In the First Half of the Fifteenth Century European States Had Continued the Dis

1 – Introduction

1History is not a very good guide to the future, but it is the only guide we have got. Because of this, the only way to understand Sino-European relations in the twenty-first century is to look into their history; and when we do so, I suggest in this paper, we also see that we can only understand Sino-European relations if we also understand the relations between both parties and the United States.

2"The farther backward you can look," Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, "the farther forward you are likely to see," [1] and the great forces driving Sino-European relations in fact only become visible when we look back a very long way indeed. In sections 2–4 of this paper, I do this, looking back first more than fifteen thousand years, to the end of the last Ice Age. In section 5, I suggest that this historical perspective not only goes far toward explaining Western Europe's place in the American-dominated world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but also reveals what Sino-European relations might be like in the increasingly post-American world of the mid and late twenty-first century.

2 – The very long run: Europe and China, 14,000BC–AD1400

3Through most of history, Europe has been a backwater. Only around 500BC did Europe's southern fringe become an important part of the world, with the rise of sophisticated civilizations in Greece and Italy; but by AD500, it was sliding back into obscurity. If we are to explain Europe's rise to globe dominance after AD1500 and its changing position in the last seventy-five years, we must first explain why the continent has usually been—as the Marxist economist Andre Gunder Frank once put it—no more than "a distant marginal peninsula." [2]

4The explanation for Europe's general insignificance in the larger scheme of things can be boiled down to just one word: geography. [3] The driving force in history has not been great men, culture, religion, institutions, or even accidents. Genetics and archaeology have shown conclusively that people are much the same all over the world, [4] and anthropology, history, and sociology have shown that—because people are all much the same—human societies have developed in similar ways all over the world. What differs is the places where the societies develop, and that is why geography has been the driving force in history. Geography determined that complex societies would develop in specific parts of the world at the end of the last Ice Age, and geography also determined that they would spread and change in specific ways across the millennia that followed.

5But if that is so, we might well ask, why has history been such a messy and complicated matter? Most historians, after all, think that their subject matter is so messy and complicated that there is no larger pattern behind it. The past, they generally conclude, is just a dismal record of one damned thing after another. [5]

6The reason for this confusion is that geography is itself messy and complicated, which means that the historical patterns it produces are doubly so. We might, in fact, think of geography's role in history as a two-way street: on the one hand, geography determines how societies develop, but on the other, social development determines what geography means. What we normally call 'history' is nothing more than the back-and-forth between geography and social development. [6]

7This is a very abstract way to put things. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz rightly observed forty years ago that "theoretical formulations [in the social sciences] hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don't make much sense or hold much interest apart from them"; [7] consequently, the only way to show how the interaction between geography and social development actually worked to shape the past (and how it will continue to work to shape the future) is to plunge into the details. This is what I will now do, providing a brief history of the world in a few thousand words.

8We need to start with the end of the Ice Age, which marked one of the two really important changes since modern humans evolved. When the world warmed up at the end of the last Ice Age, around 9600BC, [8] plants and animals multiplied madly as the solar energy available to them increased. As often happens with population explosions, however, the increase in hungry mouths outran the resources that had made the boom possible, bringing on Malthusian crises and population crashes. All over the world, humans reacted to scarcity by managing their food sources more intensively (herding animals and trying to breed them in captivity, and replanting, watering, and weeding particularly good stands of wild plants). These interventions changed the selective pressures operating on the plants and animals being eaten, pushing them down new evolutionary paths; and in one part of the world, geography determined that the new selective pressures would have spectacular results.

9The part of the world in question was a band of 'lucky latitudes' stretching in the Old World from China to the Mediterranean and in the New from Peru to Mexico (Figure 1). [9] Here, human intervention modified the genetic structures of the plants and animals people were eating to the point that these other species evolved into forms that could only survive with continued human intervention. Without really knowing what they were doing, the people of the lucky latitudes turned wolves into dogs, wild aurochs into cattle, and wild rice and barley into domesticated versions that could only grow if humans harvested and replanted them. Botanists call this process domestication, and with it, the hunters and gatherers of the lucky latitudes turned into farmers.

Figure 1

The "lucky latitudes": geography begins driving social development down different paths, 9000-5000BC

The "lucky latitudes": geography begins driving social development down different paths, 9000-5000BC

10Geography explains why farming began in these latitudes rather than in Siberia, central Africa, or anywhere else on earth, as the biologist Jared Diamond explains in his classic study Guns, Germs, and Steel. [10] The world, Diamond observes, has roughly 200,000 species of plants, but humans can only eat about 2,000 of these, and only about 200 have much genetic potential for domestication. Not many of these have seeds big enough to be worth the effort of harvesting, preparing, and eating them; and of the 56 plants with edible seeds weighing at least 10 milligrams, 50 originally grew wild in the lucky latitudes, and just 6 in the whole of the rest of the planet. Before twentieth-century science came along to speed up the process of genetic modification, humans had only managed to domesticate fourteen species of mammals weighing over a hundred pounds; nine of these were natives of the lucky latitudes.

11Farming began in the lucky latitudes not because the people who lived there were smarter, or more energetic, or had better institutions, cultures, or religions than people in other places, but because geography made it easier for people to domesticate plants and animals in the lucky latitudes than anywhere else on earth. Given that people are much the same everywhere, it is therefore no surprise that the world's first farmers appeared in the lucky latitudes; nor should we be surprised that out of all the regions within the lucky latitudes, it was Southwest Asia, which has the highest concentrations of potentially domesticable plants and animals of all, that led the way.

12The first signs of domestication—unnaturally large seeds on plants and unnaturally small bodies on animals—appeared in Southwest Asia around 9500BC, just a few generations after the end of the Ice Age. [11] By 7500BC, the region archaeologists call the "hilly flanks"—roughly the borderlands of modern Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran—was filling up with farming villages.

13At the other end of the lucky latitudes, the region we now call China also had high concentrations of domesticable plants and animals, but not as high as the hilly flanks. The first signs of domesticated rice appear between the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers around 7500BC, and farming villages by 5500BC. Millet and pigs followed over the next millennium. In Pakistan, barley, wheat, sheep, and goats were domesticated on roughly the same schedule; squash, peanuts, and teosinte (the ancestor of maize) were domesticated in Mexico between 6500 and 3250BC; and quinoa, llamas, and alpacas in Peru between 6500 and 2750BC. The fit between density of potential domesticates and date of domestication is almost perfect.

14Domestication had its downsides—farmers typically worked harder than foragers, and ate more monotonous, less healthy diets—but it also had one huge plus: farming produced much more food per hectare of land. As their food supply grew, humans—like any other animal—turned the extra calories into more of themselves. Villages grew, population densities rose, and farmers spread out across the landscape. [12] It took farming about five thousand years to spread from its initial heartland in Southwest Asia all the way across Europe, and a similar span of time saw it expand from its second-oldest core, in China, as far as Borneo and Malaysia (Figure 2).

Figure 2

First farmers: the spread of agriculture from its oldest heartlands, in Southwest Asia and East Asia

First farmers: the spread of agriculture from its oldest heartlands, in Southwest Asia and East Asia

15Farming did not, however, advance equally quickly in every direction. It took just as long—more than four thousand years—for agriculture to spread the few kilometres from the hilly flanks down into the plains of what is now Iraq as it took it to spread all the way to the shores of the Atlantic. This was because the long trip from the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris to the Seine basin all took place within what geographers call a single biome (a zone where the climate and ecology allow similar types of plants and animals to flourish), while the short trip down to the floodplains of the Euphrates and Tigris involved crossing into a very different biome.

16In Europe and the hilly flanks, there is usually enough rain to support barley, wheat, sheep, goats, and cattle, but in Iraq, that is rarely the case. To succeed in Iraq, farmers need to be able to organize fairly sophisticated irrigation systems, and for several thousand years after farming began, almost no one could manage this. Not until around 5000BC did social development reach the point that villagers could build and maintain permanent irrigation systems, but when development did reach this level, it changed the meaning of geography. Before 5000BC, the parched plains of Iraq had been almost uninhabitable; after 5000BC, irrigation made them into more productive places than farming's original heartland in the hilly flanks.

17Irrigation allowed farmers to harness the power of the great rivers, producing higher yields that could feed true cities. By 3000BC, there were 45,000 people living at Uruk, defended by fortifications and ruled by a centralized government whose bureaucrats had invented writing. Irrigated river valleys could support much larger states than rain-fed farming, and, again by 3000BC, Egypt's first pharaohs had united a thousand kilometres of territory along the Nile Valley.

18Mastery of rivers drove social development upward, only for rising social development to change the meaning of geography again. Cities and governments required rivers for irrigation and transport, but as states grew and turned into genuine empires, [13] they learned that while controlling a river was good, controlling a sea was even better. For many centuries, no state was developed enough to control the Mediterranean Sea, which meant that pirates could infest its waters, generating instability and chaos. Egyptian texts refer to these raiders as the Peoples of the Sea, and tell us that by 1200BC they had become so disruptive that they sacked and plundered almost every palace between Greece and Israel. [14] A dark age ensued, but by 500BC development had recovered and reached new heights. Phoenicians (from roughly the area of modern Lebanon) and Greeks founded colonies in Italy, France, and Spain, and by the first century BC Rome had conquered the shores of the entire sea. [15] Once again, rising development changed the meaning of geography, turning the Mediterranean from a barrier to peace and prosperity into a commercial superhighway; and once again, new meanings of geography pushed social development higher than ever before.

19By the first century AD, a continuous chain of empires ran from China to the Britain. The Roman and Han Chinese Empires each had probably sixty million subjects. Rome, the biggest city in the world, had about a million residents, and the Han capital at Luoyang had about half that number. Tens of thousand of merchant ships were plying the seas and billions of coins were in circulation. Social development rose higher than ever before, and—predictably—the meaning of geography began changing again.

20Nearly ten thousand years had passed since the end of the Ice Age, and in this time, the steppes—a band of arid, treeless grasslands running from Manchuria in the east to Hungary in the west (Figure 3)—had been even less welcoming than Iraq had been before the invention of irrigation. The only way for humans to survive there was by raising animals that could eat the grass, and then eating the animals. As the early first millennium BC went on, however, the soaring social development in the agricultural empires presented horse-riding nomads on the steppes with a new way to live: they could plunder the empires and extort bribes from their rulers, much as the Peoples of the Sea had done in the east Mediterranean a thousand years earlier.

Figure 3

The steppe highway

The steppe highway

21By the second century AD, the steppes had turned into a new highway, with mounted nomads moving rapidly across Eurasia. This, though, had much more devastating effects than the movements of the Peoples of the Sea. Up till the second century AD, the disease pools of the Chinese and Mediterranean worlds had been almost entirely separate, but the sharp increase in migration now merged them. This generated germs against which few people had antibodies. Great plagues broke out in Rome and China in the 160s, killing perhaps one third of the population, although that number can only be a guess. The consequences, though, are all too obvious. From one end of Eurasia to the other, the ancient empires proved unable to cope with the new facts of geography, and in the third century, they started disintegrating.

22For the next thousand years, the Eurasian empires cycled through periods of collapse and consolidation, never solving the problem of how to deal with steppe nomads. [16] One after another, the Huns, Xiongnu, Shaka, Yuezhi, Turks, Mongols, and others burst out of central Asia to loot and overwhelm the richest of the agricultural societies, leaving ruins in their wake. In western Eurasia, a series of rulers—the Byzantine Justinian in the sixth century, the Persian Khusrau in the seventh, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs of the Arabs in the eighth, the Frankish Charlemagne in the early ninth—tried to recreate something like the Roman Empire, only to fail. Eastern rulers did rather better, and by 1100, Chinese social development had regained the levels that Rome had seen a millennium earlier. However, the harsh new geography that required agricultural empires to coexist with steppe nomads prevented the farming societies from pushing development any higher; in the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan and his successors devastated the empires more thoroughly than ever before, and in the fourteenth the Black Death carried off somewhere between one third and one half of all Europeans, Arabs, and Chinese.

23By AD1400, it would have been easy to conclude (as the famous Arab intellectual Ibn Khaldûn did) that history was cyclical. Thanks to the new meanings of the steppes, Eurasia seemed stuck, with even its grandest empires unable to surpass the achievements of the ancient Romans. In parts of the world where agriculture had been invented independently, such as the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, social development was continuing to rise, but these societies still had very far to go to catch up. The fifteenth century Aztecs and Inca still lived in the Stone Age, while even the greatest of the African kingdoms, at Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, remained preliterate. Agricultural empires, it seemed, were the most developed societies humans would ever create.

3 – Europe triumphant, 1400-1850

24This prediction, of course, would have been badly wrong. Although no one realized it at the time, the high point of Chinese social development in the twelfth century had already produced two inventions that would change the meanings of geography—and the course of history—more dramatically than anything that had gone before. The main beneficiary of these inventions, though, would be Europe, not China.

25The first invention was reliable oceangoing ships. Viking longboats had crossed the Atlantic around AD1000 and Polynesian canoes had worked their way all across the Pacific by 1200; but it was twelfth and thirteenth century Chinese inventions—magnetic compasses, watertight compartments, superior rigging—that made voyages crossing thousands of miles of open ocean both dependable and affordable. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Arab sailors adopted and adapted these innovations, spreading superior versions across the Indian Ocean and into the Mediterranean.

26Once again, though, geography was decisive. In the early fifteenth century, China had the finest ships in the world, and its admiral Zheng He led hundreds of them (including the biggest wooden sailing ships ever built) all the way to East Africa, Mecca, and probably the north coast of Australia. Chinese officials, however, quickly realized that geography made these voyages unprofitable. East Asia's markets were the richest in the world, which meant that there were few incentives for Chinese ships to sail to India or Europe, and even fewer to plunge into the uncharted wastes of the Pacific. In the 1430s the long-distance voyages were discontinued.

27For fifteenth century Europeans, however, geography created very different incentives. They too recognized that Asian markets were the world's richest, and, having learned from Arabs how to build ships that could potentially cross oceans, they began looking for ways to sail to the Orient. Initially, Italians (best placed to learn from the Arabs in the Mediterranean) led the way, but Portuguese and Spanish sailors (whose homelands had easier access to the Atlantic) quickly displaced them.

28Cleverly adapting the latest shipbuilding ideas to suit smaller boats, Portuguese skippers nosed down the west coast of Africa, looking for a sea route into the Indian Ocean. In 1498 they found it, and Vasco da Gama braved the Cape of Storms (as the Portuguese initially called the Cape of Good Hope) to reach India and realize profits beyond the dreams of avarice.

29By this time, West European ships were the most seaworthy in the world, but their real potential only became clear when they were paired with the second great invention of this period, the gun. Once again, the technology began in the East. Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder around AD850, and were soon using it to make fireworks. By 1000 Chinese armies were spraying burning gunpowder on their enemies, and a carving made in a cave in Sichuan around 1150 seems to show a true gun, using the explosive force of gunpowder to propel a metal bullet out of a tube at lethal speed. The oldest actual example of a gun, found on a battlefield in Manchuria, probably dates to 1288.

30The new invention was a huge hit. No invention, in fact, had ever spread so quickly. By 1326, less than forty years later, it had leaped eight thousand kilometres to Italy, where a manuscript from Florence describes a brass cannon. But at that point, geography once again intervened. In the early and mid fourteenth century, Chinese gunners made great strides in cannon design as they fought the brutal civil wars that created the Ming dynasty; but after the 1360s, these advances slowed to a crawl. The explanation seems to be that the civil wars involved a lot of sieges, naval battles on the Yangzi River, and clashes between large, slow-moving formations of infantry—all of which provided good targets for the clumsy, slow-firing guns of the day, and gave artillerymen strong incentives to keep improving their weapons. Once the civil wars were over, though, China's main enemies once again became the horse nomads of the steppes, and against these fast-moving targets, even the best fourteenth century guns were little use. Investment and innovation stagnated. Western Europeans, however, never ran out of city walls, infantry, and ships to bombard, and they kept pouring money and energy into improving their guns. By the 1490s, when da Gama reached India, European firepower—like European ships—was the best in the world. [17]

31Over the next two centuries, the combination of ships and guns transformed the meanings of geography in two ways. The first was that by 1700, Western European guns had become so effective that they actually could be used to defeat horse nomads, and the rulers of China, India, Persia, Turkey, and Russia—buying European guns, hiring European gunners, and then producing their own imitations of both—now used firearms to close the steppe highway. As late as 1739, Afghan horsemen sacked Delhi and carried off the Mughal emperor's Peacock Throne, but this was the riders' last 'hurrah.' The steppes no longer presented a threat to Eurasia's empires.

32The second way that ships and guns changed the meaning of geography was by opening the oceans. Western Europe had always been a backwater because it lay such a long way from the real centres of action in Eurasia's lucky latitudes. The Atlantic Ocean, which was too big for anyone to cross it easily, had acted as a barrier sealing Western Europe off. But once China's surging social development had produced ships that could sail for thousands of kilometres, that changed. Suddenly, around AD1500, the formerly unimportant fact that East Asians needed to sail ten thousand kilometres (using the prevailing winds and tides) to reach America while Western Europeans only needed to sail half that distance became the most important fact in the world (Figure 4).

Figure 4

The Atlantic highway: Europe's geographical advantage over China once social development reached the point that the oceans could easily be crossed

The Atlantic highway: Europe's geographical advantage over China once social development reached the point that the oceans could easily be crossed

33Eleven thousand years earlier, geography had made it easier for agriculture to be invented in the hilly flanks than anywhere else, and, because people were all the same, this was where the invention had happened. Now geography was making it easier for Europeans to discover, plunder, and colonize the Americas than for anyone else; and, people still being all the same, it was Europeans rather than East Asians who did so.

34As the Atlantic turned into a new kind of superhighway, Western European social development surged upward. The Atlantic was the perfect ocean, big enough that very different ecologies and societies flourished around its shores, but small enough that seventeenth and eighteenth century ships could cross it easily, trading profitably at each point of call. Historians regularly call this "triangular" trade (Figure 5). A businessman could start in Liverpool with a boatload of textiles or guns and sail to Senegal, exchanging them, at a profit, for slaves. He could then carry the slaves to Jamaica and trade them (again at a profit) for sugar, which he could bring back to England to sell for more profits, before buying a new consignment of finished goods and setting off to Africa again. Alternatively, a Bostonian could take rum to Africa and swap it for slaves, bring the slaves to the Caribbean and exchange them for molasses, and then bring the molasses back to New England to make into more rum.

Figure 5

The triangular trades of the Atlantic economy

The triangular trades of the Atlantic economy

35Europe's conquest of America had created something entirely new: an integrated intercontinental market with a geographical division of labour. Increasingly, Western Europeans reacted by selling their labour in the market place and working longer hours, in order to raise cash to buy a host of little luxuries that had never been available before. Quite ordinary people began consuming tea, coffee, sugar, newspapers, tobacco, and spices—which meant more slaves were dragged across the Atlantic, more acres were cleared for plantations, and more factories and shops were opened. Sales rose, economies of scale were achieved, and prices fell. The world had never seen such an engine for generating wealth.

36Moneymaking, though, was just the beginning. In the sixteenth century, Europeans realized that if they could understand how the physical world really worked, and above all how the winds, tides, and stars moved, there was almost no limit to what the Atlantic market would allow them to do with their knowledge. The new meanings of geography thrust new questions onto European intellectuals, who rose to the challenge. Some of the continent's most educated men abandoned research into theology and the classics and threw themselves into questioning nature. They invented a whole new language, of mathematics, to explain the physical world (Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus in the 1680s, and spent the remainder of their lives accusing each other of plagiarism). A cascade of further breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, and biology followed. Europeans, in short, had a scientific revolution—but this happened not because Europeans were cleverer, more diligent, or more rational than Arab, Persian, Indian, or Chinese scholars, but because they were asking different questions.

37In the eighteenth century, Europeans began applying scientific principles to the ways they thought about society, laying bare the logic of the political and economic relationships that held people together. They exposed the irrationality of traditional monarchy, mercantilism, and established churches, fueling mass movements that would go on to topple the old order. Europeans, in short, had an Enlightenment—but, much like the scientific revolution, this happened not because Europeans were more democratic or reasonable than Asians, but because the new meanings of geography had forced Europeans to confront new questions.

38Thanks to its fine position on the Atlantic, a string of military victories between 1588 and 1763, and its enthusiasm for Enlightenment ideas, England won the leading position in the new Atlantic economy. By 1700, English workers were the most prosperous in the world; but as the eighteenth century wore on, rising wages began pricing British [18] goods out of many European markets. In the face of wage inflation, European engineers had for some time been trying to invent machines that could substitute wind, water, and fossil fuels for the expensive musclepower of labourer, but Britain was the place where the problems were most acute; and so, not surprisingly, the British were the first to crack the secret of steam power. Between 1780 and 1830, Britain had the world's first industrial revolution—not because the British were more industrious or practical than anyone else in the world, but because the new economic problems, driven by the new meanings of geography, confronted them particularly sharply.

39Steam engines made Britain the first state able to project its power globally. By the 1840s, most barriers of distance had collapsed. Britain shot its way into China, and industrialized armies and exports began pushing even into the landlocked interiors of Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. Europe—and above all Britain—bestrode the world like a colossus. By the century's end, 84 per cent of the planet's and surface was ruled by Europeans or their overseas colonists.

4 – America triumphant, 1850-2050?

40When I was a schoolboy in 1970s Britain, my modern history textbook stopped in 1850. This did not strike me as particularly remarkable at the time, but looking back from 2013, it does seem like that was a very convenient place for the British to feel that history had come to a full stop. [19]

41Unfortunately for Britain, though, history did not stop in 1850. Rather, the same forces that had driven history since the Ice Age continued to work. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe's rising social development had effectively shrunk the Atlantic Ocean, turning the Americas into a periphery to a Eurocentric world system dominated by Britain. In the nineteenth century, the coming of steamships, telegraphs, and the railroad continued shrinking space; and as its economic potential was unleashed, the United States began challenging Britain, going from being an economic periphery to being a core in its own right.

42Nineteenth century Britain's power—unlike that of the ancient empires—depended as much on cooptation as on conquest. [20] Military power did matter, and without its fleet and the feats of arms that brought control over India and the white settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa), Britain's preeminence would have been unthinkable. However, what gave Britain truly global influence was the willingness of other governments to work with London. Britain depended on buying and selling overseas, and its massively productive industry, huge merchant marine, and unparalleled financial sector all required free trade, open markets, and overseas customers prosperous enough to buy British goods. It was therefore in Britain's interest to see other nations industrialize and prosper, because Britain would prosper too.

43To make this system work, Britain had to perform a delicate balancing act, keeping the United States cooperative, Europe divided and mostly peaceful, and Asia weak. The reason it generally succeeded in the nineteenth century (despite constant crises) was that most of the key players preferred to work with Britain rather than against it, because that was the quickest way for them to get rich too.

44The nineteenth century's soaring social development changed the meanings of geography once more, spreading the industrial revolution across North America and Europe. The United States' GDP overtook Britain's in 1872 and Germany's followed suit in 1908. [21] Britain prospered too, of course, seeing its GDP quintuple between 1820 and 1900 and its GDP/capita increase 150 per cent; but the paradox of the British world-system was that it turned the hegemon's closest partners into its greatest rivals. As other nations' economies and military spending expanded, Britain found it harder and harder to bully or bribe them into cooperating.

45In the end, of course, Europe was where the system broke down. In 1914 and again in 1939, German leaders concluded that the only way to solve the geostrategic problem of being trapped between France and Russia was through violence. The resulting wars devastated Europe, bankrupted Britain, and left the United States and Soviet Union to divide the spoils between them. The West dominated the world even more thoroughly in 1950 than it had done in 1850, but its centre of gravity had shifted across the Atlantic.

46I didn't study history in a 1970s American high school, but friends who did have assured me that their textbooks stopped in 1950. Once again, this was a remarkably convenient place to bring the story to a close; but America's problem was—and still is—that the forces that had shaped all previous history just kept on working.

47In many important ways, history has been rerunning its script in the last sixty-plus years, but with the scene shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Between 1500 and 1850, rising social development had shrunk the Atlantic, turning North America into a periphery to European markets. Britain, which dominated these markets, actively abetted this trend, growing much richer in the process; but as the shrinking of the Atlantic accelerated between 1850 and 1950, North America pushed Europe aside and took over the core for itself.

48The post-1950 parallels are striking. Rising social development has shrunk the Pacific, which initially turned East Asia into a periphery to American-dominated markets. The United States and Western Europe actively abetted this trend, growing much richer in the process; but as the shrinking of the Pacific has accelerated, many Westerners are now worrying that East Asia is about to push them aside and take leadership for itself.

49Japan overtook West Germany to become the world's second-biggest economy in 1967, and in 1992, China pushed Japan out of the number two spot. In the thirty years after Chairman Mao died in 1976, the Chinese economy grew tenfold and its share of global economic output more than tripled, from 4.5 to 15.4 percent. Most economists expect China's GDP to overtake America's during the late 2010s or 2020s. By 2030, Chinese officials estimate, another 400 million peasants will have fled the countryside for cities (effectively creating one and a half new Chicagos every year), and half the new homes on the planet will be built in China.

50China in 2030 will still have far to go to catch up with western wage levels. Possibly its economic growth will remain strong through the 2010s, if the decision by the Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party Congress to commit more fully to market economics bears fruit. [22] Or possibly it will stall, as Japan's did in the 1990s. Or perhaps China will break down altogether. But even in that extreme case, a long line of other large Asian nations—India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, to name just a few—is waiting in the wings to take China's place. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the world's centre of economic gravity is shifting across the Pacific even faster than it shifted across the Atlantic a century ago.

51In my books Why the West Rules—For Now and The Measure of Civilisation, [23] I designed a social development index, which measured the abilities of societies to get what they wanted from the world. If we make the very conservative assumption that Western and East Asian development will continue to rise in the twenty-first century just at the same speed that it rose in the twentieth, the index predicts that the East will catch up with the West around the year 2103 (Figure 6). If we instead assume that development will increase in each region at rates that reflect their current economic growth, the transition will come closer to 2050. We should perhaps conclude that the United States will continue to dominate the globe for another generation, and perhaps for two; but probably not for three.

Figure 6

The shape of things to come: my estimates of rising social development in the twenty-first century

The shape of things to come: my estimates of rising social development in the twenty-first century

5 – Europe, America, and China in the twenty-first century

52A hundred years ago, western European intellectuals regularly worried that the American economy would overtake those of their homelands, and that this would mean the loss of their empires and their dominating position in the global balance of power. They were, of course, absolutely right; by the 1960s almost all of Europe's colonies were independent and the most important decisions about humanity's fate were being made in Washington and Moscow.

53In these senses, Western Europe paid heavily for the shift of power across the Atlantic. In other senses, however, it profited greatly from it. Europeans in 2013 can typically expect to live thirty years longer than their great-grandparents did in 1913 and earn nearly seven times as much each year. The European Union has the biggest economy on earth, and is far more democratic, open, and tolerant than Europe was in 1913. Its member nations have not fought a major war in nearly seventy years. In fact, western and central Europe has gone from being the greatest source of instability in the world to being the most peaceful place on the planet.

54The Nobel Committee was right to honour the European Union with its 2012 Peace Prize. In Denmark, the most peaceful place of all, just one person per 111,000 died violently in 2009. [24] The European Union has banned capital punishment, almost completely renounced war as a tool of policy, and become a major force for the peaceful resolution of conflicts in other continents. These trends had gone so far by 2003 that opinion polls revealed that only one French and German person in eight thought that war was ever justified—as opposed to more than half of Americans. [25] In 2006, respondents in Britain, France, and Spain even told pollsters that the greatest threat to world peace was in fact American belligerence. [26] "On major strategic and international questions today," the strategist Robert Kagan concluded, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." [27]

55The explanation for the extraordinary changes in western and central Europe, though, is not hard to find: Europeans are from Venus because Americans are from Mars. When the United States displaced western Europe from its position of dominance, it took on responsibility for managing the worldwide system of free trade and free speech that had made it rich. Without an American policeman keeping the peace, Europe's dovishness would be impossible. But on the other hand, without Europe's dovishness, the United States could not afford to act as the world's policeman. If western Europeans had continued their pre-1945 fondness for seeking military solutions to their problems, the cost of countering them would have bankrupted the United States. Mars and Venus need each other.

56Despite occasional upsets, Western Europe and the United States have managed their relationship skilfully. Between 1945 and 1989, Western Europe's best policy was to be warlike enough to help deter the Soviet Union, but not so warlike as to alarm the Americans (disagreement over exactly where that sweet spot was partly explains France's departure from NATO's unified command structure in 1966). Since 1989, though, facing no major security risks at all and being able to rely on the United States to punish any serious aggression, Western Europe has become even more dovish (disagreement over who needed punishment partly explains the spike in European anti-Americanism in 2003).

57Europe's move away from violence has not, of course, abolished the strategic tensions that have structured its politics for hundreds of years. [28] Since the seventeenth century, British grand strategy has revolved around engaging with the wider world while preventing any single power from dominating continental Europe. "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends," said Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, in 1848; only "our interests are eternal and perpetual." [29] Following this logic, Palmerston would probably have understood why Britain stayed out of the eurozone, will hold a referendum on European Union membership by 2017, and remains rather less pacific than most of its neighbours.

58Eastern Europeans also have doubts about Venus. Lacking natural barriers to protect them from their mighty German and Russian neighbours, they too find that centuries-old strategic concerns have not gone away. Like Britain, several East European governments seek to balance their fears of a German-dominated European Union by leaning even more toward the American policeman. The paradoxes of power being what they are, though, the United States does not want its best friends leaning too far away from the European Union, because that would threaten the calm that America needs if it is to do its job.

59Western and central Europe have flourished in the American-dominated world, and, by avoiding challenging the United States, have made major contributions to maintaining this world. But if the United States' position does deteriorate across the next few decades, and particularly if America loses the economic and military preeminence that allow it to act as a global policeman, Europe will find itself facing very difficult decisions, particularly about its relationship with China.

60These decisions may be very like those that are already confronting the United States' closest allies in the western Pacific, where the impact of China's increasing economic weight is most obvious. Australia, which combines a strong identity as an offshoot of Europe with a very strong economic relationship with China, may be the most important test case. In 2009, its government published a Defence White Paper that unequivocally stated that "The Government's judgement is that strategic stability in the region is best underpinned by the continued presence of the United States." [30] The text of the White Paper, however, had more to say about how Australia might stay in China's good graces than about strengthening Australia's relationship with the United States, and many Australians concluded (as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute put it) "that Australia will at some stage need to make a choice between its primary economic partner [China] and its primary strategic partner [the United States]." [31]

61By November 2011, Australia seemed to be signalling strongly that it would lean toward its strategic partner, announcing that "Australia and the United States are seeking to align their respective force postures in ways that serve shared security interests." [32] Barack Obama flew to Canberra, and told the world "Let there be no doubt. In the Asia-Pacific of the twenty-first century, the United States of America is all in […] We will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in the region […] We will keep our commitments." [33]

62But by May 2013, Australia seemed to be signalling equally strongly that it planned to pivot toward its economic partner. A new Defence White Paper dropped all the tough talk, and the government cut back military spending sharply. "Whereas the Chinese saw the [previous] plan as a red rag," Rory Medcalf of Sydney's Lowy Institute for International Policy observed, "it is tempting to caricature Australia's new strategy as raising a white flag." [34] This, apparently, was just the conclusion that the People's Liberation Army did reach; "U.S. power," its newly appointed deputy chief of staff told a communist party newspaper, "is on the decline, and leading the Asia-Pacific is beyond its grasp." [35]

63If American power does fail in the coming decades, Europe will be confronted by decisions every bit as difficult as Australia's, trying to find the best course between jumping on a Chinese bandwagon and forming alliances to balance Chinese power. [36] But whichever way Europe leans, the fact remains that every major shift in global wealth and power in the past has been accompanied by massive violence. The peaceful, progressive, and prosperous Europe that has emerged since 1945 (and especially since 1989) will find it much harder to survive in a world without a global policeman.

64The obvious conclusion, although it will be unpalatable in some quarters, is that Europe's best option is to avoid having to make these hard choices by doing everything it can to help maintain America's position as the world's policeman. Sometimes this will mean speaking truth to power, telling the world's policeman things it does not want to hear; at other times, it will mean backing the world's policeman up with diplomacy, money, or even force of arms. But above all, it will mean finding the good sense to know when to subordinate local European concerns to a global strategy, recognizing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

65"If we get China wrong," a senior American official told David Sanger of The New York Times in 2011, "in thirty years that's the only thing anyone will remember." [37] The same goes for Europe.

Notes

• [1]

  Although these words are regularly attributed to Churchill, he apparently never said them (Richard Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself [New York: PublicAffairs, 2008], 577).

• [2]

  Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 2.

• [3]

  In what follows, I draw on my books Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future (London: Profile, 2010) and War! What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots (London: Profile, 2014). These books have references to more specialized studies, and I add footnotes here only on specific points of detail or where important new scholarship has appeared.

• [4]

  Strictly speaking, I should say that people in large groups are much the same. No two people are exactly alike, and each individual is in fact constantly changing physiologically and psychologically throughout his or her entire life; but if we take large groups of people form different parts of the world, the differences average out, and in all important ways the similarities between groups vastly outweigh the differences.

• [5]

  The philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee coined the acronym "Odtaa" to describe (and criticize) this point of view in A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, abridged edition, 1957), volume II, 265.

• [6]

  I explain in more detail what I mean by "social development" in The Measure of Civilisation: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (London: Profile, 2013).

• [7]

  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 25.

• [8]

  Here I oversimplify somewhat: paleoclimatologists date the end of the Ice Age proper around 12,700BC, but the rapid melting of the ice sheets cooled the oceans so much that the Gulf Stream switched off, plunging the world back into a mini-ice age (known as the Younger Dryas). It was this last spasm of the Ice Age that ended around 9600BC, beginning the warm, wet period in which we still live.

• [9]

  On the term "lucky latitudes," see Morris, Why the West Rules (n. 3 above), 85-105.

• [10]

  Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997).

• [11]
• [12]
• [13]

  Ancient historians often treat 1 million km² of territory as a convenient dividing line between states and empires.

• [14]

  Eric Cline, 1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

• [15]

  Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013).

• [16]

  Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (New York: Viking, 2009) is excellent on western Eurasia, while Jonathan Karam Skaff, Sui-Tang China and its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Nicola di Cosmo et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chingissid Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009) are good on the East.

• [17]

  Why Europe overtook China as the centre of innovation in firearms is hotly debated. Peter Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-44, and Philip Hoffman, "Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe's Comparative Advantage in Violence," Economic History Review 64 (2011) Supplement: 39-59, are excellent recent analyses, but I find Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) more convincing.

• [18]

  England became part of Britain by the Act of Union with Scotland and Wales in 1707, and Ireland joined the Union in 1800.

• [19]

  History coming to a full stop is an idea made famous (in Britain, at least) by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen & Co., 1930).

• [20]

  This analysis draws on John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

• [21]

  All data come from Angus Maddison, Statistics on World Population, GDP, and per capita GDP, 1-2008 AD (Paris: OECD, 2010), available at www.ggdc.net/maddison/Maddison/htm.

• [22]
• [23]

  See notes 3 and 6 above.

• [24]
• [25]

  Cited from James Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

• [26]
• [27]

  Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2002).

• [28]

  Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012), is particularly good on this theme.

• [29]

  Speech to the House of Commons, reported in Hansard, 1 March, 1848, column 122.

• [30]

  Commonwealth of Australia, Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030 (Canberra: Department of Defence, 2009), 43.

• [31]
• [32]

  Allan Hawke and Ric Smith, Australian Defence Force Posture Review 2012 (Canberra: Australian Government, 2012), 53.

• [33]
• [34]
• [35]

  Lieutenant-General Qi Jianguo, "An Unprecedented Great Changing Situation," Study Times (21 January, 2013), at http://www.cna.org/sites/default/files/research/DQR-2013-U-004445-Final.pdf.

• [36]

  Edward Luttwak, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2012), has an acute analysis of these two tendencies.

• [37]

  Unidentified official, quoted in David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and the Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012), xix.

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