Human civilization is moving from a century filled with military conflicts and sacrifices to a century that will be better described in terms of consumption, development and growth. But the backbone of this is a world that is well-guarded by modern weapons, kept in check by the mutual deterrence of the leading powers, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov.
The significant anniversaries that we celebrate in 2020 - the anniversary of the victory over Nazism, the end of the Cold War and others - encourage the projection of current trends into the future. Let’s try to imagine what the world will look like in 2045 - in just 25 years.
Reviewing the events of recent years, it seems that events are accelerating and the world is in a permanent process of change. And although the pace of events has indeed accelerated, the general sense of change is less significant than it seems at first glance.
The first key factor in global stability is geopolitical. We are witnessing a strategic competition between the leading powers, which, in the pursuit of dominance, are building up their military arsenals and multiplying conflicts with each other. But collectively, this leads to the formation of deterrence systems between them, which in turn impede the escalation of conflicts. We are witnessing the emergence of a polycentric world system based on a new balance of power in different regions of the world. Since this process has not yet been completed, we are witnessing increasing uncertainties against the background of the "crumbling" previous construction of the world system.
However, this will not always be the case. Thanks to the stress tests of recent years - the Russian-Turkish conflict, the US attacks on Syria, the Ukrainian crisis, the friction between France and Turkey over Libya, the Iran-Saudi confrontation and, finally, the US-Chinese and Sino-Indian crises, we see that the world is not on the brink of war. All of these stress tests have evidenced the stability of the international system. This is due to the multidimensional interdependence of the countries of the world upon each other, but also because there is no truly revisionist force among the leading powers, ready to put everything at stake, for the sake of introducing radical changes to the balance of power in the world.
The third key trend is technological. Thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, big data, robotics and high-speed connectivity, transport, management, communications and education will undergo profound changes. All this will lead to the emergence of a more well-fed and sustainable society of opportunities, which will spend the surplus of its resources on space exploration and the conquest of new frontiers.
However, this optimistic picture is clouded by a number of radical uncertainties or even radical threats.
The first of these is the ideological crusades. As basic needs of society are saturated, its need for self-actualisation increases. The requirements of a higher order - self-realisation and individualism - are beginning to be perceived as vital and demanding satisfaction. However, satisfying a desire to protect one’s own identity can cross borders and serve as a template for an aggressive ideology, which in turn can provide an impetus for ideological crusades, as we observed in the early 2000s in US foreign policy in the Middle East. At that moment, the idea of transforming Middle Eastern societies along the Western lines had taken hold among the political elites of the United States. This entailed a military-political crisis in the region which lasted two decades, and yielded consequences which still affect us.
The second radical threat is a potential technological disaster. In an increasingly interdependent world, saturated with electronics and data, a technology disaster will be comparable in value to an armed strike using kinetic weapons. Any large-scale disruption in the operation of communication systems or Internet connections will result in losses comparable to a regional conflict.
A third potential threat lies at the crossroads of demography and ecology. Desertification of currently inhabited territories threatens with millions poised to migrate in various directions. Together, these migrations will bring new stresses to the global balance of power and could serve as a starting point for a new world system.
However, in general, we should be optimistic that the future will be better than the past. Human civilization is moving from a century filled with military conflicts and sacrifices to a century that will be better described in terms of consumption, development and growth. But the backbone of this is a world that is well-guarded by modern weapons, kept in check by the mutual deterrence of the leading powers.
