A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (17 page)

This program for the next twenty years is already in place. But year by year, from now to 2030, and just like the preceding cores, the ninth will have to confront the global difficulties we have already mentioned, and the increasingly costly challenges, inherent in every core, that will culminate in its decline and replacement.

Starting in 2015, a new challenge will come from virtual enterprises. If the Internet is now essentially an American colony, where English is spoken and where the bulk of its wealth is drained toward the mother country, this eighth continent will one day attain its autonomy. It will become a power in itself, an autonomous entity reaping profits outside America’s borders. New powers in finance, information, entertainment, and training will play against American political and cultural power. They will give birth to a new diversity that will challenge America’s financial, economic, political, ideological, and aesthetic domination of market democracy. It will become increasingly clear that one can be a democrat and favorable to the market economy, without necessarily speaking English and without believing in
the natural and everlasting supremacy of the American empire.

Next, America’s real enterprises will detach themselves from America. Facing increasing competition in numerous sectors from enterprises and research centers located elsewhere, U.S. strategic industries will exile their production and their research. As with the preceding cores, these firms will realize that their commercial interests are no longer in step with those of their government, whose increasingly degraded image will hamper sales of their products. First they will try first to elicit from the White House an attitude more in line with what their worldwide consumers need. Then (disappointed) they will distance themselves from the administration, invest less in American universities and hospitals, and create fewer jobs at home. Some of them will even accept control by foreign investment funds of indeterminate nationality. These funds will accumulate their profits in tax havens, thus depriving American shareholders of the bulk of the profits and denying the American state much of its tax receipts. The financial system — more and more concentrated around insurance institutions and funds for high-risk coverage that demand an increasingly elevated profitability — will find itself under threat.

All over America, the commercial frustrations of salaried employees will make themselves increasingly felt. The middle class, leading player in the market democracy, will rediscover the insecurity it believed it had escaped by dissociating itself from the working class. Downgraded managers, mistreated employees, families
left abandoned, indebted owners, disappointed consumers, users in revolt, frustrated minorities, and religious believers will cry out against the impenetrability of their solitude, the enormity of the injustices around them, the violence of inequalities, the breakdown of communities. Concentration of populations in cities will create growing needs for urban maintenance, schools, hospitals, and all collective services — more and more difficult to finance by taxation, and whose inadequacy will trigger unrest among the minorities. In fact, the Katrina disaster of 2005 has already revealed the structural inequality of American public services and laid bare America’s incapacity to handle its own infrastructure problems.

Expenditure on energy, water, health, education, security, retirement, and environmental protection will take up a growing share of everyone’s earnings. Financing internal and external deficits will be increasingly arduous. The dollar will become a device more political than economic, thus putting a brake on its use by others, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East — where its use is nonetheless essential to U.S. power. The profitability of capital will be maintained only artificially, through the continued increase in the value of assets.

Elsewhere, in Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the Californian model will be under increasing challenge by about 2025, and the notion of American domination will be spurned. The model of market democracy will itself be contested, in the very arena of its success: small totalitarian states will succeed perfectly well, and market democracy will no
longer be the only synonym for economic success or technical efficiency.

Thus, by around 2025 or 2030, the costs of America’s internal and external organization will have increased to such a degree that the structural deficit of its balance of payments will become insurmountable. Asia, which will continue to guarantee the essentials of its financing, will now increasingly need its own resources to reduce inequalities among its own regions, struggle against urban unrest, and put in place its own system of social insurance and retirements. Beijing, whose political power will be threatened by the previous economic downturn, and will therefore take a tougher stand, will decide against further low-cost financing of the American deficit, and will even opt for repatriating its capital invested in American bonds. Other foreign central banks will also begin to balance their reserves in other currencies. The U.S. Treasury will have to propose a much higher return on its borrowings, thus raising the cost of new credit card contracts, mortgage loans, and debts indexed — like credit cards — at variable rates. American households will have to sell the housing they had offered in guarantee of their loans; the price of real estate in the United States will plummet; the credit pyramid, based on the value of American housing, will collapse. Indebted households will become insolvent. Insurance companies will insist on the payment of premiums. The federal government — itself now paralyzed, like the whole American financial system — will be unable to rescue the weakest. Production will slow and joblessness will reach hitherto unknown heights. The crisis could also come more directly from the inability of the financial
system to hold on to its own savings, which will be invested in increasingly speculative fashion in funds managed on the Internet from tax havens. The profitability of capital will no longer be maintained by the rise in the value of assets. The financial crisis is about to explode.
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All this resembles what happened in times past to Venice, Genoa, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Boston, and New York.

By around 2030, then, California will cease to attract the lion’s share of the world’s innovators and entrepreneurs or to be the center for implementation and financing of major industrial innovations. The ninth form will have lived its day.

The United States could then become a Scandinavian-style social democracy, or a dictatorship — and even perhaps one after the other. It would not be the first time such a surprise occurred: the first leader to apply the principles required to emerge from the crisis of the eighth form was Mussolini; the second was Hitler. Roosevelt came only third.

Along one route or another, a tenth form of the mercantile order could then see the light of day.

During each of the nine previous transformations of the mercantile order, convulsions, lulls, and active resistance gave contemporaries the feeling that the form then in
place, no matter how threatened, could never disappear, and that the core of the day would forever remain the capital of the world.

Often, in fact, power has long since changed hands without anyone, in the core or around it, truly realizing what had happened. The former masters continued to believe that they dominated the world with their products and their culture, through their diplomacy and their armies — whereas they had in fact entered an irreversible decline, and others had taken their place. So it was with the previous eight. So it will be tomorrow in California.

Yet if history has a direction, when this ninth form of the mercantile order fades away in thirty years or less, exhausted by the efforts required to combat its enemies, it will give place to another form, with another core, other technologies, other geopolitical relationships between the continents.

This is where the detailed account of history set out in the preceding chapters finds its justification — for it allows us to draw the future’s face with precision.

If in fact this tenth form resembles its nine predecessors, it will strike new balances among nations. It will extend freedom of lifestyles. New technologies will permit a further reduction of the time needed to manufacture food, clothing, means of transport, and entertainment; new services will be transformed into industrial products; new workers into insecure salaried employees. New energy sources will replace those grown scarce; more and more wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a shrinking tally of the privileged; a much wider variety of choices will be offered to the consumer
and the citizen, imposing new forms of alienation on the workers.

The core of this tenth form will have to be — once again — a vast region focused on a great port (or airport) in control of the world’s commercial networks. In this new core, a particularly liberal and dynamic social climate should allow an innovative class to perfect (for its own benefit) ideas, techniques, and values capable of solving the challenges that will then face the mercantile order — in other words to reduce this time the costs of health, education, and security — and to introduce the new consumer products essential to the revival of global growth.

The likeliest scenario is that this tenth core will be situated for the fourth time somewhere in the territory of the United States. Even after the financial crisis of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, America will remain the leading military, technological, financial, and cultural power in the world. Without any conceivable competition, it will be the most immense market and the surest refuge for elites and capital. Washington will continue to be the political capital of the world, and the U.S. Army will still be the planet’s leading military force — by far. And finally, America will one day restore its finances by finding the means — as it did with the automobile, then with household equipment, and then with nomadic objects — of reviving growth through industrial production (which we shall define) of new objects.

So that if a new American city were to become the tenth core, it would doubtless once again be situated in the neighborhood of California, which will in fact
remain (for at least fifty years) the planet’s most dynamic state, situated on the shores of the busiest ocean in the world. No other American state will be in a position to challenge it: New York State will be too weakened industrially. Texas, too isolated, will fail through lack of infrastructure.

This second Californian core (just as there were two successive cores on the East Coast, Boston and New York) would probably be located farther south, at the Mexican border. It would be at once in the neighborhood of another great country and of one of the Pacific’s most dynamic ports (San Diego). It would be in the heartland of America’s defense, space, telecommunications, and microelectronic industries, and of the most important centers for biotechnologies and nanotechnologies (La Jolla). Exceptionally brilliant students from all over the planet would continue to flock here to study in some of the world’s best universities (Stanford and Berkeley). This tenth core, manufacturing new industrial products in response to future needs, would extend from north of Mexico to the Canadian West.

And yet, in my view, there is the possibility such a scenario may not come to pass. In twenty or thirty years, when the final crisis of the ninth form takes place, the United States will be weary — weary of power, weary of the ingratitude of those whose security it had guaranteed yet who still considered themselves its victims. It will need to stop and catch breath, to look after its own, to restore its finances, dress its wounds, improve the well-being of its own people, huddle over their preoccupations, and above all defend itself on its own soil. It will no longer want to run the risk of having a war at
home. It will no longer attempt to manage a world now out of range of its finances, its troops, and its diplomacy. Its armies will become essentially defensive. Indeed, at this moment, the leaders in Washington can justify the continued presence of American troops abroad only by invoking the need to defend the national territory and protect American citizens.

America will remain a very great power. But by choice — and not from weariness or under external constraint — it will no longer be either the dominant empire or the core of the mercantile order.

It is obviously difficult to give a more accurate date to this renunciation, unless it is history’s warning that the life span of empires is increasingly short. The Roman Empire of the East lasted 1,058 years; the Holy Roman Empire, 1,006 years; the empires of the East, four hundred years apiece; the Chinese empires, less than three centuries; the Dutch empire, two and a half centuries; the British Empire, a century; the Soviet empire, seventy years; the Japanese, German, and Italian bids for empire, even less. The United States, the dominant empire for the last 120 years — already longer than the average for the most recent empires — will soon cease to dominate the world.

This prospect may seem inconceivable to many. Today, a majority of American leaders still think that the American empire will be eternal. Besides, for them America is a democracy, not an empire. It is invested with a redemptive mission on a planetary scale; these leaders behave as if time (in other words God) could do nothing except serve their interests — as though America, invulnerable and beyond reproach, were still to be
mistress of the world several centuries from now. Many people around it in the rest of the world (including some of its worst adversaries) believe it, too. It makes no difference. Within three decades we must search elsewhere for the world’s new core.

Other sites suggest themselves. History has taught us that a core does not need to be located on the territory of the very biggest or most densely populated nation in order to aspire to that status. Bruges was not, nor were Venice and the cities that succeeded them. To reach their position, they had to find within themselves the energy, the creative power, the urge to innovate, to mass-produce, to expose themselves to the world, to dominate. By these criteria, several cities could come forward as candidates within twenty or thirty years.