BACK TO THE FUTURE. But history teaches us that we can look back to see the future.

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1 BACK TO THE FUTURE As if the demise of American-style capitalism with the meltdown of Wall Street was not enough, more bad news about the new declinism of the American global order recently made front pages. The US National Intelligence Council s periodic global trends report caused the British Guardian newspaper s banner headline: 2025: the end of US dominance. The fact that it was the NIC, heart of the US security establishment, which made such a conclusion was probably more shocking than the conclusion itself. After all, the observation that 2025 would see a world in which the US plays a prominent role in global events, but is seen as one among many global actors would only be surprising to the most die-hard advocates of the American Imperium. But perhaps because modern history has, despite its many upheavals, always been about the inexorable rise of Western civilisation from the age of imperialism through the two world wars, it has been difficult for the defenders of modern Western civilisation and its core, the British and then American empires, to conceive of a world where multiple civilisations coexisted with no dominant player. But history teaches us that we can look back to see the future. Around 150 years ago, an event of enormous historical significance happened, but it passed without notice. It was not a war, nor a new technology, nor the birth or death of some famous person who shook the world was the year when, for the first time, one of the world s nations had more of its people living in cities than in the countryside. That country happened to be England. For the next 100 years, England rapidly advanced to become the world s pre-eminent imperial power. That it was the first and most urbanised nation in the world is agreed by historians, to be a major contributor towards this domination. The massive rural-to-urban migration, unprecedented in history, provided human fodder for Britain s factories, army and navy, as well as the consumers for Britain s industrial revolution.

2 The whole notion of the working class, which was to lead to the fiercest ideological conflict of the 20 th century, between communism and capitalism, was entirely a result of urbanisation. What is the point of this historical anecdote? Well, the very same trend which propelled the small island of England to become one of the world s most powerful empires is now playing out in the world s largest country, China. Today, 40% of China s population is already living in cities. Right after Liberation in 1949 it was only 12% -- a typically rural developing country. But every year, from 25 to 30 million Chinese villagers are marching to the cities. Within the next 10 years, 300 to 500 million of them more than the entire population of Western Europe will make the journey, and by 2015 China will reach the same tipping point as England in The same is happening to India, though at a slightly slower pace. In 1950 marginally more Indians lived in cities than did the Chinese roughly 17% compared to 12% in China. But by 2015 when more than half of China will be urban, only one-third of Indians will live in cities. Only around 2050 will India reach the rural-urban tipping point. But 2015 and 2050 is only one generation apart, and in historical terms is close enough to be seen almost as a single trend. Whether urbanisation is the cause or the consequence of powerful socioeconomic trends; or whether urbanisation brings more social ills than progress, is not relevant. What is important is that since England s first example -- urbanisation is a leading indicator of rapid, sustainable, though not necessarily equitable, economic development. This demographic trend is so inexorable and profound in nature and impact, that we will see not just the economic or political resurgence of Asia of which we all know of and have read or heard much about but a paradigm shift in civilisational relationships.

3 Civilisations are not just about geo-political power balances or economic growth. It involves a people s collective view of life, of value systems and belief structures. In this sense, the past two hundred years have seen the rise of Western civilisation to dominance, through a combination of military and technological prowess, backed by vibrant political and economic systems. But the sheer weight of demographic evidence the rural to urban migration is tilting towards a long term, sustainable rise of the two great and ancient Asian civilisations. Economic and political change occurs in short-wave cycles while civilisations rise and fall in very long cycles measured in centuries. The decline of Asia took two hundred years, and its rise will be equally long. I use the word civilisational quite intentionally. I am not referring to the narrow concept of a multi-polar world which the political scientist may prefer, because this challenge goes beyond the geo-political balance of power. The challenge is civilisational because Western norms of human conduct, religious belief, gender relations, family relations, individual to state relations, and so forth will all be challenged. What then, will the world look like? A re-balancing of economic and political power relationships, obviously. But more fundamentally, Western cultural norms will no longer be the yardstick by which non-western societies measure themselves and aspire towards. We will see a world order with competing value systems and ways of living, rather than the sanitised, homogeneous globalisation which Davos-philes imagined. To find a time when the world was what it will likely become in the next century, we have to ironically go back around three hundred years, to the 17 th century. That was the last century the world was not dominated by any single civilisation. Let s look at a random year say 1652, exactly 200 years before my chosen seminal year of In 1652, Oliver Cromwell crowned himself protector of England. The Tokugawa shoguns in Japan celebrated their first 50 years of power. The Manchu dynasty in China, only ten years old by then, was still virile and

4 innovative. And the Taj Mahal had just been completed in India softopened that year, as it were. Isaac Newton had yet to even discover gravity and the Islamic and East Asian civilisations were more advanced in science than Europe. These four arbitrarily chosen cultures there were many more in the world, of course had contacts with each other, but none were dominant. Fast forward 100 years later to That year the British East India company seized Bengal. A decade later the steam engine was patented and not long after the cotton gin was invented, launching the Industrial Revolution. The Age of Reason, leading to a most unreasonable Age of Imperialism, was about to dawn on an unsuspecting world. Another 100 years later, England became the most urbanised nation in the world, which propelled it and the Western nations to global dominance. And despite two devastating world wars, this lasted another century, till the independence movements of the mid 20 th century. The world of 1652 with no dominant civilisation is a concept which non- Western societies can easily handle, and perhaps even long for. But to the Western world it must be slightly un-nerving at best, and quite frightening at worst. Let me at this point be even more provocative. I have argued that China, and to a lesser extent India, is one major player in this re-ordering of world civilisation. Islam is the other. And both are coming at it from totally different directions. Asia from the outside and Islam ironically, from the inside. If there is to be a clash of civilisations, it will not be in the flashpoints of the Middle East. The most profound encounter between Islam and the Western world today is not occurring in the hills of Lebanon or Gaza, but in the immigrant enclaves around say, Birmingham or Detroit. The civilisational friction between the Christian and Islamic worlds, going back centuries, is playing out in the streets and schools, the mosques and malls, within the very heart of Western civilisation. The irony that recent

5 terrorist arrests in Europe have involved not foreigners, but native-born nationals, has not been lost on many observers. Demographic trends currently underway are so fundamental and powerful that the shape of our world will be irreversibly changed. The challenge to Western civilisation is real, and whether it will lead to Huntington s dark vision of an inevitable clash, or a more peaceful transition to a new world order with not only multiple centers of economic, cultural and political power, but indeed, entire multiple civilisations with their own cultural norms and world outlooks, will depend largely on the willingness of the erstwhile dominant players to accommodate the challengers. So, to an embattled and xenophobic European or American, what lies ahead? Is the core of Western civilisation being challenged indeed rejected by some of its own, young citizens from within, and from without, by a resurgent Asia which refuses to play by the rules and has the audacity to insist on exporting cheaper products and services than the West can itself produce? In the real world, there is indeed, if not racism, clearly civilisational fear and ignorance prompting events which, if allowed to continue, will threaten to make the transition from a mono to multi civilisational world, a violent one. If this transition is to be peaceful, we must first have fundamental mindset changes. I think the Western world must acknowledge three very basic mindset changes. First, the fact that Western civilisation has dominated the globe for several hundred years, does not necessarily make it the natural order of things. One would think this is a no-brainer, but from the speeches of some Western leaders, it seems that concepts like manifest destiny, or the white man s burden, which was enunciated national policy a hundred years ago but seem quaint today, are still quite alive and kicking amongst so called neo-conservatives.

6 Second, it is very likely that 100 years from now, the world will again resemble that of 1652, with no dominant civilisation. Whether there will, as globalisation advocates propound, a single world culture, or uneasy competition and conflict between different but interconnected civilisations, remain to be seen. Third, what happens in the next 10 years is likely to shape the nature of that tectonic inter-action, as an increasingly assertive Asia finds itself blocked by a resistant, erstwhile dominant Western civilisation, and a disillusioned, disenfranchised minority born in the West rejects all Western civilisational values. What should responsible Western intellectuals and companies do? For a start, they can be the midwives rather than the attempted abortionists, of a new world order with several competing, broadly equal and constantly interacting civilisations, rather than believe that Pax Americana should continue forever, as the proponents of Pax Britannica once believed. But what we can ALL do, is remember that the greatest lesson of history is not that demographics is a great shaper of trends which indeed it is but that the cause of the downfall of every single civilisation since time immemorial, is hubris. Hubris -- that quality of believing what you want to believe of yourself, that singular lack of self-doubt which eventually clouds our wisdom, over-rides our better judgement, and renders us deaf to the advice from those who have our best interests at heart.