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F*V
发帖数: 3978 | 1 Eve of Disaster
Why 2013 eerily looks like the world of 1913, on the cusp of the Great War.
BY CHARLES EMMERSON
The leading power of the age is in relative decline, beset by political
crisis at home and by steadily eroding economic prowess. Rising powers are
jostling for position in the four corners of the world, some seeking a new
place for themselves within the current global order, others questioning its
very legitimacy. Democracy and despotism are locked in uneasy competition.
A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade,
and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying
technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness,
is emerging as a result. Small-town America rails at the excessive power of
Wall Street. Asia is rising once again. And, yes, there's trouble in the
Middle East.
Sound familiar?
In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems
not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously
refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny
feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But
can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us
understand the world we live in today?
Let's get the caveats out of the way upfront. History does not repeat itself
-- at least not exactly. Analogies from one period to another are never
perfect. However tempting it may be to view China in 2013 as an exact
parallel to Germany in 1913 (the disruptive rising power of its age) or to
view the contemporary United States as going through the exact same
experience as Britain a century ago (a "weary titan staggering under the too
vast orb of its fate," as Joseph Chamberlain put it), things are never
quite that straightforward. Whereas Germany in 1913 explicitly sought a
foreign empire, China in 2013 publicly eschews the idea that it is an
expansionist power (though it is perfectly clear about protecting its
interests around the world). Whereas the German empire in 1913 had barely 40
years of history as a unified state behind it and was only slightly more
populous that Britain or France, China in 2013 can look back on centuries of
continuous history as a player in world affairs, and it now boasts one-
fifth of the world's population. Whereas Germany's rise was a genuinely new
geopolitical phenomenon in 1913, the rise of China today is more of a return
to historical normality. These differences matter.
Similarly, the strengths and weaknesses of the United States in 2013 are not
quite the same as those of Britain 100 years ago. Then, Britain benefited
politically from being the world's banker and from being the linchpin of the
gold standard. Today the United States, though benefiting politically and
economically from being the issuer of the world's principal reserve currency
, is hardly in the same position: The country is laden with debt. (One can
argue about whether it should really be such a big issue that so much of
that debt is owned by Chinese state entities -- after all, Beijing can't
just dump Treasury bonds if it doesn't get what it wants from Washington.
But Chinese ownership of U.S. debt feeds a perception of American decline,
and perceptions of the relative powers of states matter a lot to how other
countries treat them.) There are other differences between Britain in 1913
and the United States in 2013. Britain was never a military superpower on
the order of the United States today. There was never a unipolar British
moment. Britain in 1913 had slipped behind Germany industrially decades
before, living more and more off the proceeds of the past; the United States
in 2013 is still the world's largest economy and in many respects the most
dynamic and most innovative.
Moreover, the global context in which powers rise and fall in the 21st
century is not quite the same as the one of the early 20th. In 1913, a
handful of empires, mostly European, ruled over most of the world. Only two
countries in Africa -- Ethiopia and Liberia -- could claim to be truly
independent. In 2013, the United Nations counts over 190 independent states
among its membership. Fifty-two of these are African. In 1913, one in four
of the world's people lived in Europe; now it's less than one in 10. And the
web of international laws and institutions that bind the world together is
much thicker now than it was 100 years ago, though it shouldn't be forgotten
that the Hague conventions on the laws of war date from before World War I,
while the forerunner of the International Court of Justice opened its doors
to the world in -- you guessed it -- 1913.
But the fact that historical analogies are imperfect -- and the analogy
between 1913 and 2013 is far from being seamless -- does not make them
useless. It simply means that they need to be interpreted with care. As Mark
Twain put it: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The task
is to listen for those rhymes and to calibrate our hearing to catch them.
In the end, the utility of history to the decision-maker or to the policy
analyst is not as a stock of neatly packaged lessons for the contemporary
world, to be pulled off the shelf and applied formulaically to every
situation. Rather, it is to hone a way of thinking about change and
continuity, contingency and chance. Thinking historically can remind us of
the surprises that can knock states and societies off course and, at the
same time, can check our enthusiasm for believing that this time is
different. The world of 1913, on the threshold of the seminal catastrophe of
the 20th century yet by and large not expecting it, is a case in point.
Sure, there is such a sin as misusing history -- abusing history, even. But
there is a much worse mistake: imagining that we have escaped it.
Technology is a common culprit here. It is often remarked that we live in an
era of superfast, hypertransformative technological innovation, when
history, as Henry Ford put it, is bunk. When innovation comes packaged in
the form of a shiny new iPhone -- the subatomic functioning of which seems
pretty close to magic -- it is easy to succumb to the technofantasy that we
live in an entirely new age, a new era, quite unlike anything that has come
before. Yet radical technological change is hardly new. The world of 1913
had its own revolutionary technologies. Radio telegraphy was being
introduced, with the promise of improving the safety of shipping at sea and
allowing market and strategic information to be pinged around the globe
without the need for wires. Automobiles were coming off the world's first
production line -- Ford's Highland Park plant in Detroit -- and being
shipped around the world, including, in 1913, to the Buddhist monks of
Mongolia. Oil was replacing coal to fuel the British Royal Navy -- the world
's largest -- pushing the Admiralty to go into the oil business in southern
Iran and inaugurating modern petroleum diplomacy in the Middle East. The
first feature-length Hollywood movie began shooting at the end of the year,
and the first Indian film reached cinemas in Bombay. U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson even used a campaign film in the presidential election of the
previous year. (Its theme would be well suited to 2013: Tax the rich.)
In the end, technological advances, remarkable in themselves, change things
much more than we can ever expect -- the speed of adoption of new
technologies is hard to predict, and the second- or third-order impacts of
adoption even less so -- but also much less. However new the technology, it
is ultimately being grafted onto the rather old technology of the individual
human, or the community, or the state. And even the newest of technologies
can be manipulated for the oldest of ends. It took less than 10 years from
the Wright brothers' first flight, a truly revolutionary and liberating
event in the history of humanity, to the first use of aircraft to conduct
aerial bombing: over the cities of Libya in 1911 and over the Balkans in
1912 and 1913. Similarly, while the Internet was hailed 20 years ago as a
force for the liberation of oppressed people around the world -- and indeed
many people still see it that way -- authoritarian states have begun to wise
up too. At the end of 2012, a rogues' gallery of authoritarian states tried
to use a U.N. conference to advance an agenda of much tighter state control
of the Internet internationally. Domestically, such states are already
using aspects of the Internet to contain or watch their people. The world's
second-oldest profession -- espionage -- has rapidly adapted itself to
operations in the open, online world. Technology may be a driver of
historical change, but it is subject to historical context too.
To the historically minded, the recurrence of particular themes, or
particular rhymes, through history -- human greed, the manipulation of
technology, the importance of geography in determining military outcomes,
the power of belief in shaping politics, a solid conviction that this time
is different -- is no surprise. You thought that the debt-fueled boom of the
2000s was different from all those other booms throughout history? Wrong.
The ancient Greeks, with their understanding of greed, self-deception,
hubris, and nemesis, would have been quite able to interpret the 2008
financial crisis without the need for an advanced degree in financial
astrophysics from Harvard Business School. You thought pacifying Afghanistan
would be a piece of cake because we have laser-guided munitions and drones
these days? Not so much. You think that globalization is destined to
continue forever, that interstate war is impossible, and that the onward
march of democracy is ineluctable? Hang on a second; isn't that what people
thought in 1913?
The crucial point about the world 100 years ago, then, is not that it is
identical to the world today -- it isn't -- but that there was a time, in
the not-so-distant past, when a globalized world, not entirely dissimilar to
our own, fell apart. And it wasn't because human societies were in the grip
of the uncontrollable forces of destiny or that they were particularly dumb
. Most just didn't expect things to pan out the way they did. People
actually living through the year 1913 did not experience those 12 months as
the moody prelude to catastrophe. In retrospect, there were storm clouds on
the horizon. But at the time, many people found themselves living through
the best of times -- or simply had other things to think about.
The world in 1913 was dynamic, modern, interconnected, smart -- just like
ours. 1913 was the year that the modern European art of the Armory Show
conquered New York. It was the year the United States established the
Federal Reserve, the essential precondition for the global financial power
that it would later become, in much the same way that the emergence of the
Chinese renminbi as a globally traded currency today is laying the
groundwork for a Chinese challenge to American financial supremacy tomorrow.
1913 was the year Gandhi made a name for himself as a political agitator in
South Africa, the year Australians laid the foundation for their new
capital city, the year Russian Ballets Russes took the capitals of Europe by
storm -- and then did the same in Buenos Aires, then one of the richest and
fastest-growing cities on Earth. In 1913, China assembled its first
democratically assembled parliament, weeks after the leader of its largest
party, Song Jiaoren, had been assassinated -- a murder that perhaps changed
the course of global history as much as the far more famous killing of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo a year later. In
1913, Lenin was living in exile in the mountains of Galicia; Russia was in
the middle of an industrial boom, with many believing that the moment of
maximum revolutionary danger had passed and that the Tsarist Empire was on
its way to becoming the dominant Eurasian power. In 1913, Japan -- a country
that in 60 years had gone from being a hermit empire to an expansive,
industrializing Asian nation, recognized as a peer by the other great powers
-- was dealing with the uncertainties of a new emperor on the throne and
mourning the death of the last shogun. In the last year before the Great War
, Germany was Britain's second-largest trading partner, leading many in the
City of London -- and across Europe -- to conclude that, despite the rise of
Anglo-German antagonism over naval armaments, a war between the two was
unlikely. If the international solidarity of the workers did not stop a war,
the self-interest of global finance would, it was argued.
Of course, there were prognosticators of gloom and doom in 1913 -- just as
there are in any era. But there were plenty of seasoned observers of the
world then who saw the processes of internationalization all around them --
of everything from the measurement of time to the laws of war -- as the
natural unfolding of history's grand plan. "No country, no continent any
longer lives an independent life," wrote G.P. Gooch, a British historian, in
1913. "As the world contracts the human race grows more conscious of its
unity. Ideas, ideals, and experiments make the tour of the globe.
Civilisation has become international." Many noted that economic
globalization made war unprofitable; some thought it made it impossible. In
1913, as in previous years, an international exhibition was held to
commemorate the advances of the world toward greater integration -- held in
Belgium this time, in a city that would quake with the sound of artillery
shells within a year. In 1913, German Kaiser Wilhelm II was viewed by some
as a peacemaker. A few years earlier, president of the University of
California/Berkeley had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
What does any of this say about the world in 2013?
Not that we are on the cusp of a new Great War and that, on reading this,
you should head for the hills and hope for the best. There is nothing
inevitable about future conflict between the great powers and there is
nothing foretold about the collapse of global trade -- though I would argue
that both are substantially more likely now than 10 years ago. But looking
at the world of 1913 reminds us that there is nothing immutable about the
continuity of globalization either, and certainly nothing immutable about
the Western-oriented globalization of the last few decades.
There are plenty of distinct and plausible shocks to the system that could
knock our expectations of the future wildly off course -- and plenty of
surprises that we can neither predict nor anticipate, but that we can
indirectly prepare for by attuning ourselves to the possibility of their
occurrence. To take an example of one of the more plausible shocks we now
face, a miscalculation in the South China Sea could easily set off a chain
of events not entirely dissimilar to a shot in Sarajevo in 1914, with
alliance structures, questions of prestige, escalation, credibility, and
military capability turning what should be marginal to global affairs into a
central question of war and peace.
In a general sense, while the United States in 2013 may not be a perfect
analogue for Britain in 1913 (nor China in 2013 a perfect analogue for
Germany in 1913), it is certainly the case that the world we are now
entering is more similar to that of 100 years ago -- a world of competitive
multipolarity -- than that of a quarter-century ago. Just as in 1913,
technology, trade, and finance bind the world together now -- and rational
self-interest would suggest that the integration that these forces have
brought about is irreversible. Yet, over the last few years, the world has
witnessed a rise in trade protection, a breakdown in global trade
negotiations, totally inadequate progress on global climate discussions, and
moves to fragment the Internet. There is a corrosive and self-fulfilling
sense that the dominance of the West -- as the world's rule-maker and pace-
setter -- is over.
Humanity is forever condemned to live with uncertainty about the future. But
thinking historically equips us to better gauge that uncertainty, to temper
biases, question assumptions, and stretch our imagination. By understanding
the history of other countries -- particularly those that are re-emerging
to global eminence now -- we might better understand their mindsets, hopes,
and fears. And when we've done that, we might find we need to think again
about how to build a future of our own making, rather than one decided for
us by events.
The world of 1913 -- brilliant, dynamic, interdependent -- offers a warning.
The operating system of the world in that year was taken by many for
granted. In 2013, at a time of similar global flux, the biggest mistake we
could possibly make is to assume that the operating system of our own world
will continue indefinitely, that all we need to do is stroll into the future
, and that the future will inevitably be what we want it to be. Those
comforting times are over. We need to prepare ourselves for a much rougher
ride ahead |
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