Simply put, that is ridiculous. I find it remarkable to see apparently very intelligent people predict insane xenophobic doomsday scenarios as the future. Often, they seem to be reminiscing about a simpler past they were familiar with and how we [the young] have shot it all to hell, and are thus on a path towards self-destruction and reckoning.
I love that they claim they're predicting things from the past, but actually aren't. They claim the future will see a 'polycentric' (see: multipolarity; they got the name wrong) world where we will be ruled by many powers instead of one.
Aside from the fact this has rarely been seen in history, and only during transitional periods (After WW2, briefly we had USA, USSR and the British Empire as superpowers) when it has been seen. When we look back, with hindsight it becomes clear that there is a direct line of superpowers back to the dawn of civilization and, largely, one superpower passed off the power to its successor. The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of fighting to the death stepped aside for the USA. This has been played for thousands of years, during the Classical period it was passed between Greece and Rome, who was the super power. After the Roman Empire was defeated by the Hunnic Empire (Atilla the Hun) the power moved so far to the east no one in Europe had a clue, which led to the Dark Ages, because the people who had spread their technology (the Romans) rarely taught the locals how to build it themselves.
This meant that after the Roman Empire, and the fairly swift collapse of the Hunnic Empire with the death of Atilla, Europe was left without a power and so was the world. It was quite ironic, it would be like if the USSR had beat the USA in 1990, and a year later still collapsed. The effect was profound, especially moving into the medieval period, due to the fact that people relied on these Empires to shift around technology and without them there was no one big enough to move the information.
(Ed: This is also why when moving into the late Medieval Period and the Colonial Era, we had multiple powers all handing the superpower status between them as one got a clear advantage. In hindsight this largely centered between England and France, a play reminiscent of how Greece and Rome passed the superpower title between themselves many times during the classical period, but at no point was there two true superpowers.)
I find that their predictions are based on personal opinions, and they choose to use history to back themselves up whenever it's convenient, but in many of the examples they wholly ignore it. There's no historical basis to assume suicide bombings, it's an exceptionally rare development with the invention of compact explosives and religious brainwashing. Why would a pirate perform a suicide bombing, it's absurd they're in it for personal gain not religious gain.
This article is very stupid merely for trying to predict the future. I'll trust a Sci-Fi writer on the future before I trust an economist, if we could trust economists to predict the future then we wouldn't be in the financial crisis we are.
>The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of fighting to the death stepped aside for the USA.
Uhh, no. There will always be a premiere power and the British Empire was it, but they weren't head and shoulders above everybody else the way the US is now, or Rome was in its day. Neither was any other power ever an undisputed champion between Rome and the post Cold War US.
Edit: not in Western Europe, anyway. The Mongol Empire and the Caliphate were supreme at certain times and places.
>After the Roman Empire was defeated by the Hunnic Empire
WTF? That never happened. The Romans defeated the Huns at Chalons and were then conquered by Goths a few decades later.
> WTF? That never happened. The Romans defeated the Huns at Chalons and were then conquered by Goths a few decades later.
We're discussing superpowers here, not military battles. The Hunnic Empire overtook Rome in power and size long before Rome fell. However, after the battle at Chalons the Roman army was fatally weakened, it didn't help that the Vandals sacked Rome for 14 days only 2 years after the battle at Chalons. Sucks to be Roman when coincidental invasions happen, I guess.
Aside from the Silk Road, communication between Europe and Asia was relatively small and the prospect of war was extremely remote. During the Classical Period, China definitely had some of the elements of a superpower, but they're questionable on the political and military front. China was quite insular, combating themselves with numerous political upheavals.
However, the Roman Empire (more so than Greece) managed to stay the infighting between factions until unification and what we all perceive as the Roman Empire that stretched across a huge area.
China's history is the Dynasties, which up until the Mongol Invasion and the formation of the Yuan Dynasty, the country hadn't had one single ruler of the whole territory. Probably in around 1200, when the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) itself divided into three states, the Yuan Dynasty and thus China probably became the worlds superpower.
After 1206 when Genghis Khan united the Mongols there's little doubt that the Mongol Empire was the super power. At its height it controlled over half of Eurasia, meaning at the time it essentially controlled over half of the world. Even when it broke into the Yuan Dynasty, Ilkhanate, Golden Horde and Chagatai Khanate. However, the Yuan Dynasty was largely recognized as led by the Great Khan, but the other Khanates didn't seem to care, they just never attacked each other.
In terms of political control and cultural influence on the largest number of people over the longest span of time, I think China has a better claim to be the long-term world superpower than does the West.
Since the reign of the Qianlong Emperor and King George III (rough contemporaries who both had long reigns), Britain and the West in general has plainly been more powerful and more influential than China. But that is a recent change in the balance of power. There hasn't been a lot of interaction between China and the West, but in Marco Polo's day China was much more impressive.
I largely disagree, China only unified once (see below for that, under the Tang). At its largest (geographically) it was in a civil war between the Song and Jin dynasties, which were divided along racial boundaries.
Again, sadly at their largest point there was the Holy Roman Empire, which was more clearly a superpower than either the Song or Jin. The Jin (Jurchen) supplanted the Liao Dynasty, which was an Empire formed from one Mongol tribe (not all the Mongols like under Genghis Khan).
One of the key elements of a superpower is its ability to unify and act. The USSR dissolved from superpower status when it couldn't stay unified, Russia remained a powerful country (it still is) however it isn't a superpower any longer.
The Holy Roman Empire was very powerful, potentially a superpower (at least in the beginning when it was definitely more unified than the Song and Jin) but the Mongol Empire dwarfed the HRE drastically.
Put it this way, the Mongol Empire ruled over almost as much territory as the British Empire (I think the difference is ~0.4 million km^2), without their feet ever leaving soil. Considering the British Empire contained Canada, the Thirteen Colonies, Australia, New Zealand (lots of smaller islands too) and the British Antarctic Territories, all of which the Mongols couldn't have got to during their expansion. I think the Mongols clearly won.
Defining China as a superpower is, in my opinion, false due to it never unifying into an Empire. When the Tang Dynasty was in power it had the full potential to be the world superpower, and depending on how you look at the world in the 8th century it was.
This part of history is what opinion depends on. At the time the Roman Empire was collapsing, but still held a huge swathe of the Mediterranean. However, the Caliphate ruled over an even larger part of land on the south of the Mediterranean including the whole of the Middle East, however in this case land doesn't necessarily mean power. Many European powers avoided this area of land because it was deemed worthless, the Mongols avoided this area because they decided it wasn't worth the effort, and their few excursions into this region was based on their practice of killing anyone who double crossed them.
I'd say, the Tang dynasty was quite possibly the superpower at the time. It had the politics, culture, military and most certainly the economic strength. This was probably a product of China being densely populated at the time (relative to Europe and especially the Middle-east and Saharan regions), and I believe the Tangs wide adoption of woodblock printing probably helped put their cultural development well through the roof compared to their European counterparts at the time.
I think I just convinced myself the Tang Dynasty was possibly the superpower at the time, this is possibly helped by the fact the Roman Empire repeatedly tried to ban Chinese silk as it was exporting too much money to China.
Moving towards the end of the Tang, despite their political power crashing their economic and cultural growth were still huge. So during the 9th and early 10th Century they were the only country big enough to be the superpower as the Caliphate had collapsed and the Roman Empire had shrunk and western Europe had the lovely Dark Ages.
So between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Caliphate (if they count as a superpower, due to segregation and poor land types) and the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, I believe the Tang probably held the superpower position due to it being the first unification of the country.
But the Chinese cultural sphere has long been bigger than the area under the political control of the recognized emperor in a dynastic cycle, in much the same way that Rome's influence extended beyond the broadest boundaries ever ruled by a Roman emperor. The spread of scripts and literacy is instructive: there are more pre-movable-type-printing era writings extant in literary Chinese than in all other world languages combined, by a huge margin. And Japanese and Korean (and formerly Vietnamese) have long used Chinese written characters even after developing indigenous alphabets or syllabaries for what are languages that aren't even cognate with Chinese. Many other cultural influences have spread outward from China to a recognizable cultural area known as east Asia, just as different influences spread from Greece and Rome to an area known as Europe. But for most of human history, east Asia has bested Europe in both population and prosperity.
Constantinople wasn't part of the muslim world in the middle ages, it was the center of eastern orthodox christianity, it lost its fight with the western branch, and eventually was conquered by the muslims :) (well, depends on your definition of middle ages, but the opinion that middle ages ended with the fall of Constantinople is quite popular).
It is not a doomsday scenario. It will be simply a different world, and people will get used to it (well, at least, they will have no other option). Our problems of today aren't very happy either, and if you told someone in 1950 how the world will look in 2009, he would call it insane and doomsday scenario too :)
There is a 37signals lesson in here somewhere about expanding sales... the guy predicted the recession, so now is the time to preach doomsday on that record.
Ten years ago, the same dreck would claim 2010 would see us away on extended vacation while WebVan and Pets.com delivered goodies to our internet-automated homes. Of course, everything would be paid for by effortless automated day-trading, with the Dow at 50,000 and markets headed higher due to Western nations celebrating some multi-decade milestone for time without conflict.
If someone claims to have the future figured out, it's pretty safe to assume you can ignore 'em.
> As the cofounder and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Attali won fame for calling the U.S. financial collapse as early as 2006...
But somehow he managed to not predict Europe's own financial troubles. Yes, quite the soothsaying there...
I wish more people would read Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Just as we could not predict in 1968 what the world would look like in 2009 - similarly we can't predict what the world will look like in 2050 today.
I've heard some crazy predictions... world will end in 2012 (when the Mayan calendar ends)... USA will break down into 2-5 different countries and there will be a civil war there... the arctic cap will melt submerging all the major port cities: NY Tokyo Mumbai...
Would you have predicted in 1975 that by 1995 there'd be no Soviet Union? Big changes and breakups do happen; they're inevitable over long enough. I'll agree, though, that prediction (especially of technology-affected things, which is more and more of the world) is getting considerably harder, and that that trend, at least, will continue absent some other radical change like an asteroid strike or a US police state.
Would you have predicted in 1975 that by 1995 there'd be no Soviet Union?
I know a man who is now a United States diplomat who predicted to me (when he was still a student of Chinese) in 1984 that the Soviet Union would be around well into the twenty-first century. Sometimes empires that have little press freedom are especially hard to make predictions about.
There is arctic cap meltdown and if the world stay as it is now, we might face its' catastrophic consequences.
Thats why in his latest movie "Examined Life", Slavoj Zizek points out that humanity should cut his roots from nature and doesnt intervene its inner workings.
The problem with prediction on this scale is that it's becomes a function of chaotic effects. i.e., Some small unpredictable thing like an invention or some trait of a president can have very profound effects over time akin to the butterfly effect.
Even solid statistics will fail horribly over a longer time period.
This guy is kind of an over-the-top doomsayer, but I would note that he's also a Jewish pied noir (French people born in Algeria) born during WWII, probably regaled with stories about relatives back at the mainland who ended up in concentration camps from an early age, and who would have been ethnically cleansed out of Algiera as a young man if he hadn't left already. If you could go back to the time of his birth (or a little before) and tell people what actually happened, they'd probably think you were over the top too. I'm sure this has influenced his way of thinking.
In the Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon, he covers the prognostications of futurists and discovers that they are wildy wrong something like 91% of the time.
But maybe you meant that the meaning of the snippet, that experience and evidence can guide us in what to expect for the future, is somehow profoundly wrong?
I did indeed mean the latter. Didn't even notice the missing "of".
For some things, past experience is of use. For guessing at the general trends of history, past experience should, in fact, teach us that it's completely useless. On a personal, immediate scale, it is useful to try and figure out what's about to happen, but when it comes to large trends, there are too much chaos and wild swings involved for past experience to be of any use.
