Predictions for 1993

PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON

I was reading the other day about a new approach to research which has been taken up by the Organisation for European Co- operation and Development. It calls it tech- nological forecasting. The basic idea of this technique is that governments and businesses, instead of proceeding step by step from what they already know, should make certain educa- ted assumptions about what is likely to happen in twenty-five years' time and start working backwards from there. It is suggested that by this means we might avoid wasting an enormous amount of time, money and effort in moving in directions where nobody really wants to go.

There is surely something in thii. Neither the desires of man nor the possibilities of science are as unpredictable as people like to make out. If we can define our tasks for the immediate future in rough relation to these two factors, we may well make a better shot at improving the world than we have managed so far.

But why stick at science? The main prob- lems we have to face are not scientific or technological but political. One asks oneself whether forecasting techniques of this kind might not be profitably used in the political field. That they have not been used in the past is only too radily apparent. When I think back over my lifetime the thing which strikes me most forcibly is the astonishing lack of interest of governments in long-term possibili- ties. Perhaps because they are so intimately involved in what is happening now, they seem far less aware of the future than ordinary think- ing people with no special knowledge at all.

I first began to suspect this when I read Mein Kampf as a schoolboy. It seemed hardly credible to me that anyone could mistake the deductions from this, and yet the entire British government was evidently capable of doing so. Since that day I have watched one group of politicians after another take up attitudes which any intelligent long-term forecaster could have told them were hopelessly unrealistic. I have heard Churchill say that he did not propose to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. I have heard people talk, at the end of the war, of the Big Three—and mean ,it.

I have seen a war fought for a canal whith not only the British, but the world as a whole, could perfectly well do without. I have had to put up with acres of windy verbiage about the New Commonwealth, when not only the Africans and the Asians, but even the ordinary British man in the street, realised from the beginning that it was no more than a politician's fantasy.

You may say, of course, that it is easy to be wise after the event. The real question is: what are the forecasts any one would make now, to cover the next twenty-five years? Well,

I am prepared to hazard a few fairly confident guesses, made not so much on political, but on psychological and mathematical grounds. The full acceptance of any one of these pre- dictions would mean a radical change in our attitude to present events.

1. The Americans will get out of Asia. This is a psychological certainty. The Americans have never cared very much for Asia, which

is an area highly resistant to the imposition of American values. One has only to talk to Americans to realise that they are bored to death with the whole colonial business. Unlike the smaller maritime powers, the British and the Dutch, they have a whole continent at home to interest themselves in, without tangling themselves up in oriental politics. They have no sentimental attachments to the area. They got sucked into it accidentally, as a result of the collapse of the Japanese. They yearn to leave. The Pacific, after all, is a wide enough protective barrier for their security. As soon as the communists give them half a chance to get off the hook with some semblance of honour, they will be off home. And whatever happens after that, they won't come back.

2. The Japanese will, in due course, replace them. The Japanese were always right in believing that South-East Asia was a natural sphere of influence for them. But they jumped the gun. They made the common error of supposing that empires are built by fighting other great powers for them. History shows that this method almost invariably fails. Empires are like cottage-pie—they are not made, they accumulate. The rich, strong, efficient power moves, often reluctantly, into a power vacuum. As the Japanese grow richer and stronger, they will acquire more and more commercial interests in the East Indies. Inevitably these Will become threatened, by communism, by revolutions, by muddle and mismanagement, by emotional nationalism. Weak governments will call in Japanese advisers, buy Japanese arms. The Japanese will be unable to con- template the idea of the Chinese becoming totally dominant over the whole of the East. Ultimately, as in Europe, a line will be drawn between the spheres of influence- of the two political systems. In this, the influence of the countries of the West will become totally irrelevant.

3. Democracy in India has no chalice of survival. If it is not destroyed by religion or politics it will certainly be destroyed by mathe- matics. The population of India is about 500 million and increases at over 2 per cent per annum. Measures of population control have

been hopelessly ineffective and there is every chance that the population in twenty-five years will be over 750 million. Democratic govern-

ment is. in any case, an exceptional system. It

has managed to establish itself only in a few, rich, developed countries, usually with relatively small populations of relatively high education.

How can such a delicate growth be expected to survive among 750 million people. most of them uneducated and without the means of subsistence? All the detailed democratic forms make about as much sense in this situation as Votes for Women during the Wars of the Roses.

The Indian state will end either in disintegration or military rule. To talk about it as a testing

ground for democracy is foolish and dangerous, since it has the effect uf discrediting democracy itself.

4. The Common Market has no political future whatever. It may make sense as a trade

grouping, but the idea of political integration is a mirage. No area of this size or population has ever achieved political unity in the past without either conquest or civil war. Is there any reason why Western Europe should be an exception? The fact is that everyone has become so obsessed with de Gaulle that they have tended to forget all the other more important obstacles to unification—the conflicts of interest, the different conceptions of democracy, the internal stresses, the vast communist parties in France and Italy—which will still be there when he is gone. The best one can hope for is an effective commercial and military group- ing to balance Russian influence.

5. Once America relaxes her ellorts to police the world. she will solve her domestic colonial

problem. By this I mean, of course, the negro

situation. Mathematics here compel a solution. There are enough negroes to force a policy of integration. But there are not enough to make them a dominant group, and they have nowhere else to go. Black power is, therefore, an absurdity. The two communities must integrate in the end because it is the only policy there is. And the converse situation will obtain in Southern Africa. The whites can look as strong and secure as they like. But mathematics will beat them, one of these days.

And what of Britain in all this? One cannot be sure. An important change which must surely have taken place before the next twenty- five years have gone by is a final and com- plete psychological adjustment to the country's

new insignificance. But one thing is certain— that Britain's success in adapting to events will depend on navigating the tide of history rather than trying to push it back. It may be objected that my estimates of the way the tide is run- ning are oversimplifications. Of course they are. All long-term thought is oversimplified. What we have tended to do in the past is to work out what we wanted to happen and call it policy, or else to decide what ought to hap- pen and call it principle. What I am suggesting is that we give more consideration to what is pretty certainly going to happen, whether we like it or not.