Beware fashions in geopolitics. They change as often as the hemlines on Paris catwalks.
The fast-shifting distribution of power in the world is feeding a burgeoning community of geopolitical seers. Change sharpens our appetite for certainty about the future. By and large, though, the myriad maps of a new global order are turning out to be as ephemeral as the couturiers’ spring collections.
Not so long ago, the competing ambitions of autocracies and democracies were set to shape the future. China and Russia would square up against the west. Washington rang with calls from pundits and policymakers for a global league of liberal democracies. As I recall, France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder were mustard keen to side with the autocrats.
The predicted collision was always fanciful, not least because Beijing and Moscow are more plausible strategic rivals than allies. Nor is India, the world’s largest democracy, ever likely to join a US-dominated club of political pluralists.
Never mind. The great thing about fashion is that it moves on. Soon enough, we were told that democracy and autocracy would make their peace; the US and China would jointly rule the global roost. Europe, Russia and the rest would trail quaking in the wake of this all-powerful G2.
This theory had a fair run. It held sway until quite recently. Then came Barack Obama’s so-so visit to Beijing last autumn. There followed a series of Sino-American spats about everything from climate change and the renminbi to Google, the Dalai Lama and arms sales to Taiwan.
Fortunately this provided a seamless segue to the latest grand theory of the world, the future and the universe. Forget about the G2; the geopolitical landscape will be marked out in coming decades by competition rather than co-operation. For an aggressive Germany in the second half of the 19th century substitute an assertive China in the first half of the 21st. The international order will again be held in thrall to a struggle between a mature and a rising power.
The above, of course, is an abbreviated list. I might have mentioned also the fleeting but sure belief around the turn of the millennium that the US would be a permanent global hegemon. This was followed, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, by the dismal certainty of an epoch-defining clash between the west and Islam.
I often wonder what happened to those predictions that the 21st century would belong to the soft power of a postmodern Europe? It seems only yesterday that the euro was being hailed as the currency to oust a feeble dollar. Now, or so it seems, the eurozone is breaking apart, courtesy of some dodgy book-keeping in Greece.
You will have seen by now what I am getting at. The greater the conviction of the soothsayers, the more likely they are to be wrong. If we should have learnt anything from the tumultuous changes of the post-cold war era, it is how hard it is to predict the way things will turn out. Sad to say, the economists who failed so dismally to spot any flaws in the financial system are not alone in their myopia.
Understanding present trends is not the same as knowing where they will lead. We know the world is changing faster than at any time in modern history – hence the pervasive sense of insecurity in western societies that have so long taken for granted their privileged status in the hierarchy of nations.
The biggest shifts – the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest, and a shift in the centre of geopolitical gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific – speak for themselves. So do the mega-trends: climate change, population growth, intensifying competition for resources and the ubiquity of modern communications technologies among them.
Much harder to fathom is how these changes will fit together: will they promote collisions or co-operation? Most likely both. But in what proportions? An optimist might see the planet’s rising temperature as a catalyst for the refurbishment of an outdated system of global governance. A pessimist – even a realist – might look instead to the prospect of new conflicts driven by resource scarcity.
The best in the crystal-ball gazing business understand all this. They eschew primary colours and prefer to paint the future in subtler hues. They delineate the direction of travel – from the changing balance of power between states to the worldwide trends mentioned above – but draw only tentative conclusions.
The US National Intelligence Council has done this well for many years. Its latest survey, Global Trends 2025, was published more than a year ago. It has weathered well the fads and fashions since.
A study published last month by Britain’s Ministry of Defence (spooks and the military pay close attention to all this stuff) peers further into the future. Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040 declares that it wants to inform “without being constrained by the latest good idea, fashionable trend or received wisdom”.
True to its word, its analysis usefully measures the implications of the way the world is going against the potential for dislocations. Thus it is quite possible China will boast the world’s largest economy by 2030 or so; it is also plausible, as its leaders never stop telling themselves, that China’s progress will hit the buffers of political and social unrest. It is often forgotten that China is in a race to get rich before it gets old.
The US does not look quite the waning power of fashionable fancy. It has geography and demography on its side – a friendly neighbourhood and a growing population that is ageing less fast than that of rivals. It has a big technological edge, a culture of enterprise and innovation, first-rate universities and a stable, if infuriating, political system.
It is not at all hard to paint a picture of the future that has the US and China fighting it out for the title of superpower-in-chief. It is equally true that the biggest losers would be, yes, the US and China. Their interdependence is inescapable. Both need the preservation of a relatively stable international order.
Human nature being what it is, competition may indeed triumph over self-interested co-operation. If so, the really big struggles in coming decades will be between order and disorder and between governance and anarchy. On the other hand, Beijing and Washington might just end up on the same side after all.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/efaccb08-1cc9-11df-8d8e-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1
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