A Short History of the World (27 page)

To revive the economy, the Russian premier and committed communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, called for a programme of market-oriented economic reforms (‘Perestroika’) and openness (‘Glasnost’) in the mid-1980s, not realising for a minute that this would lead to the dissolution of the USSR within six years. Despite growing problems in the economy to which there was no quick fix, Gorbachev’s popularity soared, thanks largely to the fact that people became less fearful of speaking openly. He had let the genie out of the bottle.

The collapse of the communist Eastern bloc was sudden and relatively bloodless as revolutions go. Poland became the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, a human rights campaigner, Vaclav Havel, was elected as president. In October 1989, the East German leader, Erich Honecker, resigned under pressure and East Germany opened its borders. Thousands of Eastern Europeans fled to the West, unsure of how long the border would remain open. Within a month the hated Berlin Wall had been torn down and Germany was unified the following year.

In August 1991, hardliners in the Soviet government who were unhappy at the changes and totally out of touch with the people they ruled, attempted a coup. However, massive demonstrations led by the Mayor of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, ensued and the barricading of the Russian parliament by the people brought the coup to an end within days. Having tasted the albeit limited fruits of freedom, the people understandably had no intention of returning to the old system. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president and the USSR was formally disbanded, giving way to 15 independent countries. The Russians had lost the Cold War. As Ian Morris relates in ‘Why the West Rules for Now’, ‘
the end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman.
’
¹¹²

For the new nations that sprang up after the dissolution of the communist bloc, life was not as rosy as they had expected it to be; unprepared for independence and with little experience of managing a free-market economy, they struggled under tough economic conditions and major increases in crime. Almost immediately, Yugoslavia fell apart in a brutal and bloody civil war. Territorial and ethnic conflict intensified elsewhere and terrorism became increasingly common.

The Cold War had acted as a lid on simmering disputes, as order had come about ‘through the superpower dominance of two blocs and superpower influence in the third world.’
¹¹³
Many nations now acquired highly sophisticated weapons and even nuclear weapons, which were seen as the only effective policy to challenge powers that they had no chance of defeating on a conventional battle-field. Indeed it was the threat of Iraq developing nuclear weapons that the USA used as an excuse to invade the oil-rich country in 2003.
 

The Pendulum Turns: Europe Loses its Dominance

After the Second World War, Europe ‘
finally achieved peacefully what the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve through violence
’,
¹¹⁴
yet by the end of the 20th century Western Europe could already see its dominance in world affairs begin to fade. Despite coming together in 1957 under the banner of the European Economic Community and under a common currency four decades or so later, Europe has been less and less able to compete with the dynamic growth witnessed in other parts of the world, specifically in China, which some would say is regaining the place it formerly occupied in the world. The centre of gravity of world power seems to be slowly shifting from the West back to the East.

The growth in the economies of Asia was the success story for much of the 1990s. In fact, this decade saw such growth in the economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan that they were named the ‘Asian Tigers’. Growth then moved to China and to other countries in Asia.
 

While many of the Asian countries became more capitalist and democratic with the growth of their economies, China managed to successfully introduce a mixture of capitalism and authoritarianism that saw its economy become the fastest growing economy in the world. Indeed low Chinese labour costs kept the cost of living down in the rest of the world and were largely responsible for what growth there was in the economies of the West.
 

Yet China was, and remains, an autocratic state, and continued to pay scant regard to human rights, an attitude that was clearly demonstrated by the massacre of hundreds of democratic protesters on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. When attempts were made by Western governments to link trade with an increase in the country’s attitude towards human rights, China responded angrily, claiming that human rights monitoring violated its state sovereignty. Ashamedly sacrificing human rights considerations for economic interest, Western governments rapidly capitulated. Economic power was becoming increasingly important.
 

The Resurgence of Islam

The post Cold War era saw a revival of religion in the former communist states, split between Orthodox Christianity and Islam, and in Asia, where China saw a huge growth in the number of converts to Christianity. The Islamic world in particular, encouraged by the relative decline in Western power and prestige, became increasingly hostile to the West, and the Cold War between two superpowers was replaced by ‘a civilisational Cold War between Islam and the West’.
 

Samuel Huntington, in his seminal work,
The Clash of Civilizations
, stated that this ‘Islamic Resurgence’ was at least as relevant as the Protestant Reformation and the French, American and Russian Revolutions. Several Islamic states, through their strategic locations, large populations and oil resources became increasingly influential in world affairs. Rejecting Western secularism, decadence and immorality, Islamic movements began to dominate the opposition to autocratic governments in Islamic countries. The success of these movements induced governments to promote Islamic practices and affirm the Islamic nature of the state.
 

Huge population growth in Islamic countries and the significant increase in the number of people migrating to cities led to increasing unemployment and social unrest. Extremists managed to capitalise on the anger that resulted. The first decade of the 21st century saw an increase in terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists convinced that it was the duty of all Muslims to wage war against non-believers. These included a devastating attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11th 2001, and bombings in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004) and London (2005) amongst other attacks around the world. America responded to the attack on the World Trade Centre by initiating a ‘global war on terror ‘and invading Afghanistan.

What's Next?

In the 20th century we climbed the highest mountains, visited the extremes of the earth, and even landed a machine on another planet. What we have achieved as a species is quite spectacular. In many ways we currently live in the best of times; we have unlimited and cheap energy at our disposal, we have access to medicine unparalleled in human history, we can visit any part of the planet within 24 hours, and falling costs of computing and communications have contributed to bringing barriers down around the world in every shape and form. In theory, we should be at the pinnacle of our existence.
 

Paradoxically however, the last century also witnessed the worst wars in history and even with our best minds we are still unable to free the vast majority of the world’s population from the ‘poverty trap’. Despite all the advances in science, education and communications, modern-day slavery in the form of human trafficking continues to blight the world in which we live and is becoming one of the fastest growing criminal activities. According to a UN report from 2003, an estimated 2.5 million people were in forced labour that year, of which 1.2 million were children being trafficked for commercial gain.
¹¹⁵
Our endless hankering after material wealth and possessions has led to an explosion of debt and to a crisis in our financial system. We are no closer to the perfect political system than the ancient Greeks were.
 

The resurgence of Islamic militancy threatens the very basis upon which modern Western society was built: freedom of expression, democracy and the rule of law. It also threatens the supply of oil, much of which lies in the Islamic countries of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait. If this supply is threatened, the West, and its trading partners, will suffer the consequences, and the result will be further instability and conflict.

Yet there is a much larger threat to global prosperity and world peace than a rough economy or an unstable oil supply, as serious as they are. This threat is climate change. Despite clear evidence of the consequences of doing so, we pollute the fragile climate in which we live, inadvertently destroying the environmental resources upon which we, as a species, depend. In an endless drive for profit, we destroy the forests which are needed to produce oxygen and reduce carbon dioxide – a large contributor to the heating of our planet – and through our addiction to hydrocarbons, we continue to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink.
 

Many previous societies have collapsed from over-exploiting their own resources. This is exactly what we are doing now, but on a much larger, global scale. We know the problems that we are storing up for ourselves, but our constant short-term approach and lack of political will to make unpopular decisions mean that we do nothing about it. We live in a state of denial.
 

We may be immensely adaptable as a species, but with the world’s population now at seven billion and growing, it is becoming more and more likely that competition over resources such as water will increase to a critical point. Unless we begin to think in the long term over the short term, and do something to preserve our valuable resources, we will end up fighting over them, and then the future is very likely to consist of intolerance, warfare, starvation and genocide, as it has done in the past.

Comments

With such a broad subject to cover, it is clearly difficult to please everybody.
 
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About the Author

Christopher Lascelles studied modern languages and history at St Andrews University in Scotland. His experience living in Russia, France, Italy and India made him curious about how world history fits together in a bigger picture, and it was this that drove him to write
A Short History of the World
. This is his first book.

Christopher is currently writing a book about the future.

For more information on
A Short History of the World
, including high-resolution versions of the maps in this book and a timeline of the past 5,000 years, please visit
www.lascelleshistory.com

You can also follow Christopher on Twitter
@historymeister

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