It's such a shame that a really well-written and somewhat thought out opinion piece is dragged down by the low quality comments from people who don't know what they're talking about. That and the fact FP force you to create a free account to read an article.
Another option is to right click the section in chrome and delete the div. An even more general option, if you have adblock, is to right click and use "Block this ad" to block the div forever. You will also need to block the div in the background that shadows the text.
What's really bizarre is that they separate the account signin and the commenting privileges, which require separate credentials. No great loss since I don't want to join that discussion, but you're right about the sad state of online commentary.
Livefyre, the provider for their comment service, purports to provide (for their enterprise solution) "authentication, user management, and user profile solutions. It’s also compatible with third party or custom products to deliver your users a seamless social experience." I'm surprised that FP didn't integrate the service with their homegrown login system, given that it seems to be possible. But despite the kinks, it's almost certainly a more flexible and reliable/scalable system than rolling their own comments pages.
The only point in the article which made sense to me was:
"it is certainly the case that the world we are now entering is more similar to that of 100 years ago -- a world of competitive multipolarity -- than that of a quarter-century ago."
I didn't really follow the rest of analogies being made; they were all sort of weasel-worded to acknowledge what a stretch they were.
I'm not sure I understand the comparison being made in that sentence. Europe and the US dominated the world at that point, Japan although a force in asia had a minuscule economy compared to the west. The world is far more multipolar now than it was a hundred years ago and it will continue to be so.
Europe in 1913 was a collection of feuding empires rather than a semi-unified entity like it is today. Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia all had commercial and geopolitical interests that conflicted with each other, and a long history of fighting major wars in pursuit of those interests.
Additionally, the United States at the time was coming out of a long period of isolation and beginning to flex her muscles in Latin America and the Pacific. The American victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War) demonstrated that the US was willing to fight established European powers, and could win. Similarly, Japan was relatively small economically, but by 1913 she had inflicted a major defeat on Russia in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War), making her another rising power.
This makes for an interesting read in conjunction with that National Interest article re-evaluating Oswald Spengler's legacy (via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5029200). Perhaps I'm being parochial, but I worry a bit less about a Pacific conflict (at least in the short term) than I do about what would follow a collapse in the Euro and the subsequent zero-sum bitterness that would surely result.
I'm amazed that the author of this piece managed to write all those words analogizing 2013 to 1913 without ever mentioning the huge, obvious difference between the two eras: the existence of nuclear weapons. Those weapons create pressures against direct state-on-state confrontation that simply did not exist in 1913.
You ignore something else. The nuclear weapons would (arguable) create real pressure only against countries that don't have them, and even then - it's a big risk to anyone raising the stacks and pulling the big gun. This is similar to the WW2, where chemical weapons although being available, weren't used.
This article seems to suffer from a cognitive dissonance with itself - while the theme is inherently one of speculation, the author seems to shy away from speculation wherever possible. Rather, he focuses on enumerating a list of weakly connected (albeit well-researched) parallels between 2013 and 1913. It seems he is much too concerned about protecting his words from disagreement; as a result, the words are not nearly ambitious enough.
Only about 80% of the way through the piece does the author even ask the question:
> What does any of this say about the world in 2013?
Finally! Now we might be able to see a speculative narrative:
> To take an example of one of the more plausible shocks we now face, a miscalculation in the South China Sea could easily set off a chain of events not entirely dissimilar to a shot in Sarajevo in 1914, with alliance structures, questions of prestige, escalation, credibility, and military capability turning what should be marginal to global affairs into a central question of war and peace.
And... that's it? The next paragraph is clearly the beginning of the conclusion of the piece, recapping the earlier paragraphs. As they say, "that's all she wrote."
I would have loved to see the same depth of research applied to a detailed analysis of this scenario and others. How are the alliance structures similar and different? How might world leaders react? What mistakes were made in 1913 that can be avoided today?
This article should be taken for what it is - a thought provoking introduction, but by no means a successful standalone treatment of the issue.
One thing that's not mentioned a lot, it's frighteningly easy to drag a whole country into a war, especially if regarded as a defensive one. The media are obedient and sensationalist, they will drum up the public for it. Once the train starts moving it's hard to stop.
War is the easiest thing to fund, a true emergency that requires extraordinary powers for the state.
"... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Thank God this forced login popup is killable via browser's developer tools. But why oh why did they put this on their page? Could people stop doing that?
US from 1870-1910 is much more analogous to China from 1980-2030 than Germany surely. Rapidly industrialising, large untapped low skilled population, abundant natural resources, people generating large personal wealth very quickly. However, like Britian in early 20th C the US has excessive military spending and burgeoning debt. You could argue that post war austerity in Britian (to pay for the cost of the wars) is what destroyed entrepreneurialism, which had been prevalent in Britain right through the Victorian era, by restricting access to capital for investment in industry.
Here is the article text, for those who want to avoid that nasty splash screen.
The leading power of the age is in relative decline, beset by political crisis at home and by steadily eroding economic prowess. Rising powers are jostling for position in the four corners of the world, some seeking a new place for themselves within the current global order, others questioning its very legitimacy. Democracy and despotism are locked in uneasy competition. A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result. Small-town America rails at the excessive power of Wall Street. Asia is rising once again. And, yes, there's trouble in the Middle East.
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Sound familiar?
In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today?
Let's get the caveats out of the way upfront. History does not repeat itself -- at least not exactly. Analogies from one period to another are never perfect. However tempting it may be to view China in 2013 as an exact parallel to Germany in 1913 (the disruptive rising power of its age) or to view the contemporary United States as going through the exact same experience as Britain a century ago (a "weary titan staggering under the too vast orb of its fate," as Joseph Chamberlain put it), things are never quite that straightforward. Whereas Germany in 1913 explicitly sought a foreign empire, China in 2013 publicly eschews the idea that it is an expansionist power (though it is perfectly clear about protecting its interests around the world). Whereas the German empire in 1913 had barely 40 years of history as a unified state behind it and was only slightly more populous that Britain or France, China in 2013 can look back on centuries of continuous history as a player in world affairs, and it now boasts one-fifth of the world's population. Whereas Germany's rise was a genuinely new geopolitical phenomenon in 1913, the rise of China today is more of a return to historical normality. These differences matter.
Similarly, the strengths and weaknesses of the United States in 2013 are not quite the same as those of Britain 100 years ago. Then, Britain benefited politically from being the world's banker and from being the linchpin of the gold standard. Today the United States, though benefiting politically and economically from being the issuer of the world's principal reserve currency, is hardly in the same position: The country is laden with debt. (One can argue about whether it should really be such a big issue that so much of that debt is owned by Chinese state entities -- after all, Beijing can't just dump Treasury bonds if it doesn't get what it wants from Washington. But Chinese ownership of U.S. debt feeds a perception of American decline, and perceptions of the relative powers of states matter a lot to how other countries treat them.) There are other differences between Britain in 1913 and the United States in 2013. Britain was never a military superpower on the order of the United States today. There was never a unipolar British moment. Britain in 1913 had slipped behind Germany industrially decades before, living more and more off the proceeds of the past; the United States in 2013 is still the world's largest economy and in many respects the most dynamic and most innovative.
Moreover, the global context in which powers rise and fall in the 21st century is not quite the same as the one of the early 20th. In 1913, a handful of empires, mostly European, ruled over most of the world. Only...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadWhich if anything makes this misfeature even more annoying.
"it is certainly the case that the world we are now entering is more similar to that of 100 years ago -- a world of competitive multipolarity -- than that of a quarter-century ago."
I didn't really follow the rest of analogies being made; they were all sort of weasel-worded to acknowledge what a stretch they were.
Additionally, the United States at the time was coming out of a long period of isolation and beginning to flex her muscles in Latin America and the Pacific. The American victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War) demonstrated that the US was willing to fight established European powers, and could win. Similarly, Japan was relatively small economically, but by 1913 she had inflicted a major defeat on Russia in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War), making her another rising power.
Only about 80% of the way through the piece does the author even ask the question:
> What does any of this say about the world in 2013?
Finally! Now we might be able to see a speculative narrative:
> To take an example of one of the more plausible shocks we now face, a miscalculation in the South China Sea could easily set off a chain of events not entirely dissimilar to a shot in Sarajevo in 1914, with alliance structures, questions of prestige, escalation, credibility, and military capability turning what should be marginal to global affairs into a central question of war and peace.
And... that's it? The next paragraph is clearly the beginning of the conclusion of the piece, recapping the earlier paragraphs. As they say, "that's all she wrote."
I would have loved to see the same depth of research applied to a detailed analysis of this scenario and others. How are the alliance structures similar and different? How might world leaders react? What mistakes were made in 1913 that can be avoided today?
This article should be taken for what it is - a thought provoking introduction, but by no means a successful standalone treatment of the issue.
War is the easiest thing to fund, a true emergency that requires extraordinary powers for the state.
The leading power of the age is in relative decline, beset by political crisis at home and by steadily eroding economic prowess. Rising powers are jostling for position in the four corners of the world, some seeking a new place for themselves within the current global order, others questioning its very legitimacy. Democracy and despotism are locked in uneasy competition. A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result. Small-town America rails at the excessive power of Wall Street. Asia is rising once again. And, yes, there's trouble in the Middle East.
COMMENTS (0) SHARE:
Share on twitter Twitter
Share on reddit Reddit
More... Sound familiar?
In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today?
Let's get the caveats out of the way upfront. History does not repeat itself -- at least not exactly. Analogies from one period to another are never perfect. However tempting it may be to view China in 2013 as an exact parallel to Germany in 1913 (the disruptive rising power of its age) or to view the contemporary United States as going through the exact same experience as Britain a century ago (a "weary titan staggering under the too vast orb of its fate," as Joseph Chamberlain put it), things are never quite that straightforward. Whereas Germany in 1913 explicitly sought a foreign empire, China in 2013 publicly eschews the idea that it is an expansionist power (though it is perfectly clear about protecting its interests around the world). Whereas the German empire in 1913 had barely 40 years of history as a unified state behind it and was only slightly more populous that Britain or France, China in 2013 can look back on centuries of continuous history as a player in world affairs, and it now boasts one-fifth of the world's population. Whereas Germany's rise was a genuinely new geopolitical phenomenon in 1913, the rise of China today is more of a return to historical normality. These differences matter.
Similarly, the strengths and weaknesses of the United States in 2013 are not quite the same as those of Britain 100 years ago. Then, Britain benefited politically from being the world's banker and from being the linchpin of the gold standard. Today the United States, though benefiting politically and economically from being the issuer of the world's principal reserve currency, is hardly in the same position: The country is laden with debt. (One can argue about whether it should really be such a big issue that so much of that debt is owned by Chinese state entities -- after all, Beijing can't just dump Treasury bonds if it doesn't get what it wants from Washington. But Chinese ownership of U.S. debt feeds a perception of American decline, and perceptions of the relative powers of states matter a lot to how other countries treat them.) There are other differences between Britain in 1913 and the United States in 2013. Britain was never a military superpower on the order of the United States today. There was never a unipolar British moment. Britain in 1913 had slipped behind Germany industrially decades before, living more and more off the proceeds of the past; the United States in 2013 is still the world's largest economy and in many respects the most dynamic and most innovative.
Moreover, the global context in which powers rise and fall in the 21st century is not quite the same as the one of the early 20th. In 1913, a handful of empires, mostly European, ruled over most of the world. Only...