Apocalypse 2

7/25/2019 Apocalypse 2

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CIVIL UNREST GLOBALIZATION CLIMATE CHANGE

By John Feffer

YESTERDAY 12:30 PM

L

Splinterlands: The View From 2050

A dystopian fictional tour of the world that awaits us.

et me start with a confession. Im old-fashioned and I have an

old-fashioned profession. Im a geopaleontologist. That means I dig

around in archives to exhume the extinct: all the empires and

federations and territorial unions that have passed into history. I

practically created the profession of geopaleontology as a young

scholar in 2020. (We used to joke that we were the only historians with

true 2020 hindsight). Now my profession is becoming as extinct as its

subject matter.

Today, in 2050, fewer and fewer people can recall what it was like to

live among those leviathans. Back in my youth, we imagined that

lumbering dinosaurs like Russia and China and the European Union

would endure, regardless of the global convulsions taking place around

them. Of course, at that time, our United States still functioned as its

name suggests, rather than as a motley collection of regional fragments

that today fight over a shrinking resource base.

Empires, like adolescents, think theyll live forever. In geopolitics, as in

biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, its

Splinterlands: The View From 2050 | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/splinterlands-th

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always a shock.

Consider the clash of the titans in World War I. Four enormous

empiresthe Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Germanwent

into that conflict imagining that victory would give them not just a new

lease on life but possibly even more territory to call their own. And all

four came crashing down. The war was horrific enough, but the

aftershocks just kept piling up the bodies. The flu epidemic of 191819

alonewhich soldiers unwittingly transported from the trenches to

their homelandswiped out at least 50 million people worldwide.

When dinosaurs collapse, they crush all manner of smaller creatures

beneath them. No one today remembers the death throes of the last of

the colonial empires in the mid-20th century with their staggering

population transfers, fierce insurgencies, and endless proxy warseven

if the infant states that emerged from those bloody afterbirths gained

at least a measure of independence.

My own specialty as a geo-paleontologist has been the post-1989

period. The break-up of the Soviet Union heralded the last phase ofdecolonization. So, too, did the redrawing of boundaries that took place

in parts of Asia and Africa from the 1990s into the 21st century,

producing new states like East Timor, Eritrea, South Sudan. The

break-up of the Middle East, in the aftermath of the US invasion of

Iraq and the Arab Spring, followed a similar, if far more chaotic and

bloody pattern, though religious extremism more than nationalist

sentiment tore apart the multiethnic countries of the region.

Even in this inhospitable environment, the future still seemed to

belong to the dinosaurs. Despite setbacks, the United States continued

to loom over the rest of the planet as the sole superpower, with its

military in constant intervention mode. China was on the rise. Russia

seemed bent on reconstituting the old Soviet Union. The need to


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compete on an increasingly interconnected planet contributed to what

seemed like a trend: pushing countries together to create economies of

scale. The European Union (EU) deepened its integration and

expanded its membership. Nations of very different backgrounds

formed economic pacts like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

(ASEAN) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).Even countries without any shared borders contemplated such joint

enterprises, like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

(OPEC) and, later, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the

BRICS nations).

As everyone now knows, however, this spirit of integration would, in

the end, go down to defeat as the bloodlands of the twentieth centurygave way to the splinterlands of the 21st. The sense of disintegration

and disunity that settled over our world came at precisely the wrong

moment. To combat a host of collective problems, we needed more

unity, not less. As we are all learning the hard way, a planet divided

against itself will not long stand.

THE WRATH OF NATIONS

Water boils most fiercely just before it disappears. And so it is,

evidently, with human affairs.

Just before all hell broke lose in 1914, the world witnessed an

unprecedented explosion of global trade at levels that would not be

seen again until the 1980s. Just before the Nazis took over in 1932,Germans in the Weimar Republic were enjoying an extraordinary

blossoming of cultural and political liberalism. Just before the Soviet

Union imploded in 1991, Soviet scholars were pointing proudly to rising

rates of intermarriage among the many nationalities of the federation

as a sign of ever-greater social cohesion.

And in 2015, just before the great unraveling, the world still seemed to




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be in the grip of what was then labeled globalization. The volume of

world trade was at an all-time high. Facebook had created a network of

1.5 billion active users. People on every continent were dancing to

Drake, watching the World Cup final, and eating sushi. At the other end

of the socio-economic spectrum, more people were on the move as

migrants and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II.

Borders seemed to be crumbling everywhere.

Before 2015, almost everyone believed that times arrow pointed in the

direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that

the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations.

The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some

actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global

market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all

their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by

Twitter and Instagram.

In 2015, people were so busy crossing bordersreal and

conceptualthat they barely registered the backlash againstglobalization. Officially, more and more countries had committed

themselves to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitan ideals

of liberty, solidarity, and equality. But everything began to change in

2015, a phenomenon I first chronicled in my landmark study

Splinterlands(Dispatch Books, 2025). The movements that came to the

fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls,

the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively

national virtues.

The leaders of these movementsDonald Trump in the United States,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir

Putin, French National Front Party leader Marine Le Pen, Indian

Prime Minister Nahendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,




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and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to name just a fewwere

not members of a single party. They did not consider themselves part

of a single movement. Indeed, they were quite skeptical of anything

that smacked of transnational cooperation. Personally, they were

cosmopolitans, comfortable in a variety of cultural environments, but

their politics were parochial. As a group, they heralded a change inworld politics still working itself out 35 years later.

Ironically enough, at the time these figures were the ones labeled

dinosaurs because of their focus on imaginary golden ages of the past.

But when history presses the rewind button, as it has for the last 35

years, it can turn reactionaries into visionaries.

Few serious thinkers during the waning days of the Cold War imagined

that, in the long run, nationalism would survive as anything more

significant than flag and anthem. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm

concluded in 1990, that force was almost spent, or as he put it, no

longer a major vector of historical development. Commerce and the

voracious desire for wealth were expected to rub away at national

differences until all that remained would be a single global marketplace

of supposedly rational actors. New technologies of travel and

communication would unite strangers and dissolve the passions of

particularism. The enormous bloodlettings that nations visited on one

another in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would surely

convince all but the lunatic that appeals to motherland and fatherland

had no place in a modern society.

As it turned out, however, commerce and its relentless push for

comparative advantage merely rebranded nationalism as another

marketable commodity. Although travel and communication did indeed

bring people together, they also increased the opportunities for

misunderstanding and conflict. As a result, nationalism did not go




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gently into the night. Quite the opposite: it literally remapped the

world we now live in.

THE FRACTURE LINES

The fracturing of the so-called international community did not

happen with one momentous crack. Rather, it proceeded much like the

calving of Arctic ice masses under the pressure of global warming,

leaving behind only a herd of modest ice floes. Rising geopolitical

temperatures had a similar effect on the worlds map.

At first, it was difficult to understand how the war in Syria, the conflict

in Ukraine, the simmering discontent in Xinjiang, the uprisings in

Mali, the crisis of the Europe Union, and the upsurge inanti-immigrant sentiment in both Europe and the United States were

connected. But connected they were.

The initial cracks in that now-dead global system appeared in the

Middle East. As a geopaleontologist, I must admit that I wasnt

particularly interested in those changes themselves, only in their

impact on larger entities. Iraq and Syria, multiethnic countries forged

in the post-colonial fires of Arab nationalism, split along ethnic and

confessional lines. Under the pressure of a NATO air intervention led

by the United States, Libya similarly fell apart when its autocratic

leader was killed and its arsenals were pillaged and sent to terror

groups across a broad crescent of crisis. The fracturing then continued

to spreadto Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Jordan. Peoplepoured out of these disintegrating countries like creatures fleeing a

forest fire.

This vast flood of refugees by land and sea proved to be the tipping

point for the European Union. Having expanded dramatically in the

2000s, the 28-member association hit a wall of euroskepticism, fiscal

austerity, and xenophobia. As they reacted to the rising tide of refugees,




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the anti-immigrant forces managed to end the Schengen system of

open borders. Next to unravel was the European currency system as

the highly indebted countries on the periphery of the Eurozone

reasserted their fiscal sovereignty.

The Euroskeptics took heart from these developments. In 2015, the

anti-immigrant Democratic Party in Sweden leaped to the top of the

opinion polls for the first time. Once the epitome of tolerance and

social democracy, Sweden led the great turn in Scandinavia away from

the European mainland. On the heels of local elections and those for

the European Parliament, the far-right National Front of Marine Le

Pen became the most popular French party and, with its newfound

power, began to pry apart the informal pact with Germany that hadonce been the engine for European integration. Euroskeptical parties

consolidated power in Poland, Portugal, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Desperate to curry favor with its hardcore constituents, the British

Conservative Party sponsored a referendum that guided Great Britain

out of the EU. What had once been only scattered voices of

dissatisfaction suddenly became a rush to the exits. The EU survived

for some years moreuntil the Acts of Dis-Integration of 2028but

only as a shell.

The unrest in the Middle East and the unraveling of the EU had a

profound impact on Russia. The last of that countrys Soviet-era

politicians had been attempting to reconstruct the old federation

through new Eurasian arrangements. At the same time, they weretrying to expand jurisdiction over Russian-speaking populations

through border wars with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. But in their

grab for more, they were left with less. Mother Russia could no longer

corral its children, neither the Buryats of the trans-Baikal region nor

the Sakha of Siberia, neither the inhabitants of westernmost

Kaliningrad nor those of the maritime regions of Primorye in the far




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east. Moscows entrance into the Syrian conflict on the side of

Damascus contributed to an upsurge in separatist sentiment in the

trans-Caucasus republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. In the Second

Great Perestroika of 2031, Russia divided along the lines we know so

well today, separating its European and Asian halves and its industrial

wastelands in the north from its creeping deserts in the south.

China found itself on a similar trajectory. A global economic slowdown

frayed the unstated social contractincremental improvements in

prosperity in exchange for political quiescencethat the Communist

Party had developed in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of

1989. Beijings crackdown on anything that smacked of terrorism only

pushed the Uighurs of Xinjiang into open revolt. The Tibetans, too,continued to advance their claims for greater autonomy. Inner

Mongolia, with almost twice as manyethnic Mongolians as Mongolia

itself, also pulled at the strings that held China together. Taiwan

stopped talking about cross-Straits reunification; Hong Kong

reasserted its earlier status as an entrept city. But these rebellions along

the frontiers paled in comparison to the Middle Uprising of the 2030s.

In retrospect, it was obvious that the underemployed workers and

farmers in Chinas heartland, who had only marginally benefited from

the countrys great capitalist leap forward of the late twentieth century,

would attack the political order. But who would have thought that the

middle could drop so quickly out of the Middle Kingdom?

The United States, as we all know, has not fallen apart. But theAmerican empire (which US leaders took such pains to deny ever

existed) has effectively collapsed. Once the US government went into

receivership over its mountainous debt and its infrastructure began to

truly collapse, its vast overseas military footprint became

unsupportable. As it withdrew, Washington deputized its allies

Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Israelto do the




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same work, but they regularly worked at cross-purposes and in any

case held their own national interests above those of Washington.

Meanwhile, US domestic politics remained so polarized and congealed

that Congress and the executive branch could not establish a consensus

on how to re-energize the economy or reconceive the national

interest. Up went higher walls to keep out foreigners and foreign

products. With the exception of military affairs and immigration

control, the government dwindled to the status of caretaker. Then

there was the epidemic of assault rifles, armed personal drones, and

WBA (weaponized biological agents), all easily downloaded at home on

3-D printers. The state lost its traditionally inviolable monopoly on

violence and our society, though many refuse to acknowledge thetrend, drifted into a condition closely approximating psychosis. An

increasingly embittered and armed white minority seemed determined

to adopt a scorched-earth policy rather than leave anything of value to

its mixed-race heirs. Today, of course, the country exists in name alone,

for the only policies that matter are enacted on a regional basis.

The centrifugal forces first set in motion in 2015 tore apart the great

multiethnic nations in a terrifying version of Yugoslavization that

spread across the planet. Farseeing pundits had predicted a wave of

separatism in the 1990s. They were wrong only in terms of pace. The

fissures were slower to appear, but appear they did. In South Asia,

separatist movements ate away at both India and Pakistan. In

Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar fractured alongethnic lines. In Africa, the center could not hold, and things inevitably

fell apartin the Congo, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and

Chad, among other places.

There was much talk in the early 21st century of failed states like

Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Haiti. Looking back, its now far




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clearer that, in a certain sense, all states were failing. They had little

chance against the governance-eroding winds of globalization from

above and the ever-greater upheavals of non-state actors from below.

Perhaps under the best of environmental conditions, these forces

would have pushed empires, federations, and trade pacts to the edge

but no further. As it happened, however, despite conferences and

manifestos and sort-of-binding agreements, the global thermometer

continued to rise. The effects of climate change turned out to be the

proverbial tipping point. Water shortages intensified conflict

throughout China, as did food shortages in Russia. The tropics, the

islands, the coastlines: all were vulnerable to the rising waters. And

virtually every country entered into a pitched battle over drinkingwater, clean air, indispensible minerals, and arable land.

All of us have our own personal climate-change disaster stories. For

instance, I lost my home in Hurricane Donald, which destroyed so

much of Washington, DC, and its suburbs in 2029. I started all over in

Nebraska only to be forced to move again when the Oglala aquifer gave

out in 2034, precipitating what we now call the Midwest Megadrought.

And like so many others, I lost a loved one only three years ago in that

terrible month of superstorms7/47which devastated such a large

swath of the planet.

What no one anticipated was the impact climate change would have on

nationalism. But how else would people divvy up increasingly precious

natural resources? National sentiment proved to be the go-to principle

for determining what our people deserved and those others didnt.

As a result, instead of becoming an atavistic remnant of another age,

nationalism has proved to be this centurys most potent ideology. On an

increasingly desperate planet, we face not the benevolence or tyranny

of one world, but the multiple confusions of many worlds.




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ALL THAT WAS SOLID

It was not only the multiethnic nation-state that proved untenable in

our century. Everything seemed to be fracturing.

The middle class shattered. The promise of a stable job and

incomethe iron rice bowl in the East and the ironclad pension in the

Westdisappeared into a maelstrom of inequality in which the

super-rich 1 percent effectively seceded from society while the poorest

of the poor had nowhere to turn. Back in 2015, pundits loved to

promote new trends like the sharing economy of millions of

employees turned entrepreneurs or the long tail of a splintering

consumer market. But the bottom line was grimly straightforward: the

forces that could have acted to countervail the fissiparous competition

of the market gradually disappeared. Gone was the guiding hand of the

government. Gone were the restraining pressures of morality.

Technology certainly played a role in this transformation, first when

computers and cell phones untethered individuals from fixed

workplaces and then when biochips turned each individual into his or

her own work station. The application of market principles to every

facet of existence whittled away the public sphere in favor of the

private one. Such dynamics at the social level also contributed to the

great fracturing that took place in the international sphere.

Yes, I can anticipate your criticism. Perhaps its true that, in 2050, we

are at a nadir of cooperation and some new form of centralization andglobalization lies ahead. Clearly, the jihadis, who operate their

mini-caliphates around the world, dream of uniting the faithful under a

single banner. There are diplomats even today who hope to get all

300-plus members of the United Nations to agree to the sort of

institutional reforms that could provide the world with some

semblance of global governance. And maybe a brilliant programmer is




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even now creating a new killer app that will put every single person

on the same page, literally.

As a geopaleontologist, I am reluctant to speculate. I focus on the past,

on what has actually happened. Anyone can make predictions. But

none of these scenarios of future integration seems at all plausible to

me. Thats the way the cookie crumbles, we used to say when I was a

kid. And a cookie can only crumble in one direction.

Still, I would be remiss if I didnt point out something that many have

noted over the years. We have been fragmenting at precisely the time

when we should be coming together, for the problems that face the

planet cannot be solved by millions of individuals or masses of statelets

acting alone. And yet how can we expect, with desperate millions on

the move, the rise of pandemics, and the deepening of economic

inequality globally, that people can unite against common existential

threats? Only today can we all see clearly, as I wrote so many years ago,

that the rise of the splinterlands has been humanitys true tragedy. The

inability of cultures to compromise within single states, it seems,

anticipated our current moment when multiplying nation-states cant

compromise on a single planet to address our global scourges. The glue

that once held us togethernamely, solidarity across religion, ethnicity,

and classhas lost its binding force.

At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young

man. Like everyone else, I didnt see this coming. We all lived in a

common home, I thought. Some rooms were in terrible disrepair.

Those living in the attic were often exposed to the elements. The house

as a whole needed better insulation, more efficient appliances, solar

panels on the roof, and we had indeed fallen behind on the mortgage

payments. But like so many of my peers, I seldom doubted that we

could scrape together the funds and the will to make the necessary




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repairs by asking the richer residents of the house to pay their fair

share.

Thirty-five years and endless catastrophes later on a poorer, bleaker,

less hospitable planet, its clear that we just werent paying sufficient

attention. Had we been listening, we would have heard the termites.

There, in the basement of our common home, they were eating the

very foundations out from under us. Suddenly, before we knew quite

what was happening, all that was solid had melted into air.

0 COMMENTS

JOHN FEFFER John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the

Institute for Policy Studies, is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S.Policy at a Time of Crisis(Seven Stories). His past essays, including for

Tomdispatch.com, can be read at his website.

To submit a correction for our consideration, click here.

For Reprints and Permissions, click here.




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Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor

continue their weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War.

Cohen points out that instead of cooperating with Moscows air war

against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the Obama Administration is threatening

to send US planes and possibly troops to counter the Russian military

operation there, while also stepping up NATO ground, air and seaexercises in areas on Russias own borders. The dangers inherent in

such exercises were documented in a November 10 New York Times

article recounting how such NATO maneuvers in 1983, in similarly

fraught political circumstances, led the Soviet Russian leadership to

fear an impending US nuclear attack and to put its own nuclear forces

on high alert, replicating the high noon moment of the Cuban Missile

Crisis twenty years before.

Meanwhile, on the second anniversary of the US-Russian confrontation

over Ukraine, which began in November 2013, the crisis of the

American-backed government in Kiev continues to deepen

economically and political. In recent local elections, President

Poroshenkos coalition seems to have won barely 20 percent of the vote

while ultra-nationalist parties made gains in Western and Central

Ukraine, and perhaps even in Kiev itself.

Cohen cites reports that important decisions in Kiev-governed Ukraine

are being made by, or cleared with, the American ambassador in

consultation with Vice President Joseph Biden. If so, Cohen concludes,

Kiev is increasingly taking on the appearance of an American colony,for which Washington is now politically responsible. Chances to end

the US-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, through the Minsk accords

proposed by German Chancellor Merkel and French President

Hollande, are therefore also being squanderedby Kiev and its backers

in Washington.




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STEPHEN F. COHEN Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian

studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a

contributing editor of The Nation.

To submit a correction for our consideration, click here.

For Reprints and Permissions, click here.



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