Brad DeLong quotes the Economist year-end double issue, which always contains thoughtful fodder. (A article on the travel industry that I read 10 years ago this week inspired me to start my Internet company, NetMarket, while I was at the London School of Economics, which directly led to where I am today.) Brad says:
The world continues to go to hell in a handbasket. The three big threats that may turn the twenty-first century into an abbatoir are (i) the possible emergence of an expansionist, militaristic Wilhelmine China, (ii) a failure of “transition” that results in the emergence of a Weimar Russia, and (iii) Hindu nationalistic communalism leading to the emergence of a Fascist India–a place where encouraging mobs to kill Muslims and burn their houses wins lots of votes. (The threat of an Islamic Reformation leading to lots of wholesale terrorism and the occasional repeat of what Christians did to each other on St. Bartholomew’s Day ranks fourth.)
BTW, an abattoir is a slaughterhouse, but I’m sure you already knew that.
While I agree that all of the items on Brad’s list are of concern, I personally put both China and Russia on the track of nation-states entering the Western fold through economic development, and with a little good luck, think they both will make it to fully developed market democracies. I put his India and Islam concerns in the larger realm of totalitarian fundamentalism:
Just as the once apparently doomed forces of western liberalism defeated totalitarian fascism in 1945 and totalitarian communism in 1991, we now face a war against totalitarian fundamentalism. (Note that I mean western as a moral appellation, not a geographic designation.)
I took the terms totalitarian fascism and totalitarian communism from one of the best pieces the Economist ever published, where they excerpt a history book from 2992 looking at democracy’s post-1991 failure. What I find so amazing is how different Brad’s and my concerns are from that Christmas 1992 Economist article, which includes the isolationist “Buchanan doctrine” issued by the US president in 2003. (Note also the lachrymose reference to Somalia.) The article is worth reading in full, but I append the opening to taunt you:
THIS was an opportunity of a magnitude the world had rarely seen before. As Chapter 12 explained, the three-sided War of Ideas that had occupied most of the 20th century ended in a sweeping victory for the once apparently doomed forces of liberalism. The defeat of racial totalitarianism in 1945 having been followed by the defeat of communist totalitarianism in 1989-91, the victorious pluralists seemed to have the future at their feet.
The collapse of communism brought universal agreement that there was no serious alternative to free-market capitalism as the way to organise economic life. It was almost as widely agreed that multi-party democracy was the best form of politics; only a handful of authoritarians anxious to preserve their own power — most of them in Muslim south-west Asia — and the old men still running China openly stood aside from a new orthodoxy. To this ideological triumph was added, in the Gulf war of 1991, a military success that appeared to confirm the new balance of power. The pluralist alliance possessed a technological advantage in the weapons of war that could, it seemed, defeat almost any possible adversary.
All this was potentially a greater change in the course of history than Britain’s defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815. That decided who was to be militarily dominant in the 19th century, but it did not put an end to the ideological fallacy that had begun in France in 1789 and reappeared in new shape in Russia in 1917. The events of 1989-91 could also have proved more decisive than the victory of the Reformation in the 17th century. That changed the ideological scene, but it did nothing to decide the military and political balance of power in Europe.
Perhaps not since the battle of Actium in 31BC, which made possible the Pax Romana of the next two centuries, had there been such a chance to remake the world; and in AD1991, unlike 31BC, the central idea on which the remaking would have been based was the victors’ belief in every man’s right to political and economic freedom.
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