Politics without maps to shape 21st century

By Bernard Besserglik

PARIS (AFP): Never has predicting the future of politics been more hazardous. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 at least three grand theories aimed at mapping the post-Cold War world have been put forward, only to be thrown out within a year or two.

The current wisdom among pundits and seers is that over the coming century the influence of the nation state will continue to decline as financial markets extend their grasp on global affairs, and that the United States will continue to be the predominant world power for at least the next few decades.

Bets should be hedged, however. If political analysts are agreed on anything, it is that they are wholly unable to agree on the shape of things to come.

First out of the blocks was the U.S. academic Francis Fukuyama who within months of the collapse of communism was proclaiming, in the title of his influential essay, The End of History and the imminent creation of a smiling, unproblematic world in which western liberal democracy would reign supreme.

One Balkan war later his fellow academic Samuel Huntington, in a no less influential essay in the review Foreign Affairs, was proclaiming a multi-polar, multi-civilisational politics in which the role of ideology was at an end and the nation state would wither away.

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Huntington predicted the emergence of seven or eight distinctive power blocs drawn on broadly cultural lines: western, Confucian, Japanese, Slav-Orthodox, Islamic, Hindu, Latin American and perhaps African.

This was one of the main currents in a school of thought that came to be known as Global Chaos Theory (GCT) whose proponents included former U.S. secretary of state Zbigniew Brzezinski and which held that the globalizing forces symbolized by McDonald's restaurants and the International Monetary Fund would give rise to repeated outbreaks of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

The Huntington and, in particular, the GCT theory were briefly fashionable but have both been convincingly refuted, the latter notably by Yahya Sadowski in The Myth of Global Chaos where he argues that neither the causes nor the number of conflicts in the world have changed significantly in recent times.

Meanwhile tribalism and globalization were being given short shrift in yet another influential essay, provocatively entitled Jihad vs. McWorld, by Benjamin Barber, an advisor to U.S. President Bill Clinton, who saw the trends as equally doom-laden.

Globalism, the creation of a homogenized culture comprising fast food, fast computers and fast music -- McDonald's, Macintosh and MTV -- was as much to be feared as the threatened "Lebanonisation" of nation states "in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe."

For Barber, the unifying forces of the markets and information technology ("McWorld") are accompanied by the centrifugal forces of institutional breakdown and national dissolution (Jihad). And he warns bleakly: "Neither needs democracy; neither promotes democracy."

Several French writers agree with Barber's analysis, while not necessarily sharing his gloomy conclusions.

Anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle speaks of "globalised Balkanisation." Sociologist Michel Wiewiorka believes that "globalization encourages cultural fragmentation" via the variety of reactions that it provokes. Jacques Attali, a former presidential adviser, notes market forces causing "peoples to break down into tribes, families into households, ideologies into aphorisms, culture into video-clips."

The lack of clear sign-posting for the new century is summed up by ethnologist Marc Auge who warns: "Any generalized prophecy would be rash as it is bound to underestimate the sociological plurality and complexity of innovation."

Globalization is clearly only one of the seismic forces that will shape the world in the coming decades.

Other decisive factors will be technology -- what are the implications for society of the Internet and ever-increasing computerization? -- and the impact of human activity on the ecology. Can the environment withstand the pressure on resources represented by continuing population growth? How serious is the threat posed by global warming and climate change?

Even the short term represents a test for the predictive powers of the pundits. The first year of the new century will have seen two crucial contests, the results of which will set the tone for much that follows.

No-one, a year ago, could have foreseen the election of Vladimir Putin to supreme power in Russia. Who can be sure of the result, let alone the consequences, of November's contest for the leadership of the world's remaining superpower, the United States?