Disappointed by our contributors' responses?Write inwith your own answer to the question—the best will be published on our website
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 2 (E-I)
Page 1 (A-D) Page 3 (J-M) Page 4 (N-Y)
David Edgerton, academic
I suppose we have learnt that in the 20th century, lots of different deep-seated beliefs and ambitions about nations, empires, races, science and technology were inflected through a left/right divide, without that divide being necessarily the fundamental one. Indeed, there were pretty radical shifts in what was taken to be a leftist or rightist position over time. Still, in the world of ideas, the left/right divide helped generate structured debate and questioning throughout society about many things. People will continue to disagree on many important topics, but let us hope any overarching framework of the future isn't race or nation or religion. Foxes vs hedgehogs; carnivores vs herbivores; even mods vs rockers would be preferable.
Brian Eno, musician
Interventionists vs laissez-faireists One of the big divisions of the future will be between those who believe in intervention as a moral duty and those who don't. This issue cuts across the left/right divide, as we saw in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. It asks us to consider whether we believe our way of doing things to be so superior that we must persuade others to follow it, or whether, on the other hand, we are prepared to watch as other countries pursue their own, often apparently flawed, paths. It will be a discussion between pluralists, who are prepared to tolerate the discomfort of diversity, and those who feel they know what the best system is and feel it is their moral duty to encourage it.
Globalists vs nationalists How prepared are we to allow national governments the freedom to make decisions which may not be in the interests of the rest of the world? With issues such as climate change becoming increasingly urgent, many people will begin arguing for a global system of government with the power to overrule specific national interests.
Communities of geography vs communities of choice At the same time, some people will feel less and less allegiance to "the nation," which will become an increasingly nebulous act of faith, and more allegiance to "communities of choice" which exist outside national identities and geographical restraints. We see the beginnings of this in transnational pressure groups such as Greenpeace, MoveOn and Amnesty International, but also in the choices that people now make about where they live, bank their money, get their healthcare and go on holiday.
Real life vs virtual life Some people will spend more and more of their time in virtual communities such as Second Life. They will claim that their communities represent the logical extension of citizen democracy. They will be ridiculed and opposed by "First Lifers," who will insist that reality with all its complications always trumps virtual reality, but the second-lifers in turn will insist that they live in a world of their own design and therefore are by definition more creative and free. This division will deepen and intensify, and will develop from just a cultural preference into a choice about how and where people spend their lives.
Life extension for all vs for some There will be an increasingly agonised division between those who feel that new life-extension technologies should be either available to those who can afford them or available to everyone. Life itself will be the resource over which wars will be fought: the "have nots" will feel that there is a fundamental injustice in the possibility for some people to enjoy conspicuously longer and healthier lives because they happen to be richer.
Julian Evans, writer and critic
The next hundred years will be a battleground between spirit and technology. The imperialist reach of technology is already global in ways that large sections of humanity, not least Islamist extremists, are hostile to. But it is not just terrorists who will be against the west's technological and economic hegemony. Democratic citizens will voice increasing unease at an empire of innovation that dumps its products on every street and its garbage sacks in every corner of the planet. So political battle lines will be drawn between ideologies of spirit—expressed in everything from Islam and other religious faiths to eco-campaigning—and ideologies of technology, mostly in its economic formulations. One truism of the west is that we could all do with less. Somewhere in the psychological territory the two sides will be fighting for, there will be the warring instincts of those who believe we find our identity, as well as our deepest pleasure and harmony, in intimacy and relationships, with nature as much as each other, and of those who obtain their satisfactions in the desire-based, individualistic life-support systems sold to us by technology.
Duncan Fallowell, writer
All future politics will be about survival, pure and simple. The mass migration from the hot to temperate regions has already begun. The battle between generosity and self-interest will be increasingly subject to collective panic attacks. Fear is already everywhere.
Catherine Fieschi, director, Demos
As an organisational blueprint for representational politics, the left/right dichotomy is probably dead. However, dismissing it on that basis is missing the point. Left and right are shortcuts but, beyond the revolutionary, partisan politics that gave rise to the terms, they reflect fundamentally different understandings of human nature and of how we can best hope to manage living together in the face of change.
This is not so much about progress as it is about the capacity of human beings to change. For the right, even the most enlightened right, solutions come from managing what is. At its best it is about compassion and responsibility. But the structures through which these operate are relatively fixed. A left-wing view of human nature is rooted not only in what is, but in what might be. It is about the belief in individuals not just to improve their circumstances but to change themselves and the very structures they inhabit. It's called emancipation. Our seeing the 21st century out rests on our capacity to affect human behaviour and human choice on a scale unseen before.
So understanding that such fundamental change is possible, how to encourage it, how to trigger it, is our main challenge. As the politics of identity continue to take centre-stage against a backdrop of increased resource scarcity, holding on to the conviction that our identities—and therefore our preferences and choices—are not predetermined is by no means outmoded.
Michael Fry, historian
The 21st century will be dominated by conflicts of the fit and the slack, the thin and the fat, the ascetic and the sybaritic. This will be a re-run of the age-old conflict between those intent on doing what they want to do and those intent on forcing others to do what they don't want to do. In the 21st century this conflict will be fought out over the body.
Anthony Giddens, sociologist
"The future isn't what it used to be," George Burns once said. And he was right. This century we are peering over a precipice, and it's an awful long way down. We have unleashed forces into the world that it is not certain that we can control. We may have already done so much damage to the planet that by the end of the century people will live in a world ravaged by storms, with large areas flooded and others arid. But you have to add in nuclear proliferation, and new diseases that we might have inadvertently created. Space might become militarised. The emergence of mega-computers, allied to robotics, might at some point also create beings able to escape the clutches of their creators.
Against that, you could say that we haven't much clue what the future will bring, except it's bound to be things that we haven't even suspected. Twenty years ago, Bill Gates thought there was no future in the internet. The current century might turn out much more benign than scary.
As for politics, left and right aren't about to disappear—the metaphor is too strongly entrenched for that. My best guess about where politics will focus would be upon life itself. Life politics concerns the environment, lifestyle change, health, ageing, identity and technology. It may be a politics of survival, it may be a politics of hope, or perhaps a bit of both.
Todd Gitlin, sociologist
The coming cleavage is between zealots and realists. Zealots think the world will yield to their strenuous, righteous will. These include Islamists, utopian free traders, neoconservatives, purists of all stripes. Realists think that you work with the world you have, not the world you wish you had. Realists are often greyer, more lethargic. They look for non-zero-sum games, buildings constructed from crooked timbers. Zealots are, well, thrillingly zealous about their final solutions.
Charles Grant, EU analyst
The big divide of the 21st century will be between supporters of openness, globalisation and multilateralism, and partisans of introversion, protection and unilateralism. Do you welcome the competition and opportunity that comes with international capitalism, or do you want the state to constrain it for the sake of greater equity? This is not the old left-right divide. In most of Europe, far-right nationalists and the hard left oppose EU enlargement, the WTO trade round, more powers for supranational institutions, and mass immigration. Moderates of the left and right believe in international trade and investment, global governance and multiculturalism.
The apostles of openness are right that open economies grow faster and create the wealth that can be distributed to poorer citizens—or poorer countries—through various sorts of welfare. But the introverts have strong arguments too: the embrace of globalisation in countries such as Britain and America seems to require degrees of inequality and social stress that scare those who feel insecure. Continental "altermondialistes," socialists and nationalists argue that a state which limits immigration, imports and the freedom of multinationals to buy local companies is good for social cohesion. The same divisions are visible in the US, where populist Republicans and left-wing Democrats oppose international trade agreements and support economic nationalism. Britain is a partial exception to this big divide: all its mainstream parties favour an open economy. But the Conservatives remain virulently anti-EU, having failed to see—as have most continental parties—that the EU is an agent for globalisation.
John Gray, philosopher
In British politics the near-term prospect is the collapse of New Labour. Cameron's Tories have accepted the psephological imperative and constructed a new public philosophy to suit Lib Dem and Labour voters in marginal seats. At the same time a generational shift has taken place. The next general election will be held 30 years after Thatcher came to power and could be decided by voters not yet born when she was toppled. New Labour—a by-product of the Thatcher era—is an anachronism, and the political initiative is shifting inexorably from the centre left. But there are few signs of new thinking, and in foreign policy Britain will trail on behind the floundering American juggernaut.
Both ends of the political spectrum share a Fukuyama-like faith in the triumph of liberal democracy, though for the first time since the interwar era, authoritarian states are shaping the international system. Russia has re-emerged as an energy superpower and China continues to advance by ignoring western models. In the middle east, the Iraq war is fuelling Sunni-Shia antagonism. Rapid escalation to include Iran is the logic of events, with varieties of popular theocracy challenging the region's remaining secular regimes. In a pattern political thought has yet to grasp, resource war and intra-Islamic civilisational conflict are reshaping the global scene, while climate change moves to its next, irreversible stage.
Susan Greenberg, journalist
We all made fun of Donald Rumsfeld's "known knowns" and "unknowns." But it is a useful analytical framework. And the main faultline of the future will be between those who recognise when they don't know something, and those who cannot or will not. The best neuroscientists, for example, are those who acknowledge the limits to what they know about consciousness, and remain open to the insights that can be gained from a dialogue with philosophy or psychology. The best leaders are aware of unintended consequences.
Jonathan Heawood, director, PEN
The choice facing the next generation will not be between left and right, but between politics and non-politics. The consolation peddled by the left/right narrative was twofold: a) that life is an economic phenomenon, and b) that politicians have the tools and ability to manage this phenomenon. That story doesn't hold up any more, and politics has not yet come up with a satisfactory riposte to the growing attractions of religion, pressure groups, corporate brands, virtual reality and nihilist violence as cure-alls.
When economics was politics' "other," the choice politicians presented to the electorate was clear: whether and how far to regulate the free flow of capital and labour around the world. That political choice is redundant in almost all the world's democracies, as political parties downgrade their promises to manage globalisation.
Meanwhile, alternative value-systems are making ever bigger and more persuasive offers to consumer-citizens. The choice for our children will not be which political option to follow, but whether to commit to the political process at all. Until politicians can find a way of framing the issues at stake—dignity, happiness, meaningfulness—and mapping a variety of coherent options for approaching them, the political system will continue to wither.
Ernst Hillebrand, director, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung London
Best candidate will be a conflict between a pro-globalisation "cosmopolitanism" and a more parochial attitude best labelled "anti-cosmopolitanism," invoking local, national and class solidarities and protectionist economic policies. What makes this divide a good succession candidate to left/right is its groundings in the political economy. What differentiates it from left/right is that it is not about capitalism per se, and the fact that the split cuts across established social classes.
We may also see the emergence of "liberal" cultural relativism vs cultural conservatism. The row over gay adoption in Britain might be a typical example. The imposition of liberal relativism may imply increasing social contradictions and a hefty dose of semi-authoritarian social engineering from above.
But let's not forget nationalism. While it may give way to a dominant "cosmopolitanism" and cultural relativism in the west, nationalism will still be the dominant ideological force in the rest of the world; a crucial instrument to steer the societies of the "emerging powers" in Asia and Latin America through massive economic and social transformations.
Donald Hirsch, social policy analyst
The late 20th century saw a battle between the role of collective action and individual self-interest. To a large extent, individualism won. Today's "progressive" politics speaks of community, but lacks the will to act together as a community, using the state or other collective measures to make fundamental changes to society. Interestingly, a new "equalities" agenda speaks not of economic restructuring or solidarity, but of individual rights. Ironically, in some cases this is creating not mutual respect and togetherness, but rifts between different groups asserting their rights in different ways—Christian freedom of conscience vs gay freedom of action, for example.
It must be too early to tell what political lines of cleavage—if any—will emerge from the death of state-sponsored social solidarity. We have long lived with a left that combines a generalised belief in collective action with an assertion of political and social rights for individuals, and with a right that asks the state to withdraw economically but has an authoritarian streak on social matters. With parties stealing each other's clothes in each of these four domains, who can tell whether ideological order will emerge from the confusion? I suspect it will not, and activists, governments and many voters will continue to perceive themselves as left or right according to age-old proclivities. The failure of governments to live up to those labels will cause activists to cry betrayal as loudly as they have always done.
Eric Hobsbawm, historian
None of the major problems facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved by the principles that still dominate the developed countries of the west: unlimited economic growth and technical progress, the ideal of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, electoral democracy. As is evident in the case of the environmental crisis, facing these problems will require in practice regulation by institutions, in theory a revision of both the current political rhetoric and even the more reputable intellectual constructions of liberalism. The question is can this be done within the framework of the rationalist, secularist and civilised tradition of the Enlightenment. As for left vs right, it will plainly remain central in an era which is increasing the gap between haves and have-nots. However, today the danger is that this struggle is being subsumed in the irrationalist mobilisations of ethnic or religious or other group identity.
Gerald Holtham, economist
The new alignment will combine social conservatives and egalitarians on the one hand, uniting under the banner of patriotism and responsibility to fellow citizens and supported by the votes of the less competitive. They will be opposed by meritocrats and libertarians backed by big business. The clash between the politics of identity and the politics of money will become explicit. At present the strains are contained because globalisation, although it is eroding community, is delivering prosperity. But this is unstable. By vastly increasing the supply of labour to the world economy, globalisation has led to an increase in profit share and a decline in the wage share in all industrialised countries. In the emerging economies of Asia, it has created 19th-century conditions where profits and investment can account for 50 per cent of GDP. In the west, while wage incomes have not kept up, consumption has, thanks to an explosion of consumer debt. Neither investment nor consumer debt can indefinitely grow faster than GDP without a slump. When the slump comes, alliances will reform on nationalist vs globalist lines.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, scientist
Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian in 50-70 years. In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe. Should a few western capitals be levelled, Muslim capitals will be randomly nuked in retaliation. The old planetary order is condemned to die. But the human spirit may yet prevail, and a new and better one may emerge.
Chris Huhne, politician
We are moving rapidly from a politics of class to a politics of attitude. The new cleavage will be around how we handle the big threats to human civilisation: global warming, terrorism, social solidarity, opportunity. Liberals will put the individual's rights and life chances at the centre of politics—as Benjamin Franklin said, any free people who trade their security for their freedom deserve neither. Liberals will stress choice in reacting to the need to curb carbon emissions: not regulatory decisions but carbon prices and taxes. By contrast, authoritarians will stress obligations to the community and the state, arguing that no one who is innocent need fear ID cards or Big Brother.
Nicholas Humphrey, scientist
How can anyone doubt that the faultline is going to be religion? On one side there will be those who continue to appeal for their political and moral values to what they understand to be God's will. On the other there will be the atheists, agnostics and scientific materialists, who see human lives as being under human control, subject only to the relatively negotiable constraints of our evolved psychology. What makes the outcome uncertain is that our evolved psychology almost certainly leans us towards religion, as an essential defence against the terror of death and meaninglessness.
Will Hutton, journalist
The key argument in the decades ahead will be between moral fundamentalists, animated by faith or nationalism or some combination of both, and Enlightenment liberals. This is already the battle line in the US, but there are echoes in Europe. This fundamentalism was at the core of the argument over the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands, has haunted Spanish politics since the end of Franco and is emerging in Britain with an incipient English nationalism while Scottish nationalism becomes the dominant force in Scottish politics. In Poland, faith and nationalism have fused to produce one of the ugliest internal debates in Europe.
The moral fundamentalists are ideological magpies. They are often quite ready to back protectionist economic policies, high public spending and strong welfare support, especially for the so-called deserving poor. They are even anti-business, especially if it is global; they distrust globalisation. More conventionally, they are passionate believers in the family, nation and enemies of multiculturalism, portrayed as privileging foreign minority cultures over the dominant host community. They are instinctive censors and are anti-science. They distrust gender equality, and believe in traditional sex roles. They are on the march everywhere.
Enlightenment liberals have been unsure how to respond. Some have tried to create alliances with the moral fundamentalists on issues like the family or multiculturalism, only to find that although there may be some agreement over tactics and means, there is a profound cleavage over ends. This attempt at unsuccessfully forming alliances with the new fundamentalists is arguably part of the story of New Labour.
More recently, I detect signs of a growing recognition that those of us who believe in Enlightenment values have to assert what we believe and stop making concessions to intolerant fundamentalists. This is beginning to happen in the US, with the growing readiness to take on the religious right. In Britain there has been an encouraging affirmation of Enlightenment principles before a coalition of faith communities insisting that conscience should trump equality over gay adoption; the Enlightenment view prevailed. Confronting rising English and Scottish nationalism may prove more problematic. All over the globe—China, Iran, Japan, Venezuela, the US, France, Poland. Russia—there are politicians putting themselves at the head of nationalist movements. Insisting on tolerance, the rule of law, equality, liberty, rationalism, science, solidarity, pluralism and human rights before this rising movement is the battle of our times. It may prove harder to win than the 20th-century victory over fascism and communism.
Michael Ignatieff, politician
Everything that happens to us will be unexpected. There is no reason to be discouraged about this. Practical political life is the art of managing the unexpected, just as life itself is a matter of rising to the occasion.
Pico Iyer, writer
The battle between left and right has long been eclipsed by the much more urgent debate between future and past—between, on one hand, those who hold, as the old have always done, that wisdom lies in tradition, community, continuity, and on the other, those who are convinced that transformation lies just around the corner, in whatever we come up with tomorrow. It is this division, between tenses more than civilisations, that has already put Europe in a different camp from America, and linked Syria, or even France, say, to Venezuela. It is this overarching conflict that has left China and Japan not sure which direction they're moving in. And it is this contest that has not just set technology against the claims of religion, but asked all of us how much we will listen to Silicon Valley, and how much to Jerusalem. The conflict between old and new is far deeper and graver than just the dialogue between the Islamic world and the secular west. What will divide and therefore define the century now dawning is the quarrel between those who are committed to change and those who root themselves in the changeless.?
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 2 (E-I)
Page 1 (A-D) Page 3 (J-M) Page 4 (N-Y)
David Edgerton, academic
I suppose we have learnt that in the 20th century, lots of different deep-seated beliefs and ambitions about nations, empires, races, science and technology were inflected through a left/right divide, without that divide being necessarily the fundamental one. Indeed, there were pretty radical shifts in what was taken to be a leftist or rightist position over time. Still, in the world of ideas, the left/right divide helped generate structured debate and questioning throughout society about many things. People will continue to disagree on many important topics, but let us hope any overarching framework of the future isn't race or nation or religion. Foxes vs hedgehogs; carnivores vs herbivores; even mods vs rockers would be preferable.
Brian Eno, musician
Interventionists vs laissez-faireists One of the big divisions of the future will be between those who believe in intervention as a moral duty and those who don't. This issue cuts across the left/right divide, as we saw in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. It asks us to consider whether we believe our way of doing things to be so superior that we must persuade others to follow it, or whether, on the other hand, we are prepared to watch as other countries pursue their own, often apparently flawed, paths. It will be a discussion between pluralists, who are prepared to tolerate the discomfort of diversity, and those who feel they know what the best system is and feel it is their moral duty to encourage it.
Globalists vs nationalists How prepared are we to allow national governments the freedom to make decisions which may not be in the interests of the rest of the world? With issues such as climate change becoming increasingly urgent, many people will begin arguing for a global system of government with the power to overrule specific national interests.
Communities of geography vs communities of choice At the same time, some people will feel less and less allegiance to "the nation," which will become an increasingly nebulous act of faith, and more allegiance to "communities of choice" which exist outside national identities and geographical restraints. We see the beginnings of this in transnational pressure groups such as Greenpeace, MoveOn and Amnesty International, but also in the choices that people now make about where they live, bank their money, get their healthcare and go on holiday.
Real life vs virtual life Some people will spend more and more of their time in virtual communities such as Second Life. They will claim that their communities represent the logical extension of citizen democracy. They will be ridiculed and opposed by "First Lifers," who will insist that reality with all its complications always trumps virtual reality, but the second-lifers in turn will insist that they live in a world of their own design and therefore are by definition more creative and free. This division will deepen and intensify, and will develop from just a cultural preference into a choice about how and where people spend their lives.
Life extension for all vs for some There will be an increasingly agonised division between those who feel that new life-extension technologies should be either available to those who can afford them or available to everyone. Life itself will be the resource over which wars will be fought: the "have nots" will feel that there is a fundamental injustice in the possibility for some people to enjoy conspicuously longer and healthier lives because they happen to be richer.
Julian Evans, writer and critic
The next hundred years will be a battleground between spirit and technology. The imperialist reach of technology is already global in ways that large sections of humanity, not least Islamist extremists, are hostile to. But it is not just terrorists who will be against the west's technological and economic hegemony. Democratic citizens will voice increasing unease at an empire of innovation that dumps its products on every street and its garbage sacks in every corner of the planet. So political battle lines will be drawn between ideologies of spirit—expressed in everything from Islam and other religious faiths to eco-campaigning—and ideologies of technology, mostly in its economic formulations. One truism of the west is that we could all do with less. Somewhere in the psychological territory the two sides will be fighting for, there will be the warring instincts of those who believe we find our identity, as well as our deepest pleasure and harmony, in intimacy and relationships, with nature as much as each other, and of those who obtain their satisfactions in the desire-based, individualistic life-support systems sold to us by technology.
Duncan Fallowell, writer
All future politics will be about survival, pure and simple. The mass migration from the hot to temperate regions has already begun. The battle between generosity and self-interest will be increasingly subject to collective panic attacks. Fear is already everywhere.
Catherine Fieschi, director, Demos
As an organisational blueprint for representational politics, the left/right dichotomy is probably dead. However, dismissing it on that basis is missing the point. Left and right are shortcuts but, beyond the revolutionary, partisan politics that gave rise to the terms, they reflect fundamentally different understandings of human nature and of how we can best hope to manage living together in the face of change.
This is not so much about progress as it is about the capacity of human beings to change. For the right, even the most enlightened right, solutions come from managing what is. At its best it is about compassion and responsibility. But the structures through which these operate are relatively fixed. A left-wing view of human nature is rooted not only in what is, but in what might be. It is about the belief in individuals not just to improve their circumstances but to change themselves and the very structures they inhabit. It's called emancipation. Our seeing the 21st century out rests on our capacity to affect human behaviour and human choice on a scale unseen before.
So understanding that such fundamental change is possible, how to encourage it, how to trigger it, is our main challenge. As the politics of identity continue to take centre-stage against a backdrop of increased resource scarcity, holding on to the conviction that our identities—and therefore our preferences and choices—are not predetermined is by no means outmoded.
Michael Fry, historian
The 21st century will be dominated by conflicts of the fit and the slack, the thin and the fat, the ascetic and the sybaritic. This will be a re-run of the age-old conflict between those intent on doing what they want to do and those intent on forcing others to do what they don't want to do. In the 21st century this conflict will be fought out over the body.
Anthony Giddens, sociologist
"The future isn't what it used to be," George Burns once said. And he was right. This century we are peering over a precipice, and it's an awful long way down. We have unleashed forces into the world that it is not certain that we can control. We may have already done so much damage to the planet that by the end of the century people will live in a world ravaged by storms, with large areas flooded and others arid. But you have to add in nuclear proliferation, and new diseases that we might have inadvertently created. Space might become militarised. The emergence of mega-computers, allied to robotics, might at some point also create beings able to escape the clutches of their creators.
Against that, you could say that we haven't much clue what the future will bring, except it's bound to be things that we haven't even suspected. Twenty years ago, Bill Gates thought there was no future in the internet. The current century might turn out much more benign than scary.
As for politics, left and right aren't about to disappear—the metaphor is too strongly entrenched for that. My best guess about where politics will focus would be upon life itself. Life politics concerns the environment, lifestyle change, health, ageing, identity and technology. It may be a politics of survival, it may be a politics of hope, or perhaps a bit of both.
Todd Gitlin, sociologist
The coming cleavage is between zealots and realists. Zealots think the world will yield to their strenuous, righteous will. These include Islamists, utopian free traders, neoconservatives, purists of all stripes. Realists think that you work with the world you have, not the world you wish you had. Realists are often greyer, more lethargic. They look for non-zero-sum games, buildings constructed from crooked timbers. Zealots are, well, thrillingly zealous about their final solutions.
Charles Grant, EU analyst
The big divide of the 21st century will be between supporters of openness, globalisation and multilateralism, and partisans of introversion, protection and unilateralism. Do you welcome the competition and opportunity that comes with international capitalism, or do you want the state to constrain it for the sake of greater equity? This is not the old left-right divide. In most of Europe, far-right nationalists and the hard left oppose EU enlargement, the WTO trade round, more powers for supranational institutions, and mass immigration. Moderates of the left and right believe in international trade and investment, global governance and multiculturalism.
The apostles of openness are right that open economies grow faster and create the wealth that can be distributed to poorer citizens—or poorer countries—through various sorts of welfare. But the introverts have strong arguments too: the embrace of globalisation in countries such as Britain and America seems to require degrees of inequality and social stress that scare those who feel insecure. Continental "altermondialistes," socialists and nationalists argue that a state which limits immigration, imports and the freedom of multinationals to buy local companies is good for social cohesion. The same divisions are visible in the US, where populist Republicans and left-wing Democrats oppose international trade agreements and support economic nationalism. Britain is a partial exception to this big divide: all its mainstream parties favour an open economy. But the Conservatives remain virulently anti-EU, having failed to see—as have most continental parties—that the EU is an agent for globalisation.
John Gray, philosopher
In British politics the near-term prospect is the collapse of New Labour. Cameron's Tories have accepted the psephological imperative and constructed a new public philosophy to suit Lib Dem and Labour voters in marginal seats. At the same time a generational shift has taken place. The next general election will be held 30 years after Thatcher came to power and could be decided by voters not yet born when she was toppled. New Labour—a by-product of the Thatcher era—is an anachronism, and the political initiative is shifting inexorably from the centre left. But there are few signs of new thinking, and in foreign policy Britain will trail on behind the floundering American juggernaut.
Both ends of the political spectrum share a Fukuyama-like faith in the triumph of liberal democracy, though for the first time since the interwar era, authoritarian states are shaping the international system. Russia has re-emerged as an energy superpower and China continues to advance by ignoring western models. In the middle east, the Iraq war is fuelling Sunni-Shia antagonism. Rapid escalation to include Iran is the logic of events, with varieties of popular theocracy challenging the region's remaining secular regimes. In a pattern political thought has yet to grasp, resource war and intra-Islamic civilisational conflict are reshaping the global scene, while climate change moves to its next, irreversible stage.
Susan Greenberg, journalist
We all made fun of Donald Rumsfeld's "known knowns" and "unknowns." But it is a useful analytical framework. And the main faultline of the future will be between those who recognise when they don't know something, and those who cannot or will not. The best neuroscientists, for example, are those who acknowledge the limits to what they know about consciousness, and remain open to the insights that can be gained from a dialogue with philosophy or psychology. The best leaders are aware of unintended consequences.
Jonathan Heawood, director, PEN
The choice facing the next generation will not be between left and right, but between politics and non-politics. The consolation peddled by the left/right narrative was twofold: a) that life is an economic phenomenon, and b) that politicians have the tools and ability to manage this phenomenon. That story doesn't hold up any more, and politics has not yet come up with a satisfactory riposte to the growing attractions of religion, pressure groups, corporate brands, virtual reality and nihilist violence as cure-alls.
When economics was politics' "other," the choice politicians presented to the electorate was clear: whether and how far to regulate the free flow of capital and labour around the world. That political choice is redundant in almost all the world's democracies, as political parties downgrade their promises to manage globalisation.
Meanwhile, alternative value-systems are making ever bigger and more persuasive offers to consumer-citizens. The choice for our children will not be which political option to follow, but whether to commit to the political process at all. Until politicians can find a way of framing the issues at stake—dignity, happiness, meaningfulness—and mapping a variety of coherent options for approaching them, the political system will continue to wither.
Ernst Hillebrand, director, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung London
Best candidate will be a conflict between a pro-globalisation "cosmopolitanism" and a more parochial attitude best labelled "anti-cosmopolitanism," invoking local, national and class solidarities and protectionist economic policies. What makes this divide a good succession candidate to left/right is its groundings in the political economy. What differentiates it from left/right is that it is not about capitalism per se, and the fact that the split cuts across established social classes.
We may also see the emergence of "liberal" cultural relativism vs cultural conservatism. The row over gay adoption in Britain might be a typical example. The imposition of liberal relativism may imply increasing social contradictions and a hefty dose of semi-authoritarian social engineering from above.
But let's not forget nationalism. While it may give way to a dominant "cosmopolitanism" and cultural relativism in the west, nationalism will still be the dominant ideological force in the rest of the world; a crucial instrument to steer the societies of the "emerging powers" in Asia and Latin America through massive economic and social transformations.
Donald Hirsch, social policy analyst
The late 20th century saw a battle between the role of collective action and individual self-interest. To a large extent, individualism won. Today's "progressive" politics speaks of community, but lacks the will to act together as a community, using the state or other collective measures to make fundamental changes to society. Interestingly, a new "equalities" agenda speaks not of economic restructuring or solidarity, but of individual rights. Ironically, in some cases this is creating not mutual respect and togetherness, but rifts between different groups asserting their rights in different ways—Christian freedom of conscience vs gay freedom of action, for example.
It must be too early to tell what political lines of cleavage—if any—will emerge from the death of state-sponsored social solidarity. We have long lived with a left that combines a generalised belief in collective action with an assertion of political and social rights for individuals, and with a right that asks the state to withdraw economically but has an authoritarian streak on social matters. With parties stealing each other's clothes in each of these four domains, who can tell whether ideological order will emerge from the confusion? I suspect it will not, and activists, governments and many voters will continue to perceive themselves as left or right according to age-old proclivities. The failure of governments to live up to those labels will cause activists to cry betrayal as loudly as they have always done.
Eric Hobsbawm, historian
None of the major problems facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved by the principles that still dominate the developed countries of the west: unlimited economic growth and technical progress, the ideal of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, electoral democracy. As is evident in the case of the environmental crisis, facing these problems will require in practice regulation by institutions, in theory a revision of both the current political rhetoric and even the more reputable intellectual constructions of liberalism. The question is can this be done within the framework of the rationalist, secularist and civilised tradition of the Enlightenment. As for left vs right, it will plainly remain central in an era which is increasing the gap between haves and have-nots. However, today the danger is that this struggle is being subsumed in the irrationalist mobilisations of ethnic or religious or other group identity.
Gerald Holtham, economist
The new alignment will combine social conservatives and egalitarians on the one hand, uniting under the banner of patriotism and responsibility to fellow citizens and supported by the votes of the less competitive. They will be opposed by meritocrats and libertarians backed by big business. The clash between the politics of identity and the politics of money will become explicit. At present the strains are contained because globalisation, although it is eroding community, is delivering prosperity. But this is unstable. By vastly increasing the supply of labour to the world economy, globalisation has led to an increase in profit share and a decline in the wage share in all industrialised countries. In the emerging economies of Asia, it has created 19th-century conditions where profits and investment can account for 50 per cent of GDP. In the west, while wage incomes have not kept up, consumption has, thanks to an explosion of consumer debt. Neither investment nor consumer debt can indefinitely grow faster than GDP without a slump. When the slump comes, alliances will reform on nationalist vs globalist lines.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, scientist
Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian in 50-70 years. In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe. Should a few western capitals be levelled, Muslim capitals will be randomly nuked in retaliation. The old planetary order is condemned to die. But the human spirit may yet prevail, and a new and better one may emerge.
Chris Huhne, politician
We are moving rapidly from a politics of class to a politics of attitude. The new cleavage will be around how we handle the big threats to human civilisation: global warming, terrorism, social solidarity, opportunity. Liberals will put the individual's rights and life chances at the centre of politics—as Benjamin Franklin said, any free people who trade their security for their freedom deserve neither. Liberals will stress choice in reacting to the need to curb carbon emissions: not regulatory decisions but carbon prices and taxes. By contrast, authoritarians will stress obligations to the community and the state, arguing that no one who is innocent need fear ID cards or Big Brother.
Nicholas Humphrey, scientist
How can anyone doubt that the faultline is going to be religion? On one side there will be those who continue to appeal for their political and moral values to what they understand to be God's will. On the other there will be the atheists, agnostics and scientific materialists, who see human lives as being under human control, subject only to the relatively negotiable constraints of our evolved psychology. What makes the outcome uncertain is that our evolved psychology almost certainly leans us towards religion, as an essential defence against the terror of death and meaninglessness.
Will Hutton, journalist
The key argument in the decades ahead will be between moral fundamentalists, animated by faith or nationalism or some combination of both, and Enlightenment liberals. This is already the battle line in the US, but there are echoes in Europe. This fundamentalism was at the core of the argument over the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands, has haunted Spanish politics since the end of Franco and is emerging in Britain with an incipient English nationalism while Scottish nationalism becomes the dominant force in Scottish politics. In Poland, faith and nationalism have fused to produce one of the ugliest internal debates in Europe.
The moral fundamentalists are ideological magpies. They are often quite ready to back protectionist economic policies, high public spending and strong welfare support, especially for the so-called deserving poor. They are even anti-business, especially if it is global; they distrust globalisation. More conventionally, they are passionate believers in the family, nation and enemies of multiculturalism, portrayed as privileging foreign minority cultures over the dominant host community. They are instinctive censors and are anti-science. They distrust gender equality, and believe in traditional sex roles. They are on the march everywhere.
Enlightenment liberals have been unsure how to respond. Some have tried to create alliances with the moral fundamentalists on issues like the family or multiculturalism, only to find that although there may be some agreement over tactics and means, there is a profound cleavage over ends. This attempt at unsuccessfully forming alliances with the new fundamentalists is arguably part of the story of New Labour.
More recently, I detect signs of a growing recognition that those of us who believe in Enlightenment values have to assert what we believe and stop making concessions to intolerant fundamentalists. This is beginning to happen in the US, with the growing readiness to take on the religious right. In Britain there has been an encouraging affirmation of Enlightenment principles before a coalition of faith communities insisting that conscience should trump equality over gay adoption; the Enlightenment view prevailed. Confronting rising English and Scottish nationalism may prove more problematic. All over the globe—China, Iran, Japan, Venezuela, the US, France, Poland. Russia—there are politicians putting themselves at the head of nationalist movements. Insisting on tolerance, the rule of law, equality, liberty, rationalism, science, solidarity, pluralism and human rights before this rising movement is the battle of our times. It may prove harder to win than the 20th-century victory over fascism and communism.
Michael Ignatieff, politician
Everything that happens to us will be unexpected. There is no reason to be discouraged about this. Practical political life is the art of managing the unexpected, just as life itself is a matter of rising to the occasion.
Pico Iyer, writer
The battle between left and right has long been eclipsed by the much more urgent debate between future and past—between, on one hand, those who hold, as the old have always done, that wisdom lies in tradition, community, continuity, and on the other, those who are convinced that transformation lies just around the corner, in whatever we come up with tomorrow. It is this division, between tenses more than civilisations, that has already put Europe in a different camp from America, and linked Syria, or even France, say, to Venezuela. It is this overarching conflict that has left China and Japan not sure which direction they're moving in. And it is this contest that has not just set technology against the claims of religion, but asked all of us how much we will listen to Silicon Valley, and how much to Jerusalem. The conflict between old and new is far deeper and graver than just the dialogue between the Islamic world and the secular west. What will divide and therefore define the century now dawning is the quarrel between those who are committed to change and those who root themselves in the changeless.?
