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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (9497)	7/19/2004 7:17:55 AM
From: marginmike	Respond to of 116555

the up and coming pole is China. EU could also be considered one if they got their act together

To: mishedlo who wrote (9497)	7/19/2004 9:01:11 AM
From: glenn_a	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Mish & Mike. Re: multiple poles of power, my take is this. From the end of WWII until the end of the Cold War, the global geopolitical environment was very bi-polar - you had the Capitalist/Democratic (1st world) block, and the Communist Block (2nd world). As well, you had a non-aligned block (most significantly India), and the so-called 3rd world which the competing Capitalist and Communist blocks fought to control. This was a very different geopolitical arrangement from the nineteenth century, where although Britain was a very dominant power, the power structure was much more multi-polar - i.e. Great Britain, France, a newly-unified Germany, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, & the U.S. (although the U.S. was rather isolated from European affairs. Japan wasn't a factor until their defeat of Russia in war in 1905). The political alliances that held this multi-polar world together - and for which the need became particularly evident to diplomats after the Napoleonic Wars - were (i) the Concert of Europe and (ii) The Holy Alliance (i.e. the geopolitical arrangement fashioned by Otto von Bismarck. It is this earlier multi-polar "balance of power" world that to my mind we are revisiting. What countries constitute primary poles of this world? The European Union, Europe, China, Russia, and quite possibly the Islamic peoples of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Eurasia. Actually, if you have a chance to peruse Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order", you should get a pretty good idea of the general fault lines. (BTW, I very much disagree with the thesis of Huntington's book, but the geopolitical fault lines are fairly well assessed. Another book that does a good job of assessing the geopolitical fault lines of a multi-polar world is Zbigniew Brezezinski's "The Grand Chessboard - American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperative - I don't care for Brezezinski's overall thesis much either (he's a genuine representative of the New World Order crowd) but his assessment of the geopolitical faultlines of an emerging multi-polar world are instructive. JM2C on the matter. Regards, Glenn