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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
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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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