Thomas Friedman

To all those who say that this era of globalization is no different from the previous one, I would simply ask: Was your great-grandmother playing bridge with Frenchmen on the Internet in 1900? I don't think so. There are some things about this era of globalization that we've seen before, and some things that we've never seen before and some things that are so new we don't even understand them yet. For all these reasons, I would, sum up the differences between the two eras of globalization this way: If the first era of globalization shrank the world from a size "large" to a size "medium," this era of globalization is shrinking the world from a size "medium" to a size "small."

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Without the knowledge of the U.S. government, Long-Term Capital Management – a few guys in Greenwich, Connecticut – amassed more financial bets around the world than all the foreign reserves of China. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire with his own global network, declared war on the United States in the late 1990s, and the U.S. Air Force had to launch a cruise missile attack on him as though he were another nation-state. We fired cruise missiles at an individual! Jodie Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her contribution to the International Ban on Landmines. She achieved that ban not only without much government help, but in the face of opposition from the Big Five major powers. And what did she say was her secret weapon for organizing 1,000 different human rights and arms control groups on six continents? "E-mail."