the same benefits without moving people across borders? The best chance of doing so would be an example of what, drawing on proposals developed by Yale economist Robert Shiller, I call the bargain model of globalization: the use of international, market-based arrangements to manage the costs and benefits of economic integration.

Imagine a contract in which the governments of Germany, Japan, and Italy agreed to subsidize investments in education, public health, and infrastructure in India and China. In return, the Indian and Chinese governments would commit a share of future GDP to subsidize the public pension plans of the investor countries as their dependency ratios rise. The effect would be international and intergenerational burden-sharing that acknowledged and addressed what each region lacks. Today’s rising generation in developing countries would get some of the public-investment benefits of living in a capital-rich society, by way of investments from such societies. Tomorrow’s retirees would then harvest some of the benefits of living in a country with a large and dynamic working-age population, without actually living in such a country.

A bargain like this one would have some of the virtues of a market arrangement. No party would enter if it didn’t expect to wind up better off as a result. The payments would reflect the best available judgments about the economic and demographic prospects of each country. There would be incentive for inclusion: a contract that included India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, and others would spread risk and increase the likelihood of an adequate payoff.

This bargain could also fit into a strategy for women’s empowerment: properly targeted, the public investments in the first stage could do a lot for women’s literacy, access to family planning, job training, and other aspects of sexually egalitarian development. Such investments would help women in developing countries push back against their increasingly male-dominated societies: skills and employment give women control of resources and an exit option from the family. Literacy also brings women into contact with a broad world of aspirations and ideas about what they might do and who they might be. Globalization that equalizes power in economic, social, and intimate life is less likely to produce perverse results like the problem of missing women. There is also some evidence–far from conclusive, but still provocative–that women’s empowerment is good for democracy. Political scientist M. Steven Fish has found that indicators of women’s status, particularly literacy and employment, correspond to democratic political culture as measured by the research organization Freedom House, even adjusting for the well-recognized correlation between democracy and social and economic development. Another political scientist, Karen Stenner, reports that susceptibility to authoritarian political appeals is highest worldwide among people with a hierarchical view of family structure, suggesting a link between the way intimate decisions are made and the way political culture develops.

Can It Work?
There is nothing novel in a bargain model of globalization except the size of the bargains. From health insurance to mutual funds, modern social life rests on complex markets in risk that distribute the impact of costs and benefits that we cannot individually control. These are among the most humane features of market life: voluntary, mutually advantageous devices to check some of the arbitrariness of luck. A bargain model of globalization would extend the logic of voluntarily sharing costs and benefits to countries undergoing one of the most disruptive transformations in world history.

Other trial runs for a bargain model might include a similar arrangement between the United States and India. Imagine if the money sunk into the Iraq adventure had gone instead to the front end of a bargain that purchased medium-term payments into Social Security, beginning 25 years out, taken from India’s current 7 percent annual growth. Another frontier for a bargain model of globalization is environmental policy. Treating the tropical forests that sequester carbon dioxide and release oxygen as global public goods requiring subsidy if they’re to be kept at an adequate level would give rich nations reason to pay Brazil, Indonesia, and other tropical countries to preserve them. Schemes like this are not novel, of course; but as global warming becomes impossible to ignore, they will grow more salient. The best thing we can do for them now is to pioneer the bargain model elsewhere, treating it as a step-by-step experiment in a changeable agenda.

New biopolitical crises are reminders of not-so-new truths: change has unexpected consequences, and the massive changes of globalization and modernity carry some potential disasters. They also bring the chance to look at economic integration and development with new emphases on women’s empowerment and the search for mutually advantageous ways of managing globalization. They are reminders of growing international interdependence, which means both vulnerability and opportunity. That should not be a surprise. The inconvenient fact that we are all in this together is the starting point for what Tocqueville called the American contribution to modernity and what might now be our best contribution to globalization: self-interest, rightly understood.