At the turn of the millennium who would have imagined that things we took for granted would no longer exist in 2010 — Saddam Hussein, Lehmann Brothers, the World Trade Centre, even the French unit of currency, the franc. Each played a part in shaping today’s world. Equally the decade we have just started may see the demise of aspects of life which right now seem indispensable.
Researchers at the Lowy Institute, an international policy think tank, ponder what 10 elements of global life might fade over the next decade.
Pax Americana
Since 1945 the US Navy has enjoyed untrammelled freedom of manoeuvre across the world's oceans. American maritime supremacy has maintained the peace and kept the sea-lanes open to trade for over half a century. In doing so it has underwritten Asia's economic and political transformation. By 2020, however, American access to the Western Pacific and the South China Sea - a region of crucial strategic importance - will be increasingly contested. China is developing weapons to deny US forces access to some of the most important waterways in Asia. These include advanced submarines, new-generation combat aircraft and cruise missiles. More menacing is Beijing's development of ballistic missiles able to strike US aircraft carriers and other surface ships up to 2000km from China's coast. According to some analysts, by 2020 Beijing intends to have a strike capability effective as far as 8000km. These weapons will make decisions like Bill Clinton's 1996 dispatch of two aircraft carrier groups into the Taiwan Straits highly risky. With absent effective countermeasures, these developments could spell the end of Pax Americana in our region.
- Andrew Shearer
"The international community"
The fall of the Berlin Wall led many people in Europe and North America to assume that when they were in agreement it represented an international consensus. Rarely did they stop to ask what Africans or Asians thought. The "international community", with the highly unrepresentative UN Security Council as its supposed arbitrator, was claimed to exist to lend ethical weight to campaigns on a range of international issues. The end of the Cold War did free the Security Council from its bipolar disorder. Yet, the five members with vetoes still rarely agree on key global issues from Kosovo to sanctions on Iran to Mugabe's state destruction. Rather, Russia and China often line up against the other three. More peoples and states with greater access to communications affirm how many different and often incompatible communities of beliefs and interests exist and how firmly these are held, especially when challenged by the illusory international community.
- Malcolm Cook
Tuvalu
The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu captured many hearts in Copenhagen as a symbol of the life and death consequences of the United Nations climate change negotiations. Tuvalu has a surface area of 26 square kilometres spread over nine low-lying atolls and a population of just over 11,000 people. The highest elevation point in Tuvalu is less than five metres. With Tuvalu's annual sea level rise at 5.7mm, the long-term future of the atoll state is at risk. Many blame human-induced carbon emissions in developed countries for Tuvalu's vulnerability. But the once idyllic life on Tuvalu is also under severe strain from high population density, poor waste management causing pollution of the water table, the environmental effects of the removal of vegetation for construction and a dependence on imported food. What is at stake over the next decade is not a sinking island but the very viability of life on this fragile atoll state. The land mass of Tuvalu will still exist in 2020 but it may be unable to support the population.
- Jenny Hayward-Jones
Secrets
Currently, governments seem to generate secrets at an increasing rate. But keeping them secret is getting harder. Leaks of classified material occur astonishingly regularly, and a highly competitive media carries them around the world instantaneously. Governments' compulsive secrecy has led to a devaluing of classification and an increasing tolerance of candour by serving and former officials. More and more people tend to presume that secrecy is just a cover for corruption and the abuse of power. The events of September 11 showed obsessive secrecy prevents the sharing of information that could prevent a terrorist attack. Governments have been forced to involve the private sector more deeply in national security planning. But the greatest foe of secrecy is the internet. In the interests of social networking, people are prepared to surrender astonishing amounts of their privacy through twitter and facebook. The internet can function as a vast database of our personal information, tastes, movements and alignments. Google maps provides any computer user with imagery that a decade ago was the preserve of governments. Perhaps only once it's gone will we realise the positive aspects of secrets.
- Michael Wesley
Diplomats
Diplomats once managed all dealings between countries, but today foreign ministries are struggling for relevance and resources. Globalisation makes diplomats more necessary, not less. Copenhagen highlighted how complex issues have become almost irresolvable through the proliferation of international actors, including NGOs, multinationals, and "super-empowered" individuals as well as 192 states. Other government agencies are doing their own diplomacy. There is no substitute for an effective overseas network of smart, energetic foreign affairs professionals. But by 2020, just when we need them most, diplomats could join hand-written dispatches as a relic of the diplomatic past.
- Alex Duchen
Seafood
If Paul Hogan is dusted off in 2020 by Tourism Australia, the dialogue might sound like this: "Will I throw another shrimp on the barbie Luv?" "No, better leave it at one Hon...we can share it". Rich countries already take their fisheries management pretty seriously but still have to import seafood to meet steadily growing domestic demand. A significant share of those imports come from Southeast Asian countries, where stocks are massively overfished and poorly managed. In Indonesia - the world's fourth largest fish producer - all seafood resources will likely be over-exploited in a decade. In Thai waters fish density declined by 86 per cent between 1961 and 1991. In other countries overfishing is also rife. Add to this the world's difficulties solving collective action problems (climate change) and increasing global demand for fish - in China, a growing middle class has seen fish consumption per person go from 11.5kg in 1990 to 25.6kg in 2006.
- Fergus Hanson
Pakistan
If recent patterns of terrorism, radicalisation and fraying governance continue to worsen, Pakistan as a viable state may not exist by 2020. Much will depend on whether the country's establishment can unify against the extremists it once nurtured. A complete takeover by the Taleban and its al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Toiba allies - something like the 1979 Iranian revolution - is not the most likely outcome. What is more plausible is their partial victory, heralding a many-sided civil war, not unlike 1980s Lebanon, only this time in a country of more than 200 million people and with even less prospect of peace. Whether the army or the Taleban controlled Islamabad it would be under constant counterattack from the losing side. And smaller factions would wage their own fights for survival, including the Shia minority with backing from Iran, as well as regional elements seeking autonomy. Karachi might become an embattled city state, the last bastion of an older, more tolerant Pakistan connected with the world. Islamabad's elite would flee with their money to Britain, America and the Gulf emirates.
- Rory Medcalf
The unchallenged greenback
Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, a bunch of smart international economists had looked out at a world of enormous US current account deficits and confidently predicted a US dollar crash. Then the US economy suffered its biggest financial mishap since the 1930s ... and the greenback appreciated. Whoops. Now, with a double-digit budget deficit, a Federal Reserve with a policy rate effectively at zero, and a bunch of nervous official creditors apparently so desperate for alternatives that they will even contemplate the IMF's Special Drawing Rights as a new reserve currency, a bunch of smart international economists look out at the world and confidently predict the end of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. They are right that, viewed in isolation, in many ways the greenback sucks as a prospective store of value over the next decade. Trouble is, all of its current and prospective competitors suck in various ways too. So in ten years, expect an international monetary system characterised by competing currencies rather than the dollar-denominated one we have today, but don't bid farewell to the US dollar just yet.
- Mark Thirlwell
Truth
Most of us trust the media to present us with the "facts". But the media is changing. The first Gulf War was such a success for CNN that it inspired competitors. The second Gulf War marked the arrival of Al Jazeera, a cable channel whose business case and popularity was based on providing a different perspective to that provided by CNN or the BBC. Other perspectives have followed. Beijing invested an extra $7.1 billion in international broadcasting last year.The result is that we are presented, via the internet and cable television, with a range of quite different versions of what has happened, especially if it's contentious. As the media market diversifies, for those without the time or inclination to go searching on the net, it will be harder to determine who is telling the truth. Out of helplessness, people will pre-determine which version of the news they want to watch or read - because it's accessible and agrees with their prejudices.
- Michael Wesley
Capital punishment
Capital punishment will never disappear from the face of the earth. Currently, the global death row accommodates perhaps 20,000 individuals. Only a fortnight ago, China executed the mentally ill Briton Akmal Shaikh. But the clear global trend is in the direction of abolition. Since 1990, more than 40 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. 2009 saw the fewest number of death sentences in the US since that country's death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Last year, 11 US states considered proposals to repeal the death penalty - not only because it leads to the execution of innocents and fails to deter crime, but because capital cases are so expensive to run. The vast majority of the world's executions take place in Asia, yet the number of abolitionist Asian states is increasing. The main front in the abolitionist battle is China, responsible for nearly three quarters of known executions. Yet there is progress. In 2007, China's Supreme People's Court began to review all death sentences, and the number passed is dropping. If the world can persuade Beijing its international prestige requires it to treat its prisoners humanely, then we could make great strides towards abolition in the next decade.
- Michael Fullilove
WHO WON'T LAST A DECADE?
To paraphrase the satirical newspaper The Onion, it's safe to predict that, in the next decade, the world death rate will hold steady at 100 per cent.
But although we're all going to die, in geopolitical terms, some deaths matter more than others. So without going into ghoulish speculation about which political leaders might fall to war, terrorism or assassination, here are a few notable people who continue to influence world events, but who are statistically unlikely to see out the decade:
* Queen Elizabeth II (83 years old);
* King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand (82);
* Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (81);
* Henry Kissinger (86);
* Archbishop Desmond Tutu (78);
* Fidel Castro (82) and his successor, brother Raoul (78);
* The Dalai Lama (74);
* Shia Islam's senior scholar, Ayatollah Sistani (79);
* Sunni Islam senior scholar, Yusuf al Qaradawi (83);
* Singapore's minister-mentor Lee Kuan Yew (86);
* King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (85);
* Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (83);
* Pope Benedict XVI (82);
* Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (77).
Finally, those who thought the public and media reaction to the death of Princess Diana was excessive will want to take a week's holiday when Nelson Mandela (91) dies.
- Sam Roggeveen
The Lowy Institute is an independent international policy think tank based in Sydney.
