The Code of Civilization

Vyacheslav Nikonov, Huw Davies

• Editorial: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781912894833
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Geopolitica

In his book, Vyacheslav Nikonov shows the origins of the modern world and traces the chronologies and histories of peoples and countries. Nikonov discusses the main centers of influence and forces that shape the world in which we live. The world demonstrates a variety of development models shaped by the national, regional, historical, religious and other aspects of each country. The center of gravity of world development is shifting from West to East, from North to South, from developed economies to ??developing ones. Thirty years ago, Western countries accounted for 80% of the world economy; now it is less than half. Asia, already home to most of humanity, will become a global leader in the coming decades. What does this mean? What will the world be like and what place will Russia take in it? Will American hegemony continue? Will China become a superpower? Will Europe become a museum for tourists from other continents? History has resumed its course and the world is rushing towards an unstoppable diversity.

Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.

1

People And Civilizations

Civilizations are capable not only of doing battle with one another, but also of cooperating with one another. For there is enough room on Earth for the whole of humanity, in all its diversity.

Mankind’s Past is Full of Mystery

According to the latest scientific knowledge, everything that exists came into being some 13.7 billion years ago, at the time of the Big Bang, when, for a reason not yet known to modern science, nothing was transformed into something.¹ The part of the Universe which can be observed by astronomers is known as the Metagalaxy, and contains several hundred billion galaxies. The planet on which we have the good fortune to live is the third planet from the sun in our Solar System, which came into being 4.7 billion years ago and was cast adrift (or, to look at it another way, was not cast adrift) in its further reaches, 10,000 parsecs from the center of our galaxy, which is known as the Milky Way and contains, in addition to the Sun, another 10¹¹ stars (more than the number of people living on our planet).

The majority of the earth’s surface – 70.8% of it – is covered by the world’s oceans, and the rest – all 149.1 million square kilometers of it – is taken up by land which forms 6 continents and a multitude of islands. Not all of the land is hospitable: 20% of it consists of deserts, 10% of glaciers, 30% of it is covered with forests, 20% with savannah and sparse woodland, and another 10% is used for farming.

Between 3 and 3.8 billion years ago, life came into being, and the biosphere began to take shape. At least 3 million years ago – probably in Africa – mankind, the species that would go on to become the master of the planet, appeared. Man would prove to be far from the most assiduous of masters, and certainly a very brutal one.² It transpired that man was the only species that destroyed those like him and had a strong impact on his environment, and not for the better.

As Yuval Noah Harari rightfully observed in his sensational book Sapiens, colonization of the planet by Homo sapiens has become “one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures. […] Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools. […] Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinction. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”³

The migration of Homo sapiens to various regions of the inhabited world, pushing out pre-homo sapiens hominids who lived there, and, possibly, interbreeding with them, resulted in the emergence of multiple racial types. Mankind was divided into four major racial branches: Europeoids, Mongoloids, Negroids and Australoids. As a result, around 40,000 years ago, intelligent man became the only representative of the hominid family and became established throughout virtually the entire planet. Back then, there were probably fewer than half a million people in the world. For hunter-gatherers – each of them would have needed a territory of 10-25 square kilometers – there was no more room left. In the late Neolithic era – 10,000 years ago – the population of earth stood at around 6 million people, average life expectancy was 30, and man subsisted on a diet that would have cost 2 dollars a day in today’s terms.

A particularly significant moment was the Neolithic revolution: the transition from an appropriating economy to a production economy: to agriculture and cattle rearing; metallurgy, trades, and the forerunners of the exchange of goods appeared. The central role as the protector of the home and hearth – a role played by women – began to be pushed aside by the leading role of man as a tiller of the land and a warrior. The emergence of surplus food, along with the tools of labor and other belongings, which were not distributed among the whole community but remained within the family, led to the rise of private property and inequality. A clannish elite formed, deciding matters at a tribal council, and military leaders and priests gained special prominence.

By the time of Plato and Aristotle (in the 4^th century BC), the population of the planet was approaching 200 million, and it then stayed at that level for a long time: mankind had entered the era of intense self-destruction, exacerbated by large-scale epidemics (the most devastating of which was the plague pandemic that killed off 45% of Europe’s population in the middle of the 14^th century).⁴ In the year 1000 CE, there were roughly 275 million people living on the planet. By about 1800, the human population had reached the billion mark. And then the demographic boom began.

In the 20^th century, the planet’s population doubled in size, almost twice over. In 1900, it stood at 1.6 billion people, in 1927 2 billion, and in 1950 3 billion. On 12^th October 1999, the 6 billionth person was born, in Sarajevo: Adnan Nevich. Twelve years later, the 7 billionth human arrived, in the early hours of 31^st October 2011, in Kaliningrad: Pyotr Nikolayev. Today, approximately 230,000 people are born every day on Earth, and in the year 2019, around 80 million babies were born. Average life expectancy is 67 years, and the average level of income is 25 dollars a day. Yet some 2.5 billion people live on less than 2 dollars a day.

The figures for the growth in population, in the billions, are amazing: it is hard to imagine so many people. Let us try to do just that, though. Imagine if all the people on the planet gathered together in one place, on an island for example, and stood shoulder to shoulder. How big would that island need to be? As big as the United Kingdom, or Japan, or Greenland? Far from it. The entire population of Earth in 1950 could have fitted onto the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, which measures 381 square kilometers. For today’s population, Zanzibar would suffice, measuring as it does 1,554 square kilometers, which is a little more than the area of Moscow, prior to its expansion beyond the borders of the belt-way.⁵

The peak of population growth arrived in the 1960s, when it stood at 2% a year. Today, the figure is half that. We shall not reach the next milestone – 8 billion – for another 14 years, as opposed to 12, and the next billion after that might take 18 years. The main reason for the explosive population growth in the 20^th century was a string of successes in healthcare, first and foremost in the invention of antibiotics and the implementation of rules on hygiene. The key distinctive characteristic of the 21^st century will be a fall in the birth rate. A key factor is considered to be the development of urban communities, and of an urban culture. As demographers like to joke, “urbanization is the best form of contraceptive”. Moreover, increases in the educational and professional level of women have also played a role, along with the trend for getting married at a later age and for more frequent divorces, and the absence in the cities of the economic need to have a large family, and the widespread use of abortion and contraception.

Today, experts have calmed down somewhat about the issue of over-population and the Malthusian Trap. According to the weighted-average forecast by the UN, the earth’s population will reach 9.7 billion (enough to fill every inch of an island the size of Tenerife) in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, before stabilizing. Eighty-three countries, which together are home to 46% of humanity, have a birth rate lower than the level of reproduction. These include, first and foremost, all the countries of Europe, and also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, China, and other states in East Asia. The second group of countries, which are home to another 46% – countries with better prospects on the demographic front – has an average level of reproduction of between 2.1 and 3: the majority of countries in South and South-east Asia, the Islamic world, and also the American continent, including the United States. This list includes India as well – the global champion in terms of population growth, where the birth rate will fall to the level of simple reproduction in 2025-2030 (when India will move into first place in the world in terms of population numbers, overtaking the current leader, China). Only 9% of the planet’s inhabitants are to be found in the countries where the fertility rate is over 3, almost all of them being in sub-Saharan Africa. In a decade, say experts, there will be just three countries left in the world with a fertility rate higher than five children per one woman – Mali, Niger and Somalia.⁶ Moreover, marriages are increasingly taking place at an ever later age, and growing numbers of children, particularly in developed countries, are being born outside wedlock (40% of children are born out of wedlock in the countries of the OECD).⁷

In 2100, two out of every five inhabitants of Earth will be living on the African continent – 4.4 billion people; meanwhile there will be just 646 million people in Europe.⁸ Unless, of course, everyone in Africa has migrated to Europe by then.

The planet, by all accounts, will be able to sustain and keep its population fed in the 21^st century and, therefore, in the 22^nd century as well. Even today, the yield of most agricultural crops has risen 10-fold by comparison with the 19^th century.⁹ While today there are people going hungry, and 2 billion are living in poverty, this is explained not by a shortfall in resources, but by the poor distribution of these resources, i.e., first and foremost, by the poor quality of state governance.¹⁰ And the situation varies greatly in particular parts of the world.

However, both the speed of change, and the number of changes that are unfavorable for the human race, are growing. The Holocene, which began just 16,000 years ago, turns out to be the shortest geological period in Earth’s history; all the others lasted tens of millions of years. At an international congress of geological sciences held in South Africa in 2016, it was proposed that a new era – the Anthropocene – should be considered to have begun, starting in 1950. It is characterized by the increased influence of human activity on the climate, the rapid disappearance of forests, a reduction in levels of fish in the ocean, the loss of a growing number of living species, and the emission of greenhouse gases.¹¹

Ethnicities, Nations, States

Each of us is part of a multitude of c...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. People And Civilizations
• Mankind’s Past is Full of Mystery
• Ethnicities, Nations, States
• The State and Globalization
• Power: Soft, Smart and Hard
• Civilizations
• 2. United States of Europe
• The West Has Long Been in Fashion
• Classical Debut
• Through the Dark Ages
• The Renaissance and the Reformation
• The Beginnings of Capitalism and Modern Democracy
• The Imperial Spirit
• The Westphalian World
• Nazism as a European Value
• The Western Pole
• 3. European (Dis)Union
• European Integration: From Success to Success
• The Debt Economy
• Is It Easy to Be a European?
• On the Waves of Brexit
• European Pole
• A Clash of Values?
• 4. The American Magnitude
• Colonial Duality
• Two-Party Foundations
• A Peculiar Institution
• The Triumph of Will and Capital
• Hollywood upon the Hill
• The Superpower
• A Flexible Response
• Unipolarity and the Great Recession
• Obamamania
• Resource-Constrained Environment Strategy
• Who Won in 2016?
• Drain the Washington Swamp
• The Trump Doctrine
• The Trump-Russia Affair
• The Dollar Economy
• The Empire of Lawyers and Lobbyists
• What Happened to the Melting Pot
• The Sources of American Behaviour
• 5. The Russian Matrix
• The Geography of the Russian Fate
• Initial Rus
• The Western Ulus
• The Moscow Tsardom
• The Great Power
• In the European Concert of Powers
• The Collapse of Russia – 1917
• The USSR
• The Historic Alternative
• Yeltsinism
• The Country Rises from its Knees
• Putin 2.0
• The Code of Russia
• Democracy in Russia?!
• Growth Is Seen in Comparisons
• A Revival
• “Polite People”
• The End of History? Not Just Yet
• Multi-Dimensional Civilization
• 6. The Return Of Asia
• The Fever of Growth
• The State Above All Else
• In the Shadow of the West
• Asian Community
• 7. The Chinese Party
• The Shang-Yin and the Zhou
• Confucianism, Taoism, Legism and the Empire
• The Chinese Republic
• No Matter What Color the Cat Is
• Power as Maintaining Balance
• The New Superpower
• Competitor of the West
• Back-to-Back
• Colossus of the Developing World
• 8. The Collective Of The Rising Sun
• Yamato and Nippon
• The Shogunates
• The Meiji Restoration and the Empire
• The Japanese Miracle
• Non-Westminster Democracy
• Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier
• 9. The Indian Way
• Indianism
• The Biggest Democracy
• India Grows at Night
• Strategic Autonomy
• 10. The Islamic Factor
• The Six Pillars of the Faith
• The Rise and Fall
• Re-Islamization
• The Spring Turmoil
• The Moscow Factor
• 11. Latin-American Charisma
• Conquistadors and Caudillo Realm
• Latin-American Spirit
• A Continent on the Rise
• The Left Turn and Indigenista
• A Shift to the Right
• The South-Western Pole
• The Brazilian Model
• Power to the Left
• Tropical Democracy
• The Century of Brazil?
• 12. The Afrocentrism Of Hope
• The Uncomfortable Cradle of Humankind
• Colonialism and Independence
• The Labor Resource of the Planet
• Afrocentrism
• Conflicts Non-Stop
• A Crafty Choice
• South African Path to Freedom
• Sobornost’ in the African Way
• The Continental Leader
• Diplomacy of Ubuntu
• Epilogue
• Notes
• About the Author
• Thank you for purchasing this book
• Glagoslav Publications Catalogue