Demographic change often drives conflict. Its an easy to identify trend of history. This is true not just in terms of the changing populations of different countries within a region, but of their economic growth as well.
When looking at the sort of demographic change that causes political instability, often leading to conflict, a classic example is the rise of Germany around the turn of the 20th century. Between 1870 and 1914 Germany went from a relatively undeveloped and greatly divided region to a powerful, unified and rapidly industrializing state. In steel production, for instance, Germany's went from half that of Britain's to double it over that period.
This sudden rise of a new great power in Europe greatly destabilized the continent. Britain, France, Austria and Russia had previously divided the region among themselves. Each member of this so-called 'Concert of Europe' acted as a deterrent to the ambitions of each other. The rise of Germany however, prompted a new entanglement of alliances which led directly to the semi-apocalypse that was the First World War.
The slightly later rise of countries like Italy, Japan and Russia (as the Soviet Union) greatly contributed to the Second World War as well. History shows that the rise of new great powers (let alone superpowers) is often greatly destabilizing to the world's political and economic systems. The reasons for this are basically self-evident. In any given world with a newly rising power, the older powers will already have tended to divide up the world's resources and markets into their own spheres of influence. The newer powers will rightly see this as unfair and attempt to challenge the order. Sometimes the older powers will concede this relative drop in their authority and retreat somewhat from the previous extent of their empire. Usually however, this fails to happen, or at least happen fast enough, thus igniting conflict, and conflicts between great powers tend to be very bloody indeed.
This was the ultimate cause of the First World War, just look at a map of the world in 1914. Britain and France control nearly half of the world between them. Their navies dominate its oceans and are able to bully almost any other countries into getting their way. Despite having only a few percent of the world's population between them, they are able to dominate it because of the enormous lead their recent industrialization has given them.
Along of course, then comes Germany, not to mention other rising powers like Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States. In some cases, like the US and Russia, they are states already large enough that they have little desire to seek an overseas empire (although the US did seize the Philippines, among other colonies, off the Spanish after the 1898 war). In the cases of Germany, Italy and Japan however, their homelands are relatively small and resource-poor, and there are few valuable regions overseas the British and French haven't already invested.
Hence their attempts to right this imbalance, hence, the World Wars.
Now, at the turn of the 21st century, we are in the midst of a similar transition. The 'BRIIC' countries - Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and most importantly China, are rapidly expanding their economies, and consequently demanding larger and larger shares of the world's resource pie. China's oil consumption has gone from virtually zero in 1970 to half that of America's today for instance.
There are plenty of signs of this new Chinese superpower grating up against its waning neighbors. World headlines were made back in 2010 when it was reported that China's total GDP had finally overtaken Japan's, no doubt contributing to the former country's sudden eagerness to dispute the sovereignty of the Senkaku islands. Within another twenty years or so, it could possibly have overtaken America's as well, though many analysts rightly question China's stability in the long run. The country's military spending is now second in the world also, though American military dominance is expected to continue until at least 2050, especially in terms of its navy.
Despite this rise however, things seem fairly stable for the time being. The Chinese do not seem liable to jump the Taiwan Strait and retake their wayward province any time soon, especially with the American navy parked right offshore. However, even if China's rise to superpower status does occur without significant bloodshed, it is only the first obstacle to world peace that will have to be jumped in the 21st century.
Africa is hardly the first place you think of when you think 'world power', but rest assured, that label will be coming to it. The extent to which Africa's status on the world stage will change over the next century is truly staggering. The demographic reasons behind it are eloquently summed up in this article -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/16/the-amazing-surprising-africa-driven-demographic-future-of-the-earth-in-9-charts/
In short, Africa's population is going to boom from approximately one billion today to about four billion by 2100. The rest of the world meanwhile, is going to stay much the same. Asia's population has mostly finished growing. It is predicted to crawl from the current four to just over five billion by 2050 before declining once more, while the rest of the world has stabilized already, or even started to shrink.
This has huge implications on the world stage. Just as the idea of the Chinese and Japanese dominating world car markets would have been thought laughable in 1950, the idea of Nigerian and Ethiopian goods flooding world markets in 2050 must seem somewhat far-fetched, but it is going to happen eventually. Just as America and Europe have been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China and India for the past fifty years, the same is already starting to happen to those countries in turn - this time to Africa, and other poorer parts of the world.
In terms of sheer population growth, Nigeria is the next big story, potentially almost as big as China and India were in the 20th century. In 1950 Nigeria had a population of just 38 million people, by 2000 it was 123 million and as of 2013 it is already 175 million, putting it at 7th in the world behind Pakistan. By 2100 its population could be almost a billion, behind only India and China and nearly twice that of the United States.
Three other big countries to look out for are Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, all expected to have around 250 million people by 2100. These four countries will contain nearly half of Africa's population between them. Bear this in mind as we consider the other elements of the potentially perfect storm that could engulf Africa in the second half of this century.
Basically, these four countries are going to be Africa's equivalent of Germany. They are going to be very large, resource-hungry, rising powers surrounded by weaker nations. It is easy to brand such thinking as evil, but the reality is more complicated. To feed and house, let alone provide all the modern appliances we consider so essential to modern life here in the west - from cars to fridges to the internet, to their people, the governments of these countries are going to face enormous challenges. The choice they could face is one of economic depression, if not outright collapse, or aggressive conquest of their neighbors. As one may justify a man stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, a government could justify invading a neighbor to provide needed resources to their desperate, not to mention angry, populations. History shows that when the risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting, that is the basis for war.
There are many different 'resources' to take into consideration, but oil is a good example. Despite a great deal of ongoing research into alternative energy sources the world is going to be largely dependent on fossil fuels for at least the next fifty years. Coal, oil and natural gas account for 67% of global energy production, the rest is largely nuclear (13%) and hydroelectric (16%). Other sources such as solar, wind, tidal, biomass and geothermal account for just 4%. Fusion may be an option someday, but is unlikely to be viable, let alone widespread, within several decades.
While past predictions of 'peak oil' have so far proven pessimistic, with new discoveries and technologies continually allowing global production to crawl upwards in recent years, the peak will come eventually. Most current predictions tend to congregate around the year 2030. Currently the world consumes 90 million barrels of oil a day, while proven reserves stand at 1,500 billion barrels. At current rates of consumption this is enough to last about 45 years. The two big uncertainties however are future consumption trends and future discoveries of new oil fields, plus new technologies with which to harvest them. The most optimistic predictions talk of their being enough fossil fuels to power the world for as much as a 'hundred years'.
This is a much-needed breathing space for the world to have, but it is far from certain whether it will be enough. Global production can't just hold steady to supply the developing world, but will have to increase exponentially in the coming decades. The 'developed' world today has about one billion people, but by 2050 the world's population is expected to reach ten billion, and they will be more urbanized than ever. We may have enough to supply the western world until renewables or some other energy source like fusion can take up the slack (or always have the option of going full nuclear, as France has already done) however, the developing world is going to have far harsher options.
In short, the west is likely to avoid the apocalyptic implications of peak oil, but the developing world probably won't.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios, by the second half of this century there are going to be several billion eager Africans who would otherwise be on the cusp of industrializing and enjoying all the fruits of the modern world, only to be informed that the rest of the world has beaten them to it. There will not be sufficient oil to drag all of them into the 21st century, and what remains won't come cheap.
One can imagine the results of this future shock. To rising powers like Nigeria, the choice may very well come down to conquest or stagnation. One can imagine a new generation of fascist leaders, in the style of Hitler or Mussolini, coming to power in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia or the Congo, urging for the conquest of their weaker neighbors in order to provide sufficient Lebensraum for their swelling populations. We could see whole new holocausts carried out, Ethiopians throwing Somalians or Congolese throwing Angolans in concentration camps. Racial difference will be played up. A westerner may be confused. Aren't they all black Africans? But to an African, there must be just as little discernible difference between a Frenchmen or an Englishmen, or a German or a Russian, yet that never stopped them from committing genocide against one another repeatedly.
These new, expansionist leaders will point to the historical injustices that caused the current crisis, that the borders dreamt up by European Imperialists in the 19th century have no real bearing on 21st century politics, that it is the fault of the west that they have been driven to such desperation. They will point to past resource exploitation of Africa as a precedent, arguing that what they are doing now is no worse. This is still occurring in the present day in fact. One may think that Nigeria, with its large oil reserves, will have enough left over for its own uses, but this is unlikely to be the case when it is needed most. There are 37 billion barrels of proven reserves in Nigeria at present, but 2-3 million is produced each day, and most of this is exported anyway, 43% of it to the United States alone. At present rates, Nigeria's oil will run out within 45 years, comparable to the global trend, and just as its population passes half a billion.
There are plenty of other factors with could contribute to this brewing conflict, one that may be on a scale comparable to the World Wars. Africa's population by 2050 will be larger than the entire world in 1940. There is lots of room in which wars and genocides may occur. The continent is already wracked with poverty and conflicts along ethnic, religious and political lines. Nigeria is almost exactly half-Christian and half-Muslin, while Ethiopia is two-thirds Christian and one third-Muslim. Will they be able to co-exist under such strains? Climate change may be another factor in the long run, further straining already dwindling resources. By 2100 sea levels may have risen as much as a meter or two, potentially forcing millions of coastal Africans to relocate. Lagos alone houses twenty million people. Where will they be able to go?
Different political movements are bound to rise amongst this background, ones that, as always, you can broadly categorize into left and right. At the moment most of Africa is still ruled by authoritarian regimes, and even most of the nominally democratic ones have elections so biased and corrupt as to be unworthy of the name. Just as Europe and the rest of the developed world had to go through a string of revolutions, civil wars, wars of conquest and civil uprisings to bring about real democracy (England in the 1640s and 1689, America in 1776, the 1860s and the 1960s, France in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1968, China in 1912 and 1949, Russia in 1917 and 1991, Germany in 1919, 1945 and 1989, etc) Africa will have to do the same.
Early signs of this can already be seen in the slightly more advanced Arab world with the recent Arab Spring, affecting countries from Libya to Syria to Yemen. Countries like Nigeria, Sudan, the Congo and Ethiopia will no doubt experience more revolutions like this in the near future. There will be populist uprisings against dictators, and often counter-revolutions against these movements as they grow power-hungry in turn (as happened in Egypt in 2011 and then again in 2013).
And when I say the Arab world is more 'advanced', for the most part I mean economically. In a nutshell, such revolutions are due once a people have moved beyond a subsistence economy. Previously, with the vast majority of the population toiling in the fields just to feed themselves, they were content to live under a corrupt and self-serving, but at least educated, aristocracy. Once in the early stages of industrializing however, people overwhelmingly shift towards democracy as their preferred form of government. For countries like England and France this was around the 1700s, for the Arab world it is in the present, for Africa it will be over the course of this coming century.
To conclude, the enormous level of political violence seen in the world over the past few centuries, from the French Revolution to the World Wars, may come to be seen by historians as just the beginning. They were essentially the price for the Western World to industrialize and democratize. The Western World however, only consists of around a billion people, or just 10% of the world's population (in 2050 at least). Nine-tenths of the world is still relatively poor and authoritarian. The 18th, 19th and 20th centuries each saw far higher death tolls than the century before it as the world's population grew -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYXv75o-j14
If we're lucky, and our leaders know what we're doing, hopefully we'll be able to manage this transition relatively peacefully. If not however, and I do not make this prediction lightly, I feel the 21st century is set to continue this trend. Two hundred million people died in wars and genocides during the 20th century, this is roughly double the eighty million or so that did in the 19th and four times the amount that did in the 18th. Looking at Africa so far in the fifty-odd years since most of its countries gained independence, the signs are not encouraging. In Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia and elsewhere, the first few million casualties have already occurred. Who's to say that four or five hundred million more won't have to die in order for Asia and Africa to make the same great leap of faith into the modern era that the western world has struggled with so dearly?
No comments:
Post a Comment