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100 Prospect contributors answered our invitation to respond to the question above.
The answers are spread across four pages. Use the links below to navigate.
This is Page 3 (J-M)
Page 1 (A-D) Page 2 (E-I) Page 4 (N-Y)
Simon Jenkins, journalist
Left vs right will be replaced by a clash of interest groups and bureaucracies. It will manifest itself in battles between tiers of government: global, regional, national and local. While the more public struggle will be within the UN, the EU and other regional bodies, the daily round of politics will pit central governments against provincial and local. The sophisticated anonymity of the electronic village will be balanced by a more active and angry local village. A wealthier, more leisured population will be less inclined to accept top-down authority. Deciding how far they can truly govern themselves will determine the success or failure of the new politics.
Josef Joffe, editor, "Die Zeit"
Samuel Huntington was right: "Islam has bloody borders," and those borders are not just those of Gaza, south Lebanon, Chechnya or Kashmir. They are also within Islam (see Iraq) and the west—in the inner and outer cities of Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Rome. And western liberalism is trapped in its own sacred traditions: how to integrate, assimilate or fight the enemy within while remembering our horrifying history of colonialism and racism and honouring our liberal values.
Alan Johnson, political writer
The future of progressive politics lies in a ten-syllable word: antitotalitarianism. The left vs right political division will be overlaid with another: democracy vs totalitarianism. A critical openness to modernity and plurality will pit itself against traditionalist closure. In a radically changed world, many have backed themselves into an incoherent and negativist "anti-imperialist" corner, losing touch with democratic, egalitarian and humane values. In the 21st century, democrats will be guided by a positive animating ethic: the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Those precious liberal ideas were rendered the inheritance of all by the social democratic, anti-colonial, feminist and egalitarian revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. But they were preserved for our times by the antitotalitarians—from Albert Camus to Kanan Makiya—who exposed and opposed the totalitarian temptation.
Radical Islamism is today's totalitarianism. To resist its anti-modernism, irrationalism, fear of freedom, loathing of women, and cult of master-slave human relations, we progressives will be forced to drop our knowing irony, drop our 1960s-vintage occidentalism, and become partisans and artisans of a liberal and antitotalitarian fighting faith. As we seek modes of realisation of our animating ethic through practical reform efforts to make poverty and tyranny history, we will defeat what Paul Berman has called "the totalitarian mindset."
RW Johnson, political writer
To a degree which is generally little understood, the current passionate wave of anti-Americanism so prevalent across the EU, Russia and the third world is exactly what should be expected in terms of balance of power theory. On the one hand, being the sole superpower inevitably encourages the US to take advantage of its position, but on the other there is a natural process of ganging up against that power in order to balance it. This anti-American critique is typically phrased in democratic, anti-imperialist and humanitarian terms.
It is obvious that this cannot last. The fact that the birth rate of the Muslim world is significantly higher than anyone else's will inevitably increase the power of the world's last great anti-democratic ideology, which is also likely to replace Marxism as the ideology of the third world. At the same time, the rapid rise of China will gradually restore the old bipolar balance of the cold war period. The democratic states are likely to find themselves thrown on the defensive to a degree not seen since the 1930s, and, for the first time, they will become unsure as to whether they really represent the wave of the future. The likelihood is that this will reconsolidate the forces of democratic conservatism—and it will also quite inevitably lead to a renewal of Europe's alliance with America.
Tobias Jones, writer
Rural versus urban. This century's great division will be less political than geographical: cities will, for the first time in centuries, begin to shrink, causing great tensions in rural locations having to accommodate large numbers of "evacuees."
In 2007 the world's urban population was increasing by 60m human souls a year. But after 2020, the trend is drastically reversed. Energy scarcities, food shortages and the dangers of viruses and terrorism mean that Britain's urban animals start to flee towards the countryside. The years of scarcity are felt not only in Britain but across the globe: acutely urbanised countries like Japan and Korea see violent battles to secure for city refugees ownership of food-producing, mineral-cradling earth. Redistribution of land, rather than wealth, becomes a focus point of global politics. Raw materials—fuels, metals and stones—reassume their worth, becoming themselves the means of exchange. Ancient land uses—farming, mining, hunting and coppicing—will be "modernised" to put them at the heart of a new, simpler economy. This "modernisation," this departure from "the authenticity of nature," becomes a flashpoint between the two mindsets.
There is much debate regarding the mysticism of a person's attachment to their land, and from that debate a new kind of nationalism emerges. The rural will become eulogised again, partly because of a shift in aesthetic tastes, but also because of the countryside's new-found political and demographic clout. The rural vote is the engine of the century's dominant political force: the Conservationists. The party was the result of a merger between the Tories and the Greens, a final folding in on itself of the long-forgotten left-right spectrum.
Mary Kaldor, political scientist
The big ideological cleavage of the 21st century will be global vs parochial, or human vs communitarian, or cosmopolitan vs sectarian. In other words, the divide will be between those who put the global public interest—be it climate change, poverty reduction, or peace and human rights—before the interests of particular groups (national, religious or ethnic). This cleavage supplements but does not displace left vs right.
In the current climate of insecurity, we are witnessing the rise of movements based on particularist ideologies: anti-immigrationism, Euroscepticism, Islamic militancy, ethnic exclusiveness. These are not throwbacks to the past, even though they mobilise around nostalgia for an imagined world of tradition. Rather they are both a response to globalisation and are organised in global ways, building transnational coalitions and often using new technologies as organising tools, such as mobiles, videos or internet. Yet the risks that we face in the 21st century require a different kind of response that focuses on the needs of the individual, wherever she or he lives. Such a response would also celebrate and preserve the incredible cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of our world, which is an immensely important source of human creativity. In a context where devastating destruction might be wrought by environmental degradation, the spread of disease or uncontrollable wars, only such a response will enable humankind to survive into the 22nd century.
Anatole Kaletsky, journalist
Socialism may be dead, but the tensions between haves and have-nots will dominate the next century just as they have every preceding century. The 20th century was the one period in history when egalitarianism briefly appeared to be the winner. In the future, inequality will prevail, not because it is morally right or economically efficient or even hard-wired into human nature, but because it has been made acceptable. Elites all over the world are finding ways of accommodating and satisfying majority aspirations, without undermining their own privileged positions, and the process of co-option will continue. The 20th-century battles between a conservative elite and an egalitarian proletariat are over. The new political tensions will arise between a largely conservative elite and proletariat on the one hand, and, on the other, a socially excluded underclass who, for sociological or genetic or religious reasons, cannot or will not accept co-option into bourgeois society.
Oliver Kamm, writer and banker
The dominant conflict of the last century was not between left and right. It was between open societies and competing absolutisms. In its most enduring form—the cold war—the protagonists were not progressives and reactionaries but different legatees of the Enlightenment: those of Jefferson and Rousseau, respectively. What comes next is less convoluted, because one side in the conflict of our age is explicit in its aims. Critical inquiry, freedom of conscience and the separation of civil and religious authority are the target of a violent theocratic fanaticism born and sustained in the middle east.
That movement's apocalyptic language is so far outside the conventions of western debate that many are tempted to rationalise its demands as rhetorical code for something else: a plea for the Palestinians; a cry for global justice. But the ideology is atavistic. It is part of modernity only in the sense that its adherents harness technology to millenarian ends. The most potent conflict in the international order—one that makes urgent the task of countering nuclear proliferation—is thus between the Enlightenment and those who seek its repeal.
Within the western democracies, heightened political disagreement is likely and desirable. But this is not about left vs right either. The strangest political phenomenon of our time is a convergence of isolationisms: nativism on the right, allied to identity politics and anti-Americanism on the left. Against such an adversary, liberalism will, I hope, become more militant in its own defence.
Sunder Katwala, Fabian Society
"Smaller government"—the dominant political theme of the last 30 years – has hit the buffers. Advocates of the minimal state need to be climate change deniers to sustain their political project. But their business constituency is defecting, to accept the argument about government's role in cutting carbon emissions. The rise of the environment may also see greens marginalised, as competing environmentalisms reshape each major political tradition. A blue-green conservatism would need to develop a positive account of the state while a red-green social democracy—seeking equity, development and sustainability—will finally need to work out what model of capitalism it should support. In the 21st century, as in the last, social democracy's role will be to save capitalism, not replace it, opposed by a "deeper green" anti-capitalism able to mobilise its post-materialist constituency for protectionism and against growth.
The spread of democracy and human rights was one of the stories of the last century. In the world after Bush, we will need to rescue liberal internationalism from the neocon wreckage. A return to realism, though likely, will be a dead end. Liberal internationalists need to again find the confidence and means to spread these values, mostly by means short of force. This will require new alliances of democracies and with non-western advocates of human rights. "Democratic preference" could be a big idea: effective, multilateral regimes based on values, to create a UN, World Bank and IMF system which treat democracies and dictatorships very differently.
Eric Kaufmann, academic
Future generations will still recognise the old left/right dichotomy, but will be astounded by the importance we ascribed to it in the 20th century. In the future, the main conflict in developed countries will be between conservative populism and liberal elitism. Conservative populists will be native-born members of the indigenous majority with below-average education who feel economically insecure about globalisation, existentially threatened by ethnic change and liberal values, and resentful of the wealth and cosmopolitanism of upper-income groups. The lineaments of this "new politics" cleavage were already apparent to Daniel Bell in the mid-1970s, but will become fully institutionalised in the 21st century.
Jytte Klausen, academic
God is back in politics. The new cleavage is between secularists insisting on individual freedoms and the interests of faith groups. Muslims who act as British citizens rather than citizens of the Ummah are charged by some co-religionists with being infidels. Christians say you cannot be gay and Christian. Some conservatives and Christian Democrats are saying you cannot be Muslim and European. Liberal Jews call other Liberal Jews antisemites for criticising Israel. People on the left say Christianity is essential to European identity. Left and right have become meaningless categories.
Marek Kohn, science writer
The right, of course, is still with us; robust structures remain to uphold individualism and the pursuit of wealth. There is also plenty of room in the current orthodoxy for liberalism and conservatism of all kind of stripes. What's left out? Equality and solidarity—which takes us back to the egalite and fraternite of the French revolution, where the terms "left" and "right" came in. These seem to be fundamental values, intuitively recognised as the basis of fair and healthy social relations, so we may expect that they will reassert themselves. But as dominant ideologies fail to give them their fair dues, they will reappear in marginal and often disagreeable guises. Social solidarity may be advanced within narrow group solidarities; equality may be appropriated by demagogues.
Recent manifestations in central Europe and South America have been overlooked because they are accompanied by tendencies that rightly affront liberals. It is hard to imagine what could restore social solidarity and equality to the heart of political discourse, so we must expect that collectivist tendencies in our kind of polity will likely be largely confined to the bureaucratic management of resources placed under ever-growing pressure by economic growth and its environmental consequences.
Richard Layard, economist
The great issue for the 21st century will be materialism vs quality of life. Those who want priority for economic progress will be pitched against those who focus more strongly on the quality of life that people experience. Both left and right will be divided on this issue. This division will occur in most of the main policy debates: materialism will favour higher migration; quality of life will favour lower migration. Materialism will favour financial incentives and low job security; quality of life will favour the reverse. Materialism will favour little regulation of gambling on advertising; quality of life will favour more. Materialism will favour education for success; quality of life will favour the education of character. Materialism will focus less on mental illness; quality of life will focus on it more. Materialism will focus on the cost of averting climate change; quality of life will focus on the implications of not averting it. Eventually, the quality of life will win out.
Julian Le Grand, economist
The major divide will be between those who think that individuals have choices and are therefore responsible for their actions, and those who believe the opposite. In a way this has always been one of the divides between left and right, with the left seeing family poverty, for instance, being a product of upbringing and environment, while the right putting it down to individual fecklessness and irresponsibility. The difference will emerge in attitudes towards terrorism, with the choicists engaging in moral condemnation and demanding heavy retribution, and the no-choicists emphasising the need to understand the social, economic and political reasons that lie behind the terrorists' alienation. Ironically, these will converge in political attitudes toward climate change, since the left does believe that the rich—especially in America—have choices; so many on both sides will engage in self-flagellatory moralising, coupled with exhortations to change our behaviour before we bring the apocalypse down upon ourselves. Few will want to address more fundamental causes, such as the absence of some key property rights and the unequal distribution of others.
Mark Leonard, political writer
The world will split along two axes: between democracies and autocracies; and between countries seeking a balance of power and those that want to build a world organised around international law and institutions. The most powerful pole in this "quadripolar world" will continue to be the US, which will seek to create a balance of power that favours democracy. An expanded "Eurosphere" will share the Americans' belief in democracy—but be divided from them by its support for international institutions and the rule of law. To Europe's east, Russia and China will lead an "axis of sovereignty" that seeks to use law and multilateral institutions to protect states from western interference. The middle east and north Africa could form a zone defined neither by democracy nor the rule of law. All attempts at solving global problems could be hampered by the battle of ideas between these different tendencies.
Michael Lind, political writer
Patria vs Plutopia. This is the conflict that is already replacing the left vs right debate as the deepest ideological divide in modern societies. Patria: suburban, decentralised, nationalist, melting pot, predominantly native-born, working class and middle class, democratic. Plutopia: urban, centralised, cosmopolitan, multicultural, largely foreign-born, inegalitarian, plutocratic.
Globalisation empowers economic and cultural capitals like New York and London to become city-states like Singapore. Unlike in the past, the glittering, vertical cities of the Plutopian archipelago will be able to obtain most of their consumers, most of their labour and, even, perhaps, most of their inhabitants from countries other than their own. Meanwhile, the majority of citizens in the leafy, horizontal homelands of Patria, employed in domestic service sector jobs that have no connection to the global economy, will commute from suburban dwellings to suburban work sites, and will seldom if ever go downtown. "One country, two systems," will soon describe most societies. One by one, the issues confronting modern democracies—immigration, trade, multiculturalism, taxation, national security, even affordable housing—are breaking off and floating away from the old left-right axes and aligning themselves like magnetised iron filings along the new Patria-Plutopia divide. The war between Patria and Plutopia is already under way. Because each side needs the other, let us hope it ends in a treaty.
David Lipsey, Labour peer
I am not qualified to judge where the world's political faultlines will fall, if, that is, after global warming and international mass terrorism, there still is a world. In the developed world, however, I expect left/right to reassert itself, albeit in new forms. Of course there will be no revival of traditional class politics, nor will a Marxism based on the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange thrive except as a psychological pathology. But there will be a new debate about inequality, fuelled by the capacity of the rich to divert an ever-increasing proportion of each nation's wealth into their own pockets. This will be supplemented by a debate between liberals and non-liberals, but the old equation right=illiberal, left=liberal will no longer apply. Many right-wingers will become libertarians and I trust that many on the left will again come to understand that the safety of the state is the highest priority.
James Lovelock, environmentalist
The coming division will be between those who see a future life in the Arctic or on oases and islands, and those who would rather stay put. Those who do stay and can remember life in Britain during the second world war will find global heating, when it starts to hurt, quite familiar. "Don't you know there's a climate change on?" will be the put- down to every request for an air conditioner, and Dad's "green" army will service their windmills; left and right will be in storage for the duration.
Simon Maxwell, director, ODI
By the end of this century, we will either have learned to accommodate the resurgence of China and India—or not. We will have found a way to manage climate change—or not. We will have achieved reconciliation between faiths and cultures—or not. We will have capped rising global inequality and brought Africa into the mainstream—or not. And we will have managed the transition to a world in which population growth has stabilised, but the world has become markedly older, more urban, more technological and more knowledge-based. If either left or right can manage all of that, they will be doing just fine. The key to success will be to think globally. The world needs to make operational a concept like global social inclusion, in which individuals are able to achieve their potential and capabilities within a shared political space which is open and accountable. Multilateralism must surely be the cornerstone of 21st-century thinking.
Iain McLean, political scientist
Faith versus science will dominate the 21st century. Science preserves the sceptical values of the Enlightenment. Unquestioning faith attacks them. The enemies of science are not confined to religious believers, and not all religious believers are enemies of science. But faith can be absolutist; science can only be relativist. Enemies of science can be trivial (food faddists and snake-oil salesmen) or serious (climate-change deniers and obstructers of stem cell research and therapy). There are signs that, in the capitalist democracies, absolutist religious believers are becoming more strident even as they become less numerous. On same-sex civil rights and (probably) stem cell research, Enlightenment values are triumphing. But they may be at risk, under the guise of multiculturalism, in other areas of public policy.
Alison MacLeod, novelist
My friend Jake, aged 30, is worried about his testicles. He tells me that the right one hangs lower than the left; that the left should hang lower than the right. On bad days, he eats Marmite on stale bread and concludes that he has situs inversus, a rare condition in which all the body organs are reversed in position from right to left. He sees a careworn future in which lovers pity him and tailors snigger; where routine surgery turns him into a game of lucky dip; where Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain leaves him confused, talentless and forlorn.
What happens when "left" and "right" no longer signify; when the left is waging war, eroding civil liberties and clamouring after cash and peerages while the right is talking glibly about public services, polar ice caps and global poverty? At worst, I fear this situs inversus of our body politic will leave us distracted and weakened. At best, I put a fragile hope in Richard Rorty's notion of "private irony." Rorty's would-be ironist engages not with left or right, but with a variety of vocabularies, epistemologies and stories. The ironist is not a moral juggler. Nor is he a dead-end relativist. He or she is someone who is capable of re-combinations of meaning and perception; of bold, new metaphors for ways of being in a healthy liberal democracy.
Denis MacShane, politician
Charles Péguy noted 80 years ago that when told the left vs right question was out of date he always knew the politics of the person making the point. Me too. Each decision the citizen, let alone the politician or minister, takes is informed by values, worldview, belief, experience, hope and fatalism. Call it progressive or reactionary, liberal or conservative, left or right, Republican or Democrat, radical or religious, social or Christian democratic, royalist or republican—one's politics is inevitably shaped by two broad belief systems. Things only go wrong when parties or unions or intellectuals of the left reject change and no longer hear what people say. Right now the parties of the right—Bush, Chirac, Aznar, Berlusconi—are doing badly. The left can become dominant in the 21st century if it starts to think, organise and ignores almost anything proposed by metropolitan elites.
Munira Mirza, writer and broadcaster
How we approach the world's problems and challenges depends on how we view our own capacity to act, reason and shape our lives. For 200 years following the Enlightenment, it was widely believed amongst progressives that human beings had at least the potential to act upon the world and make history. In today's political culture, by contrast, we are seen as essentially vulnerable, and subject to the whim of greater forces—globalisation, nature, genetics and so on. When we do act in the world, we are portrayed as wanton, selfish and out of control. The political class has become obsessed with protecting us from ourselves—telling us how much we should eat, drink and smoke—or protecting us from each other—depicting a world of paedophiles, racists or nuisance neighbours. Worst of all, we are bringing up the next generation to believe that humanity's most significant actions have been the Holocaust and climate change.
Future ideological battles will be fought between those who believe that human creativity is potentially a force for good and should be encouraged, and those who believe humans need to be reined in. Somebody once suggested that history is over, but some of us will continue to believe that history is still young.
Tariq Modood, sociologist
At the start of the 20th century, the American social theorist WEB De Bois predicted that it would be the century of the colour-line. In many ways this has proved true, but it will be transcended in this century, especially in Britain. The appropriate balance between civic attitudes and policies promoting commonality and respecting difference will be one of the major domestic issues, but the focus will not be colour-racism and nor will people divide on it in terms of a racial dualism, whites vs non-whites. The ideological divide will be a form of liberalism which emphasises the privatisation of religion, and in its more radical wings the structuring of public life on the assumption that God does not exist, versus a form of liberalism based on inclusivity in which neither religious nor non-religious people have to "privatise" their beliefs. It will be a divide in which each side will elaborate a liberalism with a view to whether Muslims need to be "converted" or whether they will be ethical-political partners. The question will be whether one side possess the truth or whether it lies in civic and global dialogue. An interesting development will be where assertive Christians place themselves in relation to radical secularists and Muslims.
Anshuman Mondal, academic
It is no coincidence that the left/right distinction has blurred as religion has resurfaced in public life, because those categories were underwritten by secularist ways of thinking and being. Secularism will continue to be challenged, and at stake will be nothing less than the kind of "modernity" that we have become accustomed to. There will also be an increasing challenge to the hegemony of "occidentalism," the notion that western models of politics, society and economy represent the goal of human development. This will represent the next stage of decolonisation.
Andrew Moravcsik, political writer
How quaintly European a question. Left vs right may be passé in Europe, but not here in America. Here it is not just an important issue—it's the only issue. We Americans inhabit the only major industrialised democracy still fighting the domestic battles of the 1930s (or 1890s) essentially unchanged. Unlike Europe—in this regard, Britain is fully European—Americans never reaped the fruits of progressive victory in such battles: the establishment of social democracy, secularism and anti-militarism. Instead we remain a firmly libertarian nation. The costs are evident: 40m without health insurance, the west's highest infant mortality, a tragic chasm between black and white, widespread religious domination of personal life choices, an aversion to the application of international law, and still an unhealthy fascination with imperial military might. In Europe, all this vanished a half century ago. Here, after a generation of conservative domination, it is resurgent.
Jo-Ann Mort, writer and activist
As someone schooled on ideas of the left, and still a true believer in social democracy—not an easy thing to be in the US—I think that the left/right divide is probably being erased by new generations. Where a social movement was once created by trade unionists marching in the streets or striking en masse, today, new formations like "Netroots"—young bloggers who can, with the flick of their fingers on a keyboard, create tens of thousands of viral emails that cause politicians to vote a certain way, unite people across the globe, and more—are replacing physical group actions as effective means of social change. This means that we have the opportunity to break down barriers globally unlike ever before, but it also means that we are facing an odd mix of individualism and group action unseen before—and completely unbeholden to earlier ideologies or left/right divides.
100 Prospect contributors answered our invitation to respond to the question above.
The answers are spread across four pages. Use the links below to navigate.
This is Page 3 (J-M)
Page 1 (A-D) Page 2 (E-I) Page 4 (N-Y)
Simon Jenkins, journalist
Left vs right will be replaced by a clash of interest groups and bureaucracies. It will manifest itself in battles between tiers of government: global, regional, national and local. While the more public struggle will be within the UN, the EU and other regional bodies, the daily round of politics will pit central governments against provincial and local. The sophisticated anonymity of the electronic village will be balanced by a more active and angry local village. A wealthier, more leisured population will be less inclined to accept top-down authority. Deciding how far they can truly govern themselves will determine the success or failure of the new politics.
Josef Joffe, editor, "Die Zeit"
Samuel Huntington was right: "Islam has bloody borders," and those borders are not just those of Gaza, south Lebanon, Chechnya or Kashmir. They are also within Islam (see Iraq) and the west—in the inner and outer cities of Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Rome. And western liberalism is trapped in its own sacred traditions: how to integrate, assimilate or fight the enemy within while remembering our horrifying history of colonialism and racism and honouring our liberal values.
Alan Johnson, political writer
The future of progressive politics lies in a ten-syllable word: antitotalitarianism. The left vs right political division will be overlaid with another: democracy vs totalitarianism. A critical openness to modernity and plurality will pit itself against traditionalist closure. In a radically changed world, many have backed themselves into an incoherent and negativist "anti-imperialist" corner, losing touch with democratic, egalitarian and humane values. In the 21st century, democrats will be guided by a positive animating ethic: the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Those precious liberal ideas were rendered the inheritance of all by the social democratic, anti-colonial, feminist and egalitarian revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. But they were preserved for our times by the antitotalitarians—from Albert Camus to Kanan Makiya—who exposed and opposed the totalitarian temptation.
Radical Islamism is today's totalitarianism. To resist its anti-modernism, irrationalism, fear of freedom, loathing of women, and cult of master-slave human relations, we progressives will be forced to drop our knowing irony, drop our 1960s-vintage occidentalism, and become partisans and artisans of a liberal and antitotalitarian fighting faith. As we seek modes of realisation of our animating ethic through practical reform efforts to make poverty and tyranny history, we will defeat what Paul Berman has called "the totalitarian mindset."
RW Johnson, political writer
To a degree which is generally little understood, the current passionate wave of anti-Americanism so prevalent across the EU, Russia and the third world is exactly what should be expected in terms of balance of power theory. On the one hand, being the sole superpower inevitably encourages the US to take advantage of its position, but on the other there is a natural process of ganging up against that power in order to balance it. This anti-American critique is typically phrased in democratic, anti-imperialist and humanitarian terms.
It is obvious that this cannot last. The fact that the birth rate of the Muslim world is significantly higher than anyone else's will inevitably increase the power of the world's last great anti-democratic ideology, which is also likely to replace Marxism as the ideology of the third world. At the same time, the rapid rise of China will gradually restore the old bipolar balance of the cold war period. The democratic states are likely to find themselves thrown on the defensive to a degree not seen since the 1930s, and, for the first time, they will become unsure as to whether they really represent the wave of the future. The likelihood is that this will reconsolidate the forces of democratic conservatism—and it will also quite inevitably lead to a renewal of Europe's alliance with America.
Tobias Jones, writer
Rural versus urban. This century's great division will be less political than geographical: cities will, for the first time in centuries, begin to shrink, causing great tensions in rural locations having to accommodate large numbers of "evacuees."
In 2007 the world's urban population was increasing by 60m human souls a year. But after 2020, the trend is drastically reversed. Energy scarcities, food shortages and the dangers of viruses and terrorism mean that Britain's urban animals start to flee towards the countryside. The years of scarcity are felt not only in Britain but across the globe: acutely urbanised countries like Japan and Korea see violent battles to secure for city refugees ownership of food-producing, mineral-cradling earth. Redistribution of land, rather than wealth, becomes a focus point of global politics. Raw materials—fuels, metals and stones—reassume their worth, becoming themselves the means of exchange. Ancient land uses—farming, mining, hunting and coppicing—will be "modernised" to put them at the heart of a new, simpler economy. This "modernisation," this departure from "the authenticity of nature," becomes a flashpoint between the two mindsets.
There is much debate regarding the mysticism of a person's attachment to their land, and from that debate a new kind of nationalism emerges. The rural will become eulogised again, partly because of a shift in aesthetic tastes, but also because of the countryside's new-found political and demographic clout. The rural vote is the engine of the century's dominant political force: the Conservationists. The party was the result of a merger between the Tories and the Greens, a final folding in on itself of the long-forgotten left-right spectrum.
Mary Kaldor, political scientist
The big ideological cleavage of the 21st century will be global vs parochial, or human vs communitarian, or cosmopolitan vs sectarian. In other words, the divide will be between those who put the global public interest—be it climate change, poverty reduction, or peace and human rights—before the interests of particular groups (national, religious or ethnic). This cleavage supplements but does not displace left vs right.
In the current climate of insecurity, we are witnessing the rise of movements based on particularist ideologies: anti-immigrationism, Euroscepticism, Islamic militancy, ethnic exclusiveness. These are not throwbacks to the past, even though they mobilise around nostalgia for an imagined world of tradition. Rather they are both a response to globalisation and are organised in global ways, building transnational coalitions and often using new technologies as organising tools, such as mobiles, videos or internet. Yet the risks that we face in the 21st century require a different kind of response that focuses on the needs of the individual, wherever she or he lives. Such a response would also celebrate and preserve the incredible cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of our world, which is an immensely important source of human creativity. In a context where devastating destruction might be wrought by environmental degradation, the spread of disease or uncontrollable wars, only such a response will enable humankind to survive into the 22nd century.
Anatole Kaletsky, journalist
Socialism may be dead, but the tensions between haves and have-nots will dominate the next century just as they have every preceding century. The 20th century was the one period in history when egalitarianism briefly appeared to be the winner. In the future, inequality will prevail, not because it is morally right or economically efficient or even hard-wired into human nature, but because it has been made acceptable. Elites all over the world are finding ways of accommodating and satisfying majority aspirations, without undermining their own privileged positions, and the process of co-option will continue. The 20th-century battles between a conservative elite and an egalitarian proletariat are over. The new political tensions will arise between a largely conservative elite and proletariat on the one hand, and, on the other, a socially excluded underclass who, for sociological or genetic or religious reasons, cannot or will not accept co-option into bourgeois society.
Oliver Kamm, writer and banker
The dominant conflict of the last century was not between left and right. It was between open societies and competing absolutisms. In its most enduring form—the cold war—the protagonists were not progressives and reactionaries but different legatees of the Enlightenment: those of Jefferson and Rousseau, respectively. What comes next is less convoluted, because one side in the conflict of our age is explicit in its aims. Critical inquiry, freedom of conscience and the separation of civil and religious authority are the target of a violent theocratic fanaticism born and sustained in the middle east.
That movement's apocalyptic language is so far outside the conventions of western debate that many are tempted to rationalise its demands as rhetorical code for something else: a plea for the Palestinians; a cry for global justice. But the ideology is atavistic. It is part of modernity only in the sense that its adherents harness technology to millenarian ends. The most potent conflict in the international order—one that makes urgent the task of countering nuclear proliferation—is thus between the Enlightenment and those who seek its repeal.
Within the western democracies, heightened political disagreement is likely and desirable. But this is not about left vs right either. The strangest political phenomenon of our time is a convergence of isolationisms: nativism on the right, allied to identity politics and anti-Americanism on the left. Against such an adversary, liberalism will, I hope, become more militant in its own defence.
Sunder Katwala, Fabian Society
"Smaller government"—the dominant political theme of the last 30 years – has hit the buffers. Advocates of the minimal state need to be climate change deniers to sustain their political project. But their business constituency is defecting, to accept the argument about government's role in cutting carbon emissions. The rise of the environment may also see greens marginalised, as competing environmentalisms reshape each major political tradition. A blue-green conservatism would need to develop a positive account of the state while a red-green social democracy—seeking equity, development and sustainability—will finally need to work out what model of capitalism it should support. In the 21st century, as in the last, social democracy's role will be to save capitalism, not replace it, opposed by a "deeper green" anti-capitalism able to mobilise its post-materialist constituency for protectionism and against growth.
The spread of democracy and human rights was one of the stories of the last century. In the world after Bush, we will need to rescue liberal internationalism from the neocon wreckage. A return to realism, though likely, will be a dead end. Liberal internationalists need to again find the confidence and means to spread these values, mostly by means short of force. This will require new alliances of democracies and with non-western advocates of human rights. "Democratic preference" could be a big idea: effective, multilateral regimes based on values, to create a UN, World Bank and IMF system which treat democracies and dictatorships very differently.
Eric Kaufmann, academic
Future generations will still recognise the old left/right dichotomy, but will be astounded by the importance we ascribed to it in the 20th century. In the future, the main conflict in developed countries will be between conservative populism and liberal elitism. Conservative populists will be native-born members of the indigenous majority with below-average education who feel economically insecure about globalisation, existentially threatened by ethnic change and liberal values, and resentful of the wealth and cosmopolitanism of upper-income groups. The lineaments of this "new politics" cleavage were already apparent to Daniel Bell in the mid-1970s, but will become fully institutionalised in the 21st century.
Jytte Klausen, academic
God is back in politics. The new cleavage is between secularists insisting on individual freedoms and the interests of faith groups. Muslims who act as British citizens rather than citizens of the Ummah are charged by some co-religionists with being infidels. Christians say you cannot be gay and Christian. Some conservatives and Christian Democrats are saying you cannot be Muslim and European. Liberal Jews call other Liberal Jews antisemites for criticising Israel. People on the left say Christianity is essential to European identity. Left and right have become meaningless categories.
Marek Kohn, science writer
The right, of course, is still with us; robust structures remain to uphold individualism and the pursuit of wealth. There is also plenty of room in the current orthodoxy for liberalism and conservatism of all kind of stripes. What's left out? Equality and solidarity—which takes us back to the egalite and fraternite of the French revolution, where the terms "left" and "right" came in. These seem to be fundamental values, intuitively recognised as the basis of fair and healthy social relations, so we may expect that they will reassert themselves. But as dominant ideologies fail to give them their fair dues, they will reappear in marginal and often disagreeable guises. Social solidarity may be advanced within narrow group solidarities; equality may be appropriated by demagogues.
Recent manifestations in central Europe and South America have been overlooked because they are accompanied by tendencies that rightly affront liberals. It is hard to imagine what could restore social solidarity and equality to the heart of political discourse, so we must expect that collectivist tendencies in our kind of polity will likely be largely confined to the bureaucratic management of resources placed under ever-growing pressure by economic growth and its environmental consequences.
Richard Layard, economist
The great issue for the 21st century will be materialism vs quality of life. Those who want priority for economic progress will be pitched against those who focus more strongly on the quality of life that people experience. Both left and right will be divided on this issue. This division will occur in most of the main policy debates: materialism will favour higher migration; quality of life will favour lower migration. Materialism will favour financial incentives and low job security; quality of life will favour the reverse. Materialism will favour little regulation of gambling on advertising; quality of life will favour more. Materialism will favour education for success; quality of life will favour the education of character. Materialism will focus less on mental illness; quality of life will focus on it more. Materialism will focus on the cost of averting climate change; quality of life will focus on the implications of not averting it. Eventually, the quality of life will win out.
Julian Le Grand, economist
The major divide will be between those who think that individuals have choices and are therefore responsible for their actions, and those who believe the opposite. In a way this has always been one of the divides between left and right, with the left seeing family poverty, for instance, being a product of upbringing and environment, while the right putting it down to individual fecklessness and irresponsibility. The difference will emerge in attitudes towards terrorism, with the choicists engaging in moral condemnation and demanding heavy retribution, and the no-choicists emphasising the need to understand the social, economic and political reasons that lie behind the terrorists' alienation. Ironically, these will converge in political attitudes toward climate change, since the left does believe that the rich—especially in America—have choices; so many on both sides will engage in self-flagellatory moralising, coupled with exhortations to change our behaviour before we bring the apocalypse down upon ourselves. Few will want to address more fundamental causes, such as the absence of some key property rights and the unequal distribution of others.
Mark Leonard, political writer
The world will split along two axes: between democracies and autocracies; and between countries seeking a balance of power and those that want to build a world organised around international law and institutions. The most powerful pole in this "quadripolar world" will continue to be the US, which will seek to create a balance of power that favours democracy. An expanded "Eurosphere" will share the Americans' belief in democracy—but be divided from them by its support for international institutions and the rule of law. To Europe's east, Russia and China will lead an "axis of sovereignty" that seeks to use law and multilateral institutions to protect states from western interference. The middle east and north Africa could form a zone defined neither by democracy nor the rule of law. All attempts at solving global problems could be hampered by the battle of ideas between these different tendencies.
Michael Lind, political writer
Patria vs Plutopia. This is the conflict that is already replacing the left vs right debate as the deepest ideological divide in modern societies. Patria: suburban, decentralised, nationalist, melting pot, predominantly native-born, working class and middle class, democratic. Plutopia: urban, centralised, cosmopolitan, multicultural, largely foreign-born, inegalitarian, plutocratic.
Globalisation empowers economic and cultural capitals like New York and London to become city-states like Singapore. Unlike in the past, the glittering, vertical cities of the Plutopian archipelago will be able to obtain most of their consumers, most of their labour and, even, perhaps, most of their inhabitants from countries other than their own. Meanwhile, the majority of citizens in the leafy, horizontal homelands of Patria, employed in domestic service sector jobs that have no connection to the global economy, will commute from suburban dwellings to suburban work sites, and will seldom if ever go downtown. "One country, two systems," will soon describe most societies. One by one, the issues confronting modern democracies—immigration, trade, multiculturalism, taxation, national security, even affordable housing—are breaking off and floating away from the old left-right axes and aligning themselves like magnetised iron filings along the new Patria-Plutopia divide. The war between Patria and Plutopia is already under way. Because each side needs the other, let us hope it ends in a treaty.
David Lipsey, Labour peer
I am not qualified to judge where the world's political faultlines will fall, if, that is, after global warming and international mass terrorism, there still is a world. In the developed world, however, I expect left/right to reassert itself, albeit in new forms. Of course there will be no revival of traditional class politics, nor will a Marxism based on the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange thrive except as a psychological pathology. But there will be a new debate about inequality, fuelled by the capacity of the rich to divert an ever-increasing proportion of each nation's wealth into their own pockets. This will be supplemented by a debate between liberals and non-liberals, but the old equation right=illiberal, left=liberal will no longer apply. Many right-wingers will become libertarians and I trust that many on the left will again come to understand that the safety of the state is the highest priority.
James Lovelock, environmentalist
The coming division will be between those who see a future life in the Arctic or on oases and islands, and those who would rather stay put. Those who do stay and can remember life in Britain during the second world war will find global heating, when it starts to hurt, quite familiar. "Don't you know there's a climate change on?" will be the put- down to every request for an air conditioner, and Dad's "green" army will service their windmills; left and right will be in storage for the duration.
Simon Maxwell, director, ODI
By the end of this century, we will either have learned to accommodate the resurgence of China and India—or not. We will have found a way to manage climate change—or not. We will have achieved reconciliation between faiths and cultures—or not. We will have capped rising global inequality and brought Africa into the mainstream—or not. And we will have managed the transition to a world in which population growth has stabilised, but the world has become markedly older, more urban, more technological and more knowledge-based. If either left or right can manage all of that, they will be doing just fine. The key to success will be to think globally. The world needs to make operational a concept like global social inclusion, in which individuals are able to achieve their potential and capabilities within a shared political space which is open and accountable. Multilateralism must surely be the cornerstone of 21st-century thinking.
Iain McLean, political scientist
Faith versus science will dominate the 21st century. Science preserves the sceptical values of the Enlightenment. Unquestioning faith attacks them. The enemies of science are not confined to religious believers, and not all religious believers are enemies of science. But faith can be absolutist; science can only be relativist. Enemies of science can be trivial (food faddists and snake-oil salesmen) or serious (climate-change deniers and obstructers of stem cell research and therapy). There are signs that, in the capitalist democracies, absolutist religious believers are becoming more strident even as they become less numerous. On same-sex civil rights and (probably) stem cell research, Enlightenment values are triumphing. But they may be at risk, under the guise of multiculturalism, in other areas of public policy.
Alison MacLeod, novelist
My friend Jake, aged 30, is worried about his testicles. He tells me that the right one hangs lower than the left; that the left should hang lower than the right. On bad days, he eats Marmite on stale bread and concludes that he has situs inversus, a rare condition in which all the body organs are reversed in position from right to left. He sees a careworn future in which lovers pity him and tailors snigger; where routine surgery turns him into a game of lucky dip; where Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain leaves him confused, talentless and forlorn.
What happens when "left" and "right" no longer signify; when the left is waging war, eroding civil liberties and clamouring after cash and peerages while the right is talking glibly about public services, polar ice caps and global poverty? At worst, I fear this situs inversus of our body politic will leave us distracted and weakened. At best, I put a fragile hope in Richard Rorty's notion of "private irony." Rorty's would-be ironist engages not with left or right, but with a variety of vocabularies, epistemologies and stories. The ironist is not a moral juggler. Nor is he a dead-end relativist. He or she is someone who is capable of re-combinations of meaning and perception; of bold, new metaphors for ways of being in a healthy liberal democracy.
Denis MacShane, politician
Charles Péguy noted 80 years ago that when told the left vs right question was out of date he always knew the politics of the person making the point. Me too. Each decision the citizen, let alone the politician or minister, takes is informed by values, worldview, belief, experience, hope and fatalism. Call it progressive or reactionary, liberal or conservative, left or right, Republican or Democrat, radical or religious, social or Christian democratic, royalist or republican—one's politics is inevitably shaped by two broad belief systems. Things only go wrong when parties or unions or intellectuals of the left reject change and no longer hear what people say. Right now the parties of the right—Bush, Chirac, Aznar, Berlusconi—are doing badly. The left can become dominant in the 21st century if it starts to think, organise and ignores almost anything proposed by metropolitan elites.
Munira Mirza, writer and broadcaster
How we approach the world's problems and challenges depends on how we view our own capacity to act, reason and shape our lives. For 200 years following the Enlightenment, it was widely believed amongst progressives that human beings had at least the potential to act upon the world and make history. In today's political culture, by contrast, we are seen as essentially vulnerable, and subject to the whim of greater forces—globalisation, nature, genetics and so on. When we do act in the world, we are portrayed as wanton, selfish and out of control. The political class has become obsessed with protecting us from ourselves—telling us how much we should eat, drink and smoke—or protecting us from each other—depicting a world of paedophiles, racists or nuisance neighbours. Worst of all, we are bringing up the next generation to believe that humanity's most significant actions have been the Holocaust and climate change.
Future ideological battles will be fought between those who believe that human creativity is potentially a force for good and should be encouraged, and those who believe humans need to be reined in. Somebody once suggested that history is over, but some of us will continue to believe that history is still young.
Tariq Modood, sociologist
At the start of the 20th century, the American social theorist WEB De Bois predicted that it would be the century of the colour-line. In many ways this has proved true, but it will be transcended in this century, especially in Britain. The appropriate balance between civic attitudes and policies promoting commonality and respecting difference will be one of the major domestic issues, but the focus will not be colour-racism and nor will people divide on it in terms of a racial dualism, whites vs non-whites. The ideological divide will be a form of liberalism which emphasises the privatisation of religion, and in its more radical wings the structuring of public life on the assumption that God does not exist, versus a form of liberalism based on inclusivity in which neither religious nor non-religious people have to "privatise" their beliefs. It will be a divide in which each side will elaborate a liberalism with a view to whether Muslims need to be "converted" or whether they will be ethical-political partners. The question will be whether one side possess the truth or whether it lies in civic and global dialogue. An interesting development will be where assertive Christians place themselves in relation to radical secularists and Muslims.
Anshuman Mondal, academic
It is no coincidence that the left/right distinction has blurred as religion has resurfaced in public life, because those categories were underwritten by secularist ways of thinking and being. Secularism will continue to be challenged, and at stake will be nothing less than the kind of "modernity" that we have become accustomed to. There will also be an increasing challenge to the hegemony of "occidentalism," the notion that western models of politics, society and economy represent the goal of human development. This will represent the next stage of decolonisation.
Andrew Moravcsik, political writer
How quaintly European a question. Left vs right may be passé in Europe, but not here in America. Here it is not just an important issue—it's the only issue. We Americans inhabit the only major industrialised democracy still fighting the domestic battles of the 1930s (or 1890s) essentially unchanged. Unlike Europe—in this regard, Britain is fully European—Americans never reaped the fruits of progressive victory in such battles: the establishment of social democracy, secularism and anti-militarism. Instead we remain a firmly libertarian nation. The costs are evident: 40m without health insurance, the west's highest infant mortality, a tragic chasm between black and white, widespread religious domination of personal life choices, an aversion to the application of international law, and still an unhealthy fascination with imperial military might. In Europe, all this vanished a half century ago. Here, after a generation of conservative domination, it is resurgent.
Jo-Ann Mort, writer and activist
As someone schooled on ideas of the left, and still a true believer in social democracy—not an easy thing to be in the US—I think that the left/right divide is probably being erased by new generations. Where a social movement was once created by trade unionists marching in the streets or striking en masse, today, new formations like "Netroots"—young bloggers who can, with the flick of their fingers on a keyboard, create tens of thousands of viral emails that cause politicians to vote a certain way, unite people across the globe, and more—are replacing physical group actions as effective means of social change. This means that we have the opportunity to break down barriers globally unlike ever before, but it also means that we are facing an odd mix of individualism and group action unseen before—and completely unbeholden to earlier ideologies or left/right divides.
