Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 10

Introduction

Ours is a period of change – continual, multi-form, and

multi-level – technical, scientific, economic, and political.

Scientific discovery feeds into technical innovation at dizzying speed,

changing how we communicate with each other, what we can know about

far-flung parts of the world and how quickly we can know it, how we do

business, what we understand about the natural world and how the human

brain works, how many diseases we can cure, and the kinds of energy supply

we can utilise. In every corner of our lives as individuals and as communities

and societies, there is change.

THE THREE GREAT CHANGES

The theme is repeated in the big global picture. Five major issues and how

the world – its leaders, governments, companies, international organizations,

individuals, everybody – responds to them will define our future. To take

them on, change is needed. And three great changes at approximately ten-

year intervals over the past two decades will set the terms and the tone of

how that response shapes up.

In the 1980s, the Cold War seemed stuck fast, likely to be a long-enduring

feature of world politics. Yet in half a year in 1989 its basic components

unravelled, and in a second series of events the Soviet Union came to an end

in five swift months of 1991.

For the 1990s, then, the USA seemed set to enjoy a golden age as the

sole superpower while its allies basked in the security it generated. Those

comfortable assumptions were detonated in 2001, not only by the force of

the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but by the wide-

reaching, aggressive, and ultimately self-defeating, US “war on terror”. The

golden age was gone and there was a widespread sense of insecurity as the

9/11 attacks were followed by others in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere,

as well as by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Underneath that, however, was a different kind of security. Economic growth

and prosperity seemed broadly dependable. There were winners and losers as

always, but for most people in the rich world times were pretty good, and for

many people in poorer countries conditions were also improving a little.

Much of that was destabilized by the third great change of the recent era,

as unsustainable patterns of lending and borrowing fed a shattering credit

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