Doug Cocks
The forces that threaten global stability can probably be contained for at least one more generation, but not for much longer (McRae 1994).
This paper has been written to document my perceptions of the larger world in which Australians will have to live over the next 50 years, acknowledging in doing so that these perceptions draw heavily on the works of a wide range of authors. It has been written with a focus on those aspects of the world’s future that, depending on how they eventuate, have most potential to modify Australia's efforts to shape its longer-term future, to make them successes or failures. Hence, the bulk of the paper is devoted to exploring prospects for global order and governance, the global economy, the global environment and several aspects of global society.
The paper starts with a review of the last century, looking for powerful trends and established patterns that might carry over into and shape the world’s next 50 years. It ends with an attempt to summarise a wide-ranging discussion into a manageable number of assertions (28) presented as a set of working answers to most of the questions about the world’s future that might arise when developing and evaluating national strategies for Australia. These assertions are expressed as subjective certainties (eg world population growth) or as (a) more- and (b) less-surprising pairs of alternative possibilities( eg a decreased (less surprising) or an increased (more surprising) role for the United Nations.
For much of recorded history, societies evolved in relative isolation. This began to change with the age of colonialism and today societies are intermingling to an increasing degree. In this paper we view the world, the globe, as a system of interacting nations, trans-national organisations and supra-national organisations. Systems, by definition, are networks of (many) isolable components or units continuously interacting with each other according to their own behavioural rules. So, we can view the world as a system of interacting nations etc, each changing the others’ environments while collectively evolving in ways that can be described statistically.
Here, our primary interest is in the future environment which this developing global system might create for Australia, ie in those aspects of the world where change stands to modify the international behaviour of Australia-the-nation and Australian sub-national entities such as corporations and non-government organisations. In keeping with the prevailing weltanschauung (or perhaps because it cannot be defied directly), our present interest is in the social, political, economic and natural resource dimensions of the global system rather than in more esoteric foci such as the spiritual, the cultural and the bio-evolutionary. The paper’s focal time-window is from now to about 2050---the mid-future---and while it contains a number of statements of the form ‘the future will be such-and -such’, this, unless specifically affirmed, is the confidence of the attributed owner of that knowledge speaking, not necessarily the present author.
However, before looking for possibilistic future worlds under these headings, the paper recalls the past century to get a feel for the fluxes (ongoing trends), contingencies and fluidities that it has bequeathed to the present and the future. I am accepting Elise Boulding’s (1978) view that we need to look at how the world has behaved and changed in the last hundred years if we are to have any understanding of the forces that will shape the next hundred years. This is notwithstanding Boulding’s own admission that our capacity to image the future has been weakened by, probably, the increasing rate of change being experienced in many dimensions of the global system (cf Snooks 1996). Still, if we can find generalisations over several or many countries, it will be worth asking if they include Australia, and helpful if they do, or, indeed, definitely do not.
The distinguished British historian, Eric Hobsbawm (1994), has written with great insight about what happened and why in the world during the period 1914-1991. This period (which he calls the short twentieth century) begins with the First World War and ends with the collapse of the USSR and of course covers most of Australia's history as a single nation state. He divides the period into:
. an ‘age of catastrophe’ from 1914 to the aftermath of the second world war. Apart from the two world wars, this age includes the great depression of the thirties and the rise of fascism;
. a ‘sort of golden age’ of extraordinary economic growth and social transformation (eg national independence movements) for 25 or 30 post-war years up till the early 1970s (called ‘the long boom’ by Daly and Logan (1989)) ; and
. the ‘crisis decades’ since the ‘golden age’ in which capitalism, as well as communism, has failed to deliver----as evidenced by mass unemployment, cyclical slumps, increasing divergence between wealth and poverty and between state revenues and state expenditures. An increasingly integrated world economy has undermined the institutions of all regimes. In an effort to recover, many regimes have replaced the Keynesian economic ideas which ruled in the golden age with neo-liberal and laissez faire ideas. But followers of that path have done no better than others. This has also been the time when the potentially catastrophic ecological consequences of economic growth have begun to emerge. The growth rate of the world economy dropped from five per cent per annum in the 1960s to two per cent in the 1990s (Thurow 1996).
Overall, between 1914 and 1991 people in the advanced economies, including Australia, came to live longer and better (at least until the eighties) than their parents. Technological revolutions, particularly in transport and communications, ‘virtually annihilated time and distance’ (sic). But it has been a murderous and barbaric century. As predicted by Marx, social relations in the first world have disintegrated under the advance of a-social individualism. Capitalism (Box 2.1) has been a permanent and continuous revolutionising force.
At the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past...has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings, singly and collectively, through life no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where our journey is taking us, or even ought to take us (Hobsbawm 1994).
Capitalism clarified
Technicalities aside, capital is the
savings from past profits or wages that are available to finance new
enterprises. Physical capital exists as
factories, machines etc and finance capital is wealth invested in financial
instruments such as loans, shares, bonds.
Capitalism is not a dirty word. It is a
term describing an economic production system characterised by wage-labour that
does not own the means of production.
Capitalism creates a social order characterised by constant change
caused by the drive to accumulate capital by innovation and expansion of
output. It is the drive for capital
accumulation which energises the system.
Undoubtedly, the central issue in capitalist societies is the relation
between business and government, the economy and the state.
Thus, beyond the ‘crisis decades’ Hobsbawm can see an ‘unknown and problematic but not necessarily apocalyptic future’---a period of destructuring rather than destruction. Problems he foresees include the following:
. We enter a world in which for the first time in two centuries there is no international system or structure---as evidenced by the emergence of dozens of new territories without any independent mechanisms for border determination. It is a world in which the First World can win battles against the Third World but not wars, not in the sense of being able to control the conquered territory after ‘victory’. There is a global disorder and no obvious mechanism for either ending it or keeping it under control. Hobsbawm’s view matches that of Singer and Wildavsky (1993) who divide the world into two parts. One part is zones of peace, wealth and democracy. The other is zones of war, turmoil and development in which a century of disruption can be expected.
. The privatisation of the means of destruction means that it is now quite possible for small groups of political or other dissidents to disrupt and destroy anywhere. Concurrently, the cost of keeping unofficial violence under control has risen dramatically. Note though that the rapid fall of the twentieth century’s totalitarian and ruthlessly dictatorial regimes has effectively demonstrated the limits of sheer coercive power.
. Global population will rise above 10 billion and regional differences in population change will generate great migratory pressures. There can be little doubt that friction between natives and foreigners will be a major factor in the politics, global and national, of the next decades. Eventually, the problem of how to keep world population stable will have to be faced.
. The ecological consequences of ongoing economic growth will not make the world uninhabitable for humans but will change the environments in which people live and perhaps reduce the carrying capacity of the globe dramatically. In the long run, a balance will have to be struck between humanity, the (renewable) resources it consumes and the effect of its activities on the environment. Nobody knows, and few dare speculate how this is to be done, and at what level of population, technology and consumption such a permanent balance would be possible. One thing however is undeniable. It would be incompatible with a world economy based on the unlimited pursuit of profit in capitalist economies of the type now existing.
. While globalisation and the international redistribution of production will bring more of the world’s six billion into the global economy, there will be a seemingly-irreversible widening of the gap between rich and poor countries. The belief, following neoclassical economics that unrestricted international trade will allow the poorer countries to come closer to the rich, runs counter to historical experience as well as common sense; protectionism regularly cuts off markets while oversupply reduces prices. A world economy beset by growing inequalities is inevitably accumulating future troubles. To judge by the tendency to inequality in the 1970s and 1980s, the major upcoming political problem of the developed world will not be how to multiply the wealth of nations but how to distribute it.
. Technology will continue to squeeze human labour out of the production of goods and services, without providing either enough work of the same kind for those jettisoned, or the guarantee of a rate of economic growth sufficient to absorb them. Very few observers seriously expect a return to the full employment of the ‘golden age’ in the West. Demand in mass markets will continue to decline as transfer incomes (social security etc) fall and as technology squeezes workers out of service industry jobs as well as secondary industry jobs.
Despite the difficulties of doing so identified by Hobsbawm, many have written with great insight about what the world might be like, politically, socially, technologically, economically, and environmentally, in coming decades and even generations.
Probably the three best known future-gazers of recent decades are Daniel Bell, author of The Coming of Post-industrial Society, Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, and Herman Kahn.
According to Bell, writing in 1973, the industrial economy based on manufacturing is giving way to a service economy where the bulk of the workforce will be engaged in a wide range of non-manual occupations (and manual leisure activities). The outstanding characteristic of this society is what Bell calls ‘the centrality of theoretical knowledge’. A dominant role will be played by professional and technical people, armed with a new intellectual technology. Technology assessment, forecasting models and systems analysis will replace ad hoc adaptiveness and experimentation in politics. The new scientific and technical elites will displace existing powerful groups and society will be run on the basis of rational decision making---managerialism. Education in the new skills required will be the route to power.
A similar optimistic perspective is apparent in the work of Herman Kahn (Kahn and Weiner 1967; Kahn and Bruce-Briggs 1972; Kahn and others 1976). He sees the connection between history and the future in terms of a ‘long-term multifold trend’, one important component of which is the movement towards a post-industrial society. Kahn and his collaborators foresaw continued economic expansion, linked with the growth of education, leisure and material welfare, although not in the ‘non-coping’ nations (after Encel 1979).
Alvin Toffler's (1970) 'future shock' is essentially about the increasing transience of our individual experiences of things, people, ideas, organisations and places. He points out that the industrialised world is changing so rapidly that it no longer functions as a model for the non-industrialised world to emulate.
We turn now from such panoramic views to several collations of more focussed views of the world’s mid-future, beginning with power politics, the ways in which nations might attempt to influence each other’s actions, usually, but not always, to their own benefit.
Assume that the dynamic driving inter-nation relations is that nations seek to survive and prosper within the community of nations (cf. Snooks 1996). For the foreseeable future, the model for inter-nation relations stands to be that of each country using threats and/or persuasion, backed up as required and feasible by tangible power, to try and make others behave as desired---what is called power politics.
Power on the world stage has economic, political and military components. With the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the world’s only superpower; but few see America’s superpower status lasting as the global competitive system expands to include Russia, China and the Middle East (Thurow 1996). For the moment however, the ending of the Cold War does not obviously imply any immediate major shift in international relations, despite releasing previously suppressed rivalries between the US, China, Japan and others and an outbreak of tribalism (Kennon 1995).
After the loss of US hegemony, any of a variety of scenarios would be unsurprising, including:
- A multi-state system without major alliances. This would involve coalition building between countries on an issue by issue basis eg the Australian experiences on agricultural trade, chemical weapons, Law of the Sea, Cambodia, Antarctica.
- A first world versus ‘the rest’ scenario (Peters 1995)
- A ‘three power bloc’ system built around Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. The precursors of such blocs are already in place (Grant 1994) although being so diverse, ethnically and culturally, perhaps reduces East Asia’s prospects for becoming a globally important entity. Also, defence spending is rising more rapidly in East Asia than in other parts of the world (Wilson 1996). Conversely, the logic for eastern Europe being gradually absorbed into western Europe is overwhelming (McRae 1994). While Australia would have some claim to belong to any of these three blocs it is not a natural member of any!
And to even further expand the range of geopolitical possibilities, the sheer politico-economic mass of an emerging energy-hungry China could lead Japan, India and Russia to recognise their common security interests against an unpredictable giant (Goodman and Segal 1995). Although McRae (1994) observes that China and Japan are more likely to become rivals than partners, what if they find it profitable to co-operate to the disadvantage of the US? Could Japanese militarism resurface? Friedman and Lebard (1991) conclude that Japan must at some point rearm in order to protect its access to raw materials, eg Gulf oil. Hartcher (1996) notes that, as in pre-1914 Europe, close economic integration amongst Asian countries does not preclude wars there, started by territorial claims, deep nationalism and competition for resources, notably oil.
What part might wars play in creating and maintaining future power standings and alignments? A world war in 2045 is used in Wagar’s (1989) Short History of the Future as the device to trigger the end of a global capitalist economy dominated by twelve ‘mega corporations’. However, most perceptions of next century’s wars (but not Friedman and Lebard (1991) see the possibilities as being less total than that. For example, Huntington (1994) sees wars of the future as being between civilisations, (not between nations as such) eg between the Islamic and the Christian worlds. Against this, it is Wagar’s (1989) view that while Islamic fundamentalismI is likely to have some political success for a while, it will not be able to break free of the global economy because of its need for modern arms and the need to pay for these. Mid-future wars, excluding civil wars, stand to be between pairs of nations rather than coalitions of nations or ‘core’ nations, but always with the possibility of neighbouring states becoming involved. However, continuing advances in military technology, such as precision missiles, have decoupled territory and defence (Langford 1979, Leslie 1996). By 2020, precision strike capabilities might create the potential to achieve strategic effects over continental distances.
While trade wars to protect markets are not foreseeable at this stage, 21st century wars of redistribution would not be particularly surprising (Elkins 1995). The World Bank has suggested that next century's wars could be over water. Chronic water shortages already affect 40 % of the world's population in 80 countries. Global demand for water doubles every 21 years. In the Middle East, disputes are already erupting in the watersheds of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. In South Asia, Nepal and Bangladesh are in dispute over the waters of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin. Closer to home, it would not be too surprising if Java were to run out of water.
But scarcities of resources other than water also stand to generate major conflicts, most notably when a scarcity of food-producing land created by population growth and land degradation leads to mass population movements, eg sub-Saharan Africa (Homer-Dixon 1991).
While the end of the cold war has led to an outbreak of tribalism and to wars within and between nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, there does seem to be some possibility of a system of enforceable international law emerging in coming decades. Saunders (1994) sees the world of 2025 being more integrated with more policy being driven by international and supra-national organisations, both public and private. Certainly, no first world country is interested in using military power to establish a new empire; and, most importantly, having enforceable international law is in the interests of both business and powerful bureaucracies in the first world. Against that, many deep conflicts remain to be resolved.
Such an international administration would, at first sight, be largely built around the United Nations Organisation’s establishing of minimum human rights and standards and rules for international economic and political relationships (see also Naisbitt 1994). Alternatively, the priorities might be to actively regulate the global economy or implement a ‘rights of nations’ charter which would protect and help nations taking actions they considered necessary for their citizens’ well-being. John Burton’s (pers comm) contrary view is that the United Nations is an organisation primarily seeking to preserve the sovereignty of its nation state members and will come to be seen to be largely irrelevant in the global economy. Thurow (1996) is also amongst those pessimistic about world regulation replacing national regulation of economic activities, saying ‘No one can agree on who should regulate, what should be regulated, or how it should be regulated’. Whatever form the supranational order takes, it seems likely to be a creature of the first world with others playing largely by their rules (see also Naisbitt (1994) and Boulding (1978) for discussions of prospects for world government).
Having discounted the prospect of global war, it must nonetheless be recognised that the spread of nuclear weapons remains a problem (Grant 1994; Leslie 1996) and that a ‘rogue’ nation indifferent to conventional notions of self-interest could trigger a major conflict across continents. Nuclear proliferation still provides a strong argument against nuclear fission as an energy source (Elkins 1995).
While the above discussion envisages wars as continuing to be based on military action, other possibilities exist such as information warfare based on wholesale industrial espionage and the deliberate pollution of data transmissions underlying key systems; banking and power generation for example (Elkins 1995). A first world rogue nation might be willing to introduce ethnically-specific ‘designer plagues’ into teeming third world countries seen as threatening first world security.
National sovereignty is eroded from above by the mobility of capital, goods and information across national boundaries, the integration of world financial markets, and the trans-national character of industrial production. And national sovereignty is challenged from below by the resurgent aspirations of subnational groups for autonomy and self-rule. As their effective sovereignty fades, nations gradually lose their hold on the allegiance of their citizens...nation-states are increasingly unable to link identity and self-rule (Sandel 1996).
Political unrest is the wild card in history’s deck (Heilbroner 1995).
Decline in the power and role of the nation state in the 21st century is a common theme in the writing of contemporary futurists. McRae (1994), for example, identifies reasons such as:
· power is being passed upwards to supranational bodies via treaties and international regulations and standards. Trans-national arrangements such as the European Community and North American Free Trade Association are already over-riding parts of traditional national sovereignty.
· power is being passed downwards to regional authorities
· world financial markets set limits on fiscal and monetary policy for most countries
· nations have limited scope for any actions that reduce international competitiveness
· trans-national companies determine investment partly on the basis of tax treatment and hence there is a limit on any country’s capacity to extract tax from foreign businesses.
· the talented are becoming more mobile and can choose to live where life is good and personal tax rates are low.
Cerny (1995) notes the difficulties that nation states have in providing public goods such as law enforcement, regulatory structures, property and environmental protection etc when the ideal scale for providing these is changing, under globalisation, from national to international. But while nations are declining as political actors, the political means to control world capital have not yet emerged (Leach 1995; Fagan and Webber 1994)
Just as such international influences are intensifying, so are demands for local control, eg Aboriginal demands for self-determination. Dissociation through intra-national secession is occurring in first, second and third world countries. This trend towards a world that is both shrinking and fragmenting (Camilleri and Falk 1992) is called ‘glocalisation’ by Courchene (1993). Hobsbawm (1994) also recognises symptoms of the loss of state power internally such as, for example, the rise of private security services and the erosion of natural monopolies such as postal services.
Nevertheless, the ‘territorially rigid’ nation state will continue to exist. Kennon (1995) foresees a continuation of the current division of nations into a first, second and third world, perhaps with some limited movement of nations between these categories, just as, for example, post-Franco Spain has joined the first world.
First world countries, mostly liberal democracies such as those in the OECD (eg Australia), are politically stable without having to depend on police-state methods or foreign support. They are economically advanced in terms of such indicators of a modern economy as GDP per head, price stability, inflation rate etc. They are socially developed in terms of education, life expectancy, public health and other social indicators of well-being.
Second world countries are commonly in disequilibrium because they have powerful and unrelenting internal enemies whom they control with loyal and effective police forces. The more authoritarian second world regimes put security above principle and make no claim to higher abstractions, eg Burma. Others justify and legitimate themselves on ideological grounds or on the basis of economic success (eg the newly industrialising countries of Asia). A few are totalitarian in the sense of trying to control how people think (Totalitarianism and libertarianism, the idea of minimal state interference in people’s lives, are at opposite ends of the political spectrum).
Third world countries, sometimes called the south because so many are in the southern hemisphere, are those unable to enforce their will throughout their national territories (Kennon 1995). Many are overwhelmingly burdened by foreign debt. In 1970 the 15 most heavily indebted nations had an external public debt of 9.8% of GNP. By 1987 this had risen to 47.5% of GNP. Having to make such debt repayments to first world countries ensure that schools and hospitals cannot be built and that ever-more resources will be sold off, exacerbating the problem even more.
Homer-Dixon (1991) suggests that severe civil strife is likely when:
· there are clearly defined and organised groups in society
· some of these groups regard their level of achievement as unacceptably low and, hence, the socio-economic system as unfair
· these same groups believe peaceful opportunities for change are blocked but that the authority system is capable of being overthrown.
On this analysis, the only way for a police state to cease to be a police state is to cease to be deeply divided.
The quintessence of liberal democratic government is majority rule restrained by culture, law, custom, ‘natural’ rights to protect minorities and the power of a range of countervailing institutions (such as churches, unions, business, the public service, academia). It allows the individual an effective say in running the state through a process of electing representatives under broad suffrage to make laws and carry out policy. Gorer (1966) emphasises that not only is majority rule restrained by a range of values in a democracy, it must be if democracy is to survive; that the attitude of ‘winner takes all’ is fatal to democracy.
Now that is the theory, but it is not difficult to identify a rapidly growing disenchantment with government, both with the institution itself and with its ability to perform (Shuman 1978). This is despite some spreading of forms of democratic government around the world. The Freedom House organisation, which follows such matters, rated 42 countries as ‘free’ in 1972 and 75 as ‘free’ in 1994. Domestic policies for managing deficits, debts and unemployment have generally been unsuccessful (Daly and Logan 1989). There is some evidence that young people are unimpressed with political processes, even in stable democracies (Eckersley 1995). And many first world countries contain a growing underclass that feels that the political process has failed it. Certainly many unemployed feel betrayed by a society that says ‘If you try hard enough you will get a job’.
But how has this happened? Democracy’s greatest strength, having to maintain the approval of the voters, is also its greatest weakness, namely, having to get re-elected every few years by pandering to short-sighted and greedy voters and not take account of future voters, non-voters etc. Single-issue parties can exert a disproportionate influence. Liberal democracies seem incapable of pre-empting (anticipating? forestalling?) or even seriously debating problems and, moreover, tend to overreact when they do eventually respond. The reason has been neatly diagnosed as `pluralistic stagnation' (Lindblom 1959, 1965) wherein competing interest groups continually nullify each other: whatever is proposed by one group is commonly against the interests of some other organised group and therefore vigorously opposed. Contributing to the `log jam' in many cases is the built-in unwillingness of contending parties to compromise, to moderate their demands. It is proposals which threaten only a diffuse and unorganised public interest which best stand to succeed! Mancur Olson (1982) talks about distributional coalitions or special-interest groups that are willing to sacrifice large national gains to obtain small gains for themselves. Olson foresees this fate for all developed countries and Kennon (1995) finds the signs already visible in Britain