The Decline and Fall of Almost Everything

The most significant book on international affairs published in the late 1980s was Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers. The magnum opus of a distinguished diplomatic and strategic historian, it was also the exemplary statement of what some critics termed the "declinist" school, which pointed to signs that the United States might be following in the downward path that Britain had taken a century before.

Now, a half-decade later, we have Kennedy's new book, Preparing for The Twenty-First Century, a work not so much of history but of prophecy. It is likely to be seen by critics as carrying declinism to its logical conclusion, as a work not about the rise and fall of great powers but about the decline and fall of practically everybody. Indeed its conclusion could be simplified: the great global changes underway are likely to weaken all nation states and steadily impoverish most of humanity. In fact, however, Kennedy meant for both his books to provide suggestions to nations, particularly the United States, and to their political leaders about how to avoid the worst.

Unveiling The Future

Kennedy begins by recalling Thomas Malthus and his famous and pessimistic "Essay on Population," which prophesied that a population explosion would imperil England's future by the early nineteenth century. Indeed that essay, published in 1798, could well have been entitled "Preparing for the Nineteenth Century." Kennedy takes the reader on a tour d'horizon of the great transnational forces now shaping, and disrupting, the world: the demographic explosion, causing not only massive population growth in poor countries but also massive emigration to rich ones; the globalization of financial transactions and multinational corporations; the transformation of agriculture, especially under the impact of biotechnology; the transformation of industry, especially under the impact of robotics; and the destruction of the natural environment. What Kennedy does to these oft-discussed trends is integrate them into an interacting and reinforcing drama.

Kennedy approaches the Malthusian question with the distinctive insight of a historian who sees both what is similar and what is different about Malthus' time and ours. Both Malthus and Kennedy point to a population explosion at the end of their respective centuries. In itself, this might suggest that population explosions are a rather familiar, and therefore not very frightening, problem, one that is likely to be overcome again with technological progress. But while Malthus was eventually proven wrong, it took the monumental changes of the nineteenth century--such as massive emigration from Europe, the great increase in agricultural productivity, and above all the Industrial Revolution--to refute him. This time, Kennedy observes, the technological progress is occurring in a different place--the rich nations--than

where the population growth is occurring--the poor ones. This trend puts the poor nations at a double disadvantage, and the energetic youth of the Third World have already begun crowding the shores of the First World, with its aging populace.

Population growth without industrial growth will result in even more immigrants surging into the rich countries, reproducing within the nations of the North the division between the old rich and the young poor. Unlike the great nineteenth-century migrations, which were largely into new lands rather than old societies, today's immigration into settled societies is likely to be much more disruptive. Indeed, Kennedy's analysis becomes even more pointed if we consider some examples from a century ago that he does not mention. In the few cases where immigrants did flow into old and settled countries, the eventual political reaction was dramatic and draconian, as when Slavic and Jewish immigration into Austria-Hungary and Germany produced widespread racism and paranoia among the German and Magyar populations. It is not an exaggeration to say that what Fritz Stern has called "the politics of cultural despair" that engulfed Europe in the early twentieth century was largely rooted in a sense of demographic despair.

By introducing divisions within states and removing resources from their control, the transnational changes that Kennedy outlines make nation states far less effective than before in meeting new challenges or even in performing old tasks. The conventional view is that the erosion of nation states is giving rise to powerful international regimes, which will outperform states. Kennedy, however, appears to see the nation state, with all its flaws and weaknesses, as the only effective state that we have. (One might say that the nation state is the worst form of government--except for all the others.)

It is at this point that Japan assumes a central role in the Kennedy drama. Although it will obviously be affected by transnational forces along with everyone else, it has the capacity to be less negatively affected and even to achieve certain benefits. With the most homogenous population and the most restrictive immigration laws of any major nation, Japan is better able to insulate itself from the migration spillover of the population explosion. With its educated populace, high savings rate and the largest robotics industry in the world, it is also able to support its aging population with the automated production of robots rather than the labor of young immigrants.