long been that one part of the people has regarded itself as Flemish, the other as Walloon. With the tripartite system it should be possible for the Flemish to elect their own governments (for systems of family law, for cultural issues, including education, and for other representational matters) even while living amid the Walloons, who could similarly elect their own government. The same would apply to Catholics and Protestants living together in Northern Ireland and to the provinces of Yugoslavia, and, so long as national government diminishes in importance in this way, it might eventually be possible for the two Germanies to have a joint unimportant national government of the same kind.
It is probable that in the telecommuting age all areas of the world will eventually have to move to tripartite systems of this sort: with (a) continental-sized governments to pursue regional central tax policies in order to prevent some tax havens becoming ghettoes of the rich and some inner cities ghettoes of the poor; (b) very local governments, which could eventually become as small as particular groups of citizens wanted them to be (so that people who wanted to live in a commune and telecommute from it could set that commune up as a unit of administrative local government if neighbours agreed, while at the other extreme other groups might prefer to employ a commercial company on a performance contract to carry through administrative local government tasks rather than pretend that, for example, voting Republican or Democratic was the right way of getting a mayor who would be best fitted to find the most successful changing technology for operating New York’s drains); and (c) national governments that would have a diminished role over their peoples, who would not necessarily live contiguously.
The EEC at the end of the Third World War seemed lucky in being well placed to set up a prototype for this tripartite system, when it should be needed. One problem concerned the capital city or cities for the new Europe. It had been argued even before the war that the existing city of Brussels was too crowded for this purpose, and also, strangely, too central. A central city as a capital now means that centripetal forces become too strong, so that the central area grows richer and the flanks too poor. Even by the 1970s there had been grounds for arguing that the best scheme would be to have twin cities nearly a continent apart as capitals, joined by close telecommunication links and with great data banks planned from scratch for the new information age. A sentimental opportunity now presented itself. It was the Dutch Prime Minister who suggested at Copenhagen that the custom-built capitals of the new Europe should be Peace City West and Peace City East, built on the former sites of Birmingham and Minsk.
One of the most important functions of government is the organization of military preparedness and defence. Much of this should be organized on a continental scale. The new Europe felt reasonably confident that it could avoid internal tribal wars. But it regarded the chaos emerging on its southern boundaries with sickened alarm.
The two most worried reflections at Copenhagen were: ‘the world is now divided into three parts, and the EEC is perched on top of the wildest south’; and ‘unfortunately, the earth is round’.
Many people expect the China-Japan co-prosperity sphere (including Australasia) to be the future centre of the world. Japan is rapidly becoming the most advanced country technologically. China has the largest literate labour force, and as this is still relatively underpaid in comparison with its ability and entrepreneurial drive it therefore has the fastest early capacity for growth. Australia and the islands to its north will be among the pleasantest places in which to live during the telecommuting age. No part of this area was invaded in the Third World War, though a great many Australians and New Zealanders fought as volunteers on the Allied side and in Southern Africa, and many more were on their way to Europe when the few weeks of full hostilities came to an end. The parts of the China-Japan co-prosperity area that may still be ravaged by
The second main area of the world is the Americas. North America was undamaged by the Third World War just as it had been by the First and Second. The main economic effect of war and post-war reconstruction has been (as in 1941-45) to restore it to full employment. South America has prospered, and communism has been overthrown in the Caribbean. It is about as popular to advocate Soviet-style communism in the Caribbean (including Cuba and Jamaica) in these late 1980s as it was to advocate Nazism in continental Europe in the late 1940s. For a time, at least, urban guerrilladom in the Americas is likely to be on the decline.
The problem area is the territory to the south of the new EEC. On the western side of its long southern border, Africa has become a dumping ground for every sort of surplus military weapon used in the late war; its tribal hatreds are still seething; it may be entering a new dark age. Perched on its southern rim are the triumphant white homelands of South Africa. During the years 1988–2013 they may feel as self-confident after military success as Israel did in 1948 and 1967, offering some of the same attractions but posing some of the same problems.
China-Japan is likely to co-operate with Australasia to its south, in order to help bring humane and sensible telecommuter-era government to the troubled areas between them. Some of their joint methods of neo-gunboat diplomacy will be called neo-colonialism; but as they will be a multi-racial partnership they will get away with a lot. North America may co-operate similarly with Brazil, to create its own north-south axis and an area of prosperity between them.
There will be a school of thought that thinks that the new EEC should ally itself with white South Africa, as China-Japan with Australia, and the United States with Brazil. But the EEC might then find that it had made racial problems in its ‘wild south’ even more likely to bring riot upon itself.
At the eastern end of Europe’s southern border, none of the problems of the Middle East has been resolved. An EEC’s southeastern border would lie on the Caspian Sea, including a short land frontier with triumphant Iran.
As Iran has been on the winning side, it may have temptations to extend a new Persian empire across Arabia. There will be fierce resistance if this is attempted. This uncovers two other problems: first, the fact that Iran is now the cockpit between the China-Japan and EEC spheres of interest; second, the question of how long Middle Eastern oil is likely to remain important.
While Iran’s western border is with Iraq and the Gulf, its north-eastern border is with the Asiatic republics of the former Soviet Union, now under Chinese influence, and its south-eastern border is with Pakistan. India-Pakistan was not a scene of fighting in the war; the new generation of youngsters coming out of its schools is the first generation to be almost entirely literate (like the first generation of literate Chinese to emerge from their schools fifteen years ago, and look how they’ve progressed); some people therefore expect rapid economic development in India-Pakistan at last. Some trends suggest it may become the manufacturing area for the China-Japan co- prosperity sphere, the place to which that rich area devolves its pollutant heavy industries. This may be especially likely if nearby Middle Eastern oil remains an important industrial fuel.
There could be a paradox here. The Japanese remember all too well that, on the day in 1941 when they started their war with the United States, a paper before the imperial government had said that war was necessary because of the coming shortage of oil. In that December of 1941 Japan had a reserve of oil sufficient for its needs for a few months ahead; the Japanese government believed that it would never have so much oil again unless it seized control of the oilfields of Indonesia and perhaps Burma. Thirty years later oil supplies from Indonesia and Burma were much less important than anybody had forecast. Though Japan had been defeated, Japanese industry was using every six hours an amount of oil equal to the entire stock that Japan held on Pearl Harbor day. It was buying it easily from temporarily glutted supplies in the Middle East.
The 1985 war also owed its start partly to fears on the part of the great nations that they would face penury unless they could secure physical possession of oil-producing areas. One remembers the competition run in 1920 by an Austrian newspaper for the most dramatic conceivable newspaper headline. The winning entry was ‘Archduke Franz Ferdinand alive. World war fought by mistake.’
The history of energy supplies during the recent conflict has raised some question as to whether, in relation to the ‘oil shortage’, that sort of headline may not now be proved apposite.
The areas that have increased their industrial production most in recent years (Japan-China and South America) were cut off from imported supplies of oil when the 1985 war broke out. Each had accumulated large reserve stocks before the war and the war was far shorter than they expected. They got by with ease. The Japanese, who are now the world’s most advanced technicians and who had feared that the impeding of oil supplies from the Middle East might prove much longer-lasting, have progressed dramatically with experiments on the thousands of possible other ways of releasing energy from storage in matter. This does not apply simply to nuclear, solar, wave and geothermal energy, but also to, for example, creating artificial rain in large tanks by allowing warm
