It is a truth all but universally acknowledged that the moreinternationalism there is in the world, the more nationalismthere will be: the more multinational companies, multiculturalbeings and planetary networks are crossing and transcendingborders, the more other forces will, as if in response, fashionnew divisions and aggravate old ones. Human nature abhors avacuum, and it is only natural, when people find themselves in adesert, without boundaries, that they will try to assuage theirvulnerability by settling into a community. Thus fewer and fewerwars take place these days across borders, and more and moretake place within them.

Many Americans, rejoicing in an unprecedented period of economicsuccess and celebrating the new horizons opened up by our latesttechnologies, are likely to embrace the future as a dashing (ifunknown) stranger who's appeared at our door to whisk us into astrange new world. Those who travel, though, are more likely tosee rising tribalism, widening divisions and all the fissuresthat propel ever more of the world into what looks like anarchy.Fully 97% of the population growth that will bring our numbers upto 9 billion by the year 2050 will take place in developingcountries, where conditions are scarcely better than they were ahundred years ago. In many cases, in fact, history seems to bemoving backward (in modern Zimbabwe, to take but one example, theaverage life expectancy has dwindled from 70 to 38 in recentyears because of AIDS). To travel today is to see a planet thatlooks more and more like a too typical downtown on a globalscale: a small huddle of shiny high-rises reaching toward amultinational heaven, surrounded on every side by a wasteland ofthe poor, living in a state of almost biblical desperation.

When people speak of a "digital divide," they are, in effect,putting into 21st century technological terms what is an age-oldcultural problem: that all the globalism in the world does noterase (and may in fact intensify) the differences between us.Corporate bodies stress connectedness, borderless economies, allthe wired communities that make up our worldwide webs; those inChechnya, Kosovo or Rwanda remind us of much older forces. Andeven as America exports its dotcom optimism around the world,many other countries export their primal animosities to America.Get in a cab near the Capitol, say, or the World Trade Centerand ask the wrong question, and you are likely to hear a tiradeagainst the Amhara or the Tigreans, Indians or Pakistanis. Ifall the world's a global village, that means that the ancestraldivisions of every place can play out in every other. And thevery use of that comforting word village tends to distract usfrom the fact that much of the world is coming to resemble aglobal city (with all the gang warfare, fragmentation andgeneralized estrangement that those centers of affluencepromote). When the past century began, 13% of humans lived incities; by the time it ended, roughly 50% did.

The hope, in the face of these counterclockwise movements, isthat we can be bound by what unites us, which we have ever moreoccasion to see; that the stirring visions of Thomas Paine orMartin Luther King Jr. have more resonance than ever, now that anAmerican can meet a Chinese counterpart—in Shanghai or SanFrancisco (or many places in between)—and see how much they havein common. What Emerson called the Over-soul reminds us that weare joined not only by our habits and our urges and our fears butalso by our dreams and that best part of us that intuits anidentity larger than you or I. Look up, wherever you are, and youcan see what we have in common; look down—or inside—and you cansee something universal. It is only when you look around that younote divisions.

The fresher and more particular hope of the moment is that asmore and more of us cross borders, we can step out of, andbeyond, the old categories. Every time a Palestinian man, say,marries a Singhalese woman (and such unions are growing morecommon by the day) and produces a half-Palestinian,half-Singhalese child (living in Paris or London, no doubt), anIsraeli or a Tamil is deprived of a tribal enemy. Even thePalestinian or Singhalese grandparents may be eased out oflongtime prejudices. Mongrelism—the human equivalent of WorldMusic and "fusion culture"—is the brightest child offragmentation.

Yet the danger we face is that of celebrating too soon a globalunity that only covers much deeper divisions. Much of the worldis linked, more than ever before, by common surfaces: people onevery continent may be watching Michael Jordan advertising Nikeshoes on CNN. But beneath the surface, inevitably, traditionaldifferences remain. George Bernard Shaw declared generations agothat England and America were two countries divided by a commonlanguage. Now the world often resembles 200 countries divided bya common frame of cultural reference. The number of countries onthe planet, in the 20th century, has more than tripled.

Beyond that, multinationals and machines tell us that we're allplugged into the same global circuit, without considering verymuch what takes place off-screen. China and India, to cite thetwo giants that comprise 1 in every 3 of the world's people,have recently begun to embrace the opportunities of the globalmarketplace and the conveniences of e-reality (and, of course,it is often engineers of Chinese and Indian origin who have madethese new wonders possible). Yet for all that connectedness onan individual level, the Chinese government remains as reluctantas ever to play by the rules of the rest of the world, andIndian leaders make nuclear gestures as if Dr. Strangelove hadjust landed in Delhi. And as some of us are able to fly acrosscontinents for business or pleasure, others are propelled out oftheir homelands by poverty and necessity and war, in recordnumbers: the number of refugees in the world has gone up 1,000%since 1970.

It seems a safe bet, as we move toward the year 2025, thatgovernments will become no more idealistic than they have everbeen—they will always represent a community of interests. Andcorporations cannot afford to stress conscience or sacrificebefore profit. It therefore falls to the individual, on her owninitiative, to look beyond the divisions of her parents' timeand find a common ground with strangers to apply the all-purposeadjective "global" to "identity" and "loyalty." Never before inhistory have so many people, whether in Manhattan or in Tuva,been surrounded by so much that is alien (in customs, languagesand neighborhoods). How we orient ourselves in the midst of allthis foreignness and in the absence of the old certainties willdetermine how much our nations are disunited and how much we arebound by what Augustine called "things loved in common."