Economist article, geopolitics in 2050
economist.com
SURVEY GEOPOLITICS
The war in Kosovo has helped to clear people's minds about the likely shape of the world in
2050, and how we can help to make it a better place, says Brian Beedham
HALF a century from now, what will the map of the world look like? And will the unexpected turbulence of the
1990s have made it look radically different from the way it does now? Those are the questions this survey will try to
answer. It sounds pretty misty; but in fact the broad outlines of an answer are at last starting to emerge through the
mist. The war in Kosovo, fumblingly fought though it was at the start, is one large clue to the likely shape of the
mid-21st-century world.
“The map of the world'' does not mean merely how many separate states that map will contain (62 in 1914, 74 in
1946, 193 now, how many in 2050?), or which states out of that uncertain number may, 50 years from now, be
lording it over the others: though it would be folly to ignore either of those things. It is also necessary to ask whether
by 2050 the state will still be, for geopolitical purposes, the sort of place it is now. It may well have become, say
some people, a much weaker and humbler creature, no longer wishing or needing to play a significant part on the
world's stage. On the contrary, say others, the map our children's grandchildren will be nervously studying at school
could consist of a handful of new monsters even less susceptible to reason than the sort of state whose quarrels the
20th century has, just about, managed to survive.
It is not surprising that the past few years have made people think like this. At moments of huge relief, or great
exhilaration, powerful new ideas come bubbling up from the depths of the mind. This is just what has happened since
the end of the cold war.
Everybody felt that unknotting of nerves at the start of the 1990s, when it became clear that a civilisation-obliterating
nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was no longer a possibility that had to be lived with year
after year. The post-cold-war world has its horrors, all right, but for the time being at any rate they do not look
terminal. To this relief, the victors of the cold war could add the marvellous realisation that they had just won the
second of the century's two great conflicts of ideas; staid old democracy had, good heavens, beaten first fascism
and then communism. A door was opening, it seemed, on to a new world. No wonder people wanted to know how
this new world would differ from the old one.
Theories produced during a time of high excitement should be treated with caution. Yet the times are indeed
changing. Since the collapse of communism it has become increasingly hard (except in the Muslim part of the world,
and maybe even there too) to persuade people that a small group of self-selected wise men can claim a special
expertise about Important Things which entitles them to lay down the law for everybody else. Democracy, the belief
that every man and woman should have a share in making the law, has pushed ideological authoritarianism into a
corner. It is equally unlikely that any serious country will try another experiment with state-monopoly command
economics. In one form or another, everybody will be using market capitalism (but watch that qualifying phrase). At
the same time, new technologies have simplified the movement of money and of ideas to such an extent that it is hard
for governments to exercise much control over who sends how much of them to whom.
But this is still not creating a smoothly uniform world. From Kosovo to Kashmir to Korea, the angry squabbles
continue. Something else is at work, slicing bloodily through the hoped-for new unity.
To put it another way, this survey is about the geopolitical implications of the first person plural. What is it that makes
a group of a few million or a few hundred million people think of themselves as “us”, different from all those other
groups of people out there, “them”? And are the things which create that sense of identity, the “we”, in the process
of a change more radical than anything that has been seen in the past few centuries?
Reason versus the other thing
If the answer to the second question is yes, then the geographical lines which separate these groups from each
other—those clear-cut state frontiers we are accustomed to see winding across the map—will grow blurrier, and
may one day even disappear altogether. Alternatively, retorts the rival school of thought, the lines will grow fewer but
sharper and blacker. If the answer is no, on the other hand, if nothing fundamental has changed, the map of 2050 will
not be all that different from the map of today, and we shall be back to the routine business of calculating which of
those familiar old entities are getting stronger and which weaker, who is cosying up to whom, and so on.
The war in Kosovo has made people realise that new sorts of conflict are on the agenda of tomorrow's world; that
these new conflicts could change the way in which large numbers of people live; and that this, in turn, may change the
way the world's power system works. A great deal therefore depends on which version of the map of 2050 proves
to be the right one, and on finding out as soon as possible which it will be. Until that is done, it will be hard to shape
a proper foreign policy, or plan a sensible military budget, or make an intelligent guess of what international law will
look like by 2050.
The best way to start the search for the right map is by examining the two chief theories of radical change: the
optimist-rationalist view that states are getting more and more like each other, and so have no need to fight one
another; and the bleak blood-and-guts retort that they are still divided by one vital and probably irreconcilable
difference. The optimist-rationalist case first. |
