Chevrier, J. “Benchmarks for the 21stcentury: 
What the experts are predicting” The New Federation 4.1 (1994): 7-10.

Benchmarks for the 21stcentury: What the experts are predicting
by Jean Chevrier

It is that time again in the history of the world where the future holds sway over a host of writers. The year 2000 is a pivotal point to be sure, but the subject matter is the same as it was hundreds of years ago: how to make the planet a better place.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed, in the first sentence of his “Social Contract”: Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. The American Constitution proclaims that “all men are created equal.”
Karl Marx, Adam Smith, George Orwell, not to mention Aristotle and Plato, had precise ideas on how society should evolve or how men and women should be governed.
Today’s writers seem less overpowering in a visionary sense. Grappling with unprecedented global problems, they appear more guarded in their evaluations and prescriptions.
Is the world a better place? Yes, if you look at the advances in science and technology. No, if you look at the forces of social disintegration.
History acts very much like a pendulum, sometimes going forward towards new frontiers (e.g., the end of slavery, the welfare state, the women’s movement), sometimes going backward, with recycled policies such as conservation and privatization, and sometimes harking back to the Dark Ages (ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust).
If there is a cause for celebration, it lies with education, which is fast becoming a lifelong reality. As Horace Mann, an American educator, wrote in 1846, “Intelligence is a primary ingredient in the wealth of nations.” With people living longer, a greater reservoir of knowledge and experience will be available. This new wisdom may not solve poverty or crime, but it should deepen our understanding of many facets of our existence. In fact, much of our world is fast becoming a huge laboratory of reforms and new ideas propelled by information technology and the imperatives of citizen participation.
Many predictions have been made. Some are largely based on extensions of current realities. To say that the 1990s will be the decade of women in leadership, or to talk of the rise of the Pacific Rim, the growth of genetic engineering or the expansion of market economies, is stating the obvious. Some of these predictions can be found in Megatrends 2000, by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, published in 1990.
Harder to predict is the place of religion, philosophy or culture. Fearing the worst, Le Monde diplomatique, in its special magazine edition of September 1993, entitled “L’Agonie de la culture,” deplores the fact that so much of our world is in the hands of technology and globalization – themes dear to the Anglo-American world – and that we are coming dangerously close to a civilization of chaos.
The prognosis for the longer term presents more of a challenge. In his article, “Blood and Irony,” published in the special edition of the issue of The Economist (September 11-17, 1993), “The Next 150 Years”, Henry Louis Gates, head of the department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, looks at how race and religion will shape the future. He concludes that migration will lead to the Islamicisation of the West and the “browning” of America. “Within a decade,” he writes, “Muslims will be more numerous in America than Presbyterians or Jews.”
He quotes Patrick Buchanan, “For a millennium, the struggle for mankind’s destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the 21st century, it may be so again.”
This scenario is not inevitable by any means. The West could choose to stop or reduce immigration. Better conflict resolution could also stem the flow of refugees. Gates himself recognizes that the assimilative capacity of Western culture will weigh in the balance.
There is however a “middle of the road” type of forecasting from which a number of front-line positions can be extracted.
Paul Kennedy, author of Preparing for the Twenty-First Century – a book otherwise long on theory and short on practical solutions, offers what could be called an umbrella projection, which he borrows from Robert Malthus’ famous Essay on Population. The world is in a race against time; either it produces resources and wealth fast enough to feed and sustain an exploding population, or it will perish.
This kind of doomsday scenario is not new. It failed to galvanize public opinion in 1798. It remains to be seen if it will have lasting impact today, considering that the world population, which has more than doubled in the past forty years, will reach a staggering eight billion, even ten billion, early in the next century.
One projection is that technology will likely continue to move faster than governments; and that values and ethics will combine to hold off the destructive power of technology.
The need to protect the environment is a constant theme throughout most essays, but the insistence illustrates that the battle is far from over. In Rethinking the Future, Canadian writers William Leiss and Archie Graham call for a new techno-ecological realism, and the establishment of a different set of social priorities, in particular the promotion of conservation over progress. In the same collection, on the subject of biotechnology, Varda Burstyn calls for more public regulation of science and technology. The willful fabrication of human beings, she says, has mind-bending implications and she is quick to remind us of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ominous words:” You argue about what you do, only after you have had your technical success. This is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
A second leading development involves the expansion of civil society which, by definition, takes in a multitude of special interests from racial minorities to the disabled. Writing in The Economist, Michael Walzer, professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton N.J., foresees more tumultuous politics, since “there will be many more groups focused like the feminists on particular ‘devalued or stigmatized identities’ or like the environmentalists on single neglected issues.”
He concludes it’s hard to believe that these groups will ever be silent or passive again and democratic government will be more difficult to manage than it has been in the West until now. Walzer’s ideas are similar to those of Alvin and Heidi Tofler, in War and Anti-War, Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century.
The Toflers predict a complex new global system in the next century, made up of regions, corporations, religions, non-governmental organizations and political movements, all vying for influence in an increasingly unstable world.
On the other hand, civil society will be severely altered by direct democracy. In “A better way to vote,” Brian Beedham, associate editor of The Economist, writes: “The voter, already irritated at having so little control over his representatives between elections, will be even angrier when he discovers how much influence the special-interest propagandists are now able to wield over those representatives.”
The focal point of Beedham’s essay is that the basis of modern democracy is the proposition that every adult person’s judgment about the conduct of public affairs is entitled to be given equal weight with every other person’s.
While the author refers to referendums and petitions, which are commonplace in Switzerland and California, he fails to examine other instruments of direct democracy. Constituent assemblies for instance may be suitable for different purposes. Proportional representation is often linked to direct democracy because it allows electors to vote according to their conscience and to favor smaller parties with valid ideas and policies.
But the real revolution in direct democracy will come from modern electronics and push-button technology. It should be possible in the next decade for people to vote from their homes on key issues of public policy or on government bills. This would be binding on parliamentarians under certain conditions (e.g., a two-thirds majority and a fifty per cent turnout). Canada, because of its expertise in communication technology, might be one of the first countries to make the experiment work.
Voter alienation, however, is not directed only at the political elite. It goes much deeper and addresses the whole dynamics of our social/economic/legal structures. If the cure to the ills of democracy is more democracy, to quote from “The Good Society” – which is geared to an egalitarian concept – we can expect the private sector and public institutions to start paying more attention to equality of rights, opportunity and treatment within the entire social spectrum.
The once-taboo subject of the rapidly growing inequality of earnings in America forms the basis of The Cost of Talent, by Harvard president Derek Bok. Bok extends his critique to our over-legalized society that sends millions of its citizens into costly litigation.
At first glance, these issues which among others speak to the health of our democracy, may not appear problematic but they are likely to gain momentum if the socioeconomic climate does not improve drastically. “We can restore an ethic of civic responsibility to society as a whole,” writes Amitai Etzioni in The Spirit of Community - Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda.
It is the economy however which has been receiving the most attention. The collapse of communism has brought a deluge of books, articles and analyses. Paradoxically, after an initial period of euphoria in the West, (to wit: terms like the “End of History”), capitalism itself has come under increasing attack from a variety of sources, including some powerful establishment figures.
In Boiling Point, Kevin Philips, himself a Republican, argues that the result of the Reagan years was a massive shift of wealth toward the top one per cent of Americans. This not only increased the suffering of the very poor but put a squeeze on middle class incomes, hard-hit by soaring taxes and increased costs for services and leisure. He concludes: “When the middle class falters, so does the country.”
British-based author Charles Handy, a management professor at the London Business School, strikes another troubling note in his book, Age of Unreason: “By the end of the decade, less than half the workforce in the industrialized world will have full-time jobs. The rest will be part-timers, temporary workers or unemployed.”
This echoes the sentiments of René Monory, president of the French senate: “To think that an economic recovery will reduce unemployment is to entertain a hope which if unfulfilled will only produce a social explosion.”
Twenty-first Century Capitalism, by Robert Heilbroner, paints a picture of national governments increasingly unable to cope with the problems that arise from the intrusion of the global economy into their territories (i.e., the internationalization of production). Heilbroner is of two minds: “While the market mechanism has performed prodigies of social coordination, it is responsible for mammoth misdirections of effort.”
Former White House adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, goes a step further in Out of Control, Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. He concludes: “The only way to avoid the cataclysm and to regain control over man’s destiny is for a complete restructuring of world politics.” He calls for a renewal of spiritual life and communion with others for the sake of common growth.
In short, what we are seeing – at least in theory – is a struggle between the defenders of the status quo made up of global organizations, bureaucracies and media conglomerates, and some leading proponents of a new world order, intent on putting a human face on capitalism.
The likely outcome, according to many observers, is the development of different species of capitalism, some more successful than others in reducing inequalities and redistributing wealth. Market socialism is one epithet used in Megatrends 2000 to describe the new environment. Surprisingly, few are predicting major disruptions or upheavals in the West if economic conditions do not improve.
Where the most striking developments are likely to occur is in the international arena.
Some of the best thinking in this area comes from C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington. His vision, as outlined in The Economist: “All or most of the world economy in 2150 is likely to be part of a ‘single internal market’ à la EC 1992, perhaps complete with a single currency and monetary authority.”
He also foresees several hundred or more political subdivisions – “regions” rather than “countries” that will span the globe – one of those growth poles being Quebec, “as Canada finally fragments” (with some of its units aligning with compatible regions south of the border).
Fred Bergsten argues that the challenge of the epoch is to mesh the centripetal forces of economics with the centrifugal ones of politics. “Many Nobel prizes, for both peace and economics, await those who can resolve the conflicts.”
The idea that world politics will be dominated by regional integration, which will transcend the nation-state, is widely shared. In his own essay, Henry Louis Gates writes: “Never in this century has the Western project of supranational unification seemed closer to realization.”
Obviously such optimism rests on the capacity of world leaders to preserve peace and security and halt the spread of nuclear weapons. Prospects in this area go in two opposite directions. The predominant view is that the world has entered a new phase characterized “by regional wars and global peace.”
“The tide of history has turned decisively against total war” writes Lawrence Freedman, head of the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. The United Nations is expected to get better at peacemaking/peacekeeping and succeed in reforming its international structures (i.e., by giving countries such as Japan and India a seat at the Security Council).
Others believe, however, that the world is still very much in the grips of the nuclear holocaust scenario, as materialism has lured our societies into a false sense of security. In The Logic of Accidental War, Bruce G. Blair, a senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, reminds us how important it is for the U.S. and Russia to set an example of responsible nuclear custodianship by dismantling the doomsday systems (the “pre-delegation” to launch a nuclear strike) which could be set off by mistake.
Likewise, there is still no permanent ban on nuclear testing, nor is there an agreement to end the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for use in weapons. Which still leaves plenty of room for countries such as China, North Korea, India, Iran, or Iraq, and for terrorist groups, to acquire or use weapons for strategic purposes or for blackmail.
Underlying the whole peace initiative is the growing disparity between rich and poor countries. Here there is a definite lack of vision, if not interest, in the North-South debate. This can be attributed to a profound sense of pessimism resulting from the failure to resolve the issue after decades of relentless efforts.
Perhaps the time has come to rethink the fundamental structure of international aid. Perhaps greater regionalization could force a more pronounced attack on poverty. Is it too avant-garde to think that North America and South America could mesh their economies together over the next five to ten years? What about a universe without borders, or the possibility of a world government, which have been long-standing objectives of the world community? There have been some spectacular gains in this century, like the peace process in the Middle East and the unification of Germany, not to mention the European Community. A third world war has been averted, and so too have civil wars or revolutions in the West. The best protection is still to broaden international perspectives.
As an honest broker, perhaps Canada can initiate a world conference to deal with some of these planetary issues on the eve of the 21st century. If ideology is passé, as many contend, then perhaps reaching solutions will be easier, if the right forum is created.

Jean Chevrier is Editor of The New Federation Magazine

Suggested Readings

Preparing for the Twenty-first Century, by Paul Kennedy, Harper Collins, 1993, 428 pages.
Twenty-first Century Capitalism, by Robert Heilbroner, House of Anansi, 1993, 124 pages.
Rethinking the Future, edited by Patricia Elliott, Fifth House Publishers, 1993, 184 pages.
Out of Control, Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Maxwell Macmillan, 1993, 240 pages.
“The Next 150 Years”, The Economist, September 11-17, 1993.
War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, by Alvin and Heidi Tofler, Little Brown, 1993, 302 pages.