CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Possible Worlds

By considering alternative futures, we begin to see that the future is shaped not only by the past but by what we think is possible and by the choices we make.

—Shell International Petroleum Company, 1992

I WILL NOW take up the question of how the society of market-states might respond to the challenges just surveyed. But rather than prescribe a single set of solutions to these challenges, I will describe alternative approaches, whole worldviews that, if they govern action, will bring into being radically different worlds. I choose this approach for four reasons: first, because simple forecasting—on which a prescriptive analysis must be based—is inadequate at a time when fundamental change in the consti-tutional order of states is occurring; second, my method can be used independently by readers whose values and preferences may not coincide with mine; third, this sort of presentation can clarify the moral choices we must make in the coming decades—having to do with what kind of world we want to live in and what we are willing to do to achieve it—rather than submerge those choices in the seductive calculus of efficiency; fourth, the implementation of the choices that are ultimately made will have less to do, in a market-state environment, with codified proscriptions and more to do with shared understandings, goals, and expectations.

Imagine unexpected, gravely unsettling events that happen to the world in the next few years: suppose an asteroid struck the Earth, setting in motion changes in the atmospheric climate; suppose a continental crisis in the groundwater table appeared, caused by saline-freshwater mixing zones that spread across numerous states; suppose a state embarked on a radical program of mass eugenics using genetic engineering on its own population; suppose infectious diseases appeared on a pandemic scale that could not be vaccinated against or eradicated, but that could be successfully treated by very expensive drugs; suppose a civil war broke out within a single state, leading to the use by one of the parties of biological weapons; suppose earthquakes triggered a deep worldwide economic depression.

Is the General Assembly of the United Nations the place to address the problems that would arise as consequence of these events? If not, is the U.N. Security Council endowed by the rest of the world with the political and moral authority to cope with these shattering events? Can we assume that the United States, or any other single power, could solve them alone? As we faced the year 2000 computer problem, who actually believed that the U.N. or NATO or the Council of Europe or the OAS was the institution that could solve it? This simple thought experiment shows how far we have already come from the society of nation-states and its constitution toward the society of market-states. Nor do I believe that international law—at least insofar as it may be invoked to prohibit state acts like tampering with the human genome, for example, or the use of biological weapons—is the resource we would turn to for resolution, nor that the International Court of Justice is the place we would go.

In the election of 1992, George Bush was taxed with lacking, as he himself put it, “the vision thing”—a vision of the future toward which he proposed to lead the nation with his policies. This was obviously not something Ronald Reagan had lacked, nor Jimmy Carter and certainly not Lyndon Johnson. All had clearly definable views of the future state of the union that they wished to bring about. Yet those writing speeches for George Bush and the senior officials of his administration were to a large degree the same persons who had done those jobs for President Reagan. What had changed was not simply the personality of the president: everything had changed, although things looked pretty much the same.

Before the sea change from nation-state to market-state, “vision” was simply a matter of looking ahead, extrapolating from the present. Realizing that vision was a matter of strategic planning. President Clinton's health care proposals would have fit into President Truman's Fair Deal; President Bush's START II treaty was a continuation of President Reagan's arms-control agenda. Suddenly in the 1990s, no one really had a “vision” of the future because the future was going to be so unlike the past. What was required was not lacerating self-criticism over our failures to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the mass migrations in East Africa. Rather we needed to approach the future with an acceptance that simple forecasting was not going to be useful to us for a while, that no one had any clear view of what was coming and therefore no one could be confident that he or she was offering a realistic vision of the future. Instead we had to sharpen our skills at imagining different futures so that we had some idea of what was at stake when the choices the future presented were actually upon us.

To say this is to contrast “strategic planning” with “scenario planning.” Both rely on intelligence estimates that are based on the careful analysis of immense amounts of information, sorting out the true from the false, assigning probabilities to information that might be either true or false, guessing what the future would be like if all the relevant facts were available to the analyst.¹ The problem for estimative intelligence in the current environment is that it depends upon a relatively stable world from which to extrapolate. No one has grasped this better than Joseph Nye, the former head of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, who wrote:

Greater complexity in the structure of power means greater uncertainty in estimating the future. Polities often undergo nonlinear change, but such changes have become much more frequent than during the Cold War. In the 1980s, for example, if one were estimating the number of nuclear weapons South Africa would have in the 1990s, one would have calculated what their uranium enrichment plant could produce and answered “six or seven.” But the correct answer today turns out to be zero because of radical political discontinuities associated with the transition to majority rule and the end of the Cold War. Similarly, if one were to estimate today how many nuclear weapons a country with no nuclear facilities might have in five years, the linear answer would be zero. But that would change if the country were able to purchase stolen nuclear weapons on the transnational black market.²

This is precisely the problem, and Nye's recommendation—the construction of alternative scenarios rather than single-point predictions in order not so much to predict the future as to help policy makers think about the future—is precisely the solution. But scenario planning is not widely practiced in governments, as opposed to corporations, and it is easily confused with strategic planning.

Scenario planning relies on the creation of hypothetical, alternative stories about the future that share certain factual assumptions but differ based on decisions made within each scenario; strategic planning is a formalized procedure that aims to produce an integrated system of decisions based on predetermined goals. That is, strategic planning assumes an answer to the question that scenario planning poses: what sort of future do we want? The time horizon for scenario planning is typically from five to more than twenty-five years; strategic plans usually go no further out than one to three years. Inputs to scenario planning are more qualitative, that is, they share certain factual estimates about the future but emphasize economic, technological, resource, and cultural trends. Inputs to strategic planning tend to be more quantitative, looking to past performance, forecasts, and probabilities. Thus scenario planning exploits uncertainties, allowing the creation of alternative futures; strategic planning attempts to minimize uncertainty. The results of scenario planning are multiple alternative outcomes versus the quantified single outcome based on the likeliest scenario that is the setting for strategic planning.³

The difficulty with implementing Nye's proposed solution is that such scenario construction depends upon a dialogue with decision makers at many levels in order to create a culture that is sensitive to the implications of change and alert to opportunities to create favorable conditions for change. Members of this culture produce the raw material on which scenarios are based; intensive briefings with them, once the scenarios are written, are as important to the process as the written product. But the National Intelligence Council cannot spend the time with the president and the senior members of his National Security Council, nor is it willing to disclose its estimates to the many hundreds of other less senior officials who, together, could bring such a culture into being. High-impact but low-probability contingencies, which are crucial to the imaginative dialogue of the scenario process, are of little interest to busy politicians. Competing scenarios, in the absence of a culture of dialogue animated by a sense of rapport with leaders at the top, are anathema to bureaucrats whose careers are risked by answering questions like “What would it take for this estimate to be dramatically wrong? What could cause a radically different out-come?” which translates to “What arguments can you give me that undermine your recommendations?”

Things are easier for the business corporation. In the early 1970s Royal Dutch Shell was regarded as the weakest of the great multinational oil companies, known as the “Seven Sisters.” At that time Shell began a series of scenario studies that are credited with assisting that corporation's remarkable rise since then. As early as 1972, one of Shell's scenarios envisaged the formation of OPEC and the sudden rise in oil prices that hit the world in the winter of 1973 – 74; and a subsequent scenario correctly described the equally dramatic drop in oil prices that began in early 1986. In 1984, a Shell scenario (called “The Greening of Russia”) described the possible breakup of the Soviet Union and the ensuing chaotic conditions in Eastern Europe. But to depict these descriptions, which turned out to be accurate, as validating the scenario process is to misunderstand its significance completely. After all, if a corporation is doing more than one “estimate,” it will often be able to predict a rise (or fall) that turns out to be true. What the scenario process did was to make some futures appear less plausible that had more or less been taken for granted, and to prepare managers to look for signs of likewise unexpected futures. In the absence of this preparation, managers are inclined to shoehorn events into their settled expectations or to ignore altogether outlying facts.

Since Shell's highly publicized success with scenario planning in the 1970s and 1980s, many corporations have attempted to employ this tool with the hope of achieving similar dramatic results. The Corporate Executive Board reports, however, that there has been some disillusion with the scenario-planning process. “Perhaps the single greatest driver of this dissatisfaction,” the Board has concluded, “is a widely held yet misguided expectation that scenario planning readily and directly improves strategic decision making; misconceptions rooted in scenario planning's history promote this expectation…”⁴ The problem is that Shell's successes are inevitably laid to having correctly predicted the future, rather than having enabled its decision makers to cope better with that future as it, unpredictably, unfolded. Prepared by their alternative scenarios, Shell executives were able to see a pattern in events—a story—that their competitors experienced as mere noise, a chaotic departure from conventional expectations.

Instead of simply relying on forecasts, the Shell Group does its planning for the future through a complex process of consultation, the drafting of alternative decision scenarios, and a thorough debriefing process around the world with its managers. The object is to use scenario planning as a means of stimulating institutional learning; what is being learned is a way of assimilating new events through the incorporation in (or the destruction of) the ostensive, simple stories of the scenarios. However sophisticated the tools, if there is no significant effect on exposing assumptions and heightening the focus on values, people will quickly fall back into the old habit of asking, “Tell me what will happen.”⁵

The managers of every corporation operate according to conventional expectations, usually unarticulated and seldom fully tested against alternatives. The scenario process externalizes these stories, tests them against known facts, and then uses them to provide a basis for further reaction by managers as events fit (or don't fit) the story. Following extensive interviews with fifty or so top managers at the Shell Group and with a large network of academic, political, business, and cultural figures around the globe, a team synthesizes the information drawn from these conversations into two or more competing scenarios. Thus about every three years a book of these scenarios—global, regional, country, and topical—is produced, and extensive briefings are done on its basis.⁶According to Shell, the most important aspect of this process is that “[b]y considering alternative futures, we begin to see that the future is shaped not only by the past but by what we think is possible and by the choices we make.”⁷ Let us apply this analytical process to the problem of meeting the challenges to the society of market-states described in the preceding chapter.

Initially, one must determine the fundamental choices facing states. With respect to security issues, the first set of choices derive from the military innovations that won the Long War. These have given birth to new sets of problems with regard to intervention, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the development of new technologies like ballistic missile defense. For example, the society of states must decide whether the most powerful members of that society ought to intervene in order to maintain democratic regimes and protect human rights, or whether that society should rely on regional security organizations in these matters, or whether the wisest course lies in permitting states to sort out their own internal affairs. Similar sets of alternatives exist for each of the new security challenges described in Chapter 24, particularly the challenge posed by international terrorism.

Another set of choices focuses principally on the cultural consequences of globalization, which are the consequences in the twenty-first century of the revolution in telecommunications that ccurred in the twentieth, espe-cially the interconnection between immigration and human rights. Just as each market-state must find for itself the right balance among a reverence for cultural tradition, a tolerance for individual conscience, and a respect for different groups, so the society of states will confront choices that inescapably will structure this balance. These choices center on the inequalities of opportunity and self-respect generated by meritocratic, dynamic capitalism; the intergenerational conflicts that are exacerbated both by rapid change and by the holdover of programs from the decaying nation-state; and lastly the threats posed to traditional cultures by the liberating but penetrating media of twenty-first century entertainment, information, and education.

A final set of alternatives deals with the consequences of the revolutionary liberalization of trade and finance that occurred as a result of the development of high-speed computation, producing conflicts in the areas of development, trade, and the protection of the environment. The states in these scenarios will experience the same stock market crashes, the same droughts and epidemics, the same high-tech breakthroughs. But they must decide to what degree the market will govern the market-state in the pursuit of economic growth, social stability, and long-term prosperity.

Next, one must select the key influences, or “drivers” in planning jargon, that will structure the decisional environment within which these choices are made.

These drivers include demographic developments, the availability of and access to resources (especially energy and water), innovations in technology and its diffusion, events in the new economy of market-states, and of course the synergy among these drivers. There is one other key driver, however, that is also the consequence of the outcome of the Long War and on which each of the scenarios greatly depends: this is the role of the United States. For if, in the past, only an epochal war could produce the consensus that created a constitution for the society of states, it may be that now we are entering a period in which conflict itself may take an unprecedented form and that actions of one very powerful and influential state might bring about that “creative emulation” described in Book I when states copy the triumphant winner of an epochal war. There are several ways to describe this: it may be that market-states will be led to adopt that form of the new constitutional order that is chosen by the state most dominant in the new globalized market; or it may be that a “chosen” epochal war will be a product of that state's decisions—to intervene in a long-running series of low-intensity conflicts, or to check regional actors with predatory pretensions, or to deflect (or even defeat) any peer challenges to the diffident hegemony that at present appears likely to continue for the foreseeable future; or it may be that the new, irresistible world culture will insinuate more than dominate, carrying states along a path strewn with Big Mac wrappers and universally accessible websites (in English) so that, like habits generally, the bonds of adherence will be too mild to be felt until they are too strong to be resisted. However it may be, in the following scenarios one driver partly determining which of the three general models of the market-state sweeps through the society of such states is the actions and attitude of the United States. As the U.S. National Intelligence Council put it in 2001:

U.S. global economic, technological, military and diplomatic influence will be unparalleled among national as well as regional and international organizations in 2015. This power not only will ensure America's preeminence, but also will cast the United States as the key driver of the international system.⁸

Finally, two or more alternative and internally consistent narratives must be constructed for each driver, which are then combined to produce alternate scenarios.

The following pages offer three general scenarios, constructed by assembling the elements of possible worlds that are brought into being by crucial, fundamentally moral choices that might face states—choices that could plausibly be made in a number of ways. These are only very simple stories. Because they do not attempt to capture the full richness of reality, they can make our basic assumptions stand out in a way that fate, culture, and history seldom afford.

What might the world might look like if one of the three constitutional models of the market-state dominates the society of such states? I will call these three worlds “The Meadow,” “The Park,” and “The Garden.”

The world of The Meadow is that of a society of states in which the entrepreneurial market-state has become predominant. In this world, success comes to those who nimbly exploit the fast-moving, evanescent opportunities brought about by high technology and the global marketplace. Such a world provides an environment for the fullest expression of individual creativity; it rewards those who innovate and who can deal with, indeed who relish, impermanence. There are no fixed rules or taboos. Competition is the great god that sorts out the quick and the dead.

The world view portrayed in The Park is quite different, and it reflects a society in which the values and attitudes of the managerial market-state have prevailed. Governments play a far larger role in defining the common interest and using the political power of government to assert that interest. Minority rights are more carefully husbanded; international institutions are maintained; protection of the environment is given a priority. In short, there is a sincere effort to afford respect to the mores of many different groups, accepting that this can be a costly strategy.

Finally, The Garden describes an approach associated with the mercantile market-state. In this set of scenarios, governments also play a large role but that role is less a regulatory and more a supportive one. Here governments provide long-range strategic planning based on the good of society taken as a whole—not the sum of its interest groups. Unlike the regional groupings fostered by The Park, the states of The Garden have become more and more ethnocentric, and more and more protective of their respective cultures.

In a meadow all is profusion, randomness, variety. A park is for the most part publicly maintained, highly regulated with different sectors for different uses. A garden is smaller, more inwardly turned—it aims for the sublime, not the efficient or the just.

DRIVERS AND TRENDS

(These conditions are assumed for all three scenarios.)

POPULATION

Despite a substantial fall in fertility rates, especially in developed countries, and a continuing decline in global population growth rates, the momentum of the existing population will increase the world's numbers from 6.1 billion to over 7 billion by 2015. Ninety-five percent of this growth will take place in the Third World, where most of the world's largest cities will contain about half the world's population. In many developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and parts of South Asia, the rapidly increasing number of persons between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four will strain educational systems, infrastructure, and job markets. At the same time, the population of the northern tier states will markedly age. Increasingly, the needs of older persons will impose enormous economic burdens on shrinking workforces. Facing labor shortages, some industrial countries will encourage immigration of both skilled and unskilled labor, as the United States has done. Other countries may prefer to substitute technology for labor or to outsource their labor requirements overseas. Russia's population is likely to decrease substantially, as a result of poor health care and declining birth rates. Russian life expectancy is expected to continue to decline.

Some developing countries will not experience net population growth; despite high birth rates, some African countries that are heavily infected with HIV and other diseases will have stable or even declining populations. Infectious diseases will pose a growing threat fueled by population growth, urbanization, and migration, as well as other factors such as microbial resistance. At the same time that progress is being made with respect to some diseases—such as polio and measles—diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria are re-emerging in deadlier, drug-resistant variations while new infectious diseases appear. It is estimated that at least thirty previously unknown diseases have appeared globally since 1973, including the incurable HIV, hepatitis C, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and encephalitis-related Nipah. Asia is likely to witness a major increase in infectious disease deaths, replacing Africa as the epicenter of HIV by 2015.

RESOURCES

World food stocks are projected to be sufficient to meet overall global needs through 2015. Problems with distributing food to the world's poorest as well as those displaced by internal conflicts will, however, persist. North Korea will continue to be vulnerable to nationwide famine, possibly exacerbated by natural disasters. Famines will continue to occur in countries such as Sudan and Somalia, which are also subject to natural disasters.

Fresh water, while globally abundant, will become a critical resource issue. It is estimated that by 2025, 40 percent of the world's population will live in countries, most of them in Africa and South Asia, that are water-stressed. This represents a sixfold increase since 1995. These countries will be unable to provide sufficient water for agricultural, industrial, and household needs. This will be especially true in northern China, the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Africa. There will be serious risks of water wars between states proximate to large rivers and seas.

ENERGY

Even if fuel cell technology progresses as hoped, it is projected that by 2010 worldwide demand, driven by growing populations and increases in per capita income, will require added production of energy on the order of what OPEC states now produce in toto. Assuming a fairly robust annual global per capita income growth of 2 percent through 2015, the demand for rimar ener will increase b 60 ercent over resent levels.

The market will be able to make available vast reserves—their location is already known—but the fragility of the pipeline and distribution network will increase. Technological innovations will continue to expand access to oil fields, lowering the cost of developing new wells, and improving efficiencies in automotive transport. The most exploited oil deposits will remain in the Persian Gulf and Venezuela, with new areas coming online in the West African basin and the Caspian Sea. The global shift to natural gas, with its fixed installations for fuel delivery, could establish long-lasting energy dependencies, making neighboring countries increasingly reliant on natural gas supplies from Russia, Algeria, and Central Asia. Improvements in the efficiency of solar cells and batteries, though they will result in a greater use of these and other renewable energy resources, are unlikely to significantly affect world reliance on fossil fuels in the next twenty-five years.

ECONOMIC GROWTH

The globalization of financial transactions and the rapid increase in the volume of the money supply in global financial markets will create a new global vulnerability to periodic financial crises. Notwithstanding this concern, it is anticipated that accelerating global trade, the growing integration of capital markets, and efficiencies gained from the increasing use of information technology will lead to a real growth in per capita income of about 2 percent annually.

Global economic influence and power will spread from the current G-7 countries of North America, Europe, and Japan to a more multipolar global economic system in which Brazil, India, China, and South Korea will become economic centers. Output from non-OECD countries will rise from 45 percent to about 60 percent of global GDP by 2015. Nevertheless, the inclusion of these countries—the “have-nots”—in the global economy will be marred and slow-paced. The division between the “haves” and “have-nots” could spark a backlash against globalization, reversing the trends of openness to foreign investment and trade that have been driving global economic growth. Those countries with active internal conflicts will tend to fall further behind. In virtually all countries, the disparities within societies will increase. The wealthy and well-educated will get richer, while the poor will get relatively poorer with the middle classes dividing toward one or the other group.

All states will become more vulnerable to the shocks and disruptions that are a major downside of global economic integration. The world economy is highly dependent on the United States. A major U.S. stock market correction could have a significant impact on the world economy. So could a major disruption in global energy markets arising from political instability in the Persian Gulf. Finally, weak domestic financial institutions in emerging countries could trigger a major financial crisis, crippling future financial flows. The strength of financial institutions in many countries has not kept pace with the volume of financial flows.

TECHNOLOGY

International affairs will increasingly involve the use of information networks, and information technology will not be owned by any single country. Nor can this technology and the information it conveys be easily contained. Information and communications technologies will continue to advance and diffuse rapidly, becoming so inexpensive that most countries will be able to connect to the global information infrastructure.

The United States and other developed countries will face an increasing challenge to maintain its critical infrastructure—the networks that will increasingly unite the hitherto separate sectors of banking and finance, energy, transportation, communications, and government services. Cyber threats to this infrastructure will become a major defense issue by 2015.

Rigid and authoritarian governments that resist the flow of information and attempt to restrict openness and ease of connectivity, will fall further behind economically and politically. The problem of “haves” versus “have-nots” will become increasingly related to information sharing and the diffusion of information technology.

The biological sciences will grow in importance for their applications to medicine and agriculture. Advances in basic biology will allow us to diagnose and cure diseases on a broad scale; but most biomedical advances will remain expensive, benefiting only those who are relatively well-off, most of whom will live in developed countries.

The capability to purchase, copy, or steal existing technologies rather than develop new ones offers significant catch-up opportunities for less developed countries and also for nonstate actors, including terrorists and criminal organizations. Among these technologies must be included weapons of mass destruction. Information technology will allow widely dispersed but globally connected groups such as terrorists, criminal organizations, and narcotics cartels to create far-flung networks and alliances. In some countries, these groups will be better armed than their governments and may control significant portions of territory.

It is projected that during the period 2000 – 2015, the United States will face ICBM threats from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and possibly Iraq.⁹ The arsenals of the new missile powers will be dramatically smaller, less reliable, and less accurate than those of Russia and China. European nuclear arsenals with a global reach will remain; the nuclear weaponry of Israel, India, and Pakistan will be regional in scope, however. Precisely because nuclear weapons delivered to missile technology is likely to remain a state-centered enterprise, and its use therefore subject to deterrence and retaliation, new weapons of mass destruction that exploit an ambiguity of origin will come into being. States that intervene abroad will find themselves the target of unnamed groups with the ability to do substantial damage through violent and nonviolent means.

EVENTS

(These facts are assumed to be possible for all scenarios, but vary from scenario to scenario, depending on the decisions taken by states.)

SECURITY

Suppose—

·         The Balkans degenerate into another regional war.

·         The Koreas collapse into a peninsular conflict.

·         China does not peacefully resolve its differences with Taiwan.

·         A pre-emptive strike occurs against a developing nuclear state in Central Asia.

·         A government unfriendly to the United States develops miniaturized nuclear devices.

·         Japan rearms with weapons of mass destruction.

·         Russia takes a turn toward authoritarianism domestically and asserts itself internationally with threats of violence.

·         Successful ballistic missile defenses are developed.

·         Nuclear conflict occurs in South Asia.

·         An attack on the critical infrastructure of the developed states brings major sectors of the global economy to a halt.

·         Ethnic cleansing and genocide erupt in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.

·         Nuclear proliferation to Iran or to an Arab state occurs.

CULTURE

What if—

·         Unprecedented immigration follows a nuclear accident or a Mexican or Turkish Revolution.

·         Europe and Japan fail to manage their demographic challenges, aging rapidly yet unable to replace 110 million lost workers by 2015.

·         A cheap technology for universal, wireless communication via voice/ text/image becomes available.

·         Weather epidemics—the health consequence of rapidly changing weather patterns—strike.

·         A new incurable but highly infectious virus emerges.

·         Rapid advances in, and the diffusion of, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the materials sciences extend life and expand the quality of that life, while also adding to the bioterrorist arsenal.

·         China disintegrates, with a new state emerging composed of the Guangdong region, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

·         The United States (or the European Union) loosens the human rights restraints on federalism, giving far greater autonomy to its constituent states.

·         A cultural incident inflames Muslim opinion, leading to anti-Western terrorism.

·         Criminal conspiracies flourish, trafficking in illegal immigration, money laundering, narcotics, and illegal arms trade.

·         The emergence of enlightened business leaders creates a climate of international cooperation.

·         New international institutions emerge to manage the effects of globalization.

ECONOMICS

Imagine—

·         The U.S. economy suffers a sustained downturn following a dramatic stock market crash.

·         China and/or India fail to sustain high growth rates.

·         Chemical etching for integrated circuits yields dramatically cheaper and more powerful computation.

·         Hybrid fuels greatly lower energy costs, bringing the price of oil to record lows.

·         Green tariffs are widely used by the developed states in order to protect the global environment, including punishment for the “environmental rogue state,” the United States.

·         Japan fails in the structural reform of its financial institutions and triggers an Asian currency collapse.

·         An antiglobalization movement, the New Luddites, emerges using laptop computers, websites, and sophisticated encryption to conduct a worldwide campaign of anarchy.

·         Exports surge to 50 percent of global product.

·         Global energy supplies are disrupted in a major way.

·         Major Asian countries establish an Asian Monetary Fund and/or an Asian Trade Organization, triggering a European reply in kind and undermining the IMF and the WTO.

·         Owing to escalating trade disputes, the U.S./European alliance collapses.

·         The euro becomes an alternative reserve currency with the dollar.

DECISIONS

Although each of the scenarios assumes the same factual premises, the events in each may vary depending on decisions that are taken within the scenarios to cope with unanticipated matters. I have italicized those critical decisions in order that the reader may ponder them in a way that would not necessarily be available to the decision makers. Some are defining moments, some are turning points, some illuminate one future while casting other possible worlds into the shadows. Yet each may come accompanied by such urgency and such noise that its true significance is not apparent (the decision in the early 1970s to float the dollar is an example). Or it may come so gradually that only when one looks back can one see that a great turning has occurred and the past is no longer visible (as occurred with American immigration policy after the mid-1960s). Or dominant ways of looking at the world may assimilate a new development for a while obscuring its power to change the way we look at things (the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan in the mid-1940s was just such a decision, taken more or less routinely as an orderly continuation of the campaign of strategic bombing). All these decisional environments are present in the scenarios that follow.

Taken together the italicized decisions in each scenario make up the unique style of that particular world: The Meadow with its impatient and ruthless naturalism, The Park with its bureaucratic Cartesianism, The Garden with its understated but iron insistence on harmony. Taken individually, these decisions show how essential human agency is to any account of history (even an historical account of the future) and yet how confined our choices can become as a consequence of precedent-setting decisions taken on matters that seemed, at the time, not to present much difficulty. Each scenario suite that follows will comprise three subject areas: security, culture, and economics.

THE SCENARIOS

THE MEADOW

SECURITY

In September of the first year of the new millennium, the United States was struck by a terrorist atrocity on a scale that dwarfed previous attacks. Perhaps as many as six teams of airplane hijackers attempted to take over commercial aircraft and fly them into a set of targets that included the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington; three teams succeeded. A death toll in the thousands was the result.

The terrorist teams were linked to a shadowy Arab leader who was believed to control a mercenary and religious network of zealots in many countries, but was based in the state of Afghanistan, which had, for four years, been controlled by a fundamentalist movement known as the Taliban. Allied to this movement, this charismatic leader trained thousands of terrorist fighters in Afghan camps. Now the United States demanded that the Taliban dismantle the camps and turn over the terrorist leadership.

For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article Five of its founding charter, declaring that the atrocities were an attack on the alliance. The United Nations' Security Council adopted a resolution authorizing states to employ “all necessary means” to prevent future terrorist acts. Despite these moves, the United States chose to assemble a multistate coalition not limited to NATO nor acting under U.N. authority. At the center of this coalition are the American president, the British prime minister, and the Russian president.

The first week in the following October the coalition began its attacks on Afghanistan, largely using American air assets to conduct a bombing campaign and relying on indigenous Afghan forces to defeat the Taliban on the ground. That same week a Russian airliner flying from Israel to Siberia exploded in mid-air and crashed into the Black Sea. The next week a letter seeded with anthrax arrived at the office of the U.S. Senate's majority leader. Similar letters were found in various offices, including those of other senators, media outlets, and postal sorting centers. In mid-November an American passenger jet crashed into a residential neighborhood in New York City. None of these events—the airliner crashes or the anthrax mailings—were ever conclusively tied to the militant Muslim conspiracy but nor were they definitively investigated.

By December Taliban forces had disintegrated and some of the senior leadership of the terrorist network had been eliminated. There remained, however, a decade of warfare ahead. During this period the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels into New York City, as well as the Chunnel connecting France and the United Kingdom, were attacked with explosives and collapsed. The National Cathedral in Washington, the Central Synagogue in New York, the John the Baptist site on the Jordan River, and the gothic cathedral at Chartres were all targets of attacks or attempted attacks by terrorists.

International civil aviation was renationalized and taken over by governments when it became impossible to maintain profitably. This was the result of repeated bombings on aircraft and at airports, including London's Heathrow and the Los Angeles terminal known as LAX and the destruction of a Concorde after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle.

The consequence of these horrors on the law of the countries struck was relatively consistent in The Meadow. Thousands of persons were arrested and detained without charge; some were tortured and beaten to extract information. Nonjudicial tribunals were sometimes used to convict those arrested when it appeared that they might go free under traditional rules of criminal procedure or when it was feared the ongoing threat posed by their co-conspirators was too great to risk the exposure of intelligence assets required for a successful prosecution.

Nothing seems to work to stop these attacks until two developments, one political, one technological, converge. For three decades the leaders of the most influential economies have been meeting informally, at first to discuss particular crises, and later to seek consensus on the development of the society of the market-states. Originally called the Group of Seven (G-7) by the press, the membership of this group had changed eventually to encompass a political group (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Japan, German, Russia) and an economic group (adding China).

At the G-9 (P8) meeting, the U.S. president proposed an ad hoc intelligence coalition to be financed by voluntary subscriptions by members of the society of states, and empowered to share information on a global scale. The G-9 (P8) meeting was no more than a forum; it took no position as a group on the president's proposal. In the case of anti-Western terrorism, funding for this intelligence institution was initially contributed by Saudi Arabia, Japan, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Britain, and the United States. For the first time, cooperation among the world's financial institutions (prompted by the solidarity shown among finance ministers and central bankers) yielded substantial progress in tracking and interdicting the financing of terrorism.

Careful investigative work by units of this institution was responsible for uncovering an Iraqi attempt to use the terrorist network for a nuclear attack—actually a conventional explosive that would disseminate radioactive materials, the so-called dirty bomb—against the city of Washington in 2007. But the G-9 successes were marred by an attack that used a device apparently loaded onto a container ship in Antwerp, off-loaded in Canada, and detonated by satellite signal while on a train that passes through Chicago. No one ever really determined the source of this attack. The terrorist network denied responsibility, but then they had adopted the tactic of denial sometime past. Ultimately Iraq is blamed and this provided the decisive impetus for an invasion. A slightly different coalition was organized to provide an expeditionary force.

The former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had been removed by 2004 but his successor, a Baath party functionary of Iranian descent, had continued the predatory policies of his predecessor. The new expeditionary force, composed of troops hitherto delegated to NATO commands by the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, launched an airborne assault, seizing Baghdad, and meeting up with an amphibious offensive from the Persian Gulf, joined by overland elements of the same force from Kuwait.

Only, however, when the G-9 coalitions were aided by technological breakthroughs in nanosensors—which could detect the molecular presence of weapons of mass destruction—and in global surveillance systems did terrorism on a catastrophic scale finally abate in 2015.

The success of this innovative coalitional arrangement against terrorism led to several structural reforms: first the G-9 (P8) members announced a series of rules for intervention, including commitments to deliver humanitarian assistance. In every situation, a G-9 (P8) member had to propose an intervention and raise the funds for the operation, provided only that a simple majority of the Group endorse the effort. The actual forces used are contributed on a cost-plus basis, and are placed under the unified command of the state organizing the intervention. Relying on the widespread belief that democratic regimes do not wage aggression, the G-9 (P8) is in effect offering a substantial security subsidy—through a kind of extended deterrence, that is, the promise of protection against aggression—to those states that adopt and maintain democratic regimes. At the same time, by promising to intervene against international terrorism and ethnic cleansing, and to treat epidemics and famine, the G-9 (P8) linked human rights to liberal constitutionalism, regardless of the democratic nature of the affected regime, thus reserving to itself the right to compromise the sovereignty of any state when it is unwilling, or unable, to protect a group of its own citizens from mass depredations.

This policy was tested over the next decade and a half in regions as diverse as South Asia (where a Sri Lankan revolutionary regime attempted to slaughter ethnic Hindus), South Africa (where a democratic government was temporarily deposed by a coalition of white supremacists and African separatists), and Latin America (where a Guyanese dictator refused to permit humanitarian aid to stem a smallpox epidemic). It may be judged a success in retrospect, but it did not operate in isolation. The G-9 (P8) directorate was greatly aided by three factors that tended to stabilize and enhance its impact.

First, the war against terrorism was a conflict all the great powers could unite on. Each faced the threat of attacks on its own modernity and the secular nature of its state. Thus Russia and China were no less willing to join the coalition against terrorism than were France and Japan.

Second, as they developed increasing confidence in the G-9 (P8) plan, most states were able to divert more funds away from military expenditures in their own budgets, thus accelerating their economic growth and allowing for higher payments to fund G-9 (P8) expeditionary forces. Failure to do so meant effective exclusion from the decision making process of the world's leadership.

Third, the G-9 (P8) states were able to develop a comprehensive system of nanosensors, satellite surveillance, and ballistic missile defense that provided a limited shield against weapons of mass destruction. The sheer investment required by such an effort could only have been feasible by a multinational consortium; when finally deployed, this system had the additional effect of rendering the G-9 (P8) more credible, because, at least for a time, it seemed impossible to threaten G-9 (P8) states (as Iraq had threatened Israel at the time of the Gulf War) with long range retaliation by modest or disguised forces. This tended to quiet various regional enmities (like that of China, India, and Pakistan) where states had “gone nuclear.”

Russian participation in the G-9 (P8) force structure had the wholesome effect of tying the new Russian state to the world's most influential economies. This had a stabilizing effect on politics within Russia, and enhanced Russia's prestige vis-à-vis the bordering states of the former Soviet Union. At the same time that Russian forces were ever willing to join ad hoc expeditions (for which they were well paid), the Kremlin was also more willing to resort to G-9 (P8) mediation over the autonomy campaigns of the Chechens and others.

On the other hand, this informal system had the effect of weakening the U.N. and its associated peacekeeping institutions to the vanishing point. Gradually, the United States reduced its funding to about 10 percent of the total budget, an 80 percent cut. Other multilateral security institutions adapted: NATO, for example, jettisoned its unanimity rule for the North Atlantic Council and transformed itself into a rapid reaction force for hire.

This ad hoc system was sorely tested, however, in 2018. The South Korean government was in the final stages of negotiation with North Korea over a federal reunification plan, to be financed by a huge South Korean subsidy, when labor unrest in the South broke into mass riots against the government. Although the riots initially erupted in Seoul, they soon spread to other cities and were most violent in the southern port of Pusan. Here a provisional government led by a workers' party proclaimed its independence in May, after six weeks of revolt; this government called upon the North for aid when it was reported that troops from Seoul were bound for Pusan to quell the insurrection. The North responded with such alacrity that it is clear that some sort of collusion with the rioters was already in place. Northern troops poured across the border in two columns, advancing down the Chorwan Valley and the Kaesong-Murasan Approach against Seoul. Intelligence sources indicated that, as had been expected since the 1960s, this was to be a direct strike against Seoul, but in fact the city was partly encircled and then bypassed as the Northern forces split, one group streaking south toward Pusan, the other army group attempting to trap some 15,000 U.S. troops outside Taegu. These U.S. forces were the last remnant of the American post–Cold War force stationed on the Asian mainland; they had been stripped of their tactical nuclear weapons in 1991. When the American forces were virtually surrounded, and the North Korean main force had entered Pusan, the Pusan provisional regime contacted Washington, offering to barter a peaceful withdrawal of American forces. Washington faced a dilemma: either it would risk the annihilation of its forces in an attempt to intervene to save them and to shore up the Seoul government, or it would shatter its security commitments in an ignominious evacuation. Intervention would require the reintroduction of nuclear weapons, a move strongly opposed by Japan, where the only other American forces in the area were stationed, the U.S. base at Okinawa having reverted to Japanese sovereignty.

It was never imagined that the G-9 (P8) ad hoc forces would confront a challenge of this magnitude; they were mainly expeditionary in nature. In any case, Japan blocked G-9 (P8) action by successful lobbying, out of concern that nuclear weapons might ultimately be used in the Korean peninsula with incalculable consequences for Japan. U.S. appeals to China for diplomatic mediation were rebuffed, partly, it was surmised, because China wished to remove Korean economic competition from its own export markets. In any case, China vetoed a resolution in the U.N Security Council condemning the Northern invasion.

It remained unclear for some weeks whether North Korea had produced its own nuclear weapons, using reactors it had been given in the 1990s to replace the heavy-water reactors it was then relying on. Although the replacement reactors were less useful in producing fissile material for weapons, they could have served this role and there were no definitive sources of intelligence either way. This possibility added to the complexity of the American position.

On June 1, American airborne troops attempted to reinforce the Taegu force in preparation for a breakout. Cruise missiles with conventional warheads hit targets in the North but refrained from striking Pusan. Despite the fact that U.S. troops were prepared for a chemical attack by North Korean forces, Washington seems to have been surprised when a large-scale chemical assault on Seoul was carried out by infiltrators the night of June 2, allegedly in retaliation for civilian casualties in the North resulting from American air strikes. In the aftermath of this horrifying event, a joint Chinese-Japanese proposal was put forward by the terms of which the American troops were evacuated, and emergency medical aid was sent to Seoul. Following the negotiated withdrawal of American troops, the Seoul government capitulated and Korea was ultimately united not under a federal plan as previously negotiated, but under central control from Pyongyang.

After these traumatic events, the society of market-states rallied and augmented its announced rules of international security policy. Henceforth, all ballistic missile systems capable of delivering nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, were to be placed in escrow—held in protected sites under the authority of a multinational, quasi-private consortium—and no future development of such systems was to be tolerated, on pain of pre-emption. The first pre-emptive strike by an ad hoc coalition occurred against a Central Asian state in 2020. Russia and the United States both contributed large numbers of ballistic systems to these cantonments, although the actual effect of this isolation was muted by the widespread deployment of cruise missiles by many states.

The evolution of international law in this period took its direction from the doctrine of “the new sovereignty,” on the basis of which the United States, and later NATO, had intervened in Panama in 1990 and in Kosovo nine years later. This doctrine held that a state's sovereignty was only valid so long as various criteria were met. Based on this doctrine, the United States and allied Caribbean forces overturned the “drug states” of New Grenada and New San Martin, where narcotics organizations had seized power.But faced with widespread calls for intervention to redress human-rights violations in many parts of the globe, the G-9 (P8) states also found fewer and fewer of their citizens were willing to serve in the armed forces necessary to mount such interventions. This meant that intervention forces had to rely on what were effectively nonnational mercenaries. Proposals to reintroduce the draft in the United States and France were greeted with widespread protests and were quickly shelved. When a breakaway state in the Congo Republic massacred 250,000 of its citizens, there was no political consensus on the part of any G-9 (P-8) states—though some, notably the United States, were more willing to intervene than others—to fund or support an intervention.

By 2020 the experiment of the G-9 (P-8) ad hoc forces had been restructured. All-volunteer forces—essentially multinational mercenary groups—eliminated the need for the G-9 (P-8) states to rely on the troops of member states. Such forces were successfully used by the British in Sierra Leone, by the United States in Haiti, by deBeers in southern Africa, and by Singapore in Irian Jaya. Though buffeted by many calls on its resources the G-9 (P-8) was eventually able to concentrate on those crises that were economically and strategically significant to the wealthiest states, which included some, but by no means all, human-rights crises. The G-9 (P-8) developed patterns of cooperation over time—including intelligence sharing, joint exercises, interoperable equipment, consolidated training—that brought defense costs down and muted great power conflicts.

In The Meadow security was commoditized. Market mechanisms were hitched to geostrategic objectives. Political discontent with the prevailing system was equated with crime. Still, states were able to cooperate to cope with a variety of crises.

CULTURE

In the West, the growing inequalities of wealth and personal safety were dissolving the bonds of civil society in state after state. Riots, kidnappings of wealthy persons, the anticomputer terrorism of the technically sophisticated New Luddites, the green terrorism of the “Boy Scout” movement (no relation to the twentieth century group of child explorers), begging in the streets of the wealthiest capitals, and anarchy in the poorest ones—all these were accepted as the inevitable costs of rapid growth and rapid change. There even came a point, during the worst of the terror attacks on the United States, when it appeared that New York and Washington would be depopulated like Rome during the plague, but this did not happen.

Globalization—and its terrors—were of necessity an engine of change, and the resulting dislocations were taken to be unavoidable. The bottom line was that even after an American stock market collapse in 2005 and a worldwide recession that had lasted throughout 2007, most persons were wealthier (had more consumer goods, more leisure time), healthier (owing to computer-enabled methods of preventive medicine that earmarked individual vulnerabilities before they became acute), and better educated (again owing to computer innovations that gave every child several hours of individual instruction daily for fifteen years and provided access to an almost infinite amount of information) than ever before. Led by the United States, virtually every state in the developed world and many outside it adopted a hands-off attitude toward popular culture and behavior. Affirmative action, anti-abortion laws, narcotics and prostitution prosecutions, and subsidies for the arts all vanished. The withdrawal of the state from enforcing particular sectarian views did not mean that pressure groups declined.

On the contrary, by 2010 everyone in the former First World seemed to believe in something—often so intensely and parochially that political systems all across the developed world were deadlocked. NGOs, however, flourished. These began reaching out to the Third World. In Africa and Latin America, philanthropic groups supported both Christianization and de-Christianization, attempting to change people's religion either to some form of Christianity (including Mormonism) or to some “indigenous” sect thought to have been threatened by Christianity (including animism). To these causes were added Green concerns (reforestation, restoration of species, soil depletion headed the list), inoculation against infectious diseases, and famine relief.

Indeed the proliferation and profusion of NGOs in the developed world led a large number of countries in the developing parts of the world to devise cultural policies catering to First World interests. Some countries legalized assisted suicide; some instituted Islamic legal and cultural rules; some hosted genetic engineering projects ranging from modified crops to organ harvesting; some virtually became theme parks.

NGOs also led the movement to improve health in the developing world. In many countries, rapid urbanization had outrun the capacity of the urban infrastructure and social services to cope, leaving cities to incubate disease and without adequate sewage or health facilities. NGOs organized treatment centers, and in some states governments virtually ceded their health policies to these organizations, which had the resources to alleviate disease but not the legitimate power to resolve the underlying problems that had created the crisis.

By 2025 the world's population had increased by 50 percent since the year 2000, to a level of about 7.5 billion. The most dramatic demographic event in the first quarter century, however, was a precipitous drop in population growth. This drop did not occur uniformly. The states of the developed world lost population share, going from 21 percent to 12 percent—since 1650 it had hovered between 34 percent and 26 percent—and aged at a faster rate than any other group of states. Within the group of developed states, however, there were significant differences. Japan and Italy, whose low population growth was a source of anxiety at the turn of the century, aged rapidly, Japan overtaking Italy. Except for Poland and Moldova, the European populations of the former Warsaw Pact uniformly declined. In 2020, Britain and France had a high average age among industrial countries; that same year the United States had the youngest average age. And even within a single state, there were large variations: the relative youth of the American population derived from a high rate of immigration.

In this period a number of less developed states stabilized their populations—China, Taiwan, Korea, Algeria—and their birth rates actually began to decline. Other states—India, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil—continued to grow and then leveled off in the 2030s and 2040s. Some states—Nigeria, Zaire, Ethiopia, Rwanda—experienced a largely unchanged, high fertility rate, but their population levels suffered owing to various catastrophic events.

These population variables set the terms of the differential growth rates that occurred in the first part of the twenty-first century, as the world in 2025 saw a falling population for the first time in four centuries. In the northern-tier developed states, the demand for consumer goods was faltering as the population aged; in the less developed southern-tier states, increasing population pressures drove up the price of foodstuffs. Nevertheless both sectors—with the exception of some African states—were linked by multinational commerce, opening up vast consumer markets in the South, to which genetically engineered grains and proteins were ultimately exported. By 2020, 70 percent of the world economy was in the former Third World and China.

There were some unattractive aspects to this flourishing trade. For example, organ farms (really “hospitals” that removed organs from paid donors) arose in Pakistan, the Philippines, and various other states to supply First World demand for transplants, though these were ultimately replaced by transgenic methods using animals. Some states acquired needed capital by locating nuclear waste sites on their national territory and by permitting mineral-extraction methods that were outlawed elsewhere. Russia for a time in the 2020s was taken over by a raw-materials development company that employed political prisoners as workers in mines and wholly corrupted the Duma by giving members “derivative” subsoil rights to the petroleum and minerals beneath Siberia. In Russia at this time, a new form of civil right was introduced, permitting any citizen or registered company to buy shares in the state, thus giving weighted voting according to the number of shares purchased. Unsavory as this sounds, it did have the result of efficiently extracting the abundant raw materials of the Russian state, which had hitherto frustrated most attempts at development. Moreover, the privatization of the state brought sufficient capital to the country through foreign investment that perennial Russian agricultural shortfalls were finally halted through a program, of genetically engineered hybridization.

Pakistan and India joined in a free trade area in 2010, providing the crucial momentum that made India the world's largest single market by 2025. Other, intermediary states flourished in the new environment of general free trade: Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, Algeria. A global hiring program operated on the Internet allowed anyone anywhere to access job opportunities worldwide and to receive a one-year “green card” once employment assured, as part of a universal reciprocity regime for jobs. By 2040, the number of nominal citizens and resident citizens combined of the top fifteen formerly Third World countries surpassed year 2000 levels of GDP per capita for First World countries.¹⁰In these rapidly developing countries, the proportions of GDP derived from industry and manufacturing hit the conventional maxima for a developed, postindustrial state, giving way to the relative rise in services that seems characteristic of affluence.¹¹ Successful economic reforms in these states—especially the free trade areas of India-Pakistan, China-Taiwan, Korea-Japan, and Singapore-Malaysia-Indonesia-Thailand—prompted the election of politicians committed to economic reform. Increases in successful free-market reform yielded increases in individual freedom. Third World development spurred demand for First World products that became, as the century wore on, ever cheaper.

By contrast, per-capita consumption in the First World shifted as more emphasis was placed on quality-improving investments such as child safety, preventive medical care, and lifelong education. Environmental quality was monitored and protected by licensed entrepreneurs who held various resources (for example, air quality) in trust for the state. The 2020s also saw a number of innovations in civil society: violence prone adolescents—identified by genetic screening at birth—were monitored when convicted of violent crimes, and their activities circumscribed through various electronic means; the most serious offenders were exiled to other countries in exchange for cash payments, and there typically turned to agricultural or military duties. In some countries, medical and education vouchers were earned through the avoidance of legal “demerits” so that citizens with a record of infractions were barred from schooling beyond high school and from all but some inexpensive forms of acute care, unless they were able to secure a source of funds of their own. This rather draconian system was to some extent mitigated by a system of behavior bribes whereby nonviolent offenders were paroled to specialized private corporations where they were maintained as wards of the market, in comfortable circumstances performing menial tasks, so long as they refrained from further offenses. Drug offenders were either exported to states that had legalized drug use, or confined to privately run “Virtual Holiday” camps where nonlethal drug use was permitted. By these various means, prison populations were dramatically reduced (though some increased crime did inevitably accompany this reduction).

The universal communications made possible by the ubiquitous (and cheap) handheld wireless computer/telephone/television tied the world's cultures together as never before. The reach of a single language—English—embraced 60 percent of the world's inhabitants by 2040. Only one region seemed impervious to the general economic upturn, and from that continent came the horrors that haunted the society of market-states.

In Africa, the greatest increase in population during this period occurred, from 642 million persons in 1990 to 2.25 billion in 2050, an absolute increase of more than 1.5 billion and a percentage growth (253 percent) that was more than twice as great as the rise in total population of the underdeveloped countries (including China and India) taken as a whole (109 percent). This growth was uneven, largely owing to AIDS deaths in some sub-Saharan states. Nevertheless Nigeria alone exceeded 500 million people at the end of this period. This enormous influx of population into the ecosystem of the African states accelerated the process of deforestation that was already well underway in the 1990s. One result of this deforestation was the triggering of the first twenty-year drought, which began in 2007 – 08. This drought brought about a shortage of fresh water that was so severe that even the development of genetically modified hybrid strains of sorghum and cassava were unable to alleviate Africa's grain shortfalls. Indeed, the availability of water proved to be the principal bottleneck to agricultural progress in many areas of the globe in the first two decades of the twenty-first century before laser-fusion technology made desalinization practicable. By that time, Africa had been struck with a new plague, the so-called weather epidemics of the mid-2020s.

“Weather epidemics” are so named owing to illnesses that appear to arise from unusual disturbances in the weather patterns of a given ecosystem. It is still not clear whether the bizarre weather conditions that began in the winter of 2026 were the result of covert experiments by private companies that went awry, or were another consequence of deforestation or of the intense development without environmental quality restraints that took place on the west coast of Africa in the beginning of the century, or of some combination of many unknown causes. In any event, a general malaise leading to extreme enervation, but usually not death if dehydration and starvation were treated, struck the African continent below the 10th parallel. Although there were deaths in the tens of thousands, the worst consequences of the weather epidemics, like those of the twenty-year droughts, were avoided by a voluntary system of secular tithing in the developed world, stimulated by advertising campaigns and administered through various NGOs, including the Red Cross. The ability to transmit worldwide the images of starving African children through wireless handheld communicators, enabling First World individuals to “adopt” and monitor particular children in the refugee camps, stimulated a response from the international public that dwarfed anything that governments were prepared to do. The money thus raised was used to bring food, medicine, and water to the dyshygenic new cities of West Africa, and to the swollen refugee camps of Central and East Africa.

Medical historians now believe, however, that it was an indirect consequence of this inspiring outpouring that led to the third and most lethal of the plagues to strike Africa. There is an emerging consensus that it was the pirating of portable X-ray machines from the Red Cross facility at Kinshasa and their subsequent misuse that resulted in the mutated virus known as OOA-V. Like HIV, this virus can be transmitted through sexual contact and thus spread quickly through the polygamous societies of Africa, before leaping the Atlantic and turning up in the Caribbean. But this time, unlike the HIV crisis of the late twentieth century, the disease had been identified and definitively traced. Simple sputum tests were given to passengers of air or ocean craft; whole countries were quarantined (Equatorial Guinea being the first). The medical infrastructure of the African states, still reeling from the weather epidemics, was completely overwhelmed. This time, there was no commensurate outpouring of aid from the northern-tier states. Such funds as their people were willing to spend on the problem were spent on prevention and quarantine measures. By the end of the decade—2049—OOA-V had claimed, directly or collaterally, something approaching twenty-six million lives and it appeared still unchecked.

There was a pervasive sense that an international society that could be so rich and at the same time couldn't be bothered to alleviate, much less prevent, a human catastrophe on this scale had much to answer for. Sheer materialism had become more glamorous, more accessible, and yet more alienating. Not everyone was well positioned to succeed in the Meadow's meritocratic competitions. Some were poorly educated, some were ill at ease with technology, some simply not sufficiently motivated. Marx had used the term “alienation” to describe a psychological loss of self-worth, and this perhaps was the most disturbing aspect of The Meadow. Far from creating revolutionaries and criminals, its unemployed and underemployed persons felt themselves to be at fault and punished themselves through absorption in games and drugs of many kinds. The so-called helping professions—nursing, teaching—made a comeback as people yearned for a sense of community and common purpose. But there was really nowhere to go to find such a community: The Meadow was globally pervasive.

ECONOMICS

Although the path was difficult, states in The Meadow were best able to cope with the recession of 2005. Their recovery, however, was volatile and erratic, causing vast inequalities in distribution. As one commentator put it at the time, “it seemed that every tip of the boat during the hectic years from 2003 to 2009 resulted in a new class of millionaires, mostly entrepre-neurs, investors, and currency speculators, in one part of the world and a new class of recently impoverished in another.”¹²

The United States was identified throughout the world as the leading proponent and beneficiary of globalization. Yet the entrepreneurial market-state was by no means limited in its appeal to the United States, which had led the movement to adopt this model, even to the extent of persuading Germany to abandon its corporatist policies. At different times in the first half of the twenty-first century, this model was chosen by Britain, Germany, Japan, the Baltic states, Russia, Spain, Mexico, Chile, Indonesia, Nigeria, Switzerland, Thailand, and Singapore, among others. Each sought a weak, minimal central government with low taxes; each tolerated in some economic sectors a functioning anarchy loosely governed by largely deregulated markets and some degree of persistent corruption. Each developed a high degree of privatization embracing pension plans, power utilities, and, in some states, education and relied to a great degree on local ad hoc action-oriented groups to solve political problems.

The global society—The Meadow—led by such states proved to be a phenomenal engine of innovation. The Park and The Garden eventually developed the chemical etching procedure for integrated circuits that broke the silicon barrier and multiplied the speed of computers by a factor of 100 billion, but it took so much longer and the finished cost was so much higher than in The Meadow that its benefits were confined to supercomputers in those worlds. Hybrid fuel vehicles (which cushioned The Meadow from the oil shocks of the 2010 – 2015 period and brought forth $10-a-barrel oil for the rest of the scenario period), domestic and agricultural robots, nanodevices for the diagnosis of diseases and stem cell techniques for DNA repair and immune system regeneration, genetic mapping, the ubiquitous handheld wireless computer/television/telephone nanosensors to detect the presence or transport of weapons of mass destruction: all these devices were the offspring of The Meadow. Indeed even though the first computers were developed for military purposes driven by the Long War, it was the commercial success of the first Apple and then IBM personal computers that provided the impetus for the miraculous developments of the early twenty-first century. The difficulty was that The Meadow was not the best place to make these marvels available to the peoples of the world because it invited—perhaps required—severe distributional effects and these eventually dampened demand.

The Meadow's global economy led to lower wages, as deregulated capital sought cheaper and cheaper costs of production. At the same time, new technologies had enhanced worker productivity, so that for the first time the world began to see both increases in worker productivity and falling wages. Liberalization of markets had led to lower prices. As a result of these three factors, the supply of finished goods increasingly exceeded world demand, and prices fell still lower. Workers were too poor to buy new products, and wealthier citizens tended to invest rather than consume, shifting the prices of financial goods higher and the prices of products lower.

The Meadow ignored and thus weakened international institutions. For example, the IMF did not have sufficient resources to counter the Asian currency crises that struck in 2003. Japan's economy failed to revive, despite generous fiscal stimuli and real if grudging banking reform. When Japan finally liberalized its financial services industry in 2004, allowing ordinary savers to invest in financial instruments abroad, the government faced a choice: it could either raise interest rates to coax investment back into the economy or it could increase the money supply. Following the precepts of the Meadow, Japan did both. The yen fell calamitously and the Japanese trade surplus rocketed up.

These events occurred contemporaneously with a deep cyclical downturn in the U.S. economy in 2005 that was powered by the contractions in the money supply that were the Federal Reserve's response to its overreaction to terrorist attacks on the U.S. banking and transportation systems. The Dow Industrial Average fell to 6,000 points from a high of over 14,000. The Federal Reserve then took measures that increased liquidity. These steps weakened the dollar and sent investors to the euro. But the rising euro further dampened U.S. demand, and European exports collapsed. The slower European growth that followed resulted in lower tax revenues and higher claims for unemployment benefits. This caused the European Central Bank to tighten credit. When Japan and the United States felt forced to follow suit in 2006, the resulting tight money policies triggered a world recession. European, Japanese, and U.S. output suffered losses of 1 – 2 percent for the next three years in a row. During this period world growth hovered around zero. The recovery only began when the United States took on considerable debt, ran a series of sharpening deficits, and increased the global money supply.

This was the situation when a new American administration took office in 2009, stunned by the economic slowdown that, beginning in 2004, had for four years ruined the optimistic projections of the preceding eight years. The terrorist attacks that had struck The Meadow since the World Trade Center atrocity in 2001 had had a harsh effect on the economies of the developed states. Despite repeated interest rate cuts by central banks, the equities markets never regained their pre-2001 highs, and several industries, notably the airlines, were crushed.

The recovery from this recession had been enormously expensive and the new administration was committed to drastically reducing U.S. government debt, which at that time totaled $3 trillion (in a $9 trillion economy). Several steps were taken by the new administration, including some modest tax increases and even more modest cuts in entitlement spending, but the most dramatic tactic was the devaluation of the dollar, allowing the United States to pay off Treasury obligations with cheap dollars and boosting exports to unprecedented levels. Within ten months the hitherto chronic trade deficit of the United States had been largely erased, but inflation levels soared. As if by implicit collusion, once the greater part of the U.S. debt had been retired, the Federal Reserve tightened interest rates to halt inflation. A second stock market crash—over 1,000 points in a single day—was only a symptom, but a significant one, of the deflation to come. Stock equities composed a far smaller share of U.S. capital than in the 1930s, and so a sharp contraction in the stock market did not itself bring about a catastrophe. The borrowing that would ordinarily replace such lost liquidity, however, had been dried up by the deflation and the flight of foreign capital from Treasury instruments.

This one-two punch had shattering consequences around the world. Having seen its U.S. financial assets written down by its principal debtor, Japan then saw its export market to America evaporate. By the time the U.S. Federal Reserve acted, a full-scale depression had begun in East Asia. The Fed's action only made things radically worse by depressing American demand just at the time that imports were returning to competitive prices. In Europe, the Eurodollar market had caused European Union currency—the “euro”—to skyrocket, driving up European interest rates and choking off consumer purchasing power. The hitherto willing labor forces in Europe that had accepted tight money policies in exchange for a social contract now demanded higher wages to keep up with the increased cost of living. In 2010 the European Central Bank was repopulated by reformers, appointed by a new coalition of environmental and consumer parties. In the United Kingdom, mysterious groups of cyberterrorists, calling themselves the “New Luddites,” began attacking the computer systems that operated electronic banking and financial infrastructures. The computer plagues that followed may have been a consequence of these attacks, but this was never determined.

Especially hard hit during this period was the Asian subcontinent. In 1950 the population of India was less than half the 900 million it had reached by 2000; by 2025 this had grown to 1.5 billion. The celebrated Green Revolution that had, for a time, made India a net exporter of grains had been achieved through intensive overplanting, which had depleted both soils and the watershed. In retrospect it appears that the Indians of the late twentieth century were feeding themselves on the food sources of their children in the twenty-first century.

Nevertheless, the policies of The Meadow allowed India and Pakistan to recover. The water wars predicted by many analysts never materialized and the food shortage that followed the great drought of 2020, which might have triggered such wars, was ameliorated by ample U.S. investment in drought-resistant grains. The widespread use of English, computer skills that were learned during the course of Y2K remediation (most of which was done in India), and the reluctant adoption of the entrepreneurial state model by both countries meant that when the world economy recovered, South Asia was poised to take advantage of it.

The entrepreneurial market-state—and The Meadow, which is its extrapolation by the society of states—is profoundly indifferent to sex, class, religion, and ethnicity and these were precisely the prejudices that had held South Asia back. Relying on its highly developed merchant class, a skilled labor pool of many millions of scientists and technicians, a British legal system of property rights, and a large domestic market, Indian growth rose from 6 percent in 2000, before the first world recession, to 9 percent in 2010. The Indian middle class, which already numbered 150 million in 2000, doubled by 2015. The discrediting of socialism led to the weakening of unions, and this permitted a restructuring of industry that lured foreign investment. The environment was essentially for sale: multinationals were allowed to use methods in South Asia that were permitted in few other places. The sorts of planning required to modify a pure market approach—developing markets in risks, for example, to spread the impact of foreseeable events—require institutions strong enough and practiced enough to make such an approach work. Yet the very development of highly competitive practices rendered the creation and maintenance of such institutions problematic. The aggressive free-trade intrusions of entrepreneurial market-states made other states wary of cooperation, lest they be co-opted. With weak international institutions and weak allegiances to those institutions on the part of market-states, the political leaders of each state were led to lay blame on the other models for the imperfections of the market-state model each had chosen, rather than to persuade domestic constituencies to accept the costs of modifying the operations of the market. Such adjustments would have met fierce resistance within their respective states, and no government was willing to confront such opposition. The difficulty with the modified market approach of The Meadow is that market-states are less able to muster the political strength to mitigate the operations of the market (just as nation-states had difficulty assembling the political will to overcome the vested interests that grew up around regulation). The problem really was that the United States—of all the market-states—had fixatedly followed the entrepreneurial market-state model, and without U.S. leadership to find common economic interests, the society of market-states could prosper but not thrive. This failure of leadership was exacerbated by the common perception among the other states that world events—in genetic engineering, in currency flows, in computer innovation, all with incalculable consequences—were in the hands of the reckless and self-absorbed Americans.

THE PARK

SECURITY

Perhaps more than any other driver, it was the implicit erosion of confidence in U.S. nuclear extended deterrence following the terrorist attacks on the United States that began in earnest in September 2001 that brought the world of The Park into being. Once the hitherto protected states of Japan and Germany sought their own weapons of mass destruction, regional security alliances developed that excluded the United States from North Asia, Western Europe, and elsewhere, with important consequences for nuclear proliferation.

The Korean crisis that bedeviled the Meadow in 2010 never occurred in the Park because South Korea had earlier acquired nuclear weapons and the North was unwilling to test Southern resolve to use these weapons, even against other Koreans. Japan's leapfrogging of nuclear technologyhad set in motion nuclear proliferation to Korea, and this had the ironic effect of pushing U.S. forces (some would say releasing them) from the Korean peninsula. Once the Japanese navy went postnuclear, the Koreans demanded an American nuclear guarantee against Japan. This the Americans were unwilling to give, though various other assurances were offered, including the continued forward positioning of U.S. troops as a kind of hostage to Japanese intentions. The Koreans, however, determined to deploy nuclear weapons on their own—they faced potential adversaries on every frontier (China, Russia, North Korea, Japan)—and, after lengthy but failed bargaining, went ahead with these deployments, as a result of which the American forces, as well as their nuclear umbrella, were withdrawn.

The South Koreans had the wealth and the technocracy to deploy these weapons, but the world was surprised at the speed with which the necessary advanced technology found its way to South Korea, whose nuclear reactors had a spotless International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection record. In the summer of 2010 an event took place at the Indian port of Kandla that led to an unraveling of the true history of the Korean program. At Kandla, Indian customs officials acting on a tip demanded to examine the hold of a Korean ship unloading a cargo of sugar. Inside the 9,600-ton steamer they found 150 containers listed on the cargo manifest as “water purification machinery” destined for Malta. These containers in fact held warhead components. In time it was revealed that a lucrative partnership in nuclear delivery systems (China), fissile material (Russia), and warhead design and computer simulation (Israel) had loosely cooperated to arm, or partially arm, a number of wealthy but otherwise unlikely states. By this means, Iran acquired nuclear weapons, one of which was detonated in an underground test in 2012. Pakistan and India had weaponized their own nuclear materials as far back as 1998. Now two consortia of states—Iraq, Russia, and India on the one hand; China, Pakistan, and North Korea on the other—competed as suppliers in the burgeoning trade in nuclear weapons technology and delivery systems. When Indonesia acquired MRBMs in 2011, Australia pulled out of the ANZUS pact and began to develop weapons of its own. This in turn prompted a rush for weapons by Malaysia and Tokyo; in the region, only Taiwan held back, at least overtly, from nuclear or postnuclear weapons of mass destruction, and clung to the American security guarantee.

The American guarantee was abrogated when evidence was laid before the press showing that Taiwan had approached two Italian suppliers for technology whose only practical use could have been to develop chemical and biological weapons delivered by medium-range ballistic missiles. These disclosures confirmed what had long been suspected: that the states of the European Union were violating treaty restrictions on the export of nuclear and missile technology. France had aided Iraq by providing crucial technology at about the same time German companies helped bring Iran into the nuclear club. When international terrorism repeatedly hit the United States but not the European mainland, American alienation increased.

The public outcry in the United States at these revelations may have hastened the inevitable shift from a European security pillar within NATO to a separate E.U. community-wide defense system. After some modest progress toward political union in the late 1990s, the European Union now attempted to create a common defense policy under the umbrella of a European Defense Community (to which particular weapons and units were assigned) within the Western European Union (which largely replaced the role of NATO and from which the United States was excluded). U.S. troops were entirely withdrawn from the continental landmass of Europe, though they continued to conduct joint naval exercises with Britain.

The Fifth Yugoslav War never occurred because NATO forces were withdrawn from the Balkans in 2005 as a result of U.S. retrenchment. Serbia and Croatia quickly partitioned Bosnia with tacit European support and Serbian forces retook Kosovo the following year. This returned the province to the legal status quo ante the NATO intervention of 1999, with some residual terrorism by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) but with less depredation by Belgrade.

British and French nuclear weapons were assigned to the EDC, for use under EDC/WEU commands, on a dual key basis—that is, both the French or British commander and his EDC/WEU counterpart had to concur before any weapons could actually be used. Two developments soon cast doubt on this arrangement: first, the French refused to participate in planning that would target any of the states of Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, even after it was learned that Ukraine had deployed weapons thought to have been turned over in 1996 to Russia; second, the United Kingdom refused to take part in planning that would target the United States. The result of this dissension was the so-called Multilayered Concord, which delegated some weapons to the EDC for “all-azimuth planning” but not actual targeting, and provided some rather general rules for WEU engagement. After Russia's amalgamation with Belarus, Poland acquired a limited number of postnuclear weapons (possibly with French commercial collusion), putting the accord in question and generating inevitable pressures in Germany for that state to acquire her own nuclear and postnuclear arsenal. Concern for reassuring Russia, however, checked any German moves in this direction and, by 2015 EDC nuclearization, including the Multilayered Concord, still held. German access to a nuclear trigger continued to depend on British or French concurrence. That year Slovakia and Ukraine were made associate members of the E. U. (Slovenia and Croatia having previously achieved this status along with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and atomic demolition mines were deployed in the High Tatras of Slovakia.

Europe had set a pattern for the development of regional security associations that now sprang up all across the society of market-states. Authorized by the U.N. Charter and created pursuant to Security Council resolutions, these associations were created to deal with the sort of problem that the U.N. and the E.U. had ducked in 2004 when the Balkan crisis had erupted. Principal among these were the North Asia Security Group (including South Korea, Japan, and China), the West African Organization for Peace (Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, and Cote d'Ivoire), the South Pacific Treaty Association (Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Viet Nam), the Caspian Sea Security Arrangement (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan), and others.

These regional arrangements were a force for stability, but they were not without shortcomings. First, they tended to be relatively passive because, even following Security Council reform, it was still easy to block any U.N. endorsement of action. Various horrors in South Asia, South Africa, and Guyana had failed to prompt armed intervention. Second, key states with respect to a particular regional group—like Russia and the Caspian Sea Security Arrangement, or China and the South Pacific Treaty Association—were disinclined to participate, fearing their pockets would be picked by the other members who would rely on them for funding. Third, the true security interests of market-states were not especially regional, being connected instead through an abstract archipelago of shared economic and cultural interests.

All of these factors were in play when China seized Taiwan in a series of shrewdly planned, if brutal moves. China's navy and air forces were large, but consisted mainly of small coastal craft, antiquated Soviet submarines, and obsolete fighter aircraft. There was little fear that China could conduct a successful amphibious assault against the island. Moreover, China's nuclear weapons were scarcely suited to reuniting a related but recalcitrant province. It was rather China's acquisition of neutron bomb technology (aided perhaps by espionage) that proved the key to the takeover. In an assault that was murderous but highly confined, China attacked military targets with ballistic weapons that were conventionally armed and, hours later, irradiated the largely Formosan city of Tainan, one of the centers of the independence movement. It is estimated a quarter of a million persons died in the brief, two-week campaign. The United States no longer perceived itself as a protector of Taiwan. The regional group did not want to get involved. Action by the U.N. was stopped by the Chinese who treated the entire affair as an internal matter.

This event again focused attention on the U.N. and its provisions for regional security organizations. Security Council reform had already changed the membership of that body: the European members (France and the United Kingdom) had been replaced by a single E.U. representative. Representatives of India, the Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also sat as permanent members of the Council. Moreover, the veto power vested in permanent members was modified to prevent a veto that would trump action recommended by a unanimous regional group, which is simply to say that nonregional permanent members could not stop action outside their own immediate regions. By 2020, however, regional forces had completely replaced any “blue-hatted” U.N. peacekeepers just as NGOs had replaced the U.N. humanitarian arm, though it must be conceded that these regional forces were used chiefly to suppress separatist movements at the behest of various states. This paved the way for a universal consensus around a concept of sovereignty that would have been familiar to international lawyers of the second half of the twentieth century. One might call it “sovereignty with exceptions,” meaning that the classic view of impermeable sovereignty was qualified only to the extent that the U.N. Charter was held to endorse such limitations. This satisfied both large states—that wished to avoid being drawn into local conflicts—and small states that feared intervention. The state leaders of The Park considered themselves worldly wise: they did not chase after humanitarian crises; they were willing to accommodate the facts of life; above all, they sought reassurance in alliances with those to whom they were historically bound. This set the stage for great power confrontation among the three great blocs—Asian, American, and European.

CULTURE

In the uncertain economic environment following the American recession, a new destabilizing element appeared: the shift in the ratio between young and old. In 2003, Italy's population of persons sixty-five years of age and over passed 20 percent of the total; Japan followed in 2005 and Germany in 2006. France and Britain arrived at this figure in 2015. At the same time, global life expectancy was rapidly growing. As life spans increased, fertility rates in the developed world plummeted. As recently as the 1960s, the worldwide fertility rate (the average number of lifetime births per woman) was at 5.0. By 2000 it stood at 2.7—a figure fast approaching the replacement rate of 2.1. In the developed world, the average fertility rate declined to 1.6. By 2000, Japan was projecting a population decline of 20 percent in the ensuing two and a half decades. In Germany, where the rate had fallen to 1.3 by 2000, fewer babies had been born each year in the 1990s than in Nepal. In the United States this development had been masked by large numbers of immigrants, who included families with higher fertility rates than those of native-born Americans. The looming demographic crisis pitted young unemployed persons against taxpaying workers against pensioners. As a result of this tricornered struggle, by 2010 the politics of social security reform became effectively paralyzed. Governments were forced to make severe cuts in defense spending, infrastructure maintenance, and finally in health benefits.

These developments—unemployment, social tensions among groups, and a recession that followed government cutbacks—brought to power a number of reform-minded governments determined to protect the youth who had elected them. To invigorate their economies—and mindful that falling population rates could not be made up by productivity gains—states in the developed world followed the U.S. example and began loosening their immigration rules. These immigrants brought with them higher fertility rates and lower labor costs, forcing a revision of state-regulated employment practices that had stifled growth. In Germany, foreign workers rose to 40 percent of the workforce by 2025 and dominated cities like Munich and Frankfurt. At the same time, governments began encouraging higher fertility rates and investing more in the education and the productivity of future workers. In the high-tax states that followed the managerial market-state model tax credits were offered for taking intergenerational responsibility within families, including home day care for the young and residence care for the elderly. Because these popular measures directly attacked the existing social contract and affronted entrenched ideologies and interests, they opened up the politics of these states to reform; and because such policies brought youth into the reform camp, the parties of the past with their addiction to state ownership withered away.

The economic turmoil leading up to this revision and the demographic crisis that brought it to a head were certainly critical factors; so also was the growth in knowledge about how other people live and how other social systems function, which fueled immigration. The core E.U. was now powered by two late twentieth century developments that had appeared to be a drain on the E.U.: the takeover of East Germany, bringing a well-educated workforce into the capital system, and the proximity of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine, which enlarged the E.U. and provided cheaper labor and a vast new market for consumer goods once they were assured that their national cultures would be respected. Indeed it was the ability of the managerial market-states to recognize the rights of cultural minorities—including the United States with its decentralized constitutional system of federalism—that ultimately provided a key to success.

One important constitutional tool in the institutionalization of this respect for minorities was the relative ease with which devolved partial states were created. Regions in Italy (the northern industrialized region centering on Milan and Lombardy), Spain (Catalonia and the Basque region), Canada (Quebec and the city-state of Vancouver), and the United Kingdom (Wales and Scotland) all “devolved” into new states with varying defense and trade relations to their parent states or, like the two partial states that emerged from the breakup of Belgium, sheltered within the economic and defense community of the E. U. The results were generally positive: the new states retained the role of reinforcing the historic culture of their peoples (something the market-state had been in danger of losing as it became more meritocratic, more multicultural, and more secular). As one observer noted:

In social policy terms, regional organizations allowed different ethnic groups to choose their own cultural policy. In Europe, for example, demands for Basque language schools subsided as it became apparent that, while the Basques were not happy to be schooled in Spanish, they were perfectly happy to be schooled in English with Basque as their second language. By 2025 all of Europe and much of Asia had accepted the policy of “English plus two,” meaning that primary and secondary school students were taught in English and two other languages, usually their native language and one foreign language.¹³

In the United States, cultural groups were allowed, by constitutional amendments that altered the application of the 14th Amendment, to transform states to their own liking. This led to considerable migration within the United States as its citizens sought congenial states that catered to religious, ethnic, and political preferences. All these new “states” retained an open trade relation with the rest of the United States much like the one that prevailed in Europe within the E. U., and all adhered to a common defense policy with the rest of the United States under a much-shrunken defense establishment. Only their state constitutions were radically different: some permitted a union of church and state; some allowed the prosecution of “hate speech” and forbade books and movies that reinforced racial or gender stereotypes; some reintroduced corporal punishment, while others forbade capital punishment. There were feminist states where women were given certain affirmative benefits, including requirements that a certain number of officeholders and corporate board members be women; there were religious fundamentalist states that forbade commercial transactions on the Sabbath, required prayer in schools, and outlawed the sale of alcohol; there were ethnic states where English was a second language; and so on. In short, the new states permitted a closer match between the values of a certain polity and its legal rules—a reaction, it may be said, to the market-state's indifference to cultural values.

This ability to decentralize not only liberated the political evolution of the highly developed states; it also led to a recognition of the economic, social, and environmental interdependence of states. Green tariffs—which penalized imports from states that did not obey Kyoto standards for environmental protection—date from this period. States in The Park were well-positioned to create the World Environmental Organization in 2008 as a follow-up to the Rio de Janeiro initiatives of the late 1990s. States were able to agree, as they were not at Rio, on principles of allocating environmental property rights. The WEO administered these rights, sometimes arbitrating, sometimes auctioning off rights. The largest step forward occurred in 2012 when the WEO won agreement on rules for tradable licenses to water, fishing, and emissions rights. The introduction of fungible carbon dioxide emission rights had come somewhat earlier. Thus different regions were able to achieve environmental targets in differ-ent ways, while bartering development and pollution rights globally.

The creation of other multinational institutions followed: the World Commission on Biotechnology in 2010 and the World Commission on Internet Privacy in 2013. In some quarters, these commissions were viewed as high-handed and stifling of innovation, but the general view was that the society of states was better able to manage a new generation of multinational institutions in The Park than under other global approaches.

Finally, though total wages grew more slowly than in The Meadow, wage disparities within the states of The Park were far less. Indeed, the relatively high wages in the developed world tended to encourage growth in the developing world. The Asian Industrial Prosperity Conference and the North American Free Trade Association were able to raise wages to such a degree that multinational corporations looked to Africa to reduce their labor costs. This resulted in a slowing of migration to African cities as factory complexes were sited beyond the supercities. This allowed Africa to avoid the flight to the coastal cities that plagued The Meadow, with the consequence that hygiene and sanitation were sufficient to mitigate the health threats that had haunted Africa.

ECONOMICS

The Park was characterized by three great blocs of states whose leading members had chosen some form of the Soziale Marktwirtschaft. The decisive step had been taken in 2005 by the United States when it rejected a British proposal for a “virtual” regional free trade alliance that would have included Japan, and decided instead to pursue a larger NAFTA. The result was a hardening of regional lines and a surge of regional protectionism.

Within three blocs—led by Germany, Japan, and the United States respectively—trade flourished. By the year 2025, market-states within these groupings were exporting 50 percent of their production, even though most of this product was, at some point, made in other states. By adding value at the high end, and by erecting a forbidding tariff wall around the trading bloc, individual member states were able to maintain a large share of global profits through repatriation. At the same time, the protectionism of the regional blocs tended to retard the advance and diffusion of technology, and to reduce economies of scale. Conflicts over market openings for high technology became endemic, with charges of pirating and predatory pricing being frequently and acrimoniously exchanged.

Unemployment was relatively high within these blocs, usually above 10 percent in the years between 2000 and 2025 in the Americas, almost 20 percent in Europe—but a jobless worker with a family could draw benefits equal to almost 70 percent of his former net earnings (somewhat less in the Asian countries). There were generous child allowances, substantially larger for poorer families, to the age of seventeen—or twenty-one if the child elected to go to college or state-sponsored vocational training. Parents drew child-rearing benefits for up to two years if they chose to take work leaves in order to stay home with children; job rights for those taking parental leaves were protected for three years.¹⁴ Periodic efforts to change provisions like these in order to curtail government expenditure collided with the fundamental sense of fairness that pervaded states in The Park. True, innovations like domestic robots were more expensive than they might otherwise have been and the most efficient hybrid fuel vehicles were beyond the reach of most—a painful fact as governments began to enforce more and more stringent air-quality controls—but the price of these items eventually came down. Innovation occurred, but at a far slower pace and with more expensive development costs than would otherwise have been the case.

The principal external effect of the dominance of these three great groups of states was to restrict growth in the Third World by shifting the terms of trade sharply against raw-materials producers, though wages did rise in the developing world as corporations fled the high-wage blocs. Within the blocs, the main result was to delay innovation and increase costs to the consumer. Both internally and externally, the Park encouraged state fragmentation within the umbrellas of its larger groups and beneath the sheltering international institutions that it excelled at creating and maintaining.

While many persons feared a Y2K crisis over New Year's Day 2000, this never materialized. What came later, however, was an infrastructure overload that cascaded through interconnected systems, apparently coincidentally, on New Year's Day 2005. Many analysts now believe this event triggered the stock market crash in 2005. The flight to the euro resulted in a 40 percent appreciation against the dollar, effectively destroying European exports. When the world recession struck in 2006, growth in The Park, which had been sluggish, turned sharply negative.

The Park was hampered in its recovery by a problem that, though hardly unique to this particular society of states, was characteristic of it. This was the phenomenon of “moral hazard”—overaggressive risk taking pursued in the confidence that market-state governments would not permit truly large enterprises—or interest groups—to fail. It was evident, for example, that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation provisions in the United States induced many savers to make deposits in bankrupt banks and savings institutions because these desperate enterprises were offering the highest rates on short-term deposits. American savers correctly calculated that the government would bail them out when the crash came. Similarly, the difficulty for states in The Park was that, by removing risk from some investments, these states crippled the ability of the market to discipline investment and brought about costly misallocations. Although the hardest hit economies in The Park were India, Nigeria, and Brazil, all economies suffered from this phenomenon because the social safety nets of The Park created perverse incentives by distorting true market risks. Furthermore, the high trading walls of the three great blocs prevented the development of a truly global system of reinsurance that would have cushioned the setbacks of this decade.

Instead, states of The Park turned to the creation of new international financial institutions. In 2006, a conference in Paris resulted in the transfer of the functions of the IMF to new institutions, more market-state than nation-state in their orientation (and located outside of Washington). First, the Commission on Monetary Stability was given authority to combat speculation not by trying to outbid speculators, but by negotiating complicated baskets that bundled various currencies together and stabilized Third World monies by tying them to the dollar, the yen, or the euro. This commission was sometimes referred to as a New Bretton Woods, but its methods were decidedly those of the market-state. Second, the International Banking Board was created in order to oversee the capital adequacy of banks and their provisions for bad loans—not by mandating certain ratios but by publicizing the prevailing ratios and permitting shareholders to do the enforcing—and to prevent money laundering by much the same methods of transparency and public revelation. Third, the Agency on International Transactions attempted to prevent e-commerce from evading national value-added and sales taxes by licensing only certain firms on the Internet. It also aimed to create exceptions to sovereignty in order to prevent tax havens in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and elsewhere and to employ electronic monitoring to track liquid capital. It must be said that these efforts were not entirely successful, owing in part to corruption within some of the agencies created. Finally, the mission of the World Bank was changed from a lender-for-development to the Third World to a lender-of-last-resort for countries who could persuade the bank that avoiding default was to the economic benefit of the entire society of states, and not simply for the sake of the potentially defaulting state.

These institutional measures were of some benefit to the northern-tier blocs, but they did little to cushion the main effect of The Park, which was the rupture of North-South economic relations. Writing in 2020 and looking back on this period, one commentator observed:

This age of fragmentation and regrouping within the society of market-states took place on account of the rupture of trade and interdependence between North and South. When the developed states looked to the South they saw refugees pounding on their golden doors, driven northward by the squalor, crime, disease, and environmental degradation that seemed immune to human ingenuity once a certain level of population growth and resource exhaustion had occurred. When the undeveloped states of the South looked to the North for investment and assistance, they believed they received instead cultural viruses of secularism, materialism, racism, and neocolonialism. In both cases, the result was an increase in regional capitalism enforced by protectionist barriers to the import of investment or goods.¹⁵

Without growth in the underdeveloped states, the northern-tier economies stagnated for a lack of new markets. With their aging populations, savings rates in these countries plummeted and, along with them, the rate of new investment. In each of the principal states of the former First World, government deficits burgeoned as older populations demanded more and more services that had become more and more expensive (including costly anti-aging genomic treatments). The fragmentation of the polities of these states along cultural and ideological lines—the creation of interest groups willing and able to block legislation that did not buy off their constituents—paralyzed the adoption of the fiscal policies necessary to cope with these demands. This paralysis was worsened by the adoption, first in the United Kingdom, but later in the United States and elsewhere, of a system of proportional representation in parliament and Congress. The revenue base of governments eroded as capital moved abroad beyond the reach of tax collection. Many wealthy persons ceased to think of themselves in national terms and adopted tax residences in state havens abroad where their income could be sheltered.

Concern about the environment led to costly regulations, which had the effect of imposing ever higher barriers on the products of the undeveloped world. States like China and India that refused to reduce emissions found their products barred from entry to lucrative First World markets. Agreement to reduce emissions, however, meant imposing lower standards of living on local populations and immense capital costs on producers. Either way, the effect was to close the markets of the developed world, just as concern about genetically engineered foods had closed the E. U. to American exports, or concern about child labor had closed the United States to Asian exports. Interest groups in the Park struck alliances that invariably proved costly to economic vitality.

With export-driven growth cut off and without investment inflows from the developed states, the economic situation of the underdeveloped states grew worse. Overpopulation led to resource scarcity; resource scarcity led to deforestation and desertification, which led in turn to water shortages and migrations to cities that were plagued with disease, crime, and a breakdown in political authority. Except in search of lower wages multinational corporations were reluctant to be lured to these countries, even when enticed with large tax incentives. The other such incentive—relaxed regulations—had backfired in the face of so-called green tariffs imposed at the behest of an alliance between environmental groups and First World companies saddled with expensive environmental regulations. These provisions kept the products of poorer countries without environmental safeguards out of First World markets. Thus the opportunity to garner capital for infrastructure from exports wilted.

The effects of these policies can be seen in India's experience in The Park at this period. Owing to resistance from various interest groups—civil servants, workers in long-protected domestic industries, political allies of the ruling government, even religious and ethnic groups that had been subsidized—it was difficult for reform regimes to modernize the Indian economy. The socialist policies of the Indian nation-state were largely dismantled and domestic competition thrived, but truly radical reforms that would make products export-worthy were harder to bring about. Secessionist movements not only in Kashmir and Punjab but in literally dozens of smaller areas were a constant threat to the central government.

The consequences of falling water tables served as the flash point between the Muslim and Hindu populations relying on irrigation in the Indus River Basin. Pakistan had not participated in the growth experienced by India. With 65 percent of its land dependent on intensive irrigation, with widespread deforestation and a yearly population growth of 2.7 percent, Pakistan had no margin for failure when crop yields began to plummet in 2015. Neither the Indian nor the Pakistani government was strong enough to enforce restrictions on water use; neither had the legitimacy among its starving citizens to get them to refrain from attempting to drive away their neighbors in order to cultivate more land. The Water Wars of the Indus that began in 2017 lasted ten years. By the end of this period, 140 million people had starved or been driven from their homes by violence. (This dwarfed the 1960 famine in China, in which thirty million are supposed to have died.) International attempts at mediation—even the supply of emergency food relief—were rebuffed by officials on grounds of “Indian dignity.” The arrival of partial laser-fusion eventually would reverse the draining of the water supply by providing power to tap freshwater sources in the Himalayas, but this technology required capital investments on such a huge scale that only very large, wealthy states could afford it, and there were no such states remaining on the subcontinent. Pakistan had devolved into a patchwork of ethnic states of which Pakhtunistan was the largest and throughout which a strict Islamic code prevailed; India had fragmented into a loose congress of more than fifty states—largely organized along linguistic and religious lines. If these devolved states were too weak to enforce population growth control or environmental protection, and too contentious to ally in order to accumulate capital, they were also too feeble to wage war on a continental scale. One of the remarkable facts about the Water Wars is that neither side used nuclear weapons, though both possessed them, perhaps, one may speculate, because the small size of their respective arsenals encouraged them to husband such weapons. As a result, the soils of the subcontinent, though depleted, were not irradiated, and began slowly to recover as new genetically modified grains came into being, and population rates leveled off and then fell.

The lesson learned by the states of The Park was that regional protectionism tended to lock in high unemployment rates and slow growth in part because it locked out global capital flows and the rapid diffusion of new technology. Coping with these problems gave a new lease on life to government agencies that might otherwise have died with the nation-state but that remained and further hampered economic efficiency.

THE GARDEN

SECURITY

The U.S elections of 2008, it can be seen in retrospect, were a watershed in American politics, not so much for the new leaders in both Congress and the White House who were brought to the world stage as for the consensus reflected in the election results that the governance of the preceding years—both Democratic and Republican—had been misguided. The slow recovery from the recession encouraged protectionist barriers to trade; these further constrained the global recovery and invited foreign criticism that Americans found irksome. American pre-eminence in many arenas was perceived abroad as hegemony and contributed to a U.S./European estrangement. Traditional ethnocentrism in Asia coupled with mercantile trade policies intensified the sense of mutual alienation that arose between Americans and Asians.

In a stunning repudiation of previous policy, a public consensus in the United States emerged that the multilateral interventions of the previous twelve years had been a mistake. The steady, unpredictable terrorist attacks (and, it must be said the harrowing but fruitless “alerts”) left the United States demoralized. Many believed that, but for American involvement abroad, the terror campaigns would never have happened. The collapse of Haitian democracy; the televised melees in the refugee camps of Burundi and Rwanda, in which Western aid workers were set on fire; and the much-publicized case of a French commander at NATO headquarters in Brussels, apparently part of a vast network of agents, who had been stealing high-tech American industrial secrets in order to aid French companies—all these had the effect of extinguishing the enthusiasm of the U.S. public for foreign cooperation. Undoubtedly the decisive event, however, was the discovery that, through a complicated system of loans guaranteed by foreign government bonds, both U.S. political parties had unwittingly accepted huge sums of money from foreign governments whose role was hidden by the use of intermediaries. Disillusionment and disgust swept across the entire landscape of foreign policy engagement: U.S. support for the U.N., which then stood at 25 percent of the U.N. annual budget, was reduced to 10 percent by a joint resolution of Congress on the technical ground that the U.N. was not permitted to acquire debt without the express permission of the Security Council (debt that had in fact accumulated as a result of a U.S. refusal to pay its dues). U.S. foreign aid, which had stabilized at a meager $10 billion, was slashed by 30 percent with a proviso that it was to be phased out altogether over a ten-year period; funds originally earmarked for Russia to assist with denuclearization were cut completely when comptroller reports disclosed widespread skimming by Russian officials. For roughly similar reasons, U.S. support for drug eradication in other countries, largely Latin American and Asian, was simply stopped. After a fruitless effort to get NATO to intervene in the renewed Balkan conflict, the United States had allowed the North Atlantic Council to fall into desuetude, and at this time the top three NATO commanders were all non-American. But the most dramatic breaks in policy occurred with those states who had been caught in the campaign finance scheme: Israel, China, and the Gulf States.

The United States had played a pivotal role in the Middle East since 1948. The disclosure of covert campaign assistance by Middle Eastern governments to both American political parties coincided with widely televised, violent Israeli repression of Palestinian marches for suffrage in the occupied areas still under Israeli control, and the savage suppression of a “pro-democracy” movement in Kuwait (including allegations of beheadings). Many Americans suspected, although probably without foundation, that the campaign finance loans by foreign governments had effectively bought U.S. military assistance to both states. The result was the withdrawal of U.S. naval forces in the region and a sharp scaling back in security assistance. The continuous fall in world energy prices had reduced the importance of the region to American interests, but it was at least as significant that, after sixty years, the regional conflict in that area seemed no closer to resolution. The United States virtually withdrew from any high-profile leadership in the area, taking with it $3 billion in direct aid to Israel and about $2 billion in aid to Egypt.

In Asia, once the Chinese regime had been listed as a “human rights abuser” by the United States in 2004, U.S. statutory restrictions kicked in that had the effect of virtually ceding Chinese markets to European, Korean, and Japanese exports. When Chinese covert campaign assistance came to light, it appeared that the Chinese were trying to reverse this “decertification” process by corrupt means. There was some evidence that members of Congress and the administration had made promises to Chinese intermediaries that were embarrassing, and that they had made public statements that were plainly at variance with the known facts about Chinese human rights policies. It appeared that in many places Panama and Haiti, Israel and the Gulf, China and Russia—American meddling had been expensive and counterproductive; now this appearance was acutely enhanced by the fact of foreign meddling in American affairs, suggesting to some that hidden forces were manipulating U.S. policy.

Perhaps no line received as much applause at the Inauguration as when on January 20, 2009, the new American president said,

No one can see the future. But the recent past has taught us that we must let every nation develop in its own way, making its own mistakes perhaps but living and growing according to its own lights. To do otherwise encourages dependency in the weak and the constant drain of resources from the strong, and above all, interference in other people's business. No one—and no organization—is anointed to decide which nations shall survive and which shall be left to fail. We shall tend our own garden.

When the Sri Lankan massacres occurred, when the South African coup took place—even when the situation in Guyana potentially threatened a renewal of the boat people crises of the 1990s (only worse, because these refugees were laden with disease), even then the United States studiously did not intervene. Other states were in much the same mood. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic government had fallen over its insistence on observing the U.S./Japan Status of Forces Agreement's provision that American servicemen indicted for crimes in Japan be tried in the United States. A brutal rape by a group of American sailors based in Yokohama had become a cause célèbre; in the elections that followed, a coalition came to power pledged to terminate the treaty and to demand the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Japan. “The Occupation Is Over”—Senryou Teppai!—was the campaign slogan of the victorious candidates. The new government's pledge to increase self-reliance struck a welcome chord with the Japanese public. Few voices of dissent were raised when the Japanese defense budget—since 1989 the third largest in the world—was raised by 15 percent to develop and procure a new generation of cyber weapons, leapfrogging the delivery systems of the late twentieth century. These weapons primarily targeted information centers and networks rather than conventional military bases, harbors, and railway centers. With respect to these latter targets, the Japanese nuclear-powered submarines that had flourished in the late twentieth century took over as platforms for a new generation of smaller but equally lethal postnuclear warheads. The accuracy of these systems, directed by Japanese “black”—undetectable—satellites, permitted the Japanese to continue their adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while advancing to a newer generation of weapons of mass destruction that the United States had yet to deploy. Japanese rearmament was sufficient to check North Korean ambitions on the peninsula, but this had the unintended and undesired consequence—from the Japanese point of view—of bringing about a closer relationship between the two Koreas.

These events led to what became commonly known as the Iron Triangles, a series of interlocking deterrence relationships around the world in which, it was believed, a mutual stability was achieved through nuclear proliferation among regional adversaries. China-Korea-Japan; Germany-Russia-Ukraine; India-Pakistan-China; Iran-Israel-Iraq; Australia-Indonesia-Malaysia; Chile-Argentina-Brazil: these were the main Iron Triangles, with subsidiary triangles such as Singapore-China-Viet Nam, Germany-Poland-Russia, France–Germany-Great Britain.

The intense trade in weapons and delivery systems was responsible, as much as any other single factor, for the surge in capital growth in Russia and the liberalization of the Chinese regime once it effectively merged with the now-compliant island of Taiwan. Unable to either acquire nuclear weapons (for fear of Chinese pre-emption) or hold on to a U.S. defense commitment, Taiwan had been forced to negotiate a union with the mainland. With the Hong Kong Chinese and the Shenzhen, the Taiwanese had effectively bought their way into influence with the army with the promise of larger defense budgets and had managed to significantly liberalize the Chinese political environment. In 2018 the Chinese capital was moved to Shanghai, and Tibet was allowed limited autonomy as a theocratic state.

Only two states stood aloof from this rapidly replicating system of mutual deterrence relationships: South Africa and the United States. South Africa renounced all weapons of mass destruction and became a haven for persons everywhere seeking refuge from the terror of nuclear war. The United States, having no obvious proximate adversaries, devoted its attention to developing ballistic missile and anti-aircraft defenses that, by the year 2020, were confidently thought to be effective against the sort of proliferated delivery systems that most states were now acquiring. The preceding period of arms control and reduction was now seen by most commentators as one of intense danger in which the United States and other powerful states had unsuccessfully attempted, through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Missile Technology Control Regime, to determine what states would be allowed to have the weapons of survival. This had been replaced by a more stable international environment, it was usually said. Terrorism had steadily abated during this period.

At least this was the common opinion when, on May 1, 2021, the Russian government announced that it was the subject of an extortion demand and asked for financial support from the international community. This demand came from a shadowy group that claimed to have control over a biological/computer virus that could spread a debilitating influenza through the Internet. This threat struck directly at the weakness of international institutions during this period—for who was there to broker such financial support? Or to determine whether elements of the Russian government itself were behind the scheme?

The Russian government had promised to bring prosperity by relying on unique Russian capabilities in two areas: natural resources and the arms trade. The energy sector had been nominally privatized but in fact was part of a cooperative complex that included not only the large energy firms that had succeeded Gazprom, but also the principal banks and the armed forces. This system was highly popular with the public because it promised growth after years of economic stagnation. Arms deals flourished and Russian exports soared. Few realized, however, that Russian weapons development would include biological weapons or that it might be possible to create a “doomsday” machine that could spread biological agents electronically.

The classic view of sovereignty dominated this period and reinforced Russia in its assertions that its internal affairs—especially how to investigate and prosecute crimes—were finally a matter for its own determination. Nevertheless there were calls from many countries, including the United States, for an international investigation—even intervention—in order to head off the possibility that this virtual machine would be turned on other countries. For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a superpower crisis occurred that had the potential to lead to a cataclysm. The United States, which had withdrawn from Eurasian affairs, now seemed prepared to reassert itself in an environment fraught with peril. Highly threatening messages were exchanged over a hotline (a satellite system that sends only written, coded text) that had not been used for decades. U.S. nuclear warheads targeted a laboratory beneath a mountain in the Caucasus where it was believed the conspirators were working; no other weapon was powerful enough to guarantee destruction of the lab.

In the event, Russian police work—using methods that were not for the squeamish—successfully ended the crisis. By resolving matters without resorting to intervention, the society of states had strengthened the shared confidence that its members would be allowed to develop in their ways. The doomsday virtual machine was “dismantled” and handed over to a consortium of states that agreed to provide long-term credits to Russia.

This period had enshrined, as never before, the absolute equality of states to determine their own security needs. In so doing, the society of market-states bore unavoidable responsibility for refusing to protect some (such as Taiwan or the many states of the Third World like Sri Lanka who became de facto provinces of their nuclear neighbors) or to shore up the positions of those states least likely to engage in aggression (like the United States). “Let many flowers bloom” was a popular political slogan during this era, but gardens take cultivation and selection, whereas the society of states resolutely refused to prefer one regime to another, leaving it to fate to determine which one would find itself outside the stability-conferring systems of terror and technology. The Garden also brought the world closer to a nuclear cataclysm between the United States and Russia than it had been since the end of the Cold War.

CULTURE

The enormous wealth made possible by the technological breakthroughs of this period, especially laser-fusion, fueled the recovery from the 2005 – 2009 recession, but it was simply not enough to paper over the cultural chasms that opened up among states. These chasms were in part the result of the dizzying growth in the knowledge about how other people live and how other societies' systems work. A deep alienation arose between the states of the developed North and the underdeveloped South and also even within states, leading to a fragmentation of the world trading system and the creation of the first new states since the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In some parts of the world, the terrifying appearance of the weather epidemics followed by the OOA-V plague raised suspicions that government agencies in the developed world—the CIA was often mentioned—were deliberately trying to depopulate the Third World.

In the 1990s, an analyst from the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State had concluded that the “unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it…. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances.”¹⁶ He further concluded that these forces “have a powerful effect in undermining traditional social groups like tribes, clans, extended families, religious sects, and so on,”¹⁷ and predicted “something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy”¹⁸ which actually seemed about to come true in the wake of the commitments of the Peace of Paris. In retrospect we can see, however, that the disruption of traditional societies and values had exactly the opposite effect, rendering the South suspicious and insular, and ultimately fractionating the progressive states of the North. Moreover, one of the consequences of modern science, advancing automation, deprived the South of the capital benefits of cheap labor that would otherwise have resulted from globalization. With hostility and fear toward the messages that advanced telecommunications would bring, and without the capital to build the telecommunications infrastructure needed to exploit that technology for their own benefit, the states of the South gradually sank into a kind of silence, but not before they had received pictures, and been pictured, in ways that deeply alienated the two parts of the globe from each other.

Emblematic of this mutual misunderstanding was the massacre at Times Square in 2005, only one year after the final collapse of the remnants of the Al Qaeda network that had savagely attacked the United States in 2001. The movie version of the novel Mahomet depicted the prophet as a young man in defiance of the Islamic injunction not to portray his face. Perhaps because the script had been the subject of worldwide protests, large crowds were gathered on the evening of the premiere at a theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The movie's principal actors, as well as about two hundred persons, including many adolescents, were attacked with automatic weapons by a militant Islamicist group. More than fifty were killed. The pictures of the massacre—the entire scene was captured on video—were repeatedly played across the world and, to the growing consternation of many, produced diametrically opposed opinions in different countries. In the West there was outrage at the killing; in many Islamic states, the terrorists were regarded as heroes. When their release was achieved through a bombing campaign against movie theatres that threatened to shut down the film industry, the West embargoed oil sales from Iran (where the terrorists had turned up to a tumultuous welcome). This proved to be the first in a series of economic reprisals against various oil-producing states in the Middle East, which had the unfortunate effect of raising oil prices and slowing growth early in the century. There seemed to come from the Islamic world a surge of hatred that distressed, alarmed, and above all baffled¹⁹ persons in the West. In retrospect this should not have come as a surprise.²⁰

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, Muslims had suffered successive stages of humiliation at the hands of the West. The first was their loss of a leading role in the world economy as other energy sources—principally owing to laser-fusion technology, which brought the long-sought “hydrogen economy” into being—finally lessened reliance on the fossil fuels that were the source of wealth for many Muslim states. The second was the undermining of Muslim authority in Palestine through the economic renaissance of the Israeli state in the very midst of one of Islam's holiest lands, and the refusal of the United States and other powers to play a part in Mideast negotiations with Israel. The third was the challenge to Muslim cultural traditions, from emancipated women to rebellious children, as the presence of the new handheld television/computer/ telephones loaded with “edutainment” software that combined educational materials with entertainment formats—began to sweep the world. The main effect of the efforts of various Islamic governments that undertook spectrum jamming in an effort to disrupt the signals on which such technology depended, was to remove large sections of the globe from the international communications architecture. The Muslim world was the first to turn its back on the West and the ethos of consumerism, secularism, and libertarianism that was the engine of economic growth of this era. Not all Muslims were reconciled to the ignominious defeat of the Taliban in 2001, nor to the death of their terrorist collaborator. One consequence of the World Trade Center attacks had been a mutual suspicion between Islamic and non-Islamic cultures.

At almost the same time, the meltdown of a nuclear reactor in Belarus (of the same design as the one that curdled at Chernobyl in 1988) caused a flood of refugees from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to storm barricades hastily erected at the German border. In the next two and a half months, more than 1.5 million persons tried to enter Germany, where eventually they were housed in camps. Unable to return to their poisoned homelands, these persons were not allowed to move further west into Germany and were strictly confined. A wall, unfortunately reminiscent in some ways of the Berlin Wall, was ultimately erected around the perimeter of the camps.

Then, as if to show that no area would go unscathed, an indigenous revolution in the southern states of Mexico ignited a popular uprising in the economically depressed north. This touched off another mass migration, with eventually more than five million Mexican nationals pouring into southern Texas and California. Scenes of vigilante violence against the illegal aliens shocked the country, and perhaps more ominously angered and repelled the Hispanic community in the United States. In both Texas and California there were reprisals; armed Mexican Americans volunteered to protect the refugees; for some months there was a lawless state of affairs along the border. Throughout the nation, there was a mood of mutual disgust: non-Mexican Americans felt betrayed by those who sheltered and hid illegal aliens. Hispanic Americans, in numbers well beyond those of Mexican heritage, felt contempt for their fellow Anglo citizens who had appeared indifferent to Mexican suffering.

In 2015, a teenage gang led by a former Army officer known to the world only as “Prince” seized power in the area around Monrovia, in Liberia. There were at that time about one million persons living in this city without potable water and without electricity. Using automatic weapons and often accompanied by handheld minicams, soldiers from this force engaged throughout the next months in a campaign of terror and depravity that was filmed and sold to distributors in the West. An outcry arose in the United States in particular urging intervention to restore order. There was no G-9 (P8) or U.N. force available to intervene. The advocates of a policy of intervention captured the imagination of the African American community—Liberia had been founded by former American slaves— who detected an unspoken racism behind the president's reluctance to intervene. Many Americans, however, saw the matter differently: the problems of poverty, political instability, and what were widely perceived as “tribal” conflicts were thought to be beyond solution. Indeed events in Africa tended to harden the worst racial stereotypes in the developed world. A divisive and intemperate debate in the Congress over whether to send humanitarian aid ended by failing to provide any funds for such a measure. Rioting broke out in Washington, D.C., where an Afrocentric curriculum had long been mandated in the public schools.

These developments seemed to exhaust the global community, which had struggled with the immediate but attenuated empathy that instant communications seemed to evoke. In reaction, states of The Garden turned inward, and groups within those states ceased striving for cultural homogeneity and celebrated differences instead.

Ironically, it was the multicultural aspects of the developed states that fostered this mutual distancing. By creating a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry had more influence than the national political class of any state, the market-states of the early twenty-first century had also created a powerful weapon that destabilized other societies and, even in their own societies, brought forth violent reactions that sought to restore the cultural values that were apparently being cast away. International communications at first made famines in faraway countries moving and tragic; eventually, these events seemed tiresome and inevitable. International communications initially made the prosperity and liberty of the developed states alluring; eventually these qualities came to seem vulgar and addictive. The national political class was powerless to either lead a state's people toward compassion or insulate a state from cultural invasion. The fragmentation that then occurred in these developed states was only an inner reflection of the alienation their peoples felt toward the outer, foreign world: the contact with other cultures had reinforced the intractability of cultural differences and the felt need to avoid the frustration and danger of such encounters.

As a result, the market-states of this era were thrown back on custom. Customary approaches to allocations are not concerned with optimizing output or increasing the productivity of the individual. Many of the steps taken by the states in this era were irrational, if by that is meant the adoption of policies that cannot in the long run strengthen the economic opportunities of the society on whose behalf such policies are undertaken. Openness and candor are often sacrificed by relying on customary approaches, but openness and candor are not absolutes and there are other values—the preservation of a way of life, religious values that range from the sanctity of life to the protection of a certain structure of the family—that were protected. By mid-century languages that were almost dead in 2000 were flourishing. Art and architecture ceased to be dominated by the West and experienced a new renaissance. Educated persons played more musical instruments, performed more plays, and made more art now that echnology brought down the skill levels required for these tasks. The Garden, by subordinating the value of the race for wealth, evoked the value of artistic expression in many cultures that had almost nothing else in common.

ECONOMICS

During this period of increasing surpluses in finished products, little attention was paid to stable or slightly falling levels of food production. Grain stockpiles had been reduced during the middle teens of the century, but as population seemed to be leveling off, there seemed to be no cause for alarm. When in the summer of 2020, a drought struck the United States there were ample world reserves of foodstuffs.

But the following year the drought expanded, and by 2022 it was clear that the world might be entering a period of food shortages. As world stocks of grain became depleted, China and Japan began buying rice in large quantities; Russia attempted to purchase virtually the entire U.S. wheat export crop, which had been cut by a third by the drought. Prices started to rise aggressively: wheat went to $ 10 a bushel; soybeans hit $15, while corn topped $9 for the first time in history.²¹

Weather patterns around the world intensified the drought that gripped the United States and Canada: records for the severity and duration of winter were set in Russia, Poland, and Germany; dramatically uneven precipitation caused flash floods in China and Southeast Asia, bursting dike systems and polluting rice fields. The price of wheat doubled to more than $20 per bushel; a loaf of bread in an American supermarket cost $4; the price of a quart of cooking oil went to $8. Hoarding began to spread across the developed world, as images of starvation in India, Bangladesh, and Central Africa filled television screens.

There was, in fact, plenty of food for the world's population, although its availability—particularly that of proteins—was sharply constricted by hoarding in the wealthier states. The real difficulty was distribution, and here the collapse of international cooperation proved highly destructive. Nation-state institutions like the IMF and the World Bank had been discredited (the IMF by its doctrinaire adherence to the Washington Consensus, the bank by its perceived reluctance to follow that Consensus) and had fallen into disuse. The OECD had become a forum for high-profile quarreling and finger-pointing. There were literally no international institutions that might have stepped in to organize a worldwide, rational distribution system for food, and in any case there was no legal authority to do so. When in 2024 Viet Nam announced that it was joining a food cartel organized by Japan, China mobilized its armed forces and with some difficulty occupied Hanoi. The following year Russia massed troops on the Ukraine border and virtually coerced an economic union between the two countries to get access to Ukrainian crops. So things stood in 2025 when weather patterns began to ease.

The mercantile model had been adopted by many market-states—and sometimes by states that had tried, and abandoned, the entrepreneurial model, such as the United States. States as varied as Canada, France, Japan, Tanzania, Korea, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Ecuador, Iran, and even Norway all pursued this method of achieving market success. The mercantile market-state stressed the need for harmony among different market actors. On average, in market-states that adopted the mercantile model the incomes received by the highest 20 percent of the population amounted to no more than four times the incomes of the lowest 20 percent; in entrepreneurial market-states the ratio had often been more than 15 to 1. By sharing the benefits of growth widely among its citizens, a state following this model was able to justify subsidies to certain sectors and to maintain political stability. To be sure, some states without an almost exclusive ethnic and cultural homogeneity that attempted this model—Brazil did so in the early teens of the twenty-first century, for example—faced widespread consumer-led revolts. Still, states following this model seemed to be able to avoid the problems of organized crime and of street crime that plagued other market-states, though whether this was a result of their more homogeneous societies or (as in the United States) other factors cannot easily be determined.

Initially, The Garden was an inhospitable environment for the society of states, because it stressed the mercantile, competitive relations of nonho-mogeneous groups like a society of states. What was required was an international system that could generalize to the society of states itself the self-consciously stable and equitable obligations of the mercantile market-state. Because such an approach depends on complex systems of mutual obligation and trust, it may be that this could never have come into being without the famines and food crises of the early twenty-first century, which ultimately discredited mercantilist attitudes.

Prior to the famines, Asian business combines of hitherto unimagined size dwarfed all other enterprises in other countries. The largest twenty banks, the largest seventy-five corporations, the largest fifty trading companies were all Asian. This figure hid the fact, however, that intra-Asian competition was more cutthroat than ever before, with savage competitive tactics that, in an effort to gain market share in the consuming West, had led to falling living standards in Asia despite the fact that these had been the fastest-growing economies in the world. The intensely aggressive policies of these states—ruthless market penetration through price-cutting combined with heavily regulated imports of capital and goods—gave them trade surpluses and made them creditors but did not raise living standards. Child labor appeared more broadly in the world, moving into the developed states, which had not seen such practices since the early decades of the previous century. Moreover, greater investment was being diverted into military uses, as each of these states began to fear domination by one of the others when tensions rose out of fierce economic com-etition.

Among world business leaders, there emerged a consensus that would have surprised many of the businessmen of the twentieth century: all three state models were rejected on essentially ethical rather than economic grounds. The entrepreneurial model, because it emphasized personal rights at the expense of personal responsibilities, led to a kind of libertarian anarchy. The managerial model induced in the peoples of the countries in which it reigned a torpor and dependence on the welfare state that produced a youth culture of drug abuse, birth rates so low as to be practically nonexistent, and ubiquitous vandalism. The mercantile model had proved too competitive, too national to apply even to a handful of states in the same region—much less to all the developed and developing states. This model turned out to work best when it took advantage of a stable international set of rules on which it could act as a free rider, but it had had the effect of dissipating the very system on which it was parasitic.

In the year 2004, the chairman of the largest of the American investment banks gave an address to a group of international executives. It was widely reported and eventually took on an iconic status, though at first its impact was largely owing to the novelty of an American executive thoughtfully comparing the entrepreneurial and the mercantile market-state models. He said:

For the past fifteen years I have been calling for the establishment of an ethical state with a concrete plan for change. The policies pursued by Japan and others have succeeded in achieving the objective of social prosperity; this sense of cohesion is something we seem to lack here in the multicultural United States. We have learned, however, to live and let live in our society, even if this has meant a little distance sometimes. Now we must adopt a principle of “kyosei”—of living together in harmony and interdependence with the other peoples of the world—and commit ourselves wholeheartedly to this purpose… We have learned that governments matter, not as a source of welfare benefits, but as the provider of key elements of infrastructure such as education and primary scientific research, and the enabler of societal changes necessary to take maximum advantage of new opportunities. Now we are learning that government also matters as the legitimate arbiter of those decisions we are unwilling to leave to the market, decisions which those new opportunities have set before us.²²

This criticism of the entrepreneurial model from one of its most successful advocates stirred many. That same year the first of the gene-tech scandals occurred: a series of gene manipulations by computer-assisted technology that went awry and produced horrifying birth defects. When serious weather-induced food shortages began to appear the following year, there was widespread suspicion that these too were the result of corporate experiments with computer-guided weather control systems that had misfired. Although this was never actually determined to be the case, the public's outrage and fear gave immense momentum to movements that sought to reinvigorate the political dimensions of the state. The speech was thought to have prophesied something of what had happened and its call for an “ethical state” was renewed.

One unusual element of that speech was the call for a greater role for the corporation and for business leadership generally. “Today,” this corporate leader had said, “there is only one entity whose effort to create stability in the world matches its self-interest. That entity is a corporation acting globally. In the increasingly borderless world created by the microchip, politicians and bureaucrats will not be the ones to turn to for guidance. It is in the nature of politicians and bureaucrats to serve one country. But global corporations can only do business in a peaceful and stable world.”²³

This might have been the most controversial part of the speech; after all, the “gene-tech” scandals and weather-induced famines had called into question the accountability of global corporations. Some corporate leaders might truly act on the assumption that their business enterprises were responsible to their “customers, their employees, and society,” but most thought they were solely responsible to their shareholders. In fact, it wasn't clear that most managers would know what to do if such a broad social responsibility were given to them. They were not politicians or lawyers. Government leaders only knew one way—the way of the nation-state—to make corporations accountable: this was through law and close regulation. Corporations that could pollute the gene pool and precipitate mass migrations by manipulating the weather were hardly to be trusted. On the other hand, absent a culture of trust, there could never develop the long-term relationships of stability and responsibility that seemed so lacking in the states of this period.

In many countries there were riots against the offices of multinational corporations; some firms hired private security forces that grew until they were private militias. Most states were too weak to prevent this development; others had already privatized police and even core military functions, so that the line between the security force protecting the corporate headquarters and that protecting the seat of government was blurred.

The principal transforming event, however, was the famine. The collapse of an international effort by governments to save the worst-hit areas from mass starvation—evoking the disillusionment of citizens in relatively prosperous areas who began to fear for their own well-being—was replaced by an international consortium of business firms who levied a kind of tax on their customers—really a price surcharge on their products—to finance food aid. This consortium turned over its operations to government agencies when the crisis had passed. There is little question that millions of lives were saved. This enhanced the credibility of multinational corporations generally, even though suspicions persisted in some circles that the weather changes had been artificially induced. Nevertheless, investigations, including an antitrust prosecution for the price fixing by which the famine funds had been raised, proved fruitless and were widely unpopular.

When the United States and the E. U. were able to negotiate a huge revaluation of the yen in order to improve their trade deficits, they found that the purchasing power of Japanese multinationals had skyrocketed and that the largest corporate taxpayers, as well as the largest equity holders, were now Asian companies. It was as if these companies had bought the real assets of European and American states through a kind of novel lease-purchase—lending to finance trade deficits and then, through the revaluation, converting those liens to ownership. This too, however, had the effect of strengthening the move to give a political role to the multinational corporation.

By 2025 an informal code of conduct was developing between international business and market-state governments. Those governments that were able to enhance stability while maintaining an open intellectual environment became magnets for investment. Measures such as income supplements to enable families to care for their elderly relatives, property tax breaks to encourage longer periods of residence in a single community, and invigorated libel and consumer protection laws all tended to impede market growth; but they also contributed to the citizen's sense of well-being, his sense of place in the environment, and his growing assumption of responsibility. These factors tended to increase trust, which lowered the burden of legal regulation—greater delegation and discretion replaced rule making and litigation—and thus enhanced market growth by lessening transaction costs. Here the computer was indispensable, because informal networks alerted consumers to the activities of responsible corporations as well as facilitating ad hoc “communities” centered on common problems. These developments tended to raise citizen confidence that the society was able to respond to social problems and that society's members were willing to take responsibility for addressing these problems.

These structural adjustments did much to ameliorate the worst excesses of the market. Informal business codes enabled corporations to isolate and shun other businesses that failed to act in the long-term interests of the communities they served (including large wage differentials between managers and workers) and the instant information provided by computer linkups gave consumers an enforcement mechanism to supplement business pressure. But these adjustments did little to resolve issues of social justice and group identity. Many persons felt stifled in The Garden that emerged from this process of business-led harmony. While crime as a whole lessened in the developed market-states, partly for demographic reasons, the lethality and intensity of criminal acts increased. Millennial cults grew up even though the millennium had passed, and in 2030 the first of a series of computer plagues struck the infrastructure of the developed world. The world saw the first hostile use of a nuclear weapon since 1945 when an Indian religious cult devastated the financial center at Bombay by poisoning its water supply with radioactive isotopes stolen from a lab.

At the same time, corporate-led international policy was more successful in the developing world where its innovative system of institutional “tithing” was coupled with the business codes' emphases on environmental protection as a basis for developmental aid. Corporations could direct capital investment to those states committed to sustainable development and deny capital and expertise to states determined to despoil their own environments in an effort at too-rapid growth. What was lacking, as evidenced by the soaring levels of crime in these countries, was the mechanism for political cohesion. The market-state had survived by bringing international business leadership to bear on interstate problems and the society of such states was stronger for this move. But the State still had difficulty regaining its position as legitimate social arbiter of those moral and political questions to which business was indifferent, and for which an international institution, like the multinational corporation, was too acultural, too ahistorical to replace the State.

Nevertheless the new market-states of this era—roughly 2012–2030—had successfully used the business corporation to introduce decentralization and individuation into government, supplementing the role of citizens, who could only act in groups, with that of individual consumers, who acted individually and instantly. Historians looking back on the period between 2000 and 2050 will surely debate which of several factors was responsible for the sustained worldwide economic growth of this period: the technological breakthroughs of superconductivity and laser-fusion and gene modification; the spread of new and successful managerial techniques for both firms and countries; falling populations and a fall in the price of raw materials; a changing leadership that moved multinational corporations into a higher profile in providing transnational political direction; unexpected and heartrending events that exposed the lack of common ground among groups in the pitiless market-state. Much of the credit, however, must go to The Garden itself, which brought forth business leadership at a crucial time.

CONCLUSION: THE THREE SCENARIO SUITES

It is tempting to read these small narratives and conclude that there is an optimum course for the society of market-states to pursue. On the contrary, these scenarios reveal instead that any choice burdens our values, for these values are both contradictory and incommensurable.*

In The Meadow pressures from population growth were mitigated by high average annual economic growth. Cities, however, became scarcely livable. Elites thrived but the majority of persons were not better off and their prospects for social and economic security were constantly threatened. High migration was beneficial for both the sending and the receiving states, but ethnic heterogeneity threatened the cohesion of some states and communal violence escalated accordingly. The advanced countries largely solved their resource problems but they stressed ecosystems causing increased CO₂ pollution, deforestation, the loss of species, and widespread soil degradation through their dietary demands for animal protein. The Meadow was an hospitable place for technological innovation, the diffusion and implementation of information technology, biotechnology, and smart materials. But most countries fell further behind because they lacked the education levels, infrastructure, and governance systems to exploit these technologies. And new technologies could also be destabilizing, empowering terrorists and criminals and accelerating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As the chief advocate and beneficiary of globalization, the United States assumed world leadership in The Meadow, but a U.S. economic downturn sent other states into a tailspin, ultimately eroding support for the United States. The Meadow managed low-intensity interventions with characteristic inventiveness, but the risk of regional conflict in Asia rose substantially.

In The Park regional integration increased rapidly, bringing robust initial growth. This growth was eventually diminished, however, by the effects of regionalism and protectionism. Growth within the developed states of The Park was less volatile than in The Meadow, and therefore more sustainable; furthermore, the benefits were more widely distributed within the leading societies of The Park, enhancing the quality of life for more persons. Nevertheless, increased regionalism resulted in irrefragable positions about markets, investment flows, intellectual property rights, and natural resources. The United States was confined to a single regional grouping, the Americas, which was neither in its interest nor that of the world, with which it ought to have had broader economic intercourse. International collaboration was reduced regarding terrorism, crime, cross-border conflicts, humanitarian interventions, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, yet some national and international—though not global—institutions that had atrophied in The Meadow thrived in The Park. Regional identities sharpened political resistance to the United States and to U.S.-led globalization in The Park; this was reflected in the uneven absorption of new techniques in biotechnology. So long as the United States continued to develop cutting-edge military technology, there was no prospect of great power conflict in The Park, but there were far higher levels of internal and crossborder conflicts in developing countries. Diversity (through federalism) thrived, but true multiculturalism shrank.

In The Garden, the seductive melody of withdrawal, almost isolation, contributed to U.S. disengagement in the world. Traditional national identities asserted themselves. Mercantilist competition strengthened the state while weakening global and regional intergovernmental institutions. As the United States withdrew its presence in Europe and Asia, China drove toward regional dominance, Japan rearmed, and the risk of great power conflict for the first time since the end of the Long War increased when the United States sought to reassert itself in Asia. Nevertheless, Korea was able to achieve normalization and unification. The cultures of emerging market-states were able to protect themselves from historical annihilation. The need for community, felt but ignored in The Meadow, was addressed in The Garden. Most important, the ability to develop business leaders who would take up the moral and political challenges abandoned by states was nurtured in The Garden, though scarcely tolerated in The Park and out of place in the entrepreneurial Meadow.

Think of The Meadow as “A,” The Park as “B,” and The Garden as “C.” If we rank these approaches with respect to the security decisions taken in each scenario, A is preferred to B, which is preferred to C. That is, peace with some justice (the protection of nonaggressors, for example) is to be preferred to simple peace (bought at the price of sacrificing innocent peoples), which is still preferable to a cataclysm that would destroy the innocent and guilty alike. Or perhaps we get B/A/C—no conflict is preferred to frustrating low-intensity conflict, which is still preferable to a high risk of cataclysm. In any case, we can agree that C (The Garden) presents the worst option for satisfying the world's security needs. But if we do the same sort of exercise with respect to the issues raised by the “culture” scenarios, preferring genuine pluralism to mere cultural protectionism, and yet preferring the protection of minorities to their marginalization, we get B/C/A. Or at least we get C/B/A, for some will feel that the protection of sanctified ways of life trumps pluralism. In any case, we can agree that A—The Meadow—is an inhospitable place for the serenity, continuity, and community that protect cultures. And if we conduct this same exercise with respect to the scenarios devoted to economic issues, ranking sustainable growth ahead of recovery, which is still preferable to stagnation, we get C/A/B. Or, if growth alone is our objective, we get A/C/B: the insatiable but impressive engine of dynamic, innovative risk taking is preferred to the methods of mercantilist competition. In any case we must concede that regional protectionism—the world created in the Park—is a sure route to high unemployment, slow growth, and the costliness (and uneven diffusion) of new technology.

Moreover, we are unwilling, or we should be, to trade off our economic or cultural or strategic well-being because these interests are in fact so bound up with one another. Even survival is not an ultimate value, for there are conditions of life that are intolerable. So we have this unstable con-tredanse, ABC/BCA/CAB, or BAC/CBA/ACB, contrived—of course—to make this point: that an optimal constitutional arrangement is one that permits peaceful change as states shift from one approach to another over time and as these shifts impose stresses on international society that mirror the stresses felt within states. In the stories, as I have written them, it is that constitutional arrangement that allows a society—even a society of states—to transcend its prevailing approach that proves most successful. It is human agency that avoids the plausible futures that on examination seem so intolerable.

We choose which questions to answer in life just as studiedly as we choose our answers. Societies are creatures of their decisions to treat certain issues as problems, because such decisions enable societies to respond to those problems. Because there is at this moment a growing confusion in our understanding of the role of the State, our usual habits of choosing certain problems and creating our history by means of crafting solutions to those problems is at present ill-formed and confused. We know the old rules—to uphold the international law of nation-states—no longer command us. Yet we are unclear about the choices we are making in the new society of market-states when we decide cases whose ultimate significance is still hidden from us. In the scenarios just described, we can get some picture of the problems and opportunities that may arise as a result of our choosing different paths for this society.

We do scenarios to help us define what kind of world we really want, among many possible worlds, to clarify how decisions taken today will effect large-scale results later, and to make us more alert to the meaning of unfolding events. Thus scenario-based planning is not about solving the hypothetical problems of some distant tomorrow, but about making deci-sions wisely today. To take one example from the scenario exercise above: the first decades of the twenty-first century will witness the acceleration of two trends already evident at the end of the twentieth: the withdrawal of governments from the task of providing for the ultimate welfare of their citizens and the increasing assumption of this responsibility by the private sector. All across the postindustrial world, governments will have to learn from the experience and knowledge of the private sector how to create opportunity, and business leaders will have to learn how to manage with an eye to the public acceptance of their actions. Business leaders are wholly unprepared to take up the moral and political responsibilities that governments are busily casting off, and politicians and bureaucrats are seldom well situated to make the long-term investments in infrastructure that create opportunity. Yet how many business schools, law schools, and public policy institutes will plan this next semester's curriculum with these shortfalls in mind? How many are even aware that they are contributing to these mounting intellectual deficits?

This chapter, “Possible Worlds,” is not the last chapter in this book because it is not really about the future. It is not a coda. It is not futurology. It is about current choices, as these can be illuminated by the imagination.