The Last Challenge - Introduction

Introduction

The world order, as we knew it in our time, between the end of the 2nd World War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, crumbled when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. That breach symbolized the end of what has been an ever-present fear that nuclear rivalry between the two super-powers might have caused catastrophe (however unintentional) on a world scale. But, as it was stated before, the Berlin Wall, and the super-power rivalry together with it, was knocked down. That was about 11 years ago. Some 9 years ago, at the end of the Gulf War, the President of the United States, the last remaining superpower, declared that there is a New World Order. Indeed, there is a new World Order and it has an accompanying economic expression, called Global Economy. The two expressions are really synonyms. There are no clear definitions for either of them; the inner contradictions are so numerous that the meaning of the two expressions changes according the user and the circumstances.

It is certain that the world did not become a safer place to live. Despite the end of the superpower rivalry, and the end of the real danger of nuclear annihilation, the world became much more dangerous than it was before. Paradoxically, the rivalry between the superpowers was the safety valve of global peace. The patrons have kept a close watch on their clients, aware of the well-grounded fear that local conflicts might escalate into general conflagrations. So, with the end of the Cold War, the simmering enmities between ethnic groups stopped simmering and reached boiling point because the lack of safety valve. The world of the New Order became a much less safer place to live than before the end of the Cold War. Ethnic cleansing and even genocide became widely used words.

Not only the Berlin Wall has crumbled; the focal point of the world's attention has changed too. In the Cold War, the potential stage of the next World War was in the German plain. Innumerable dangerous points around the world have replaced that border. The traditional cauldrons of ethnic hatreds, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Kashmir, Middle East, Indonesia etc., which were repressed during the Cold War, have burst into flames. Even the African continent became one vast battlefield where the old colonial borders are being redrawn or eliminated altogether.

Nation-states are comparatively modern, western inventions. The African continent had nothing similar to nation-states before colonization. Together with the colonies, the concept of nation-states is vanishing too. They might remain as far as seats in the United Nations or recipients of foreign aid are concerned, but on the ground they revert to murderous, tangled, tribal kaleidoscope. That was the norm before colonization, and that is where they are heading today.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the mid-19^th century that the central conflict in the 20^th century will be between the United States and Russia. He certainly had no premonition about the victory of Marxism-Leninism in Russia, but he looked at the map and evaluated what he saw. It was obvious that those two countries had the space to grow and it was obvious that eventually they will meet. A hundred years after Alexis de Tocqueville came George Orwell and clothed Tocqueville's prediction with ideological garb. He wrote in his book: 1984 about Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, as the permanent fighters for the domination of the world. It is true that Orwell presented that permanent fight as something similar to the fights of Tweedledum and Tweedledee; fight for the sake of allowing internal terror to maintain permanent rule of the ruling elites. These three, under different names, are the main players of the new World Order.

So now, there is a New World Order and Global Economy. Both are based upon open borders, clear international relations, free trade and free movement of capital. There is no free movement of labor, and it is the biggest problem of the Order. In a world where each year there are about 60 million additional mouths to feed, free movement of labor would quickly drown the affluent West in waves of immigrants. It would probably destroy the new World Order, and everything else with it. Even without free movement of labor, there is a continuous pressure on the southern borders, on both sides of the Atlantic. Probably, one of the undeclared aims of the New World Order is to relieve the demographic pressure on the affluent West by transferring jobs to south of the borders.

The system is supposed to be managed by autonomous international organizations, like the WTO, to set the rules for trade, the IMF – to regulate the movement of capital and the World Bank, the highest instance for international investments. Common sense would dictate that a New Order, built upon international organizations, with recognized rules and laws, would eventually point to a World Government; ensuring a central authority for solving conflicts and keep the peace around the world. Such an organization does exist since 1945; it is the United Nations, which should have been a precursor to a World Government, using the same international organizations.

However, practice does not always follow theory. The problems caused by the New World Order and Global Economy are not similar at all to the conflicts predicted by de Tocqueville and Orwell, which are basically the conflicts predicted by the geography of the globe. Those conflicts are certainly with us but with much less intensity than one would anticipate them.

Geography has remained constant, so there is a certain bad feeling between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, or by using their actual names, between Nato, Russia and China. Still, the conflict is of much less intensity and enmity than what was predicted by Orwell. There are, however, a number of serious problems that came to the surface since the declaration of the New World Order.

	According the scenario of George Orwell, the three competing powers were in a state of undeclared war with each other, but apart of occasional rocket attacks there was no overt military action against the heartland. There were military actions, but they were carefully controlled by the patrons, and they were fought by clients against each other on territories that were out of the area of the three powers. This is exactly what has happened in the Cold War, without the missile attacks. When Ethiopia became a Soviet satellite, its traditional enemy, Somalia, became an American client, and they were fighting their war in East Africa. It was exactly the prediction of George Orwell, where the scene of wars was in the tropical areas of the world - Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. Since the declaration of the New World Order there were meaningful changes in the pattern of the conflicts. There are many armed conflicts, probably more than during the Cold War, but the direct involvement of the great powers is restricted to their immediate neighborhoods. America had to intervene in Panama and Haiti; NATO tried to solve the ethnic problems of the Balkans, without much success and Russia attempts to do the same in the Caucasus. Even China has a low-level involvement in Chinese Turkestan and in Tibet. The big block of territory, stretching from Australia in the east to South America in the west, was left out of the big powers' rivalry. Maybe being left out is not the most proper expression, but it seems that states in that territory make their own fights and struggles without too much intervention. It is possible that it is the result of the inequality between the powers, but it is also possible that they learned an important lesson during the Cold War. Competition for the favors of the states of the Third World is non-efficient at best and counterproductive at worst. The result is that the fragile nation-state structure of the Third World is crumbling. There are degrees in the collapse. African states are leading the line, followed by Southeast Asia and South America at the end. One should also remember that outside Europe, the principle of nation-state is a recent introduction; it has no strong roots.
	The second problem facing the New World Order is the antithesis of parochialism to the globalism of the New World Order. Thomas Friedman expressed the conflict in the title of his latest book: The Lexus and the Olive Tree.(The Lexus is the name is a Japanese luxury car). It is a problem without a solution. Human nature is built around a sense of belonging to a close circle, family, clan, tribe or nation and upon enmity to whomever not belonging to the same frame. It is doubtful that human nature will ever be able to accept a government of the whole humanity, unless it will be done under an extreme coercion, but even then it might not work. Communism was supposed to be a social system that surpassed ethnic diversities. Still, even under the strictest Soviet rule, ethnic diversities influenced the practice, and Communism in one country had not much similarity to the practice in another country. Even there, the ethnic diversity was stronger than the ideology. It is no wonder that after the collapse of Communism, the ethnic conflicts reappeared without much change. That happened in Yugoslavia and in the Caucasus too.
	The third, and probably the most important, point of friction is that the New World Order, or rather the Global Economy, not only separates the world into two parts, but it divides the societies of most of the countries into two parts as well. The root of that division is a simple economic law: the maximization of profits. Each business wishes to maximize its profit by selling at the best possible prices, and buying at the lowest possible price. This law is valid in local economies too, but in national economies businesses have restrictions, which are not applicable when the scope of the business is outside the national borders. Manpower is one of the commodities each business needs; it is also the most important element when it comes to maximization of profits. In a global economy one can buy labor in countries with low wages and saving the high cost of labor in his own country. There is inequality here and it is the most vulnerable point of the Global Economy. Capital is free to move from country to country, labor is restricted. There is no free movement of labor; and there are very good reasons for this restriction. Freeing the movement of labor would swamp the affluent west with millions of starving people from the Third World, which no western politician could allow and remain in office. The surest way to allow to some neo-Nazi movement to grasp power in countries of the West, would be to allow, or even to seem to allow, free and unrestricted immigration. The ruling elite might be amenable to multiculturalism on its doorstep; the common people would never agree to it. The process of mobility of capital is continuing some time and it has two phases. One of the phases is already in practice; the second is still developing. The first phase is to transfer production to countries with low labor cost and with more lenient safety regulations. The result of the phase is that thousands of factories are dismantled from high-wage countries and moved to countries with low wages. The northern part of Mexico is full of thousands of factories, all originating from north of the border. They are all producing simple parts, or assembling and packaging. These transfers have practically eliminated a class of factory workers in countries of high wages, North America, Western Europe and Japan. The second phase of the process is the deepening of computer applications to reduce the number of people in management, design and financial services. Service jobs are in two parts. Management services, supervisory tasks, etc. are in a comparatively high salary category. The others, which are designated as personal services, the so-called MacJobs, are simple repetitious jobs with low wages. Once those jobs were thought as entrypoints, for kids in summer holidays, or fillers between two real jobs, but now they became dead ends for those whose livelihood was downsized or exported. One of the catching phrases of the Global Economy is the cliche that a rising tide lifts all boats. It is true but some, the leaky ones, get sunk. However, even jobs from the high-salary category have a kind of mobility; usually of a downward type. Global Economy, with global communication and computer connections, can easily export professional jobs to countries with lower wages. This is exactly the phase that is developing right now, It is difficult to open a newspaper and not find a laconic announcement that a bank, or an insurance company, or other similar enterprise is reducing its staff by the tens of thousands. The reductions, called downsizing, are either taken up by intense computerization or are exported to low-wage countries. Thus, whole industries are growing up as a result of the transfer of management or design jobs. The famous Hi-Tech industrial park in Bangalore, South India, is one of the examples. It did increase the overall wealth of India by very little; it only increased the size of the Indian middle-class and the chasm between the have's and the have-not's.

Since the end of the 20th century there is definitely a New World Order. One cannot create a balance sheet of a global political system after only a few years, but one can list the pros and the cons of the system, as they seem to an outside observer. As the new order is intimately connected with Global Economy; indeed they are synonyms of each other, it is easier to describe the system by its economic side.

The central thesis of globalization is this: Removing barriers to trade will increase the collective wealth of humanity. This is the theory that claims that a rising tide lifts all boats. Except the leaky ones, of course. Underpinning this are three prior assumptions:

	Economic well being is by far the most important consideration in social life. The ideology of globalization assumes that nationalistic impulses are primitive, tribalistic hangovers and that the desire of say, Indians to have an economy not dominated by German corporations, is a disease to be cured.
	Economic growth is desirable regardless of social disruption. The United States came into existence as a social disruption and has institutionalized it. While it works in the United States (after a fashion) it is not clear that disruption will work equally well elsewhere.
	The distribution of economic benefits is less important than the aggregate benefits of free trade. Unsophisticated advocates ignore harm and look at the total growth rates. More sophisticated advocates acknowledge harm and emphasize the need for all to benefit – but they ignore relative growth inside and between countries.

These are the main tenets of the ideology of Global Economy. One must admit that it has a certain appeal to those who benefit from it. In western countries with well-developed industrial base, it has a kind of mass-appeal, but even in those countries there are centers of resistance.

The resistance to the idea of Global Economy comes in many forms and is nourished from many sources. The most important issue is that Global Economy simply and willfully ignores the realities of politics.

To the believers in Global Economy, New World Order and Multiculturalism, nationalism is a bothersome annoyance. And yet, the most important lesson of the 20th century is that the proletariat does have a country and that national loyalty is more important than class loyalty, Both world wars and the national uprisings against the Soviet empire are proof enough. Ironically, it was the greatest classical economist, Karl Marx, who memorialized a phrase essentially echoed on Wall Street and the White House alike: "Capital has no country".

In reality, though, Marx and enthusiasts for globalization aside, nations do matter. And within nations, the sense that leaders have betrayed the national interests in favor of an international ideology also matters. This does not matter much in times of prosperity, but it becomes critical when the economic situation darkens and the charts point downwards.

The case for the nationalistic opposition to the New World system is much more complex than it meets the eye at the first glance. They ought to be carefully investigated before continuing to connect them to previous historical processes. When French farmers smash MacDonald outlets in France, they do not do it to protest against American tariffs on Roquefort cheese. Those farmers attempt to protect the French way of life, with its tradition of gourmet cooking, far from the philosophy of MacDonald. The fact that the general French public wholeheartedly endorses the protest of the farmers shows that the fight is not about tariffs but about cultural values.

The New World Order and the Global Economy are dividing the world into two parts. There are those parts, mainly rich and industrialized nations, that do belong to it, some even with sizable popular enthusiasm, and there are those that are beyond the pale. Contrary to the practice of the late Cold War, the powers do not seem to worry too much about what is happening there, apart of a constantly dwindling humanitarian aid.

Even in those countries that are parts of the Global Economy there is an internal division. A good example for that division is India. India has a flourishing high-tech industry and has a well-developed and growing middle class. It is estimated that there are about 50 million people in India who can be assigned to middle class. It means that 50 million people, about 5 % of the population, have a decent standard of living, while the rest of the population, 95 % or so, are living in abject poverty. It is the same in other countries on the Pacific Rim. In China, it is about 150 – 200 million people who are the participants in the new economy, where the wealth generated by the Global Economy is trickling down. The rest of the country is beyond it. The same situation exists in Indonesia, Thailand and other countries.

The internal split exists not only in the lesser developed nations, like Mexico, India and China, but in the affluent west too. Even in the United States there are big differences between those from the affluent East and West Coasts and those from small mid-western towns, where industries, which were the mainstay of the economies of those towns, have shut down and transferred their jobs to low wage countries. A social safety net keeps the people in a standard that would be fabulous in Third World countries, but which is far from the expectations. It is a general process. Global economy treats all resources equally and always looks for the lowest prices.

The last few pages introduced the concepts of the New World Order and Global Economy, and presented their advantages and disadvantages. The presentation was attempted to be made in the most neutral manner. It was not easy and the attempt was not always successful. There are elements in the system that are against basic human nature. It is possible that the system has many economic advantages, but it still remains a new attempt of social engineering. All previous attempts so far have failed because of the same reason. Basic human nature is always stronger and always wins at the end.

The concept of this study is that there is a clear correlation between the historical events of the modern age, the last 300 years, or so, and the demographic explosion of the same period. If that correlation is to be described in a graphic manner, then the historical events and the curve of the demographic explosion form a double spiral, like the double-helix of the DNA, where the two curves are not interconnected but follow each other's motions, as if they would be connected by invisible strings.

This study, therefore, analyses the interaction of two processes in the modern age. Both processes are well known and copiously documented. One is a historical process, which could probably be defined as a transition from the Age of Agriculture to the Age of Information, passing on the way the Age of Industry. The second is the problem of demographic explosion, or to put it simply the question of human fertility. It is not a process; it is rather a biological imperative, which is seemingly uncontrollable. Its influence on history is so great that it certainly can be compared to any man-made historical processes.

The first task of this study is to describe the starting point, which was the state of the word at the beginning of the 18 century. That was the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, followed by a historical process from there until the end of the 20 century, which was the end of the Industrial Age and the beginning of the Information Age. Together with the analysis of the historical process, the extent of the demographic explosion is analyzed too, and the events of history are plotted on the curve of demography.

The result of the double analysis is very enlightening. Up to a certain point, the historical processes influenced the demographic explosion, but beyond that point it is the exact opposite. There is a lag between history and demography. In simple terms, it means that at the beginning the advanced technology and industry needed more working hands that gave a positive feedback to the demographic trend. More industrial workers needed more agricultural products, which again increased the trend. The problem started when new advances in science and technology, increased the output without increasing the number of people what was necessary to produce that output. That was a negative feedback but demography did not follow it. This is exactly the point that brings us to the New World Order.

The analysis above has shown the picture of the demographic explosion in the western world. There, the demographic curve has indeed descended when the standard of life went up. This proves an important rule of demography: rich people have fewer children. In the third world the success of limiting childbirth was only partially successful because the standard of life remained low. There are only a few countries, outside the western world, where the rate of fertility has dropped. These include Mauritius and the Seychelles in Africa, Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean and Sri Lanka in Asia. The key to lower fertility is higher living standard and better education, especially education of women. It seems that it will be a long time until the third world will follow the example given by the western world.

Because of the nature of the study, the major events of the modern age are not presented in chronological order but according to main points of interest. It might cause some duplication but analysis of individual subjects and not events in chronological order, can show a clearer picture.

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Designed by AAI Ltd. All rights reserved^© 2000. Contact us at: AAI@Center4all.com
Tel: 972-4-9541790 Fax: 972-4-9541793