[...]... available, the late twentieth-century concern with the culture and politics of these small and otherwise unproductive countries will seem as obsolete as sixteenth- or seventeenth-century concerns for the control of the Spice Islands The profound shift that began in the late twentieth century and that the twenty-first will see completed – one way or another – is the integration into the global market for the world s... held together by an artificial ideology of German nationhood, in the interests of which the bourgeoisie were expected to subordinate their desire for political autonomy to their military rulers These in turn were under increasing pressure to demonstrate their value to the nation (that is, to secure their own positions) by belligerent gestures and plans, which one day turned into disastrous reality The. .. than the United Nations to world peace The danger signs over the next few years will be any retreat by the American administration from the WTO or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (especially if it claims to be speaking for the generation born in the 1980s), any marked upgrading of China’s military capacity and any intensification of the ideological rhetoric (whether it is China telling the. .. Britain Nor should we set too much store by speculation on an end to single-party rule 10 The Great Event in China Even if there were to be a Chinese revolution it would not necessarily improve the prospects for world peace The current regime is probably more realistic, and certainly better informed, about the outside world than the majority of the Chinese electorate is ever likely to be Bismarck after... into 75 years of hot and cold world war in 1914 Fancies need no justification If one is thought to be necessary, though, it might be something like this: by 15 or 20 years into each new century, those born in the last decades of the old – say, in the ’80s – are mature and influential enough to dispense with the heritage of the epoch that they never felt was their own They are the parents, making the world. .. international, trade At the same time, the imperialist race for territory 17 2014 accelerated as it became a matter of practical concern that the world is a limited whole and the resources within it are limited The symbolic moment of definition was the Washington conference of 1884, which made the Greenwich meridian into the baseline for a conceptual grid embracing the world and accepted by the world As often... happens, though, the imagination of the poets had anticipated the scientists and statesmen The sense of a new and global unity runs through Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1872–3 The dénouement of Verne’s tale depends on the paradoxes of the soon -to- be-fixed system of imaginary cartographic lines – a system which was also soon to determine physical and human reality in the preposterously... the systematic exploitation of fossil fuel This, then, implies that the future of globalization depends on the future of world energy policy Unless we can quickly come to rely only on renewable sources of energy, either climate change or the exhaustion of fossil fuels will cause the world economy and the world population to revert to their pre-nineteenth-century conditions, through natural disaster,... duration of the Soviet Empire and the Cold War, to America, Western Europe, Australasia, Southeast Asia and Japan Capital transfers from the First World, to developing regions of the Third World, such as Africa and Latin America, were much lower in the late twentieth century than they had been in the late nineteenth Inside the First World, after 1945, under American military protection and thanks to the stability... pull down the house upon us all In numerological terms, we should then know whether the twenty-first century has begun with a new 1815 or a new 1914 Maybe the period from the collapse of communism in 1989 to the Great Event around 2015 will come in retrospect to resemble the period from 1789 to 1815 During that turbulent transition new states came and went, a 900-year-old empire disappeared and the papacy . 2014 This page intentionally left blank 2014 How to Survive the Next World Crisis Nicholas Boyle Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road. uential enough to dispense with the heritage of the epoch that they never felt was their own. They are the parents, making the world that will be inhabited by their children – the generation. negotiating the set- tlement that in the twenty- fi rst century will have to make up for the follies of the past and ensure us against an even more threatening future. In this book I attempt to show how