Two columns that appeared this week, by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times and Jim Hoagland in The Washington Post, bring me back to a subject that I’ve been pondering for some time—how the world will change in the next half century. There are already signs that the changes that are coming will the least match those that we have seen since World War II. Consider which countries dominated the world in that period: the Soviet Union and the United States, of course. In economics, they were joined by Japan and the countries of the European Union, particularly Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Not coincidentally, all these countries, save France, were among the 10 most populous countries in 1950, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The most populous countries, China and India, were prostrate from internal troubles, economic and political, for part of the period, and only learning how to compete effectively in the economic realm for most of it. (This is a reminder that it takes more than a crowd of people to make a country rich.)
As Friedman and Hoagland point out and many others have also noted, India and China are hitting their stride. Their growth is beginning to have strong effects on parts of the rest of the world economy—China’s growing thirst for oil is helping drive prices to heights never seen; the consternation of Lou Dobbs and other commentators about outsourcing to Bangalore testify to the growing sophistication of Indian technology.
The contrast to the powers that dominated the globe in the last few decades is striking. Russia, as part of the Soviet Union, saw its economic growth rates soar through the 1950s, shrink to nothing in the last years of the Soviet period, and turn sharply negative in between 1990 and 2002 (see the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report 2004 for GDP growth rates). Its economy is growing now, thanks to the rising price of oil, but it can hardly be said to be undergoing an economic miracle.
The United Kingdom continues to grow at a reasonable pace, the rest of “Old Europe” creeps. France’s economy grew at an annual rate of only 1.7 percent between 1975 and 2002. Germany grew sclerotic, its rate slowing from 2 percent between 1975 and 2002, but only 1.3 percent after 1990. Japan did much the same: it matched Germany’s growth rate through the entire period, but slowed even more in its last dozen years. The United States has grown steadily, 2 percent through the period, but far more slowly than the two Asian giants. India grew 3.3 percent after 1975, accelerating to 4 percent from 1990 to 2002; China was spectacular: its growth exceeded 8 percent throughout (whether that data is accurate might be questioned, but it is the data we have).
As your broker might say, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But the shrinking, aging populations of Europe, Russia, and Japan, and, less severely, the United States will guarantee that the robust, youthful energy that brought these countries to global power will not be available to keep them in the positions to which they became accustomed.
Assuming that these trends continue (a tenuous assumption at best), the world is growing into something much different than we are used to. Europe is fading from the global stage. The great hopes that accompanied the unifying reforms of 1992 have not been realized; it is no longer the vital force, but a stagnating one. Russia will remain a regional power at best, but may well weaken even there as its immense Asian neighbors and the more dynamic of its former colonies grow. Japan will join it in weakness.
And the United States? We are dominant as no power has been before. That will not change completely, we will be powerful still. Yet we will see our dominance fade and our vitality pale before the brightening beacons emerging from Asia.
That begins a set of arguments that these few words cannot exhaust.
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