Wars that are coming soon (für Swissman und andere)

Geschrieben von Andreas am 02. Oktober 2003 18:24:53:

Als Antwort auf: Re: Dauer des Niedergangs - Beginn des Dark Age geschrieben von HotelNoir am 02. Oktober 2003 16:09:22:

The five thousand years of history reviewed in Part 1 of this book have been five thousand years of tremendous achievement, but also of tremendous bloodshed and destruction. As we embark on the next thousand years, there is no sign of any let up in the fighting. Conflict is an essential component of human existence and will always be relevant. More than this, however, war preparedness is actually on the increase at the same time that weapons are becoming more lethal.

For many years, total defence expenditure world-wide has been comparable with the GNPs of the entire South American and African continents put together. The total amount of official development aid to all developing countries is equivalent to a few days of global military spending, while the annual budget of UNICEF would be used up in just four hours. Clearly fighting is still far more important to people than helping each other out on the basis of common humanity.

This spending is dominated by the US and western countries, but the share of third world countries has been increasing for some decades. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, third world arms budgets rose by a factor of ten to be about a third of the total. At the same time, western expenditures have hardly decreased in absolute terms. Although the 1990s have seen some pressure on NATO defence budgets, the overall trend has been a four-fold increase in real terms since the second world war and a twenty five fold increase since the beginning of the 20th century. And in the world as a whole, military spending continues to ratchet up.

Not only are we a very long way from the world of brotherly love and peace that some people hope will characterise the third millennium but we are getting further away. Governments do not like spending money if they can help it. During peace, there has always been a tendency for defence budgets to be cut back. The fact that they are rising globally is indicative of the deteriorating global security situation due to international political disintegration. Meanwhile, there is an unequivocal link between war preparedness and war proneness. Sooner or later people that have weapons tend to use them. It is no coincidence, for example, that gunshot deaths are far higher in the US than in Britain, where they are much more strictly controlled.

In western countries, we have not experienced war on our doorsteps for over fifty years. We tend to think of the last half of the 20th century as a peaceful episode. Nevertheless, around the world, there have been some two hundred wars in that time. People still die in fighting at a high rate - around 200,000 in the recent Yugoslav conflict alone. There are thirty wars ongoing today, and UN forces are deployed in more than a dozen peace-keeping operations around the world.

Most of these are wars of liberation as states break up. As Geoff Mulgan notes, wars between nations have been largely suppressed, but wars within nations are many. The wars within nations are primarily evidence of internal political disintegration. However, they can also be considered symptomatic of international disintegration in that an effective hegemon would not allow people to be taking up arms anywhere within its sphere of influence. In the British empire, for instance, troops spent considerable time suppressing internecine conflicts within its subject territories. Now Britain, the US, and the west generally allows people to fight it out among themselves. The west stands by as guerilla armies struggle over the boundaries that it drew up one or two centuries ago and used to enforce.

A sign of the disintegrating times is that where western armies used to enforce the peace, western mercenaries are now being called in by embattled rulers. This is a privatisation of threat power, characteristic of political disintegration. British mercenaries, it was revealed in 1998, were then active in about thirty countries. The intelligence services told government ministers that companies providing private soldiering services are a growth industry in an increasingly unstable world. There are at least ten such companies in London with overseas contracts amounting to some £100 million. Between them, they have 8000 soldiers on their books. Manpower cut-backs in the services mean that there is no shortage of recruits. Their clients include Algeria, Colombia, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, the former Soviet Republics, Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda and various other African states. While this is big business in Britain, it is bigger by far in the US. One American mercenary organisation claims to have more 4 star generals on its books than the Pentagon.

Besides the break-up of states, the other main type of war in the contemporary world involves flare-ups along long-standing cultural fault-lines, such as that between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans. The last thousand years have shown that these fault-line conflicts go on interminably, although actual wars are intermittent. Controlled fighting in a world that retains some order and continuity is evidently never enough to resolve people's differences. The only way that these conflicts will be resolved is via a dark age. Then much blood is shed, communities are atomised, people forget who they are, they forget their own writing and culture, new identities are forged. The problems in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East will remain with us into the coming dark age - but in that upheaval we may hope that they will be laid to rest once and for all.

The break-up of states and the boiling over of fault-line conflicts represent only the crumbling of international political integration. They are small, short-lived dips in integration, as recessions and depressions are small, short-lived dips in economic organisation. Severe political disintegration involves a condition of general war. No hegemon rules the world and there is no peace in it. As we move towards a dark age, we should expect to see these eruptions becoming frequent and severe. Of course, we have already seen such eruptions in the world wars of the twentieth century. However, it is the combination of general war with the other processes of internal and international disintegration/disorganisation/discohesion that constitutes a dark age. As the other chapters show, these processes are now advanced to an extent that was not the case fifty or a hundred years ago.


Much of the US struggle for continued dominance can be characterised as economic warfare. It has created the North American Free Trade Area as the first step to a hemispheric trade bloc that it can lead. It has allied with Germany in Europe and supported the creation of a German-dominated zone to oppose Russia. It is conducting an aggressive struggle for markets in the third world, including invading Somalia for fruit concessions, and it leads great power action against troublesome, independently minded states. It aims to prevent either China or Japan attaining hegemony in Asia-Pacific through its continued involvement there.

These policies are already leading to friction with notionally friendly countries. Japan has complained about US economic espionage and France has gone so far as to expel a number of American diplomats. Japan and China chafe increasingly at their bonds of subordinate status. America's attempts to keep them down are creating precisely the kind of issue that can lead to a flare up. Already Japan has shown its willingness to start resisting. In February 1994, Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa firmly rejected Clinton's demand for numerical targets for Japanese imports of US manufactured goods. Even a Japanese official noted that such forthright defiance was unprecedented. As China's growth continues and it also begins to put economic pressure on the west, the problem will be doubled. As we have seen several times, violence tends to erupt when conditions are improving but, for subordinates, not fast enough. This is in effect the situation for many East Asian countries, yet it is a situation that the US is deliberately attempting to engineer.

The policy of course is not working. The dollar is losing its preeminent position and US industry is losing one market after another. The US is getting weaker and a number of nations are emerging who are wealthy enough to make a challenge. This may not be a problem for just the next few years, yet we are being carried inexorably towards the time when it will be a problem. The greater the divergence between the American self-image and reality, between the perceptions and the fundamentals, the more unstable the situation. This is because it is more likely that the US and one or more of its challengers will make a misjudgement.


One might find it difficult to understand how any future government could initiate a great power war that would most likely go nuclear. It seems, after all, hardly rational. The trouble is that when it comes to starting wars rationality does not enter into it. Before Pearl Harbour, for instance, a series of wargames had shown the Japanese high command that they would lose a Pacific war against the US. Yet, they went ahead and started the war anyway. Wars are based on emotions - of frustration, outrage, pride - the kinds of emotion that are smouldering today in East Asian hearts. Boredom may also be factor as it probably was in starting the first world war. When the Kaiser returned to Berlin from Potsdam on July 31, 1914, his motorcade was swamped by crowds clamouring for war. Similar scenes were repeated in Paris, Petrograd, London and Vienna. It is the supreme contest, bestowing feelings of excitement and fulfilment, that in more peaceful times people seek on the playing field.

On the other hand, a growing body of literature supports the proposition that liberal democracies do not fight each other, for there have been few if any instances. The political scientist Michael Doyle says that there have been none in the last 200 years. He cites the US and Canada, which live peacefully, separated by an undefended border, and with no intention of attacking each other or invading each other's territory. He also cites modern France and Germany, which live peacefully in the same way, whereas when those countries were ruled by various kinds of dictator they were forever clashing on the battlefield.

It is suggested that the war avoidance of liberal democracies is due to the open nature of their decision making, which discourages deluded thinking and helps them to resolve their differences rationally. It is difficult to whip emotions up to a fever pitch when both you and your enemy are criticised at home by the press and a vigorous opposition. However, it would be premature to draw too much comfort from this. For one thing, liberal democracies can turn into dictatorships. Indeed, it may be that frustration and outrage create the conditions for this to occur. Thus, the reason that liberal democracies do not fight each other is because when a liberal democracy has some grievance so severe as to be worth fighting about it first transforms itself into something else. In any case, not all the major frustrated and outraged nations today are liberal democracies. China for one is an ideological as well as economic foe of the US; and countries in turmoil like Russia and South Africa may not be liberal democracies for very much longer.

War could also break out by accident. Defence analysts still see accidental nuclear war as a threat. This was brought home in January 1995, when the Russian nuclear briefcase was first activated for emergency use. Alert systems had detected a missile launch off the coast of Norway and for a tense eight minutes the Russians stood by to unleash a retaliatory nuclear strike. After that time, senior military officials detected that the missile was headed far out to sea and posed no threat to Russia. It turned out that it was an American scientific mission, but though Russia had been notified, the message had failed to get to the right desks. It is not really likely that President Yeltsin would have ordered retaliation in a condition of uncertainty for such an incident coming out of the blue. However, if tensions were already high for other reasons, it might be a different matter. Also the incident exposed the real weakness of political control over the Russian nuclear button, for decision-making throughout was almost wholly in the hands of the General Staff. This iterates the point that Russia is unreliable as a liberal democracy.

Finally, the wars of the future will surely be different from those of the past. Governments may not realise the threat until it has hit them and it is too late. The war might begin in cyberspace, or over an American mission against nuclear-armed Russian mafias that the authorities there take as an infringement of their sovereignty and a casus belli. For decades, western armies trained for world war 3 against the Soviet Union, and they got the Gulf and Bosnia. Today, they are training for another Gulf and more Bosnias, but what they get is likely to be something completely different. It could even be world war 3 after all, perhaps against China or a China-Russia alliance. It is by no means inconceivable that the Russian army, despairing, dissatisfied, tempted by the spoils, goaded by some right wing demagogue succeeding Yeltsin, could drive its tanks across eastern Europe and onto the north German plain - the very cold war scenario that now seems consigned to the pile of discarded plans. If that happens, after all this time, we will find ironically that we are looking the other way.

We will now look at some of the numerous conflicts that are taking shape in the contemporary world. These are situations where two or more countries are on a collision course, owing to a problem that has no obvious solution. The aim is to show that there are numerous possible triggers for interstate war over the coming decades. Of course, not all conflicts lead to shooting matches. Instead, wars are caused by the straws that break the camel's back. However, there are so many contentious issues in the contemporary world, and the west's ability to enforce the peace has declined so far, that the outbreak of serious wars over the next few decades is now a certainty. Those who have children or grandchildren under ten must face the fact that they are likely to find themselves on the front line of some coming war. And this will be war of a very bitter and destructive kind, almost certainly involving nuclear weapons, in which the casualty figures will exceed those of all previous wars added together.

The end of the cold war was widely touted as ushering in an era of peace, with governments seeking to cash in on the peace dividend. In fact, the reverse is the case, for a common enemy is good for social cohesion. To the extent that that common enemy has disappeared, relations between the US and Japan or China have deteriorated dramatically. It is also undermining the cohesion of the western alliance. At the same time, it seems that western elites no longer have to look over their shoulder at an alternative model in which they are redundant and workers have more of a say. That means that they are more ready to oppress their own populations - or at least, conditions for ordinary people have deteriorated since the end of the cold war, with cut backs in social security for instance.

Defence ministries of all shades see the security outlook for the next couple of years as having taken a turn for the worse. Israel sees war as more likely than it has been for some time, with Yassir Arafat's promised Palestinian UDI on the 4th of May, 1999. The Chinese Central Military Commission has also characterised the situation in East Asia as grim. Opinions such as these have to be taken seriously for these are major players, able to influence the events they predict. If they believe that war is more likely they are not speaking about some academic analysis so much as about their own plans and attitudes.

Theoreticians of war have generally rejected the idea that competition over natural resources is by itself a significant cause of armed conflict. Chimpanzees and even New Guinea tribes may fight over access to treasured resources, but wars between nations have more complicated and subtle causes - often ideological. Bearing that in mind, however, disagreements over rights to resources may be the back-breaking straw that propel communities with a multi-faceted antipathy into war. As our world becomes more populous, pressures on resources are bound to intensify and war-triggering disagreements will become more frequent. The Scientific American reported in February 1993 that shortages of water, forests and land are already creating conflict in much of the third world. In Assam, for instance, local tribespeople attacked migrant Muslims from Bangladesh, having long accused them of stealing some of the region's richest farmland. 1700 Bengalis died before troops arrived to restore order.

Water is the most fundamental of all resources, essential to life. Yet the way in which it is delivered to human populations, i.e. via lakes and rivers, seems almost guaranteed to stimulate conflicts. This is because lakes and rivers are no respecters of borders. Nearly 40% of the world's population lives in a river basin shared by more than two countries. In the past this was not usually a problem - there was enough for everyone - but industrialisation leads to a huge growth in water consumption and the potential to pollute waterways to the detriment of those communities living downstream.

The sheer importance of water makes people uniquely sensitive about threats to its continued supply. Some of the most serious disagreements over water in the contemporary world are between India and Bangladesh, Thai and Vietnam, Arab and Jewish communities in Israel, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the countries of the Rhine, and Egypt and its southern neighbours. Dams and industrial pollution are the main causes of contention. Egyptian leaders have said on several occasions that they are prepared to go to war over the use of the waters of the Nile. In 1990, they were in a rage over a new dam project on Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile, which contributes 80% to the Nile flow. The dam would inevitably reduce the water available to Egypt, especially sequestering the vital silt that replenishes Egypt's soil. It did not help that the engineers working on the project were Israelis, reflecting how resource conflicts can provide the excuse for giving vent to more generalised enmities. At any rate, Dr Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary General, predicted when he was Egyptian Foreign Minister that 'the next war in our region will be over water'.

The Arab-Israeli conflict in Israel is exacerbated by problems over water. This region, including Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan, suffers from severe water stress. Water is so precious that Israeli farmers have devised methods of irrigation that practically involve injecting water drop by drop into the root zones of the growing plants. Even so, Jordan and Israel are using their water resources at 15% or more beyond the replenishment rate and sea water intrusion is a growing problem in the coastal aquifer. Israel restricts the number of wells that Arabs can drill in the West Bank, the amount of water that they are allowed to pump and the times at which they can draw irrigation water. Although these measures may be well intentioned attempts at conversation, their capacity to foster resentment and raise tensions can be well imagined. There are sincere attempts going on between the various players to solve their water disputes, yet they cannot deal with the fundamental problem which is simple insufficiency of precipitation to support the regional population and its aspirations.

Another aspect to disagreements over water is shown in the periodic clashes between Iraq, Syria and Turkey over the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. The downstream countries, Syria and Iraq, cannot help but get alarmed over the increasing extraction by Turkey, which controls the headwaters of both rivers, on account of its rapidly growing population and expanding industry. In 1990, Turkey's President Özal (who dies suddenly shortly afterwards) pledged that Turkey would never use the control of water to coerce or threaten its neighbours. Nevertheless, dams in Turkey and Syria have helped to stimulate heightened tension. It seems, in fact, that there is sufficient water available for all three countries. Yet concerns over this vital issue serve as just another catalyst to an already combustible security situation - complicated for example by Turkey's membership of NATO setting it against Iraq the old Gulf war enemy, and by the struggle for an independent homeland by the Kurds whose population spans all three countries.

After water, the second most important resource to contemporary industrial society is oil. The 1990-1 Gulf war was essentially a struggle over oil. Here the struggle is not so much one of life or death as of economics. Industrial and industrialising countries are anxious to ensure a reliable supply of oil at a fair price. Most of the embryonic disputes here arise over territorial claims to regions where geologists believe that oil might well be found in large quantities. Some have suggested, for example, that a second Kuwait lies under the South China Sea. This is not unconnected to the fact that China has laid claim over the Sea practically up to the beaches of Indonesia. There have been a number of diplomatic incidents and even firing of shots over some of the uninhabited islands and reefs in the regions. The continental shelf to the east of Patagonia has also been declared very prospective by geologists. Again, this is not unconnected to the continuing Argentinian enthusiasm for acquiring sovereignty over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, which have a key territorial stake in the region.

Japan, that frustrated, ambitious, economically powerful, sleeping Asian giant, is crucially connected into these issues, for though it is one of the world's biggest consumers of oil, it has no resources of its own. Its prosperity is, at bottom, heavily dependent on other countries, which have not necessarily shown anything like the same ingenuity and drive, but have just been lucky enough to find themselves on top of a black goldmine. Thus, Japan serves as a link between possible tensions over oil and the unfolding geopolitical power game involving East Asia and the US. Its oil dependency is a key motivation behind Japan's investment in nuclear energy. The deputy director of the country's Monju Fast Breeder Reactor, which is intended to breed more nuclear fuel than it consumes thus ensuring self-sufficiency, made Japanese thinking clear when he predicted that the world would be engaged in a war over energy by 2010 to 2015.

There is a part of our planet, rich in potential resources, of enormous extent, and yet unclaimed by any country. It is of course the deep ocean, rich not only for its fisheries but also for the mineral resources, including maybe oil, that lie beneath it. In some parts of the Pacific, there are nodules of valuable metals simply lying about on the sea-bed waiting for someone to scoop them up. For decades the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has been conducting negotiations between all the countries of the world about how to manage and apportion deep marine resources. Although one or two agreements have been signed, there has been no firm, final and satisfactory conclusion to its deliberations. At the heart of the issue is an intractable problem. Entrepreneurs from the industrialised countries have the money and the technology to develop the deep ocean, but the third world does not see why these countries should reap all the benefits of what is a planetary resource; this would be a case of giving more to them that have. On the other hand, the industrialised countries - and the private concerns that would actually operate any concessions - do not see why they should share any of the spoils with the third world after having taken all the technical and financial risks.

The problem addressed by UNCLOS is something of an unexploded bomb. At the moment, there is no significant pressure to start exploiting deep marine resources. Hence, the impasse at the centre of UNCLOS has stalled activity but, because it does not threaten any significant existing interests, has not created friction leading to serious conflict. However, the long term prospect is for this situation to change as the world continues to industrialise and its population continues to grow. The cost-benefit calculations will eventually start favouring marine mining. UNCLOS is therefore a long-term contentious issue, one towards which we are moving slowly and for the most part unknowingly. Since resolution of the issue seems impossible, the most likely scenario is unilateral action by those countries in a position to take it, followed by struggles for control of ocean areas. This would be part of the free-for-all hostility that characterises a dark age.

We will now consider some particular countries and regions around the world. These are ones that are surrounded by emerging quarrels that promise to develop into serious troubles and could spark the all-out wars of the future. Among the leaders is Japan. It is jostling for position as a superpower and preferably the world's number one. This brings it into conflict not only with the US but also with other contenders and its partners in East Asia. Japan's economic success has won it admiration but, now that it is virtually complete, also hostility. In the US, politicians have smashed up imported Japanese imported cars on the steps of the Senate. This is precisely the kind of symbolic action that can lead to war, for it combines insult and humiliation with a real threat to the enemy's livelihood. It is an argument based on emotion and conducted by emotional means. Recent surveys show that the American and Japanese publics both rate each other as a bigger threat to their security than the former Soviet Union.

There is no love lost for Japan, either, in its home region of East Asia. Although relations are mostly cordial, beneath the surface there is resentment over Japan's imperial past and the atrocities for which it was responsible. This resentment is probably strongest in Korea. During the Japanese occupation of Korea up to 1945, peasants were dispossessed, speaking Korean was forbidden and school students were given Japanese names. Korean men were conscripted into forced labour battalions, while thousands of women were kidnapped to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese forces. This was only the latest manifestation of a long-standing hostility between Japan and Korea - which a shogun once described as a dagger pointing at the heart of Japan. It was a Korean fleet setting out to invade Japan that was sunk by the kamikaze, or divine wind, after which world war 2 suicide pilots called themselves. There has long been in Japan a significant Korean minority population, which is despised and discriminated against. After Japan's Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, when 140,000 people died in great fires, the Korean community was selected as a scapegoat and many Koreans were killed in revenge. All this is buried now in the light of East Asia's new prosperity but, as history shows, such bitter and long standing hatred has a tendency to come to the surface again when the pressure is on. It was noted when a Japanese politician publicly apologised to Korea for his country's past behaviour that he used an obscure noun to express his regret, suggesting less than heart-felt sincerity. Korea thus has a wary eye on Japan and is unlikely to be entirely comfortable about Japan's emerging political trajectory including its inexorable approach towards rearmament and greater self-assertion. South Korea and Japan have been in confrontation in the 1990s over the disputed Takeshima/Tokdo Island in the Sea of Japan, and this led to a series of anti-Japanese demonstrations. Meanwhile, the two countries have been selected as co-hosts for the 2002 World Cup - a situation that could foster habits of co-operation and better mutual understanding but is more likely to jealousy and mutual suspicion.

Overall, Japan's path is winning it new enemies and reawakening the fears of old ones. A network of vested interests is gradually materialising to keep Japan in its place. Combine this with Japan's burning aspirations, and the known combustibility of frustrated ambition, and you have a highly explosive situation emerging.

For example, Japan also has a long-standing conflict with China. It occupied Manchuria in 1905 and again invaded and fought over China from 1937 through to 1945. The prospect of these two old enemies vying for economic dominance behind a weakening US has been described as a potential powder keg. China is one of the key frustraters of Japan's ambition, keeping it out of the Security Council. It also has several ongoing disputes with Japan, over such issues as territorial claims and nuclear testing.

On the other hand, Japan is just one of the countries with which China is on a collision course. China has borders with 15 countries, extending over 17,000 miles, and uniquely among the great powers it is not content with any of them. Through its venerable history, it has accumulated a formidable list of unsatisfied national territorial claims. The most consequential of these are offshore territorial disputes, which are intensified by food and energy requirements that are rising rapidly in line with China's economic growth. It claims 80% of the South China Sea, which brings it into conflict with all the other countries of the region. This has led to violence at sea on several occasions, particularly with Vietnam, and many of its neighbours are permanently hostile to China.

Instead of seeing itself as the aggressor, however, China has a sense of wounded pride and of being cheated by the rest of the world. It has longed to put the world back to rights, such that China resumes its fair place, and it senses that its growing economic power is giving it the ability to do so. Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States all engaged in outward expansion, assertion and imperialism as they went through rapid industrialisation and economic growth in the way that China now is. Passions are already running high in the Russian Far East, where China's fast growth contrasts with starkly with the increasingly desperate condition of the Russians. There is a large Chinese immigrant population, comparable with the Russian population itself, and Chinese merchants are accused of exploiting the locals. It was precisely disputes of this nature that led previous imperial powers to annex territories. Thus, it can only be a question of time before the borders rupture and the Chinese military spills out over land and sea to seize what it considers it is due. And when that happens, neither the west nor Japan will be able to stand by. One or both will be drawn in to a war of possibly unprecedented scale.

At the heart of China's claims and indignation is the island of Taiwan. It was here that Chiang Kai Shek fled with his forces after they had been defeated by Mao Tse Tung. Although the communists did not succeed in capturing Taiwan, they have never recognised it as an independent country. When the People's Republic of China joined the United Nations in the 1970s, it was on the condition that Taiwan should be thrown out - which duly happened. In recognising China, the US was compelled to de-recognise Taiwan. China's eventual intention is that Taiwan should be reabsorbed into its bosom, although it has so far eschewed the use of force. Nevertheless, the former Chinese premier Deng Xiao Ping enunciated five conditions which would provoke the mainland into attacking and invading. These included Taiwanese UDI and the acquisition by Taiwan of nuclear weapons.

Taiwan meanwhile has grown extremely wealthy over the last few decades and, not surprisingly given China's attitude, built up strong defence forces. It is believed to be close to the nuclear threshold and some elements within it are becoming increasingly vocal in their aspirations for recognition as an independent country. Predictably, given Deng's conditions, China has sought to warn the Taiwanese off. When Taiwan's President visited the US in 1995, Beijing responded by testing its nuclear-capable M-9 missiles in an ocean target zone only 85 miles from the island. The growing murmurings in Taiwan, combined with China's resurgence, make such incidents increasingly likely. If the uneasy relations between China and Taiwan break down, the most likely result in the first instance would be a Chinese naval blockade intended to bring Taiwan back to its senses. However, such an act of war might only increase Taiwanese belligerence and, given the volatility of the whole Asia-Pacific region, set off something much bigger. The US would inevitably get involved, for Taiwan is the world's second largest holder of foreign currency reserves - a prize that the US would not lightly allow to fall to one of its key economic and ideological rivals.

China's claims to the South China Sea are largely motivated by the suspicion that there might be another Saudi Arabia beneath the waves. It is uncertain whether that suspicion is well-founded but the strength of China's interest is considerable, given that it went into an oil trade deficit in late 1993. The deficit has since deepened and is expected to grow five times by 2010. China's new thirst for oil stems from the explosive growth of local industry and the pressures of consumer demand in what is effectively a virgin market for refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and cars. China has embarked on production of a people's car and when ownership levels there reach those typical in the already industrialised countries the demand for fuel will be simply phenomenal.

In early 1995, China seized from the Philippines the so-called Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands. Not only is this close to potentially major gas and oil reserves but it also affords control of vital sealanes bringing oil supertankers from the Gulf. Later in 1995, China provoked a confrontation with Japan over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands whose geology is similar to that of the North Sea. Thus, we see a direct connection between China's ambitions for economic growth and geopolitical considerations bringing it into collision with its neighbours. Again, this is precisely the kind of irresistible force to immovable object scenario that finds its only outlet in war. Chinese publications openly talked of this option after the Philippines military blew up border markings erected by the Chinese on reefs off the Philippines coast and subsequently arrested some Chinese fishermen.

To the aspirations of China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea must be added those of Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and others in the region - all of them having tasted some improvement and eager to continue their upward movement. For many of these countries, the key foreign policy aim is to contain China. Indonesia has concluded a pact with Australia in pursuit of this aim. Vietnam has briefly fought China on both land and sea in the 1970s and 1980s, in the course of their dispute over the Spratly Islands. Commentators find that there is an emerging Asian balance of power game, similar to that which characterised 19th century Europe and finally broke down in the trenches of the first world war. East Asia however offers an additional complication in that it is a cauldron of civilisations: Japanese, Sinic, Orthodox, Buddhist, Muslim, Western, Hindu. The criss-crossing network of interests, allegiance and opportunity is extremely complex. Singapore, for instance, which has a predominantly Chinese population, is not just surrounded by Muslims but is attached to them by a lifeline. Its water is piped over a causeway across the Strait of Johore from Islamic Malaysia.

The potential for misjudgement in East Asia is high. The hubris, fears and hopes of the emerging powers, combined with existing bones of contention will surely generate a continuing series of potential war triggers. If oil were discovered in the South China Sea, for instance, and claimed by China, it would immediately be disputed by at least five other nations. In such circumstances, fighting is almost bound eventually to occur.

International political disintegration is reflected in the fact that it no longer looks plausible that the US will be able to suppress military conflict in this area. The balance of power game is emerging because there is no dominant political authority. It is every country for itself and no hegemon is imposing order from on high. Clinging on to its role as a political integrator, the US is finding itself more frequently in confrontation with China, for example over the alleged shipment in 1993 of nuclear technology to Iran. As China gets bigger, it gets increasingly more difficult for the US to control. The choices emerging for the US are to go to war to prevent Chinese hegemony in East Asia or to accept it. Even if it goes to war, however, it probably cannot avoid a reduced position in the world, the loss of authority that amounts to disintegration.

To China's south, an already warm troublespot is the Kashmiri border between India and Pakistan, where these countries are currently shooting at each other in a desultory fashion. At the time of the formation of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Hindu Maharajah of Kashmir, which has a largely Muslim population, decided to accede to Hindu India rather than Muslim Pakistan. He had initially tried to avoid both but had found himself caught between Pathan tribesmen invading from Pakistan and units of the Indian army. However, tribesmen and others continued to invade Kashmir with, in India's view, Pakistani support. Pakistan denied this and declared Kashmir's accession to India illegal. In 1949, agreement was reached to withdraw Indian troops and conduct a plebiscite on the state's future. However, this proved hard to effect and has never taken place. Fighting across the border blew up into full scale hostilities during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, which was stimulated by civil strife in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). A new round of peace talks began in 1990 but failed to make any progress.

The line between Pakistan and India in this region is not recognised by either side as an actual border and is referred to as the line of actual control. It has been described as the most dangerous frontier region in the world. Most of it is extremely remote, bleak, high, snowbound, rugged terrain where the changeability of the thin, frigid air makes it difficult to predict the trajectories of the artillery shells. Low-intensity fighting, with few casualties, continues every day.

In 1998, tension ratcheted up several notches in the wake of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. The Indian tests, which came first, were ordered by the unstable minority government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a radical Hindu party that has emerged on the Indian political scene in the last twenty years. The BJP's platform amounts to nothing more than undermining the foundations of secular India and oppressing the Muslim minority. It has no interest in maintaining peaceful relations with Pakistan but is instead pleased to give Pakistan every cause for outrage and for feeling threatened by its more powerful neighbour.

The conflict between India and Pakistan is primarily religious, and we know from history that religious wars are the most bitter of all - for a religious challenge is a direct threat to people's whole culture and belief system, everything in effect that makes them what they are. Religious wars are not just about winning. They are about slaughtering as many of your foe as it is possible to do. Meanwhile, Pakistan has made clear that it is prepared to use the nuclear option, in view of its military disadvantage. Pakistan's President declared in 1990 that, in the event of a war with India, Pakistan would use nuclear weapons at an early stage. South Asia thus faces the possibility of a religious nuclear war, the kind of scenario for which the term Armageddon was invented.

The Middle East is another venue for religious war, in this case between Jews and Muslims. Fighting here has a critical global significance because of the region's relation to the oil industry, and all that implies for the industrial world. Nuclear weapons have not openly entered the equation but many analysts think that both Israel and Iran probably have them by now. The various Arab countries that are also interested in acquiring warheads might well do so in the near future, given the leakiness of Russian arsenals. Israel is in growing danger and its policies towards its Palestinian minority - motivated by the Israelis' feeling of embattlement - is storing up considerable animosity. As American power declines further, it becomes increasingly likely that Israel's chickens will come home to roost. The solidarity between the Arab nations is also an important factor, with reduced solidarity being helpful to Israel. The Gulf War partially undid this solidarity. Recent western airstrikes and continued sanctions against Iraq help to restore it, but Iraq's continued aggression towards Kuwait serves to undo it again.

The resolution of the Palestinian question is compounded by numerous points of disagreement, where the security interests of the Palestinians and Israelis conflict. Four particular bones of contention involve control over the Samarian Mountains, over the Yarkon-Tarinim aquifer, over the eastern approach to Tel Aviv airport and over access to the Jordanian border. Yassir Arafat has pledged that he will declare in independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza strip on the 4th May 1999, if talks with Israel on a final peace accord do not reach a satisfactory conclusion. The Israelis have pledged that they will oppose such a declaration with force. Whatever happens, it will not be a permanent solution. Even if war is avoided in 1999, Israel's difficult presence will continue to elevate tensions in the region.

The conflict between Israel and its neighbours is tied into the whole question of the Islamic challenge to the west. The Muslim world feels that its culture and identity have been assaulted by the western global hegemony. It is now eager to reassert that identity as forcefully as it can. In the words of James Goldsmith, the strengthening of Islam is a natural reaction against the excessive intrusion of western modernism. Since the late 20th century, the word Islamic is most likely to be followed by fundamentalist, a mindset that is characteristically intolerant and benighted. Yet, during the Middle Ages, the Islamic countries were highly sophisticated centres of civilisation, urbane and cultured, in some ways more tolerant than the Christian world, and vigorously generating great literature, art and scientific knowledge. There is no necessary relation between Islam and the fanatical and dogmatic attitudes that are now associated with it. Fundamentalism and jihad, for which the west is the primary target, are merely symptoms of the Muslim world's to recover its dignity and throw off its subordination.

Though we may understand it thus, this does not give much cause for comfort. As the west declines, Islamic self-assertion grows stronger in conviction. Increasingly, Muslims are keen to hasten the demise of this decadent culture and reassert their own. And they are prepared to use violence to this end. The flashpoints around the world where Muslim communities are either under threat or struggling for autonomy represent sparks that could set the tinder of Muslim aspiration alight. When Lord Owen returned from his peacemaking mission in the former Yugoslavia, he observed that the problems in Bosnia were self-contained, but the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo were at the end of a fuse that connected to the Albanians in Macedonia, then to Albania itself, and on from there to Greece and Turkey. He noted his relief, therefore, that brief fighting in Kosovo had stopped and the fuse appeared to have gone out. Five years on, however, we find that the fuse is alight again, and this time it appears to have caught properly.

At the Turkish end of this fuse, combustibility has also recently increased to a large extent, owing to its perceived humiliation at the hands of Europe. For years, the European Union has been sending positive signals to Turkey about the possibility of membership. However, when it came to the moment of decision in 1998, Turkey was not accepted even on the reserve list of potential candidates for membership. What was particularly galling to the Turks was the fact that none of the five states that were accepted was a member of NATO, although Turkey is. However, unlike Turkey, they were all Christian.

The EU's rebuff to Turkey was largely stirred up by Greece (incidentally, a fellow-NATO member). Greece has a long-standing enmity with Turkey, over the divided island of Cyprus. These tensions intensified during 1998, over the Greek Cypriots' intention to buy air defence missiles from Russia. Turkey saw these as threats to its F-16s and threatened pre-emptive strikes against the missiles, should they be delivered. Greece said that this would amount to a declaration of war. As a show of force and of solidarity with the Turkish Cypriots, Turkish F-16s flew to the Turkish end of the island, where they displayed Turkish and Turkish Cypriot flags. In the end, tension was reduced again when the missile delivery was postponed and then at the end of 1998, Turkey was admitted as a candidate for EU membership.

Nevertheless, the underlying problems here are by no means resolved. The arguments over Cyprus continue to smoulder on. Turks still feel humiliated and disenchanted by problems in their economy, where inflation is running at 90%. The reaction identified by James Goldsmith seems to be on the cards. In 1997, Turkey's Islamic Welfare Party, which had been gaining popularity, was banned by a constitutional court as a threat to law and order. However, the former party's MPs remained in Parliament, where they simply gathered under a new umbrella organisation, called the Virtue Party. They already form the biggest bloc, with 163 seats, in a Parliament that is currently governed by a secular coalition. It now appears certain that Turkey will jump significantly to the Islamic right in the general election due to be held in April 1999. When this happens we can expect a considerable hardening of attitudes over Cyprus and relations with the EU, and a greater willingness to provoke conflict. A continuing crisis in Kosovo will amplify the situation.

East of Turkey, central Asia is another region where the heady combination of oil and Islam is encouraging a growing challenge to the western-dominated global status quo. One can add to this rivalry between Russia and the US for influence in the region, with Turkey, Israel and increasingly China also anxious to shape things to their advantage. The enormous potential of this region, not only for oil but for other minerals too, has become increasingly clear since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Russian unwillingness to lose control of Chechnya was motivated to a considerable extent by the fact that it lies on the proposed route for a pipeline transporting oil from Baku in Azerbaijan and the huge Tengiz field in Kazakhstan (dubbed the next Kuwait) to ports in the Black Sea. Meanwhile, the US is pushing for an alternative route for the pipeline, south through its partner Turkey instead of north through Russia. Both revenues and control over the governments of central Asia are at stake in this geopolitical tussle. Even if it wins, the US will effectively have lost, since Russian resentment is likely to breed extreme reactions there.

Russia is feeling bruised and vulnerable after the sudden loss of its empire - more traumatic than the European experience. Russians find it hard to believe that they have really lost their empire, which after all still surrounds them and contains 25 million of their own people. It is crucial to their self-respect, and the most important issue in Russia's contemporary foreign policy, to retain some kind of influence over this, their Near Abroad. Yet, the reality is that they are being humiliated on every side.

The central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are experiencing the rise of political Islam in a backlash against their long subjection to Russian culture. Of these, only Tajikistan has actually exploded with a murderous campaign against ethnic Russians and catastrophic breakdown of civil order. Yet in all of them, relations with Russia tend to be uneasy. Moreover, it was Stalin's policy to ensure a thorough mix of ethnicities in these states, as a form of divide and rule, and they are subject to increasing ethnic tensions and civil wars. This drives home Russia's new impotence and increases feelings of vulnerability on its southern border.

The Baltic states, also brutually incorporated into the Soviet Union under Stalin, received large-scale Russian immigration. Now that they have seceded from the Russian federation, these states, with bitter memories of the Soviet era, discriminate thoroughly against ethnic Russians. In Estonia, for instance, Russians may not own property, although they form 30% of the population and are highly active in the economy. The plight of their colleagues in the Baltic states strikes a chord with Russians. If the call went out, says one Russian official, 50,000 Russians would sign up overnight to go to the aid of Russians in Estonia. And all the time that they humiliate the Russian incomers, the Baltic states rely upon Russia to supply them with electric power.

The Caucasus, meanwhile, has been described as an asteroid belt of small mountain people driven by innumerable hatreds and grievances. The Chechen rebellion is just the most serious of a whole range of uprisings and feuds, many of a particularly vicious nature.

To the west, the Ukraine is another complex nexus of unresolved issues, with one of the largest Russian minorities. It is strongly polarised into an eastern half which is strongly oriented towards Russia and a western half which is inordinately hostile, and some commentators have speculated that the resultant tensions may eventually tear the country in half. The Ukraine also has a number of serious disagreements with Russia over security issues, specifically concerning the stationing and exercising of troops.

Thus Russians feel beleaguered and unappreciated, surrounded by former friends who now seem more like enemies. Struggling to retain a sense of dignity befitting to a country that still considers itself the second superpower, Russia is opposed to the eastward expansion of NATO. It is too much to lose the loyalty of former members of the Warsaw pact, with whom the Russians consider that they have a strong affinity. Yet the western powers pay little heed to Russian objections and seem rather to delight in rubbing in Russia's drastic loss of prestige and influence.

These feelings of the Russians do not bode well for the future stability of the world. One commentator has observed that the west's current high-handed treatment of Russia and its objections over NATO expansion is reminiscent of the way the victorious powers treated Germany after the first world war. That is to say, they sought to humiliate Germany and keep it in penury through the swingeing conditions of the Versailles Treaty. It would be a great mistake to consider Russia to have been defeated in the cold war, and one should beware of riding rough-shod over the legitimate concerns of a nation which was only recently great and still has immense war potential. In Russia, all the conditions are there for blatant demagoguery. If things do not improve, and it is difficult to see how they can, Russians are likely to seek a palliative for their wounded pride in rallying behind some strong leader and the promise of restoring their confidence and regaining the world's respect through some form of military adventurism. President Yeltsin has already said that the eastward expansion of NATO would plunge Europe into the flames of war. He knows what he is talking about. At the very least, the west will find Russia less inclined to co-operate in promoting the western agenda, for example in dealing with pariah states like Iraq - indeed that is already happening. In the event of crises elsewhere, such as between the west and China, Russia could well be in the opposite camp, helping to change the odds to the west's disadvantage.

Another important dimension concerns the aspirations of Germany, like Japan slowly rehabilitating itself. Germany's ambitions to dominate eastern Europe were a key trigger for the second world war. Now that the Soviet Union is no more, Germany is surreptitiously building its influence there once more. Thus, Russian and German ambitions are directly opposed. It is if the challenges become too obvious, too close to the heart, that we could well see the long-forgotten cold war scenario of a Russian invasion of Germany. We may recall that the Russian military is increasingly desperate and has little to lose. Charging through Germany bent on plunder may seem an attractive option compared to watching your daughter starve to death.

Finally, at the heart of the west, in Europe itself, processes now in place seem to have put the various states on a collision course. In particular, integration in the European community is creating a backlash of popular resentment and disenchantment. While politicians and business leaders are enthusiasts for this great game, Europe's ordinary people are suffering as the struggle to meet the Maastricht criteria imposes an unaccustomed austerity. As one journalist put it in The Times, past evidence suggests that the more the people of Europe get to know each other, the less they like it.

In 1994, Austria and Sweden voted to join the EU. Yet only one year later a survey showed that the majority regretted the decision. For the better off countries, the EU imposes a large financial burden as they subsidise the worse off countries, for dubious benefit to themselves. Yet it is well known that the recipients of charity have little respect or affection for their benefactors and these flows of wealth do not seem to generate much sense of community.

In the early 1980s, Britain was making the biggest net contribution to the EC, when its per capita GNP was among the lowest. Mrs Thatcher negotiated a rebate to correct this gross unfairness, but in so doing Britain had to give way on access to our fisheries, leading to the loss of many livelihoods in what were already some of the more depressed parts of the British Isles. Meanwhile, France refused to comply with the ruling of the European Court of Justice that it must allow British sheep meat into the European market - the very kind of free trade that the EU is supposed to promote. Now, nearly twenty years on, the British rebate is subject to growing criticism and is a standing source of friction with our European partners.

It is by no means only Britain that finds aspects of its involvement in Europe frustrating and encouraging resentment. Every European country has gripes and feels itself in someway disadvantaged. For example, Greece enjoys a net inflow of £933 per household per year while it has a cavalier attitude to all the EU regulations. But still the average citizen detests the EU because most of the money goes to a comparatively small number of politicians, officials, businessmen and farmers who are turning the flow of subsidies into a colossal racket. The subsidies have the perverse effect of destroying farming communities and impoverishing ordinary people as they distort Greece's economy.

The idea that the process of European integration is leading not to peace and harmony, as dreamed by its founders, but to resentment, conflict and even war is not just a warning from the margins. It is one of the key themes of Bernard Connolly in his book 'The Rotten Heart of Europe'. Connolly was head of the EC unit organising the European Monetary System until his career came to an abrupt halt with publication of his exposé of the duplicitous conspiracy behind monetary union and plans for political integration.

In attempting to forge a European superstate the Brussels machinators are going against the trends for political autonomy that we see in every other part of the world, with the former Yugoslavia being the prime example. Yugoslavia (meaning 'Slav Union'), an amalgam of cultures and ethnicities, was held together for some forty years following the second world war. Yet it is clear that these peoples never belonged together. When they came to split apart again, it was with considerable animosity, violence and bloodshed. Is this the future that we are currently engineering for the European Union? The answer is surely yes, if five thousand years of history have anything to tell us at all. It is already apparent that the enthusiasm for European integration wanes when unemployment is high and the economy is depressed. The European community will never survive the failures of organisation, cohesion and integration that we foresee coming up over the next few decades.

The centralised apparatus that would govern a future integrated European state is currently not up to the job. It has what officials recognise as a democratic deficit. Something approach 80% of national legislation now comes from the Community, yet this is prepared by a small group of unelected officials in the European Commission and although it is supposed to be approved by ministers from the various states they act as nothing more than a rubber stamp. They are out of their depths in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the EU and it is difficult for them to put up a united front against the savvy, networking Euro civil servants. As we saw in an earlier chapter, it always tends to be the civil service not the politicians that have the real power. Jacques Delors as President of the Commission, for instance, largely drove the move towards European Monetary Union. He badgered the twelve leaders of the community over their commitment to the 'objective of progressive realisation of EMU'. This reveals as disingenuous the claims of Leon Brittan, one of Britain's Commissioners, that the Commission only does what the Council of Minsters tells it to.

The European Parliament meanwhile is unable to provide any kind of independent scrutiny to the work of the Commission. It is little more than a talking shop and, to most ordinary citizens in the EU's member states, distant and irrelevant. When the European Parliament once had the rare opportunity to vote on a piece of proposed legislation it voted against by 252 to 28. But it turned out that the required number of votes was 260 under some arcane rule, so the vote against failed and the Commission won the day! In the EU, therefore, there are no checks and balances as in the US. The legislature is a hollow sham. The judiciary is only an arm of the system dedicated to upholding and extending its powers. And the undemocratic Commission is the overmighty executive with only vestigial restraint from member state governments.

The critical thing is not just that the EU is undemocratic but that attempts to plug the democratic deficit are bound only to magnify the existing friction and hasten the downfall of the whole project. Thus, at the moment, each nation has an equal say in the Council of Ministers. Yet this means that Luxembourg, say, has one vote for every 186,000 people, while Germany only has one vote for every 8 million. Yet, if this were to be evened up, it would mean that Germany would completely swamp Luxembourg's voice - a prospect that is unlikely to go down well there.

A resurgent Germany at the heart of an integrated Europe has to be a worrying prospect, with Germany bidding for supremacy and its partners seeking to resist it at all costs. This is a sure-fire formula for agitation and discord. However, it may be a question of being damned if you do and damned if you don't. Germany has already given oblique warnings to other EU states and to Russia that war may be on the cards if things do not go the way that it considers is reasonable. In a much-quoted speech at the University of Louvain in February 1996, the then Chancellor Kohl declared that 'the policy of European integration is in reality a question of war and peace in the 21st century'. He also endorsed President Mitterand's remark that 'nationalism is war', saying 'nationalism has brought great suffering to our continent'. Kohl is surely right. A non-integrated Europe is going to fight over its differences in the future as it has done in the past. However, the problem is that he is wrong in suggesting that integration can be achieved peacefully; integration, if it happens, will be the product of that future war. The most likely scenario for such a war would be a German conquest, but it seems unlikely that this could happen this side of a dark age. When Europe goes to war again, it will almost certainly be part of the expected global breakdown of political order. We are now too connected into the international system for the grievances of this continent to be resolved here alone, decoupled from the rest of the world. Apart from anything else, war in Europe would encourage the Japanese, Chinese, Russians, and probably others as well, to make the kinds of bid for greater authority that we have discussed above.

At any rate, for Germany, the EU is a vehicle to be used for promoting its interests and achieving dominance. Germany's power grows year by year. The Benelux countries have already been drawn far into its orbit. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union it is extending its influence into eastern Europe virtually uncontested but under the cover of the EU. This involves reawakening territorial claims there that have not been aired since the days of Nazism. In 1938, Adolf Hitler declared 'with regard to the Sudeten Germans, my patience is now at an end!'. And in 1998, Theo Waigel, the German finance minister declared 'the Czechs must understand that we and the Sudeten Germans will not allow ourselves to be treated in this manner!'

When the French were criticised for conducting a series of nuclear tests in 1995, the French Foreign Minister defended his country's actions saying that France had been invaded three times in the previous hundred years and it was anxious not to repeat the experience. It is worth bearing mind who the invader was on each of those three occasions - not Islamic fundamentalists, nor third world rogue states, but France's own neighbour. Those who have read this far in this book should know by now that the kinds of issue that led Germany to invade France three times in a hundred years do not go away lightly. In fact, they do not go away without passing through the crucible of a dark age. And since 1945, Europe has certainly not passed through a dark age.

Thus, one day we will be at war again with Germany. It may be sooner than we think. It will be a world war that builds on and takes to new heights the two convulsions which marred the twentieth century. It will be a nuclear war.

There is more however. The world is losing international political integration. What lies ahead is not just one war, but a descent into chronic war. The world will be torn apart by war between countries, as every country is itself torn apart by internal disagreements. This will be the dark age that wipes away all the resentment and contentiousness and humiliations of the last thousand years, allowing the world to forget its troubled past and rebuild itself along happier lines.




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