"Inside every one of them Yanks, there's a Chinese wanting to get out."

[jetfx]

I've recently been reading The Vertigo Years, a book I got for my birthday from karenjeane at my request. It's a cultural history of the Western world in the first fourteen years of the last century, a time the book argues, is very much like our own. It was a time of globalization, multi polar international affairs, rapid technological development, mass

Comments

[postrodent]

I don't know if we're going to even see a global hegemon -- even if we manage to avoid an energy or climate collapse (which I wouldn't bet my life on, oh wait I already am). I think the era of big states may be drawing slowly to a close. America is in a steep decline - its economy is hollowed out and its political system is still basically incapable of recognizing or responding to reality -- but I don't see anybody else stepping up to take the kind of role we had in the 20th century. The fault lines in Chinese society are already quite visible. Europe is fractious. Russia never really was all that

[jetfx]

Even in a pre-industrial age there were global hegemons. I think we can remain confident that we'll have one, regardless of the energy crisis outcome. Even with a severe energy crisis, I can't see some major regression. It would be painful, but not fatal.

[baron_waste]

I've tried very hard to come up with an alternate-history scenario where the Great War didn't happen - it really almost didn't! Whether some weird Vietnam-style 'proxy war' might have flared up in the Balkans is debatable - but it's difficult to suss out. Fun to try, though...

I'm also reminded of S M Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers, wherein as a consequence of a series of cometary impacts in 1878 the United States are simply obliterated, by first a seaboard-wiping tsunami and the following “nuclear winter.” The British Empire survives, though much changed, and to its modern-day inhabitants, the notion that large areas of North America had once spent a century or so in rebellion against the Raj is really just an irrelevant footnote. After all, “the American Century” never happened...

(It's an interesting variant on the traditional disaffected-leftist-intellectual SF trope, that the United States are destroyed and good riddance. There was a lot of that going on in the '80s, until its ultimate source went out of business in 1989.)

[jetfx]

Without the Great War, I suspect that we would have had a significantly less bloody and more productive century. Social democratic parties pursuing reform through the ballot box rather than blood thirsty Bolshevik revolutionaries or Fascist stormtroopers. Europe's historic architecture intact rather then rebuilt after being pulverized from the air. A still vibrant and populous European Jewry and likely no Israel either. Longer lasting empires and a less rapid and destructive decolonization. Tens of millions of people who didn't meet violent deaths.

I don't think there would have been some sort of proxy war in the Balkans. Proxy wars were born out of the reality that the two super powers could not fight each other directly without risking nuclear war. That was not a problem in 1914, and so the great powers went to war. Also there had been a major war in the Balkans the year previous and the only great power involved was the Ottomans, who had their ass handed to them as the borders were redrawn.