During a conversation with Carl Zha (already posted for BrownCast patrons) I inquired about Chinese views of the rest of the world and China’s relationship to other nation-states. I reflected offhand in some ways we don’t know how to deal with this “multi-polar” world, where Asian powers are again relevant after many centuries of being in the shadow of Europe and its offspring. Some of this is also reflected in India, where a rising reactionary conservative nationalism is the odds on favorite to retain power when the tallies are counted for the 2019 election.*
If I live my expected lifespan, I will see the end of the long centuries of the hegemony of Greater Europe. Today the European Union and the USA make up about 30% of the world’s GDP. India and China together are 25%. In 2050 the EU and USA will be 20%. India and China will be 35%. Many projections put Asia as a whole at (excluding the Middle East) at 50% of the world economy in 2050.
If Asian societies maintain current economic momentum, they will have returned to the same proportion of the world economy as they were in ~1800. This date intuitively makes sense. Though the British, under the East India company, were already advancing their way through the subcontinent, in 1800 Manchu ruled Imperial China still retained certain self-confidence, born of a century of economic and demographic expansion.
The 1793 Macartney Embassy saw the Chinese treat the British as they always had. But by this point the dynamic force of history had moved past the Chinese, they just didn’t know it.
The oldest person I have known personally with any great familiarity was my maternal grandfather. He was born in 1896 and died in 1996. It is unlikely that he knew anyone personally who remembered a time before the hegemony of Europeans across the globe. But, it is entirely possible his own grandfather, my own great-great-grandfather, knew people for whom the British as an eternal and dominant force of history was something of a novelty in their youth. My own children will live on after me, likely into the 22nd century. Most of their lives will play out in a very different epoch when it comes to the balance of civilizations.
Of course, one can argue, with some reason, that all civilization from here on out is Western civilization. But I think we need to think back to the late 1990s, and what we believed at the time a post-Western universal civilization would look like. There was an optimism that the end of history would force nations like China to open up politically, while India would match its democratic humanism with robust economic growth. Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was the sometimes helpmate, and sometimes supplicant, of the USA. Though people in India might speak Hindi and eat off thali, while those in China would speak Mandarin and eat with chopsticks, by the end of the 21st century many expected that universal values would lead to a natural federative political state on planet earth. There was no need for top-down world government when capitalism and democratic liberalism spread to all the nation-states on the planet.
Though we should be cautious of swinging in the opposite direction, it does look like the 21st-century will exhibit its own characteristics, not just reflect the dreams of the late 20th.
* I say reactionary because I don’t think Hindu nationalism, like Islamism, is comprehensible without the shock of European modernity. Though these movements present themselves as primal and authentic, they’re really syntheses that came out of the dialectic between the native (Indian) and the colonial (European).
The wildcard is of course genetic engineering. What countries will use it and which ones will not? When genetic engineered people reach adulthood, likely 30-50 years from now depending on when China puts it in to high gear, the balance of power will tip quite quickly.
The estimates of Asian GDP are based on some pretty flawed population estimates for East and Southeast Asia. The real story will be the rise of Africa.
Probably, maybe, the end of the “universal” aspect, but the civilization that arose in the north-western corner of Afro-Eurasia will still remain. Although it will have to compete with the other civilization that arose in the north-eastern side of Afro-Eurasia. I see it as the disintegration of civilization in the Middle East and its, civilization’s, move or recreation in areas on the fringes of the Middle Eastern/Islamic world. A long historical process. I wonder if Sub-Saharan Africa will also rise. Also the Americas are just an extension of Western Europe since the 16th century, in case anybody believes that they are somehow inherently different from Western Europe and Afro-Eurasia as a whole. Here comes the age of the new Caesars and Huangdis.
Of course, western Europe and North America won’t be ‘European’ in terms of population by 2050 – so any talk about ‘the decline of the west’ is really meaningless in that context.
Of course, western Europe and North America won’t be ‘European’ in terms of population by 2050 – so any talk about ‘the decline of the west’ is really meaningless in that context.
what are your projections and models? post them, don’t assert them.