The Global Me : Why Nations Will Succeed or Fail in the Next Generation

A Wall Street Journal correspondent's visionary, big-picture look at why countries, businesses, and people win and lose in an increasingly multicultural world.

Why is Japan, a country that looked economically invincible a decade ago stagnating, while long-moribund Ireland booms? What qualities will ensure a country's dominance in the new millennium?

In The Global Me, Wall Street Journal writer G. Pascal Zachary provides a provocative roadmap to the new civilisation arising out of sweeping shifts in the world economy. Through vivid examples of individuals and institutions he reveals that the key 'secrets to success' for economic, political and cultural dominance do not lie in a nation's size, military strength or natural resources, but in its openness to absorbing values and people from around the world. Roaming the globe, Zachary shows how the rise of new forms of identity and migration are helping to determine who will win and lose in the next century.

Zachary's thesis isn't just about countries, but individuals too. In this tour of a new global civilisation, we meet a fascinating gallery of characters who possess an intriguing mix of 'roots' and 'wings'. Strong enough to know who they are, they are nevertheless ceaselessly becoming someone else - and in the process bestowing the gifts of creativity and social harmony on the cities and states that they call home.

Social critics, pundits, politicians and economists will argue about The Global Me and years from now they will realise the prescience of Zachary's original and compelling vision of a world where nations who embrace multiculturalism win big, and those who don't are doomed to stagnation or worse.

G. PASCAL ZACHARY is a senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, which he joined in 1989. His writings have appeared in numerous other publications including Washington Quarterly, and the radical newsweekly In These Times. He is the author of two previous books: Showstopper, a 1994 account of the making of a software program at Microsoft, and Endless Frontier, a biography of Vannevar Bush, organiser of the Manhattan Project. He lives in London.