One World Scenario

by Robert Fuller

One World Scenario.

Robert Fuller

* Central Europe rejoins Western Europe to re-create prewar Europe. This Europe, with the European Community of twelve as nucleus, continues to unify economically during the 1990s. By the beginning of the 21st century Europe has reassumed her pre-World War H status as the center of world culture and commerce.

* Japan also re-assumes her preWorld War n role as the center of a de facto greater East Asian coprosperity sphere.

* A Greater Europe and a Greater Japan shoulder America aside and assume leadership in the global marketplace. America, burdened by domestic and foreign debt, and distracted by rising domestic troubles, turns inward.

* In the Soviet Union nationalist yearnings and economic distress lead to chaos. To America - the introspective, solitary superpower - falls prime responsibility for holding be world together during the tremors and the world-quake that occur as the cold war system of superpower hegemony collapses leaving a power vacuum. In trying to maintain international stability America further exhausts her financial, political, and spiritual resources. Being the only cop on the block is a thankless task. America, in a reprise of pre-war isolationism, all but withdraws from world affairs.

* It has been long in coming, but now America suffers - economically and spiritually. A deepening loss of confidence leads to depression both psychological and economic). It is America's long-postponed mid-life crisis, which she never knew because adulthood was thrust upon her when World War II forced the older nations to abdicate their paternal roles. Drafted into the role of elder statesman, while still adolescent at heart, America's anti-authoritarianism and can-do optimism not only dazzled the world for fifty years, they also set an example that a great many subjugated and impoverished people emulated in their struggles for freedom and prosperity. Like a prince become king before his maturity, America played the juvenile - for better and for worse. She could model youthful qualities like rebelliousness, audacity, extravagance, and passion. And for a time, the world was star-struck. But with the end of the cold war people everywhere suddenly felt their age. They were tired -tired of hype, tired of hope. America, which had suffered so little adversity, had yet to absorb the sober values of maturity - moderation, self-restraint, and sacrifice; compassion for the less fortunate; responsibility for the whole. As the 20th century ends, we see that it wasn't America's century after all. She'd been good for a dash of leadership, but was unprepared to provide stewardship. In retrospect it appears rather that Europe's star dimmed for a half-century during which America's seemed bright only by comparison. At the end of the century, America's glory seems but a flash in the pan. Europe is back in her historic role of world leader and Japan has risen independently to join her as peer and partner.

* World War II is seen in retrospect as a temporary setback in the long march of a few seasoned civilizations to world leadership. America and the Soviet Union, the ostensible victors, were still young nations, and were not ready to shoulder continuing responsibilities. They held the limelight only while the world remained mesmerized by their cold war with each other. The older civilizations - Europe and Japan - once back on their feet, resumed their leading roles, hardly missing a beat.

* The historic consequence of America's ascendancy was that she had been in a position to insist that Europe and Japan rid themselves of empire, and to hold an expansionist Soviet Union in check until internal pressures forced her too to grant freedom to her satellites and her citizens. One after another, the imperial powers of Europe - Britain, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and finally, momentously, Russia - released their colonial possessions. The postwar period is, first and foremost, a period of world-wide decolonialization, and a brash America the first nation in modem times to escape empire (from the British, back in the 18th century) - served as a beacon and as a bulwark in the decolonialization of the world. Scores of liberated nations set out to imitate America. However, while being admired and widely imitated, Americans gradually ceased to appreciate the genius of their own political system - handed them on a platter by the founding fathers. Precocity is seldom aware of its sources and the adulation and narcissism this encourages delay maturation. By the end of the 20th century, Americans had lost their sense of historic mission.

* America was spared the horrors of the 20th century that were visited upon Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was as if God had indeed blessed America. She had never suffered. She had not earned her place in the sun. America had been free so long she had forgotten what tyranny was. Her civilization hadn't ripened. She found herself in the spotlight before she was ready for world leadership. Her compassion was sentimental, opportunistic, and episodic. She acted like a precocious, spoiled teenager: prodigal, chauvinistic, patronizing, self-centered, callous, greedy - in short, still possessed by adolescent arrogance and the pre-adult's sense of immortality and hubris. At the end of the 20th century, America remained an innocent among nations, and was vulnerable to a fall.

* In contrast, the Soviet Union suffered terribly - in war, in revolution, under despotism, in the failure of her utopian ideology, and in the collapse of her empire. Throughout the century-long struggle for liberation - first from the European empires and then from the Soviet empire - people in every part of the world looked to America as an example of political freedom and economic prosperity. The pressure America exerted throughout the entire postwar-cold war period contributed to the success of these anti-colonial struggles, the demise of bureaucratic communism, and the spread of market democracies. But for America the result was not uplifting. It was spiritual, moral, and financial exhaustion. America, in passing her values into the world, seemed to have lost herself in the bargain.

* By the early years of the 21st century, a chastened America and Russia are sitting on the sidelines of world history while proud and prosperous Europe and Japan preside over a global marketplace with aristocratic largesse. It is as if the era of the superpowers were an aberration.

* But there is trouble brewing. National passions, suppressed under the superpower condominium, are bubbling over; tribalism, in all its primitive fury, is returning. The nations of Europe and Japan lack experience in egalitarian dealings with peoples of different race, religion, and culture. Although they developed an academic respect for other cultures, they have never learned to live with them cheek by jowl. Country alongside country, yes, this accommodation was finally made after over fifty million people died in the name of nationalist ambitions in two world wars. But the constituent nations of Europe are still remarkably homogeneous at the turn of the century. Japan is even more so. Foreign visitors remain foreigners and visitors - they do not become citizens as in America. National borders of the European countries, and of Japan, have remained relatively impermeable membranes to the tide of immigrants casting around the world for a better life. Unlike America, these "pots" do not melt. Despite well-intentioned efforts by the Europeans and the Japanese to mitigate ancient antagonisms, nationalism is again upstaging mercantilism. Questions of identity take a back seat to no other, and in the absence of unifying myths the world is fast descending into chaos. Busy seeing after their own commercial interests, Europe and Japan have declined to pursue superpower status. Shielded for a half-century by America and mindful of past imperial experience, they have focused primarily on economic objectives. Now their economic reach exceeds their political grasp. Even allied, they'd be lacking the military muscle, the diplomatic clout, and the moral leadership to inaugurate an era of Peace on Earth. As the crisis builds it becomes clear that the diffident leadership offered by the Europeans and the Japanese is insufficient to the task - and the task is becoming urgent. The combined threat of intensifying regional wars - fought with nuclear and chemical weapons - and impending environmental catastrophe has brought humanity to an historic impasse. The power and proliferation of modem weapons means that the whole fabric of human civilization is at risk. The problem of sovereignty can be ignored no longer and Europe and Japan are not equipped to confront it.

* Although America and Russia have lost world leadership, they have not lost their military might. Wary of instability, they have kept their powder dry, and between these two vast continental powers there remains a decisive advantage in both geography and weaponry over any combination of adversaries.

* As the world moves towards the brink, America and Russia see that only by acting in concert can conflagration be prevented. They form an alliance. It is known to the world as AmerRuss. Its first order of business is to put a stop to the fighting that is threatening to engulf the planet. In the chaos and destruction that ensue, both America and Russia are hit hard. Provoked, they resolve to create once and for all an exclusive monopoly on modern weapons. This is the moment of truth in humanity's long, tortuous path to unitary sovereignty. With a judicious mix of persuasion, intimidation, bluff, bribes, and coercion, AmerRuss uses its primacy in the oceans and in space to deny to all other sovereignties the power to project military force. When the dust settles, the peace is for good. Unlike the Soviet-American alliance in World War II, this time Americans and Soviets have shared the suffering. And this time the alliance holds together when the fighting is done. No longer do ideology and conflicting imperial designs divide the partners. in the course of their joint effort, both nations have come of age and stand ready to assume world leadership.

* Learning to live with peoples of different language, culture, race, and religion had been matters of national survival for Americans and Russians. They discovered that diversity was strength, not weakness. Europe and Japan - consisting of homogeneous, national cultures - did not have this knowledge in their bones. in subtle but self-limiting ways, they placed kinship over pluralism, conformity over diversity, privilege over opportunity. It is their hard-won, proven capacity to govern diverse peoples that has prepared AmerRussians for world leadership. Now this common heritage moves AmerRuss to establish a world government. Under its aegis, a constitution is drafted. It defines a democratic, decentralized, pluralistic, representative, federal world government. Although the preamble is idealistic when it gets down to nuts and bolts it is deliberately non-utopian. All power is delimited, checked and balanced. National states retain traditional forms of government if their citizens so elect. Although there remain many bones of contention among and within states, procedures for dealing with them are in place. But no more does might make right. It counts for naught. The military option is gone. What counts is cultural creativity in all its forms: scientific, artistic, commercial, political.

* By mid-21st century there flowers another renaissance. This time around there are many new players, free at last of colonialism, militarism, home-grown tyranny and second-class, third-world status. And this time the Europeans don't steal the show.

* American and Soviet predominance during the mid-20th century is revealed as a mere foretaste of their historic destiny. During the 21st century these now mature, heterogeneous societies, emerging older but wiser from the final war in human history, act as one to oversee the establishment of world government under law which assumes stewardship of the planet. The 21st century marks the true beginning of a world history.