A NEW WORLD ORDER?
The runner ups are already running down...
In the late seventies the social anthropologists focused on the rise and falls of civilizations by using a dialectical model: the centralistic powers of highly stratified societies repeatedly collapsed and the power of dominance shifted. By studying significant downfalls of power centres we turned to the constant collapses of coastal indigenous superpowers such as the Valdivia, Chimur and Nazca in favour of altiplano (highland) empires such as Huari and, much, much later, the Incas in the pre-Columbian era, the rise ad fall of the “Mexican” Tolteca, Azteca and Olmeca empires in addition to the Indus Valley early citystate and the Harapa civilization as well as the Asian constantly altering Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian Empires. The patterns of the dynamics of rise in power and the collpases could be understood by applying the Hegelian model.
The pattern of dominance versus and submission in symbiosis and disolution was addressed and scientifically expressed in the theory of Centrum versus Peripheries. When a regional superpower gradually became heavily bureaucratized and depending totally on the supplies for reproduction from the enslaved peripheries or satelites, the latter formed alliences, rebelled and the non-productive centre collapsed for obvious reasons. Are we more sophisticated today? Not at all. The finacial superpowers is drowning in beuracracy and administration. The nations export their own industries to low wage countries believing the equation is solved, although mass unemployment and dramatically reduced consumism paralyse the domestic market.
This raised the question of how long Europe and North America could rely on the underdeveloped nations export of natural resources and the western sophisticated production industry of consumer´s goods. The issue of how to impose and maintain a durable system keeping peripheral or satellite regions in poverty and submission without any efforts to change the exploitative interdependency was alarming on all levels.
By exporting know how and technology to the less developed nations we could see no reason why the exploited nations, once they learned to use the tools of sophisticated production, would willingly remain submissive. The core of the issue was of a moral and ethical character: should we keep our knowledge to ourselves and thus permanent the inequality in order to remain in financial growth and prosperity? There is no obvious answer.
In the nineties this issue became acute when the liberal market economy policies had come to a point when the surplus became fictional and the obvious intentions of the suppliers of natural resources began woke up to their own potential to manufacture on their own to lesser costs and to satisfy their internal markets growing demands for consumer´s goods. Anything else would have been utterly stupid. To each his own…
Insipid efforts:
In desperation the Occident created the dogma of a Global Village to manipulate our thoughts that we were all involved in a benevolent togetherness, alarmed by the rapidly growing economies in Asia. The ideology par excellence focused on energy production and the global ecological waste and pollution´and with good reasons.
To the Occidental market economy it became essential that the Chinese or the Indian households should lessen their demands and willingly abstain from a car or a refrigerator since this would be disastrous for the ecology on a global scale. They are so many…Simultaneously a profitable commerce with waste quotas developed without any ethical scruples. It is not a nice scenario.
Man acts, scientifically seen, by means of a biological selfish gene in order to survive and reproduce and the urge to accumulate, primarily by necessity and at the other end of the chain, by greed and unlimited accumulation, has been evident since the birth of the Homo Sapiens as socially organized groups. ( The MaximizationTheory, Fredrick Barth).
Insipid solutions
China, seemingly wisely, invested in Africa and can take a great credit for the rapidly growing economies in Ethiopia, Mocambique and Nigeria. Once, however, the production and the know how was exported to Africa, because of very low salary levels at a stunningly cheap production costs, Chinese employees were fired on a massive scale and the Chinese rise to a finacial superpower is already jeopardized with a serious primarily growing middle class generated social unrest. India´s promising financial growth has halted. The middle class, because of it´s unimaginable size, virtually has emptied the nest. Nobody wants to work for a mediocre salary, the middle class is highly educated and will not regress to rural patterns of survival. India faces enormous problems. The Asian financial miracle and the new world order is already yesterday news. The stampeding economies of Laos, Burma and Cambodia cannot save the Asian financial lead. They are rapidly becoming hostile to Chinese investments in their countries. The State of the Art knowhow had already been exported. China turned to Africa. Now it finds itself in competition with the pauper nations they invested in...
The Nano technique, which obviously is the crucial invention of this century and vital to the development in almost every field of production, relies totally on a special phosphuros ingredient. China possesses 90% of the resources of this particular phosphor and has already started to reduce the export to the west.
The nightmare of a Chinese upper hand to hold the rest of the world hostage however will wane. As the Chinese economy decreases on a massive scale, China will be forced to become a nation of natural resources export, a step or two back in financial development, and to sell the phosphuros to whoever have the financial resources.
We are rapidly facing a situation when, as so many times before in a historic perspective, the dominance of centers such as contemporary North America and Europe are collapsing. It has, however, seldom happened that two major financial centers are going downhill simultaneously. We have know historic sources to learn from. It simply hasen´t happened before on such an elephantine scale. With a scenario with the Occident and the previously fast growing economies in Asia on the verge of collapsing we will face a New World Order. But, honestly, we have no idea of what it will look like. Only that the going is getting very rough
In summery:
I have little doubt, from a social anthropologist´s standpoint, that history will repeat itself. The peripheries unite and the centre collapses and, if everything had turned out as so many times before, a rapid rise to domination will occur in India, China and South East Asia, until, which already is a fact, they make the same mistake as all dominant civilizations have done before them. Europe will fall back into deep regression with demographialc, ethnialc and geographical fragmentazation, maybe into semi feudal unities and serious social unrest as has happened before.
It is not a question of a dramatical changes in the future. It is happening now. Are we sophisticated enough to cope with this situation? The level of sophistication can be seen in the Obama / Republican conflict. Need I say more?
References:
Maurice Godelier: Rationalité et Irrationalité en Economie 1969
Fredrick Bart: Maximization
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