2400AD Notes: 5
Dec. 29th, 2002 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn my previous post, I touched upon the history of Tripartite Alliance Earth.
In the Long Twenty-First Century--let's define it as a time period beginning with the last aftershocks of the Third World War and continuing to 2100--the question of how the world will recover is important.
For starters, there's the question of what recovery is: Will it be recovering the pre-Third World War population? If so, that won't happen for a long time given the assumption that a relatively developed world will have slow population growth. (And it's quite open to question whether the countries devastated in the war could even begin to recover, by this definition.) Is it recovering pre-war economic levels, and if so is
gross or per capita economic output to be measured? Or is it recovering to the point where the growth potential lost in the aftermath of the Third World War is regained and the various countries are where they would have been absent the rather nasty last quarter of the 20th century? Or are demographic and economic measures irrelevant: Should we turn, perhaps, to cultural indicators, the ways in which people react to the national mythos of the Third World War? Maybe ecological indicators are better ...
Anyway.
As I said in my previous post in this series, this world is in better shape for recovery than the post-Twilight War in 2300AD, since the core industrial nations are largely intact, lacking the extensive devastation that marred even France and Japan. Just as importantly, the Third World War acted as a filter of sorts for viable regime types: authoritarian regimes opposed to the formation of some kind of world community generally failed to survive, while democratic regimes that supported some kind of world community generally survived. There were exceptions, but by and large the countries which survived were nations strongly inclined to cooperate on a global scale already.
Over the past five years, there has been quite a lot of activity involving Tripartite Alliance Earth on the AHTG mailing list. Two major themes have appeared that are relevant to the discussion of the recovery period in the Long Twenty-First Century:
Some preliminary conclusions:
The first half of the Long Twentieth Century, to the 2040's or thereabouts, will likely be conformist and conservative. The world order will be based on a coalition of the surviving Great Powers--blocs like South America and Europe, countries like Japan and Australia--concerned with their reconstruction. powers and those non-industrial, concerned with supervising their hinterlands to make sure that no more dangerous surprises emerge. There will be more-or-less flee global trade and more-or-less free global migration as a consequence of the broadening of pre-War trade and migration pacts to include the broader world. There will be extensive regulation of industry, to ensure minimal pollution, job security for workers, a positive and productive relationship with local communities, and so on. There will be extensive use of biotechnology in the areas of agriculture (food surpluses are good) and ecological restoration, while in keeping with the needs for a global communication network and for global environment surveillance there will be an extensive network of satellites (some of them manned). There will not be major international wars; there will not be genetic engineering of human beings; there will not be an ambitious manned space program. There will simply be stability.
This stability won't last, though. For one thing, as generations are born which have no experience of the War and its terrors, the image of the War will lose its power. Conformity and conservatism are good for traumatized cultures, but they invariably end up being rejected by bored youth (admittedly to the horror of their elders). If the most visible damage to the Earth's societies and ecologies has been repaired, and the remaining damage can be made a matter of relatively inexpensive routine, there isn't anything to the children of the 2030's and 2040's which would be an absolutely convincing argument in favour of an indefinitely perpetuated unwillingness to change, to move beyond the natural confines of the Earth or the self-imposed confines of biotechnology.
Like I said previously, there's nowhere else to go but up.
Thoughts?
In the Long Twenty-First Century--let's define it as a time period beginning with the last aftershocks of the Third World War and continuing to 2100--the question of how the world will recover is important.
For starters, there's the question of what recovery is: Will it be recovering the pre-Third World War population? If so, that won't happen for a long time given the assumption that a relatively developed world will have slow population growth. (And it's quite open to question whether the countries devastated in the war could even begin to recover, by this definition.) Is it recovering pre-war economic levels, and if so is
gross or per capita economic output to be measured? Or is it recovering to the point where the growth potential lost in the aftermath of the Third World War is regained and the various countries are where they would have been absent the rather nasty last quarter of the 20th century? Or are demographic and economic measures irrelevant: Should we turn, perhaps, to cultural indicators, the ways in which people react to the national mythos of the Third World War? Maybe ecological indicators are better ...
Anyway.
As I said in my previous post in this series, this world is in better shape for recovery than the post-Twilight War in 2300AD, since the core industrial nations are largely intact, lacking the extensive devastation that marred even France and Japan. Just as importantly, the Third World War acted as a filter of sorts for viable regime types: authoritarian regimes opposed to the formation of some kind of world community generally failed to survive, while democratic regimes that supported some kind of world community generally survived. There were exceptions, but by and large the countries which survived were nations strongly inclined to cooperate on a global scale already.
Over the past five years, there has been quite a lot of activity involving Tripartite Alliance Earth on the AHTG mailing list. Two major themes have appeared that are relevant to the discussion of the recovery period in the Long Twenty-First Century:
- Many technologies related to the warmaking abilities of the Third World War combatants--space travel, biotechnological research--were proscribed, placed under strict multinational control.
- Many people were quite paranoid about a recurrence of apocalyptic violence from any quarter, and so, emigration to off-world colonies (alternate Earths on the mailing list) grew fairly sharply.
Some preliminary conclusions:
- In the decades and generations after the Third World War, economic recovery proceeds fairly rapidly. Different national and regional economies will fare differently, of course: Areas which export raw materials will see their terms of trade deteriorate, while areas dependent on industrial exports will do better. (This factor might be partly compensated by migration-associated remittances, as people move from generally poorer resource-exporting regions to generally richer
- industrial regions.) Areas closer to the war zones will fair worse than areas relatively distant from the war zones, and areas suffering light damage will take longer than areas suffering heavy damage. So: The Southern Hemisphere will do better than Europe and Egypt, which will do better than Japan and Korea, which will do better than Canada and Mexico and Thailand and Iran, which will do better than the rest of the world. (This last category can be further sorted: south India ahead of north India, north India ahead of Russia, Russia ahead of China.)
- Relative power rankings will shift. The European Confederation will remain, by virtue of its extensive pre-War and post-War integration, the single largest economic unit in the world. The South Atlantic area, encompassing South America and southern Africa, could well begin to pull ahead as the richer economies of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile begin to pull ahead of the rest of the world and the poorer
- economies in southern Africa and South America's Andes associated with the ABC group are brought along. Japan and Korea--and, yes, Thailand--will be relatively much more powerful relative to the rest of Asia than before the Third World War, simply because they're the only functioning societies in a devastated and depopulated continent. Relative to the rest of the world, Japanese and Korean influence will decline significantly. In North America, Mexico and to a lesser extent Canada will have the advantages of being the one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind, but they will be marginal on the global scale throughout the Long Twenty-First Century.
- Bureaucratic state control will be quite important to the world's survivors for the first couple of generations after the Third World War. On AHTG, it has been established that the failure of the existing state structures to prevent the Third World War and the worst post-War sufferings created a new sense of the state as protector of its citizens, charged with regulating the world to prevent future catastrophes: devastating wars, economic collapses, famines and plagues, general uncertainties. This will place limits on the realms of the possible. Private space-launch companies, for instance, will be politically and legally impossible, since rockets capable of hurling probes or manned capsules to orbit can just as easily deliver warheads globally. Space-based weapons systems or long-range space probes will be exceptionally unpopular, given how American and Siberian efforts in space helped push the Third World War to its terminal phase. Biotechnology will also be frowned upon, at least inasmuch as it is applied to humans, given its association with weapons research.
The first half of the Long Twentieth Century, to the 2040's or thereabouts, will likely be conformist and conservative. The world order will be based on a coalition of the surviving Great Powers--blocs like South America and Europe, countries like Japan and Australia--concerned with their reconstruction. powers and those non-industrial, concerned with supervising their hinterlands to make sure that no more dangerous surprises emerge. There will be more-or-less flee global trade and more-or-less free global migration as a consequence of the broadening of pre-War trade and migration pacts to include the broader world. There will be extensive regulation of industry, to ensure minimal pollution, job security for workers, a positive and productive relationship with local communities, and so on. There will be extensive use of biotechnology in the areas of agriculture (food surpluses are good) and ecological restoration, while in keeping with the needs for a global communication network and for global environment surveillance there will be an extensive network of satellites (some of them manned). There will not be major international wars; there will not be genetic engineering of human beings; there will not be an ambitious manned space program. There will simply be stability.
This stability won't last, though. For one thing, as generations are born which have no experience of the War and its terrors, the image of the War will lose its power. Conformity and conservatism are good for traumatized cultures, but they invariably end up being rejected by bored youth (admittedly to the horror of their elders). If the most visible damage to the Earth's societies and ecologies has been repaired, and the remaining damage can be made a matter of relatively inexpensive routine, there isn't anything to the children of the 2030's and 2040's which would be an absolutely convincing argument in favour of an indefinitely perpetuated unwillingness to change, to move beyond the natural confines of the Earth or the self-imposed confines of biotechnology.
Like I said previously, there's nowhere else to go but up.
Thoughts?
