THE FUTURE.

U.S. hegemony will be challenged

In talking about the future, it is necessary to understand that change ordinarily is very slow, but cumulative change is very fast, and rupture in the continuity of history is always possible.

The responsible thing that one can say today about the models for society and political organization in the new millennium is that initially they will be the same models with which we ended the last millennium. But sooner than one may think, the international system will have changed in fundamental ways.

The United States is and will remain the most powerful and influential state and social system in the early years of the new millennium. It remains the "sole superpower." The market capitalist system dominant during the past two decades, given its present form by the United States, its "globalization" sponsored by the United States, will continue as the most visible and important economic and commercial model. However, the American position and the prevailing system will both be challenged. The nature and identity of a successful challenge are unforeseeable today, but it is in the nature of a dominant or hegemonic system to generate challenges and its own eventual replacement.

This is a basic political reality. Domination can endure for long periods when it is that of an advanced civilization over backward ones (as with Rome). The challenge to the American position will come from societies who are themselves equally advanced.

Look back a century. In 1900 the British Empire was "the sole superpower." It had rivals in Europe, as the United States today has one rival in the European Union, another in Russia, and still others in Asia. But the conventional belief a century ago was that which Norman Angell was to express in a globally best-selling book in 1910, The Great Illusion, which held that the common interests of the great powers, and above all their economies, were so closely interlinked and interdependent that war no longer made sense. The existence of empires and the gold standard made the world's economies and international finance more "globalized" than they are today.

The destructive forces which were to dominate most of the twentieth century were without influence in 1900, or did not yet exist. Marxism as a political movement was a marginal affair. Lenin was thirty years old, concluding a period of political internment in Siberia, and about to go into exile. Hitler was eleven years old. Benito Mussolini was seventeen, a budding pacifist and socialist. Fascism and Nazism did not exist. They were unimagined, perhaps unimaginable.

The British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch empires dominated Asia and Africa. The United States was in the process of putting together its own empire from the Spanish possessions it had just seized in the Caribbean and the Far East. The Hapsburg system was troubled by nationalism in the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire was in decline, but all that seemed manageable.

China was weak, dormant. Japan was alert, and in 1899 had just put a final end to the extraterritorial privileges enjoyed by European traders in Japan. It was about to make an explosive entrance into world affairs by destroying the Russian army at Port Arthur in 1904, and sinking the entire Russian fleet in a single day-completely unexpected exploits.

But I have surely made my point. The century began in circumstances of apparent security more reassuring than those of today. No one in 1900 could have imagined the events that only fourteen years later were to destroy the existing international system and deal a blow to Western civilization. The effects are still felt. They opened the way to the immense and totally original totalitarian political phenomenon which, following the Russian Revolution in 1917 and Hitler's coming to power in 1933, dominated world affairs for most of the rest of the century.

Responsible political and economic scholars in 1900 would undoubtedly have described the twentieth-century prospect as continuing imperial rivalries within a Europe-dominated world, lasting paternalistic tutelage by Europeans of their Asian and African colonies, solid constitutional government in Western Europe, steadily growing prosperity, increasing scientific knowledge turned to human benefit, etc. All would have been wrong.

In the 1960s and 1970s, "futurism" was in vogue and briefly became an academic undertaking in the United States. While it tried to produce imaginative "alternative futures," it was fundamentally an exercise in responsible projection of what seemed the dominant trends of the time. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in the 1960s that the United States and the U.S.S.R. were "converging" toward what he called "the technotronic age," a new kind of technological "superculture" dominated by "organization-oriented, application-minded intellectuals."

Herman Kahn and Anthony Weiner wrote a book in the 1960s called The Year 2000. They took for granted an unchanging international system and continuing cold war. Their cultural forecasts (a dominant global trend toward "sensate" culture, secularization, Westernization, the marginalization of religion) were mere generalizations of the experience of the American sixties.

Daniel Bell forty years ago said ideology was finished. Francis Fukuyama said ten years ago that history was over. The well-known Cambridge social anthropologist Ernest Gellner identified nationalism with the "social chasms connected with early industrialism" and predicted that it would become muted and "less virulent" as time passed. When Anthony Lake was policy advisor to President Bill Clinton, Lake said that America's obligation was to struggle against nationalism "and all those who would return newly free states to the intolerant ways of the past."

He, like Gellner, took for granted that nationalism is a primitive phenomenon which progress will eventually remedy. Yet the ideology survives and thrives today; the United States, Britain-and Russia-are among the most chauvinistic societies on earth, and history marches on.

Thus far I have been looking back, not ahead, but I have been doing so in order to insist upon how little we really can see when we look ahead. The Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper remarked many years ago that "for strictly logical reasons it is impossible for us to predict the future course of history." This follows from the fact that knowledge grows at an immensely rapid pace, and "we cannot anticipate today what we shall know only tomorrow." We can project statistical series and established material trends, and generalize from perceived present realities. It is useful to do this, but not that useful.

The conventional wisdom of the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall has said that Europe and the United States would grow closer, the former Communist states would become integrated into the democratic community, globalization would advance the economic and technological Westernization and modernization of the developing nations, a further internationalization of society would see more "humanitarian" interventions and greater limitation on national sovereignty-and that only "rogues" would resist all this. Those already seem excessively optimistic assumptions.

As the new century begins, we see that globalization, as a doctrine or ideology of radical trade deregulation, has probably peaked in influence. The Seattle WTO conference ended in confusion; the American Congress denies the president fast-track negotiating authority. The radical deregulation model is questioned in Asia and has always met skepticism in the continental European Western industrial countries. There is accumulating European-U.S. tension on important issues of technological, economic, and political sovereignty. The belief that Russia will soon be incorporated into Western economic and political systems is no longer tenable. Those statements contain implicit forecasts. They describe realities or observable trends expected to influence the next decade. They presume continuity or, in the case of globalism, project into the future a recent important discontinuity in the current of opinion and events.

They suggest an outcome a decade hence which would be markedly different from that contained in the optimistic forecasts, but which would still be easily recognizable. Cumulative change would have altered our perceptions and expectations, but there would have been no rupture in history.

However, ruptures occur. A traumatic transformation in world history occurred between 1914 and 1918. Another rupture was provoked by the Russian Revolution, and by Mussolini's march on Rome followed by Hitler's accession to power. Another by the Crash of 1929. Sun Yat- sen's alliance with the Chinese Communist party and Soviet Russia in 1924 was a rupture in Asia's modern history, as were Japan's occupation of Manchuria and departure from the League of Nations. This is to speak only of the first half of the twentieth century.

The simple and straightforward expectation of the future is for more of the same. Or if not that, for more or less of a repetition of something well-known from the recent past (another stock-market crash, another depression, another Hitler, another Munich). Neither assumption is really useful; however, both are inevitable because without them it is hard to talk at all about the future, even though the sole certainty about the future is that it is, strictly speaking, unforeseeable.

The useful statements that can be made are the general ones: that hegemonic power invites opposition; that a vacuum of power will be filled; that political entities seek to aggrandize their power and wealth; that evil exists in history and reason is not its master.

The American historian Charles Beard once said that a lifetime's reflection on history had taught him four things: "When darkness comes, the stars begin to shine; the bees that rob the flowers provide the honey; whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad; the mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small." Such gnomic utterances are no use to policymakers. They nonetheless contain all we can really know about what the new millennium will bring.

William Pfaff was an editor at Commonweal from 1949 to 1955. His Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends, was a National Book Award finalist in 1989. It will be reissued this year with an afterword about how the century did end, and on what follows now.