I. The Atlantic Perspective and the emergence of a Concrete West
Timeframes for this future: universality by 2150?
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Timeframes for this future: universality by 2150?Stalactites and stalagmites; or, the Atlantic and Global systems What we have just described is the “stalagmite” side of growth, from the bottom up: the First World is shown growing from below, gradually expanding, potentially becoming the entire world. At the same time, there is a “stalactite” side: global institutions growing from the top down, gradually increasing their capabilities.12 In nature, stalactites and stalagmites eventually meet and combine. Is this a likely outcome in the present, institutional matter? To answer this, a different analogy may be more helpful. The Atlantic and the global are two levels of international organization. Both provide a bit of structure to help fill in the vast space of international interdependence; this is their complementarity. Draw them as two circles of the world order, and they are concentric. As the inner Atlantic circle grows, it increasingly comes closer to the outer global one, as if to someday merge. In the Atlantic Perspective, global institutions continue to operate alongside the Atlantic ones. The global ones gradually deepen their interface and cooperation with the Atlantic institutions, gradually give more recognition to the Atlantic structures as playing a core role. This mutual support was already anticipated in Streit’s formulation. Support for global institutions is not concession on the part of Atlanticism, as many thought when it was re-emphasized after 1989, or a contradiction to it as a few have thought, rather it is something that was always there in Atlanticism. It is a necessary supplement for Atlantic institutions, in the condition that the Atlantic grouping, while playing a leading global role, is still a long distance from being the world. From this flows the case for two-tiered organizational effort -- organization of the leading core, whose commonalities make possible strong, deep, reliable organization; organization of the whole, whose diversities limit the strength of organization -- and coordination of the two so the former can lend some of its strength to the latter. This, like so much else that Streit advocated, has been gradually carried out in practice: since 1940, institutions were formed on the two levels of the UN system and Atlantic system; and the coordination between the two, while limited during the Cold War when the Atlantic system was widely mistaken for simply one pole of a bipolar confrontation, has grown since 1989 when its core role in the world system has become more obvious. Can the West ever become the world? How long would it take? Our answer to the first question is: No in one sense, Yes in two larger senses. No, in the sense of the world all having the same premodern cultural heritage as the West. Yes, in the sense of the world continuing to absorb much, eventually most, of the same overlay of modern civilization as the West has absorbed. And Yes in the sense of eventually becoming a part of the Concrete West. No one can know in advance whether, in the end, the global order will be based primarily on the UN system, or on the institutions of the Atlantic system having spread to the entire globe. Will the stalactites swallow up the stalagmites, or the stalagmites engulf the stalactites? Or a combination of the two? Some amalgamation of the two systems is likely in the end, assuming the species endures and makes it there; but such an end-point is still a long way off. Let us assume for a moment the stalagmite, Atlantic-based ultimate consummation, not because it is more probable, but because it provides a readier possibility of estimating the timeframe. When might all the world become “West” and a part of the Atlantic structures? Predictions range from 40 to 400 years, to never. The truth is probably somewhere in-between. Probably it will happen; but the “never” reminds us that it is not likely to take place in a simple form. Westernization is not total, making unlikely a pure swallowing up of the UN system by the Atlantic; yet it is real and often goes deep, making it likely that a point will someday arrive for a merger of the Atlantic and UN systems. Within Atlanticism, there has always been a minority view that it will never happen, on grounds of an intrinsic incompatibility of civilizations. But the incompatibilities of civilizations are shrinking with modernization, and have always been in principle secondary compared to their commonalities in human nature and in the nature of every society; secondary even compared to commonalities in the goals of their religions. The incompatibilities of material interest, based on long differences of historical development, are another matter; many of them are likely to endure for some time, but none of them eternally. How long would it take? There are substantive foundations for both timeframe predictions, 40 years and 400; and for their geometrical mean, 125 years: 1 - The 40 year predictions are based on prospects of scientific breakthroughs -- nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, and the continued geometric growth of information technology -- which might eliminate manual labor and the First World-Third World distinction. Extrapolation from a long-term historical chart of acceleration of the spread of democracy led Michael Doyle to a similar projection of democracy in all countries by 2050. However, that was prior to the authoritarian retrenchment in Russia, the rise of global confidence in authoritarian China as an emerging superpower, and the setbacks dealt to peace in Palestine and Iraq by elections held there in 2004.
New technologies will also produce new WMDs, and a proliferation of means of accidental self-annihilation; some argue that nanotechnology will inevitably eliminate all life with gray goo. This leads to an argument that the dangers from technological growth, unregulated or regulated only nationally with weak international coordination, are so great as to mandate much faster movement toward world government, which might already be too late or too weak to manage the problem. In this context, the 40-year framework of globalization of the Atlantic becomes one for which to pray fervently. But imposed social arrangements usually fail, and exacerbate along the way the problems they were intended to solve. It is best to stick with the feasible, which can be determined only as it becomes feasible; for purposes of policy planning in the present, there is only the best guess to work from, which is perhaps 125 years. 2 - Sociological change does accelerate with technological and economic change; the 400 year prediction is too slow. Rapid change can lead to crises and phases of political retrogression, as some aspects of society change faster than other aspects; forced change brings additional crises. But attempts to slow change, often made in the name of a gradual organic development, also lead to crises; international influence is a reality that cannot be eliminated, organic development a myth that never existed. 3 - Economic change has become fast through globalization, as the largest Third World countries have ceased protecting Western workers from the competition of their much larger, much lower paid work forces. But as the poor grow richer, the comparative advantage of outsourcing will shrink, reducing the growth rates. Projections of a linear growth rate until catch-up are unrealistic to the point of having near zero probability. There may meanwhile also be a Western reaction against outsourcing; and the present strength of Third Worldism within the West, which creates a taboo against protectionism against the Third World, may not be permanent. There are always countries that are growing faster than the core leading countries of the world; that is the nature of the spread of technology and of catching up. It is also the nature of things that an end is reached to the easy period of rapid assimilation of a batch of old technologies, and the growth spurt slows down. There is nothing new in the fact that China and India are growing fast today. There was a period of decades when Soviet Russia was growing fast. There was a period when Germany was growing fast. And Japan. Declinist predictions were made with a view to each of them. Yet the decline of the West never actually took place. There was never even a terrible crisis of the West. Rather, it was the latecomers that almost invariably experienced terrible crises, usually of their own making: as a consequence of their temptation to embrace the idea of Western decline, they have waged losing wars against the West; and further, they have often adopted totalitarian domestic forms, believing that this would save them from the predicted crisis of Western individualist decadence, but in fact it brought them to real crisis and collapse.
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