Preface
History is the science, or the art, of the past. Present events belong to the realms of political science or sociology; certainly not to history. Nevertheless, the subject of this study is an evaluation of a present political system. It is a comparatively recent development in the industrialized part of the world. It is called the New World Order, as the President of the United States has announced it at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. The subject of this study is the evaluation of the New World Order and its counterpart, the Global Economy.
The reason that this subject is treated as history and not as part of political science is the realization that the New World Order and the Global Economy, are not new developments but logical continuation of historical processes that originated a few hundred years ago. Their present stage is the culmination of those processes. Indeed, this study claims that the present New World Order and Global Economy are connected to political, social and economic developments of the last 300 years, and are directly correlated to the demographic explosion of the same period.
This study proves that the developments of the last period of human history
are nothing more than reactions to a demographic explosion. Generations of schoolchildren were taught that one day the heroes, or the villains, depending on the part of the world from where one looks at the events, opened up the hidden continents of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, bringing with them order and civilization, or destruction and slavery, again depending on the viewpoint. This book claims that the heroes, or the villains, followed a historical imperative, over which they had no control and not much understanding either. An unprecedented demographic explosion powered that historical imperative. This book claims that the present New World Order and Global Economy is not different from the motives that sent Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus and others, to all corners of the earth. The present stage is a direct continuation of the past trend, its treatment in a historical analysis is legitimate. Nevertheless, the study is restricted to the analysis of the present and the connections to past trends, and gives no prediction as for the future. The last chapter will elaborate on the reason for this abstention.
It seems that the present political and economic system is a kind of preventive measure to allow the affluent nations to deflect being overwhelmed by the demographic explosion of the Third World. Despite the knowledge that the world's population will grow for the foreseeable future, by at least 60 millions each year, it is doubtful that anyone could predict how the world will be organized with the Third World having runaway, inflationary population numbers, and at the same time the affluent nations having a demographic stagnation, or even reduction of numbers. It is an equation with so many unknowns that a prediction would be a wild guess.
There are a few points to be explained. The history, which is treated in this study is European, or more accurately Western, history. It is not a question of preferences but of facts. History deals with facts and not with wishful thinking. Europeans and people of European origin dominated the world in the whole period this study analyses. The domination was not only military and political, but also economic and cultural.
The world is built upon western concepts. Nation-state, liberalism, socialism, nationalism, etc. are all western ideas. They were taken over by other parts of the world, partly because of dissemination by colonization and partly by choice. The Chinese Revolution, which was probably one of the most important non-European event of the modern age, was based upon the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The Meiji Revolution of Japan, another important non-European event was also an application of western ideas to a non-Western country.
It is true that after the decolonization, there were many areas that have shed their colonial heritage, i.e. like nation-state, parliamentary democracy and others, and reverted to their precolonial, amorphous selves, but whatever still remained, it is of western origin.
Curiously, the culmination of the process the present Global Economy is much less European-centered than its predecessors. There were always local factors involved in the trade between Europe and local suppliers and buyers, but the present non-European involvement in the Global Economy is on a different level than the factors of old. In this respect the New World Order is much less 'racist' than the old European domination. Still, people, money and ideas of European origin are the leading elements of the system. However, one cannot equate a modern Japanese banker or a manager of a Chinese conglomerate to the local assistants of the colonial rulers.. The New World Order has paraphrased Marx's dictum: "The working class has no country" into "Capital has no country" and added, "Capital has no color" either.
This study is an ambitious project. It describes a currently operating political and economic system, and claims that the system is not the brainchild of politicians and economists, but it is a logical continuation to political and economic processes that dominated western history in the last centuries. It deals with the history of the last 300 years or so, which is a segment of history known as personal history. The concept of personal history ought to be explained. Let's show first what is not a personal history.
Looking back on early history, one can discard the activities of the leaders, as it is well know that the leaders were figureheads and not active participants in decisions. It is known that Charlemagne did not create the Holy Roman Empire. There were numerous factors contributing to it. They can be analyzed and evaluated: feudalism, papacy, recovery of Europe, conflicts with the East, and even the invasion of the Langobards and their conflict with the papacy were factors in the decision. They can create an impersonal historical framework that can originate the development.
Charlemagne as a person does not belong to that framework except as a paper cutout placed in the middle of the picture. No one can claim that things did happen because Charlemagne as a person said, thought or did something. At most he accepted or rejected advice. He remains a shadowy figure, a mere label to a historical period. We might be wrong, but too little is known about the period to be thought otherwise. As far as historical research is concerned, the Carolingian period is impersonal.
When we near our own age, the picture changes. We know everything about the players. It is difficult to realize that the politicians, leaders or generals, about whom we know everything, including what they ate for breakfast on some important day of decision, were also paper cutouts, like Charlemagne.
For people who were brought up on tales about historical figures, it is difficult to accept that historical figures could be nothing more than chancy froth on top of a wave. That chancy froth might have been named Lenin or Hitler or Louis XVI, but if not the person with that name then someone else with a different name would have done the same. However, when the word 'same' is used in a historical sense, it is advisable to define what exactly we mean by the word.
It is obvious that no two events can exactly be the same, meaning identical, if even the smallest detail was changed. So, the Second World War could not have been the same without Hitler, but the same is true to the last soldier of the German Army or of the Allied forces.
Naturally, if one means 'same' as identical, then only identical personalities can create identical outcomes. However, 'same' does not have to be identical. It is worth while to examine a number of well-known and familiar examples.
Let's assume that the political and economic circumstances would have been the same, as they actually were, but without an individual whose name was Adolf Hitler.
In 1918 Germany was defeated but had a seemingly undefeated army. It should be remembered that contrary to the events of 1945, in 1918 the German army had marched back from France to Germany, with most of its arms and equipment intact. It is not sure that all the Germans felt that the war was lost because a stab in the back, but there were sufficient numbers who felt like that, and they formed right-wing parties, movements, irregular military units, etc. The National Socialist Workers Party was only one of them. If not the party, led by Hitler, had taken the power, the resentment felt because of the defeat in 1918 together with the results of the economic depression would have found other candidates for the same role. It is also doubtful that any right-wing German regime could have taken a different path from what was taken by Hitler and the Nazis. German national sentiment would have demanded to return Germany to a great-power status, and it would have led to the same results.
After the First World War, Georges Clemencau, the Prime Minister of France, not a great friend of Germany, said that nothing is wrong with Germany, except the fact that there are too many Germans and they are in the middle of Europe. It is a fact that is still with us. However, Germany's position in the middle of Europe and the size of its population, were insufficient to impose its will on the rest of Europe, which meant basically the whole world. So, the outcomes of both World Wars were predestined, with or without Hitler.
One of the new English historians, Niall Ferguson, wrote in his book, The Pity of War, about the First World War, that if England would not have intervened in the war on the side of France and Russia, Germany would have won the war, with the result that something similar to the present European Union would have been established 50 years earlier. According to Ferguson, it would have saved the world the horrors of Communism, the Second World War, the Jewish Holocaust and many others. It is one of the speculations that historians indulge in from time to time.
However, even an analysis of a Europe without a Hitler, between the two World Wars, is a kind of speculation, because it involves a 'what if' question that should be outside the scientific consensus. If we wish to prove the validity of historical research without a personal element, another example, without a 'what if' element, should be examined.
At the end of the Middle Ages, conflicts and problems wracked Europe. The papacy was in a constant schism, there were peasant uprising everywhere, England and France were exhausted after their 1Hundred-Years War, and the Turks were advancing in the Balkans towards the heart of Europe. It was a difficult period. Eventually it created an ideological upheaval to find answers to the problems. As the Middle Ages were based upon religion, the ideological challenge was religious too; that was the Reformation.
Many learned people, Wycliff, Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others led the ideological battle. Each of them brought a different ideology with suitable argumentation. There is no point of retelling the finer points of their theology. We wouldn't understand them today; it is questionable whether in their time there were many who understood them. They all proposed dogmas and heavenly rules, and there was a murderous argument over many decades. It was all learned and complex stuff.
Still, when the dust settled after the ideological battle, it was found that none of the learned reformators could make headway with people who were living in the territory of the defunct Western Roman Empire. They were much more successful with people who lived beyond the borders of the late Western Roman Empire. It is a curious historical fact; nevertheless it is true. If someone compares a map with the European borders of the Western Roman Empire and the dividing line between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, he will see that the lines nearly overlap. There seems to be no doubt that the Reformation was the revolt of Germanic Europe against the domination of Rome. It was the continuation of the revolt that destroyed the legions of Varus in the forests of Germany, near the beginning of the Christian era.
That was the case of the problems of the end of the Middle Ages and their ideological responses. After the First World War there was again an ideological upheaval. The old order that was established after the Napoleonic wars had crumbled. The wholesale slaughter of the First World War has erased the old beliefs. It was only natural that people should search for an ideology that would return them to their deserved place in society. Not that society in which they found themselves after the war but to something better suited to their needs and dreams. Some of them were looking at the past, to find a better society than the one they were living in. Others were looking for a new and utopian society in which the present faults will be eradicated. As the period between the wars was secular, the ideologies came also in secular formats and not as religious theologies.
There were many revolutionary ideologies. There was one that harked back to Medieval times and saw in them a better way of life; that was fascism. There were others that saw the near future as a final point in a required and necessary direction. There was not much difference between the forward-looking, utopian ideologies; even their slogans were similar. One promised nationalism and socialism, and placed the nation or the race in the center of the future order. The second has promised socialism in one country, socialism and nationalism, and saw in the class of the workers the center of the new order.
However, all these were ideologies through which they could collect supporters and grasp power in due course. Ideologies notwithstanding, all those political movements were led by professional revolutionaries, whose aim was to grasp power. Exactly as with the great theological reforms at the end of the Middle Ages, the three revolutionary ideologies had great successes between the two World Wars. Here too, the spread of the three main revolutionary movements has closely followed the borders of the defunct Roman Empire.
The countries, whose territories were part of the Roman Empire, had mainly accepted the fascist ideology. Italy, Spain, Portugal were officially fascist, and so were the right-wing movements of European countries were the right was in opposition. In France, it was the Croix de Feu, in Belgium the Rexist movement of Leon Degrelle.
In Germany and other Nordic countries the National-Socialist version was dominant, and Communism became the leading ideology of all the countries whose religion was Greek-Orthodox. There were countries where Communism was imposed in 1945 by the Red Army, but there were other countries, where Communism took hold without being imposed from outside. They were the Balkan countries: Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and even Greece. They all belonged to the Greek-Orthodox church.
It is worth to examine the situation of one country between the wars. That country was Austria, which had sufficient causes to be desperate. It lost its empire and became a rump country. However, Austria had an ambiguous situation. It was part of the Roman Empire, it was fervently Catholic, but it was German. The result was that it had a fascist rule and a veritable civil war between the fascists and the Austrian Nazis. The Nazis assassinated one chancellor, Dollfuss. Eventually, the German belonging proved to be stronger than the religious and historical traditions, and Austria became Nazi. Despite that, one cannot be sure whether that was not the result of the Anschluss with Germany. The same happened in Germany. The Germanness in the western and southern parts of the country was stronger than the Roman heritage. Despite that, one should not forget that Adenauer, who was originally the mayor of Cologne, in the Rhine area, was always one of the leading politician to advocate connection of Germany to the West. It was so, after the Second World War, but it was so after the First World War too.
This was one example to show that history is built upon multiple layers of precedents and traditions, and the effects of personal interventions are very rare. One always should remember the words of Bismarck that a good statesman is the one who catches God's sleeves when it is passing him by.This study follows Bismarck advice and sees in the historical imperatives a sign of God's sleeves. In this case the historical imperative was a demographic explosion.
We can follow the hypothesis that great men create historical events, and Italy became fascists because Mussolini willed it so. That was the opinion of Thomas Mann, in his short novel, "Mario and the Sorcerer", an allegory of Italy, where Mussolini was the sorcerer and Mario represented Italy. However, Hitler was a sorcerer too, probably even better than Mussolini, but his power has stopped south of the Alps and west of the Rhine. The old dividing lines, left behind by the Romans, proved stronger than the words of the professional revolutionaries, as they were also stronger than the theologies of the protesters against the misrule of Rome.
That line was older than the Roman limes. It is known from history that Augustus, and the rulers who followed him, decided on the border between the Roman Empire, which was the civilized world, and the barbarians, because it was a defensible border that could have been maintained by a minimum of force. That line was also a border between the Celtic and the Germanic world, before the Romans passed the Alps. They knew well, and counted on it, that in times of danger, the Gauls will help the Romans to defend the line of the Rhine, despite the fact that the Romans were conquerors in their eyes.
After Augustus' time, the border has changed 3 times only. Once under Claudius when Britain was added, and under Traian, who added Dacia and Mesopotamia. None of the additions lasted very long; they were the first colonies to be abandoned. By settling the border of a defensible line, which was basically the line of the Rhine and the Danube, from the North to the Black Sea, they joined the territory to the Mediterranean world, and that joint became dominant in more than one occasion.
There are a number of points to be clarified. One of them is the question of race. The whole history of the last few hundreds of years, as well the history of the present, is one of domination of the world by Europeans and by people of European origin. One can argue about meanings, motivations, intentions, etc. but one cannot argue about facts, and European domination of the world is a fact. This book, just like all my other writings, openly disregards 'political correctness', but there is a large gap between writing about facts, however unpleasant, and being racist.
First, I believe that all people, wherever and whenever they lived, inherited personalities that were shaped by environmental circumstances. As humanity is one species, it has a common biological heritage and that heritage was modified by environment. To put blame on someone because his or her ancestors lived in some parts of the world would be extremely stupid. There is no doubt that environmental circumstances, or nature in simple word, shaped humanity to fit best to the territory where they lived. All distinguishing, visible and invisible, human traits are adaptation made by nature to allow better selection of future generation. If it would have remained so as the method of selection has intended, the world would be a better place with much less people and much less friction.
When one speaks of adaptation made by nature to fit the people to the environmental circumstances, one could receive the impression that there is some impersonal being, called nature, and it decides what is good and what is not. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The basic theory of Darwinian selection claims that individuals who fit better to an environment have a better chance of creating descendants than those who do not fit. In this way, a certain gene, or a combination of genes, becomes dominant and part of the standard genetic setup of the group. However, even a simple development, like the content of melanin in the skin, or in simpler words, the color of the skin, is a process of thousands of years. There are many examples for changes like that even in historical times.
The last invasion of India by the Indo-European tribes was probably between 3500 – 4000 years. They came from somewhere in Central Asia or southern Russia through Afghanistan, the perennial corridor of invasion. Judging from the strict restrictions of the caste system, it is unlikely that there were much intermarriage between the invading Aryans and the local Dravidians. The Sanskrit word for 'caste' – varna, means color too, so the original caste system was really a segregation by color. Still, after less than 4000 years, the color of most of the North Indians, those who might be direct descendants of the original invaders, is much darker than the color of the peoples in the territories from where the invaders came. That can only mean that in a comparatively short time, there was a natural selection to adapt the people to local conditions. This example is only one of the many. So, the selection process is one of good intentions, but good intentions alone are usually insufficient.
However, something went amiss, and instead of a few millions, there are untold millions, even billions of people. Increasing population caused that people from different areas became mixed, and even the original environmental circumstances have disappeared because of the population pressure. Now, we have a situation that relentlessly mixes people of different origins. Modern times are a very small fraction of humanity's stay on this earth, so no inherited habits and behavioral traits could change. Nature is working very slowly; we might have to wait a few tens of thousands of years and by then, if we are lucky and humanity is still around, we might find a mixture of humanity, adapted by nature to live everywhere.
In addition to nature's gift of adapting humans to fit better to environment where they were living, which was in itself a positive gift, there is another of nature's gift, which is similar to the first one. Human beings are gregarious animals. They tend to live in groups with a clear hierarchy within the group. The basic group is the family, whether nuclear or extended, which was the basic human social unit The meaning of gregarious behavior is obvious and is basically a defensive mechanism. For animals without sufficient weaponry, gregarious behavior is the only possible defense. They willingly accept the restrictions of the hierarchical system for the defense given by the numbers of the group. A tiger or a lion does not have to be gregarious, they are powerful enough to stand alone. Cattle, sheep and the vegetarian animals in general live in large gregarious herds. So do all the primates, including the humans.
As far as nature goes, there was no difference between adaptation to a specific environment and gregarious behavior. Both enhanced the genes to survive. Animals, or humans, having a better community sense, could defend better against predators or against other groups from the same species. It did not happen often with vegetarian animals. One herd of cattle usually does not attack another herd. It exists among primates, humans included. Therefore, gregarious behavior with humans means that anyone not belonging to their group is a potential enemy.
As with the changes in outward look to fit people to a specific environment, gregarious behavior was a wonderful method of survival at the time when there were few bands of humans wandering around the earth. However, gregarious behavior was also connected to a limitation of population. The higher primates, the closest relatives of humans, have a distance of 6 – 8 years between births. It is not their decision, it is genetically programmed. As their span of life is similar to humans, it means that there can be no population explosion. That regulatory mechanism has been lost for humans.The result is that we live with a huge variation of humans and with a biological imperative saying that we have to be afraid of anyone who is different from us.
In times of plenty, the suspicion and enmity felt by members of gregarious groups against everyone else will be tolerable. In times of scarcity and danger, the enmity comes to the fore. One cannot really fight against it; it is part of the basic human nature. Education and ingrained civilized behavior can help, but only to a limit. However, education and civilization are parts of the behavior of the rich; the poor have never heard of them. But even with the rich, no education or multicultural slogans can act against basic human instincts. If they would change anything, the rich world would not be full of anti-immigrant groups, whose size, activity and violence are in direct relation to the perceived danger to their society.
It is so clear and so obvious, that it is surprising that scholars attempt to cover it with learned treatises, proving that white is black, and day is night. I think that humanity is indeed in a cleft stick, but scholars have to describe things as they are and not as they wish that they would be. Indeed, the present scholars follow a well-treated path. The prototype of 'political correctness' in modern times was probably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who created the ideology that human beings in unspoiled circumstances were good and only civilization has spoiled them.
When the French explorer, Bougainville, returned from one of his expeditions to the Pacific Islands and told Rousseau that the natives in Polynesia, who lived in pristine and unspoiled environment, were wild cannibals who were killing and eating everybody in sight. Rousseau refused to change his theory and declared that the Polynesians were the exceptions to prove the general law.
This book will follow neither Rousseau nor the multiculturalists who go in his footsteps. Human beings are gregarious and they behave accordingly. So, in the best of circumstances, there will be a tension and enmity between Hutus and Tutsis, Sinhalese and Tamils, Gipsys and East Europeans, Gentiles and Jews, fans of Chelsea and Arsenal, and between any group of people who feels threatened in any way by members of another group.
I believe these facts are being true, which does not mean that I like them. However, my liking or disliking cannot change the facts. I also believe that the threats being actual or potential depends on independent circumstances. Demography is one of those circumstances. If it is true that putting different types of people in close contact is a potential tinderbox, then the present situation is prone with dangers. We live in a finite world with an expansive number of people. Each further increase will only compress the different groups into nearer contacts, with predicted outcomes. Any evaluation of the present should take these facts into consideration.
* * *
This book evaluates the history of the last 300 years through a prism of a demographic explosion. Charts 1 – 3 show that the expression of 'explosion' is not misplaced. Its task is to prove that the main historical processes that happened in those hundreds of years were motivated by that spring, which affected first the west and after that the rest of the world.
In order to sharpen the focus of the analysis, the main part of the book was divided into a number of chapters. Each chapter describes an important historical process, which were either contemporary or consecutive. None of the chapters are treated in chronological order because there is a considerable overlapping between them. It is to be added here that the chapters treat extremely complex subjects that could fill a book, if not a library. The treatment here compresses them to a few pages. It is obvious that many seemingly important elements are missing.
The selection of the details within the chapters was done the same way as the selection of the chapters was done. The aim of the book is to show that there is an unbroken link between the end of the Feudal Age and the present. The connecting link is a demographic process. A responsible scholar, when attempting to prove a point, has to make use of available testimonies, whether they prove his thesis or disprove it. No honest scholar can rely on one type of testimony, as it would be a fraudulent procedure. On the other hand, there is no scientific imperative to make use of data that neither proves nor disproves the thesis.
When selecting the subjects of the way stations, the chapters of the main part of the book, the principles of Occam's Razor were employed. The principle of Occam's Razor says that one has to prove his point with the least possible arguments. The application of the method of Occam's Razor to this book was: Find those historical events or processes having causal connection with each other, and make sure that without the selected way stations the present state of the world or the states of the intervening way stations could not have been explained. Events or processes not answering to this criterion can be abandoned.
The application of this selection caused many seemingly important subjects to be eliminated from the book. A few examples should suffice. The Napoleonic wars were important European events. They were connected to the chapter Middle Class and were also instrumental to spread the principles of the French Revolution all over Europe. Still, when one asks today a question: in what way the Napoleonic wars affected the world of today, the answer is that there was nothing in those wars, important though they were in their time, which left a residual effect on the Western World of today. The same answer should stand for the American Civil war, which was an important American internal watershed, but it has no residual effect on the world of today.
Therefore, the way stations that were selected are those, which are in a direct line of transmission of a shock wave between the beginning of the demographic explosion, the end of the Feudal Age and the world of today. The same selection process that was used for the selection of the way station was also used for the selection of the data elements used within the chapters. The same Occam's Razor principle was used here too.
The chapter of the Middle Class is undoubtedly one of the pivotal chapters of the book. The event, culminating in the French Revolution was an extremely important process without which the present world could not be imagined. Neither the New World Order, nor the Global Economy would be feasible without a society whose large majority belongs to the Middle Class. The basic thesis of that way station is that there was a demographic increase, starting probably in the 12th century AD and that demographic event increased the weight of the Middle Class, which was commercially based, opposite the aristocracy, whose base was territorial, therefore unsuitable to changes. Eventually, the imbalance tilted the scale that opened the way to the Middle Class, the Industrial Revolution, and so on
.
The critical period for the process was the 17th and 18th centuries AD. In those centuries there were many events, which are not mentioned in the relevant chapter. It is an axiomatic assertion that the Age of Enlightenment of the second half of the 18th century was instrumental to the French Revolution. Meaning, that Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire and others had important parts to play in the events of the Revolution.
That assertion might be correct but still the book disregards the whole subject of the Enlightenment. The reason for it is again the principles of Occam's Razor. The thesis of the chapter is that the demographic explosion caused an imbalance between the classes that brought the victory of the Middle Class. It is very possible that without the work of the gentlemen who were the Enlightenment the events and principles of the Revolution might have been slightly different, but it misses the main point. The aim of that chapter is not to write a correct description of the century, but to show in what way the events of that century influenced the state of the world today. With due respect to Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire, there is nothing in the present world that would be different if we would remember different names and different theories from that period
This method of selecting way stations and subjects within way stations is that the resulting picture is not a photograph showing every detail, but a picture painted with a broad brush, showing only the connecting links between the beginning until today.
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