Open Democracy's retrospective and prospective look at the decade/s
January 3rd, 2010 by Mark Bahnisch | Published in Authoritarianism, Climate change, Developing world, Economics, Environment, International, Markets, Politics, Security, Sociology, Terrorism, The Web, War | 12 Comments
Open Democracy has asked a range of its contributors to answer the following questions:
A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:
1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?
2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?
3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?
Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.
Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).
Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.
There’s much to ponder here.
Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.
The GWOT (now morphed into the morass that is Afghanistan), for the USA: (as WW2 did for the British Empire) was the Empire breaker and a destroyer of hard won human rights in the noughties.
US foreign policy created Al Queda (an offshoot of the 70′s and 80′s Mujahadeen) and through proxy Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah. Now those foreign policy chickens are coming home to roost in the next decade as evidenced in part by the fact that airport “security” is so draconian that it seems toothpaste is suspect these days and who do so many innocent people end up on some shit list perpetrated by some troglodyte in the bowels of the security services? (If ‘god’ had intended us to fly he would never have given us teh terrorists and should never [it seems, given recent events] have given us clothes.)
(That so called security is window dressing and gives a false sense of security IMO)
Predictions:
1) China will become the biggest economy this decade, or if not will markedly close the gap. Will take some time however for the communist leaders to be as obnoxious in FP as George Bush.
2)Human rights will remain under attack although I would reserve judgement on the mooted new social contract that exchanges significant democratic rights for free market security.
3) Japan and the EU will have similar and more damaging demographic problems than most others, ie aging populations and declining living (welfare) standards. (Granted the EU can compensate to some extent with immigration where Japan can’t for cultural reasons.)
4) Other factors for the US decline is the combination of abysmal education in the bottom half and religious indifference or influences promoting more scientific stupidity than ever before. I predict that within 10 years the USD will be a shadow of its influence today.
5) The next decade should see AGW established beyond any doubt (and the last denialist will probably be Birdy) towards meaningful global solutions.
6) Ten years to controlling hydrogen fusion reactions for almost unlimited power.(Over-optimistic? Perhaps.)
7) In Latin America the trend towards Chavez style socialisation of hitherto foreign dominated natural resources (especially oil) will continue (and give rise to more Libertarian and neo-con heart attacks).
In summary: cautious optimism.
I so hope you are correct Peter (@1), in all your
predictions.
1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?
The end of the End of History.
2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?
Hope: Cross-cultural consensus on planetary limits.
Fear: Various kleptocracies will vie with increasing violence for access to strategic resources.
3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?
Fading: neoliberal mythologies of limitless growth.
Emerging: a new, combative mercantilism led by an alliance of national political elites and favoured corporations. The relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Obama administration is an embryonic form of this relationship.
1 Mobile Media. Micro electronics have allowed people to create and connect in unprecedented ways. This has generated a new class of freedom, though not without cost, that evokes entirely new concepts of community. This freedom offers the ability to shed weighty materialism if people are able to recognise the cost of such materialism.
2. Hope. That Western governments will sieze the opportunity of Global Warming Awareness and Resources Depletion to change the course of our civilisation towards clean perpetual sustainability away from unfettered exploitation.
Fear. Greed will dominate commerce and politics for another 10 critical years.
3. Fading. The love of the “car” as a thing to dominate our way of life. Cars have become a trap that confines and isolates. While cars give us mobility, their form and their needs are beginning to cost more than they save.
Emerging. A desire to step back from the frenetic chase for asset security. Our emerging young are demonstrating a new class of personal security based on pride of their own performance supported by their mobility of interconnection. This can go horribly wrong when the new media are used as weapons of hate, but from what I can see the new media are used for positive personal development and sharing. The nice part about this new order is that parasitic commerce is struggling to find ways take a hold.
1) The rise of Internet 2.0. Where else can us base partisans get our fix of post-structuralist analysis of the pollies at Canberra? But seriously, it has the potential to change Western society beyond imagining, and to widen the gap between us & with the rest of the world.
2) WMD terrorism existing, pandemics existing, India and Pakistan throwing down, the assassination of the American president, a new bubble emerging before some basic sensible controls can be imposed on high finance, know-nothingism stopping any further climate change policy. Those are the fears.
The hopes? Why would they ask us about the hopes in the same sentence as they ask us our fears? Is this a highschool essay contest?
3) Obviously something to do with stopping AGW. Hopefully not a return to neo-Malthusian-population-control-before-everything-else as our main attitude to the issues of the developing world (though I was bothered to see a ‘Lateline’ report by Ticky Fullerton pushing this very line a month ago. I would hope some of the science bloggers like Lambert took that show apart, but I’m not optimistic, and won’t be googling for that.)
My gut feeling is that any further American decline will be imperceptible, I don’t expect the greenback to remain in the gutter permanently. Likewise I think the PRC is reaching a ceiling that can only be breached by full ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’, and I don’t think the regime looks to Taipei as an example of how mainland Chinese should be allowed to choose the form of their own government/civil society.
I wonder if they’re just Czarist Russia with a trade surplus. An analogy that will screw with the Marxians’ heads, I admit.
1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?
2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?
3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?
1) The triumph of post-modernism in political and social discourse. The expansion of the internet and its communication possibilities has actually exacerbated this trend, by blurring the distinctions between reality and the cacophony of opinion. The consumers of Fox News get their reality, and others get theirs. Reality has become, perhaps for the first time since the middle ages, disputed territory. Bloggers have become as valued a source of what passes for knowledge influencing policy as are scientists. The Enlightenment is under serious threat for the first time since the imprisonment of Gallileo.
2) Ditto Katz.
3) Fading: Illusions in the global North about the positive and constructive role of the imperial powers in their dealings with the global South, and specifically the illusion that Israel is a democratic light unto the nations.
Emerging: Local and individual action regarding consumption and climate change action eclipsing government initiatives.
The most significant trend in first decade: a shamble towards global paranoia, rgardless of what side you’re on. This is very worrying. International irrationality, partly faith-based on all sides. isn’t likely to produce a successful result.
Hopes and fears: [Sounds like a bloody Tarot reading.] Hopes: A global solution to global warming that actually works; Moderate Islam wins in the Islamic world;
Fears: Some fool lets off one or more nuclear bombs; Global warming is already totally irreversible;
Fading in 2010: the end of neo-conservatism – an economic philosophy finally revealed for all its shallow selfishness;
Emerging in 2010: Mass popular movement the woirld over forcing politicians to do something really effective about global warming;
1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?
Id have to go with the rise of China. Their involvement in Africa and other 3rd world countries over resource security, untied loans, handouts, and (frankly) general neo-imperialism will be have profound ramifications by 2020.
2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?
Most hope for concerted international action on climate change. Most fear tipping points are far closer than we think.
3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?
Global warming denialism will die off by mid-decade owing not to the victory of scientific rationalism, but to popular rejection – run over by the Clapham Omnibus for denying the bleeding obvious.
Emerging ideas – people to people networks increasingly undermine and supplants traditional state internationalism. Crisis of legitimacy in several western states as carbon elites dominate policy making, increasing restriction on freedom of speech and assembly in response to popular protests over inaction – various brands of authoritarian capitalism jostle for market share.
Dude, are we narcissistic bastards or what.
The biggest story of the decade may be the rise of China, but we see it only in terms of a pissing contest with our own governments, not the massive and very real differences in millions of people’s lives.
Likewise, we describe the last decade as being on of rising inequality. Within many societies certainly, a troubling yes. But globally, astonishingly trend was slightly down. The consequence of which was subsumed into the pissing contest.
Subsequently I predict the story of the teens, told by us, will be about us (middle class, mostly white etc.) and self obsessed.
The most remarkable thing about the past decade is it is likely to be the decade in which people were least likely to die as a result of other people’s malice. Population growth had meant that even the World Wars etc. couldn’t bring the twentieth century up to the proportion of previous centuries, and existing hunter gatherer societies seem to demonstate a 40% chance of a male dying of homicide over a lifetime. It speaks volumes that we are so appalled by Afghanistan, Darfur and Iraq. They pale massively even compared to the “optimistic” 90s, with the Yugoslav wars, Rwanda and the Congo war (perhaps the 4th bloodiest ever). Then Iran-Iraq, The first Sudan war, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nigeria, The Great leap Forward, Korea and the rest of them.
After all that we can be disgusted at Iraq. That is the most wonderful thing ever! May we maintain this disgust so we can be appalled enough to bring our murderous urges down even more.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about the coming years, but one bright spot might be the interestction of increasing processing power by PCs and what may loosely be called biotechnology
It’s at worst conceivable that the capacity to use this massive increase in processing power to identify genomic sequences will allow significant innovation in whole fields of vital importance to us human folk — waste disposal, especially of polymers for example), protection from infectious disease, oncology, better targeted drug delivery, biofuels, low footprint mineral resources harvest, CO2 sequestration and much else.
What sticks in my mind is the unsustainabilities at the end of this decade.
Firstly there is the financial one. China is the rising star but it’s financial model is based on the US continuing further into debt so that it can buy more and more from the Chinese. The optimistic view is that there will be a planned reaction against the WTO extremists. This means that there will be a recognition that countries with unreasonable debt levels do have the right to gradually drive down their imports. The pessimistic view is that the WTO will block gradual change, and, in the end the US and others will crack, reject the WTO and start suddenly ramp up import restrictions.
Secondly, there is the environmental unsustainability made worse now that the world’s two largest economies have finally started their rise towards parity with the developed world. (Not helped too by WTO extremism that makes it difficult for countries to act independently without threatening their precious competitiveness. Optimistically, we will go beyond the “ain’t it awful” phase and start looking seriously at the different barriers to action (and opportunities) for different countries. (For example, action by the US to reduce it’s emissions would probably help it’s economy so long as it could be done using internal resources to avoid further growth in debt.) Pessimistically, progress will be halted by crazies that insist that we must put a price on carbon if we are serious or a developed world that thinks it will be OK for China and India to be locked into lower living standards than that of the developed world for the next 40 years.
There are other issues but the above issues really need to be resolved before 2020
Depends on what is meant by malice.
But for argument’s sake, let us restrict the definition of malice to organised lethal violence, a term which includes conventional war, unconventional war, state terrorism and non-state terrorism.
Some very nasty wars have continued apace. The Congo, for example, was not spared massive violence during the noughties. We didn’t notice because the great powers, especially the US, were not particularly engaged.
On other levels, the arithmetic of death encompassed by the above statement is possibly correct.
But does this mean that the world has developed a higher order of morality in the last ten years? Almost certainly not.
Our relatively malice-free noughties were more likely to be the result of the final years of post-Soviet Pax Americana. No major power had filled the breach of the chief supplier and promoter of insurgency relinquished by the Soviet Union upon its demise.
Perhaps China can institute a Pax Sinoica [a neologism whose time may have arrived] without resort to massive violence, either in its achievement or in hanging on to it in the face of US-inspired insurgency.
My guess, however, is that a future without massive malice is an unlikely one.
In other words, I predict that humans, especially, Chinese and Americans, will prove that their appetite for organised malice has not been satiated.