Empire
In decline?
Could Donald Trump be the Last World Emperor? States and Empires After the End of the Fossil Age
The 20th century was the age of fossil empires. The British used coal to create the biggest and the most powerful empire ever built -- it faded away with the gradual decline of its coal production. Another ancient empire, Austria-Hungary, the last remnant of the concept of a European Empire, went to pieces during WWI, the only state which didn't survive it.
The attempt of Italy to re-create the Roman Empire in 1936 with the conquest of Ethiopia had the only effect of generating the shortest-lived empire in the history of the world, just five years but, at least, it could demonstrate that no empire can exist for long without abundant mineral resources available.
With the end of WWII, only two large empires remained: the Soviet and the American one. Both were based on fossil fuels and, in particular, on the abundant crude oil they could produce. For a while, the Soviet Empire challenged the worldwide supremacy of the American Empire - but it had to give up and fold when its oil resources became too expensive to fuel its military apparatus.
Today, the sole heir of some four and a half millennia of empire building is the American Empire, a stupendous structure that dominates the world's oceans and a large part of the world's land. But, as for older empires, the American one will last only as long as will be able to produce fossil fuels. And the end starts being in sight: conventional oil production has been declining for decades in the US territory, while the production from shale can only postpone the unavoidable. It may well be that the mighty American Empire will soon follow the path of its predecessors. If this is the case, the collapse will be fast and brutal, the kind of collapse that we call sometimes "Seneca Cliff."
So, the American Empire is destined to go, but what will come after the fall? Most likely, we'll see a situation resembling that of the fall of the Roman Empire, when there were no resources to build another empire of the same size and Europe moved back into an age of independent cities and statelets.
Nowadays, many people seem to think that the disappearance of fossil fuels would bring a return of the Middle Ages. It might happen: large organizations need a lot of energy to run and, in addition, our civilization will be badly hit by global warming. The result may be the fragmentation of the current political entities, returning to nation-states or even back to city-states. There will not be another World Empire and Donald Trump could be, if not the last emperor, the last who ruled an empire as large as the current American one.
DYI
No comments:
Post a Comment