The New World Order should not be Pax Americana. It is time to end the so-called “long cycle” of the historical succession of hegemonic empires. These began with the hegemony of Portugal (1517-1580), which ended with the Dutch Independence War against Spain (1585-1608), Portugal’s primary challenger, and ushered in an era dominated by the newly independent Netherlands and its commercial empire (1609-1713). This era ended with the Wars of Spanish Succession (1689-1713) which culminated in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). France under Louis XIV had been the Netherlands’ main challenger for power, but actually Britain became the new hegemon (1714-1815). Britain was challenged by France in the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon (1793-1815), but Napoleon lost at Waterloo in 1815 and Britain won another term of world rule (1816-1945) after the Congress of Vienna (1815). The new challenger in World Wars I and II was Germany, but the actual successor became the United States, from 1946 on. The challenge by the USSR has now been beaten back without a war. The U.S. could have an uncontested second term, and shows signs of wanting it. But periods of hegemony have usually ended in big wars (the last period is an exception, perhaps because of nuclear deterrence). We should now look beyond hegemony, to the rule of a new principle, and break the deadly cycle of empires.

(Information about the “long cycle” is taken from International Studies Quarterly, Sept. 1983, article by William R. Thompson.)

In the search for this new principle, we should note the patterns of findings emerging from recent research on peace, international relations, economics, demography, and ecology. Remarkably, all but One (ecology) seem to converge on a single pattern: the ‘lazy S” logistic curve placed at the head of this article.

The lazy S curve is well known from Rostow’s book on “Stages of Economic Development”. The lower, almost horizontal, gently rising portion represents the steady, almost non-growing subsistence economy of traditional societies. Households or clans of extended families were nearly self~sufficient and self-supporting, in both hunter­-gatherer and early pastoral-agricultural societies, with only moderate barter-trade exchanges of surplus goods. This seemed indefinitely sustainable at the then-existing low population levels.
There followed the steep rise in productivity following the agricultural revolution, and an even steeper rise following the industrial revolution; the world is still at this stage of what has been called “the transitional economy”. Economic growth proceeds at a rate of a few percent each year, which overall means an exponential growth curve (the rule being: the bigger it is, the faster it grows in absolute terms). The steep rise is a time of turbulence and rapid change; in other words, a time of protracted “crisis”.

Some countries at this time are still at the very beginning of the “take-off” to the rapid rise, which has been termed “economic development”; others are already near the end, at, or past the point of levelling off to the higher plateau, again of no growth or little growth; these are the “modern” or “developed” or “industrialized” economies. Our present “development gap” or “poverty gap” is the differential between nations near the lower end of the rapid rise curve and those on the upper plateau; a phenomenon which may be caused either by a historical time­lag (the fact that “first-comers” gain an economic advantage, as already pointed out long ago in an essay by George Bernard Shaw); or by a deliberate, or perhaps an inadvertent (“structural”) exploitation of the poor by the rich, depending on one’s ideological inclination. The cause of the poverty gap is of no practical importance in efforts at overcoming it; but it makes a tremendous difference in our perceptions of justice. The final part of the Rostow curve is the (already mentioned) upper plateau of the prosperous wealthy societies.

Another lazy-S curve closely correlates with the Rostow stages of economic development: this is the well-known curve of the demographic transition. Again we start with the nearly horizontal lower plateau of slow natural population growth in traditional societies, representing a natural near-equilibrium between high birth rates and high death rates (low life expectancy). There follows the stormy transitional stage of a steep rise in population (the “population explosion”), due to the dramatic drop in death rates (from life expectancies less than 40 to over 70) due to greater wealth, better nutrition, better hygiene, and medical advances in curing infectious diseases; meanwhile, however, the birth rates remain high because of the inertia effect of traditional and cultural customs. Finally, at the higher plateau, birth rates drop to again approximately balance the death rates (both now at a low level), as women are more educated and more commonly in occupations outside the home.

Now let us look at some other correlations. It has been shown in studies by Dean Babst and separately by Rudolph Rummel, that democratic states never fight wars with other democratic states, although democracies continue to fight wars with dictatorships, and there are also wars of dictatorships with each other. “Democracy” is rather stringently defined here as the presence of representative or responsible government with parliamentary institutions and multi-party fair and honest elections, the absence of press censorship, an independent judiciary, and the observance of the civil and political rights of individuals and minorities.

There were relatively few states that qualified as democracies under all these criteria until fairly recent times, and this might partly explain why they fought no wars with each other – there were simply too few to find each other or be neighbours likely to have disputes in times of slower communications. Nevertheless, there are more democracies nowadays, and their number has just spurted ahead in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And the correlation still holds – no wars between democratic states. Moreover, it is more than a simple high correlation between democracy and peace — the number of wars between democracies is literally zero. Correlations between sociological phenomena are usually much lower than this.

Immanuel Kant (in his “On Perpetual Peace”) has predicted such a correlation, on the basis that if the people as a whole were making political decisions, they would never choose war over peace, especially with nations who were perceived as being very similar to themselves in their political institutions. Therefore he specified that the states in his world federation would have to be republics, not monarchies (the classification used in his time more commonly than ours into democracies and dictatorships). But whether this is the explanation or not, the empirical correlation remains highly significant.

And here is another correlation: the “islands of stable peace” (where war has not only been absent for a long time, but is now almost inconceivable) in the world are found invariably only in the wealthy parts of the world. The examples usually cited are Scandinavia, North America, and Western Europe. This finding comes from the work of Norman Alcock and independently Bruce Russett. It also follows the definitions by Kenneth Boulding of the four phases in different world regions – stable peace (as in the regions mentioned above), unstable peace (occasional wars, but mainly peace), unstable war (usually war, but occasional peace), and stable (almost constant) war, as in Cambodia and Lebanon.

These observed correlations between democracy and peace, and wealth and peace, mean that we probably have two more lazy-S curves. Political regimes have grown from the traditional authoritarianism (perhaps of tribal elders) in primitive societies, through a stormy rise in social complexity characterized by tyrants, dictators, and revolutions, to a final stable plateau of orderly democratic government {almost like Fukuyama’s “End of History”, except that it does not specify capitalism, only democracy). The world is still largely in the stormy crisis stage, but perhaps approaching the higher plateau.

The second lazy-S curve, linked to the first by an extremely high empirical correlation, is the rise from the relative peacefulness of early pre-civilized societies (noted e.g. by William Eckhardt and others), through the turbulence of many wars in which the world has laboured for perhaps about 5,000 years, and in which we still find ourselves, to the upper plateau of stable peace in rich civilized societies. (Note, by the way, that the statement ~ “we have always had wars” is not true; only for the last 5,000 years has war been a human institution.)

And what is more, the curve of peace-war-peace has been found to be correlated to the curve of the rise of wealth (the Rostow stages of economic development), and thereby also the demographic transition curve.

We are now ready to represent these findings in a common diagram.

The pattern that seems to emerge is one of an overall lazy-S curve of a society that changes from being poor, with high birth and death rates, peaceful, and authoritarian, through a transitional stage in which the economy is growing, the population is exploding (high birth rates and low death rates), wars are frequent, and dictatorships abound (the present time of storm and crisis, from which we may be emerging), to an upper plateau of a world with a steady prosperous economy, stabilized though high population levels (birth rates and death rates both low), stable peace, and democratic institutions.

The lazy-S curve pattern is no accident. It is an extremely common pattern of development in many natural occurrences, from pH changes in a titration curve in chemistry to the growth and saturation of bacterial growth in a Petri dish. It is also seen in the psychological development of children (e.g. the late childhood latency plateau, but also further stages of maturity – a series of S curves rising like a staircase) (the Erikson stages of development are alluded to here), and perhaps in “punctuated biological evolution” schemes of Steven Jay Gould. The common occurrence of this pattern is easily explained by the exponential growth to saturation: exponential growth is at first self-sustaining as it “takes off” and progresses, but it must eventually stop and level off when saturation is reached or natural obstacles to further growth are encountered.

In view of the ubiquity of this pattern throughout the natural world, we should not be surprised at its appearance in social-historical development as well. We have not noticed it before, except in fragments, because we did not observe a sufficiently long stretch of time, and not various aspects of it in their entirety.

As an outlook for the human future, the S-curve patterns can give rise to an overly-facile optimism. We still have to ask two very important questions: (1) Can we actually reach the upper plateau FOR THE WHOLE WORLD? (2) Can it be done in a long-term equilibrium with Nature? Positive answers to these two questions are by no means assured.

If only a part of the world reaches the upper plateau while another part does not (the classic North-South gap); or, even worse, if this is due to exploitation of the South by the North, we are in a “Lifeboat Ethics” situation (cf. Garret Hardin). Some of us in the North are safe in a lifeboat and doing rather well with plenty of supplies, while the others all around the boat are drowning. We deliberately do not give them room in the lifeboat, or we might not survive either – the supplies would be insufficient or the boat would sink under the weight of so many people. Apart from the ethics of the situation (reminiscent of shooting your neighbours if they try to get into your fallout shelter in a nuclear war), there is the danger that the drowning in their rage will overturn the lifeboat, or punch holes in it and sink it. Garrett Hardin’s metaphor of the lifeboat was not at all fanciful or future­oriented; we are already practicing lifeboat ethics in real life in North-South relations.

We are also in trouble if balance with Nature is not reached. (I capitalize Nature to indicate that she is to be regarded somewhat as a foreign power to be dealt with in fear of retaliation for any mistreatment on our part. That metaphor is due to Ursula Franklin.) Today’s wealthy societies (the very ones already on the upper plateau) are extremely wasteful of resources and highly pOlluting; ecological mismanagement has also grown, as another, highly malignant, S-curve. In this sense, we have grown like a cancer on the Earth. True, on the upper plateau growth will stop; but the high level of consumption on that plateau may nevertheless not be sustainable in the long run.

Thus we see that the high population levels and the high consumption rates at the upper plateau are colliding headlong with both social and natural problems, and may turn out not to be attainable universally and not stable over time even for the fortunate few who have reached it. Unless the social and natural problems are overcome, we may be in the position of Moses who caught a glimpse of the Promised Land, but was not allowed to enter it. It is a Paradise lost before it has been gained.

Are there any solutions? Possibly, possibly not. Let us at least try to explore a few options.

We may note, as a start, that the ecological problems, both of wasting resources and pollution, increase in proportion to three factors: overpopulation, excessive wealth, and damaging (inappropriate) technology. This three­factor relationship has been used previously, both by Barry Commoner and by Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s, although they got into an argument about the relative importance of the three factors. Disregarding the controversy, we shall use these three factors as the basis for the discussion of options which follows.

(1) It would seem that the upper plateau need not be reached at any pre-defined world population level. If we let nature take its course, as we have been doing, we will level off at 9-10 billion, which is too high for sustainability, even if most of us remain poor and therefore less wasteful (in which case we face the social inequity problem). If we knew how to regulate population, we might be able to combine sustainability and equity with the high plateau of peace and democracy (the Pax Democratica), at perhaps 1-2 billion population.

This seems almost impossible to reach. Family limitation to one child or no child per family would cause population numbers to plummet in the next generation, but such policies have failed in India and China – even though in China highly repressive and drastic measures were used. Potential parents seem to be fairly willing to limit their families to two children per family (the natural replacement rate), but it has proved much more difficult in practice to go below that. Perhaps we are confronting some basic biological imperative.

Nature is capable of achieving a very high rate of “cull” through epidemics such as AIDS or something far more contagious (e.g. spread by sneezing rather than only intimate contact), but surely we would not deliberately engineer this, except in biological warfare. Could we stabilize at the present 5 billion? Would that be sufficient? Perhaps, if the further conditions suggested below are fulfilled; but we do not really know.

(2) Is the high consumption rate of the presently prosperous countries really necessary for being at the upper plateau? Again, this happened when we let matters proceed without interference or regulation. The important point at the upper plateau is not the absolute wealth level – we would conjecture – but the fact of saturation, i.e. no further precipitous growth. However, we note with caution, this is a conjecture which does not directly follow from the empirical correlations; but neither does it contradict those correlations. We would probably need to be (and want to be) above subsistence levels (as at the lower plateau), but perhaps somewhere between subsistence and prosperity as now defined.

Alcock et al in 1978 suggested a GNP per capita of about 700 US dollars per year as a reasonable medium level at which basic needs would be satisfied without going into luxuries. These authors reached their conclusion on the basis of a sharp change of the slope in the semi-log plot of average life expectancy against GNP per capita, as observed for all the world’s nations. In this plot, we see a steady increase (linear in the semi-log graph) to to a GNP per capita of 700 US dollars, after which further increases in GNP per capita have only slight effects on life expectancy. We can assume that increases in wealth beyond this point are merely adding luxuries and no longer necessities; they affect the (material) quality of life only, not the quantity of life.

We hasten to add (and expand on it later) that quality of life need not be defined as material quality; the non­material aspects of quality would not be affected by this limitation of wealth. At these lower consumption rates, we might be able to combine sustainability with existence at the upper plateau, especially at lower population levels. Studies by Bruce Russett have reached similar conclusions. The recommendation following from this is for a life-style of voluntary simplicity, long recommended by Gandhi and the Quakers, among others.

It is also recommended that the level of 700 US dollars in annual GNP per capita should apply to all nations, and also internally within nations, at least approximately, with a spread of not more than a factor of 5. That is, everyone should be between a GNP per capita of, say, from 300 to 1500. The deviation from absolute equality is an allowance for cultural differences and in the interest of diversity. The elimination of the present huge rich-poor gap should be an essential part of the change toward sustainability, for reasons already explained above.

The equalization could be achieved by something 1ike the Guaranteed Annual Income Plan for Nations (GAIN Plan) calculated previously by the present author, or by allocating a “peace dividend” or a “tax on overarmament” in a Disarmament Fund for Development as proposed at the United Nations.

(3) Since ecological deterioration is also caused by the use of inappropriate or harmful technologies, as already stated, we would need to pay attention to this factor also. By being careful to use only environment-friendly technologies, we could further contribute to sustainability while maintaining ourselves at the prosperity-democracy­peace high plateau of a mature civilization.

The main changes must be in the energy sources and the raw materials that we use in industrial processes. The alternatives in energy sources are fossil (coal, oil, natural gas), nuclear (fission and fusion), current solar (space and water heating, photo-voltaics, wind, biomass, hydro-electric, ocean currents, ocean waves, ocean temperature differences), geothermal, and tidal (dependent on the Moon) .

Fossil fuels must be ruled out because they add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; anyway, they will sooner or later be exhausted. Nuclear fission is too dangerous, both because of radioactive waste disposal problems and the possibility of accidents or terrorist sabotage; and also too expensive. Nuclear fusion has not yet been invented and may never be; and it too might have problems of radio-activation of the surroundings by the high neutron flux. Current solar must be more vigorously pursued in research, to make it cheaper and more accessible; but hydro-electric power generation by building huge dams has adverse environmental impacts, as in the proposed James Bay II project. Micro-hydro has possibilities: generating local electricity supplies by utilizing small waterfalls or rapids surrounding many communities. Geothermal can be used only in Iceland or Yosemite Park, or where these sources are located. Tidal has been explored in the Bay of Fundy, but might have some adverse environmental effects and is not yet cheap enough. Direct solar, wind, biomass, and micro-hydro remain the best candidates for future energy sources, but they are not ideal. It is a toss-up if we can achieve sustainability in energy.

Regarding raw materials used in manufacturing, these must be not only renewable, but also actually renewed (reused or recycled). Industrial processes must run in closed cycles like natural processes do; i.e. “waste products” must be used somewhere else, not discarded. The free-energy (negentropy) costs of production and consumption processes must be considered more important than the money costs.

Overall prognosis: We can be cautiously hopeful, but only if some very stringent criteria are fulfilled. To be realistic, we must be aware that fulfilling them amounts to a true social revolution and a transformation of values, not mere tinkering at the periphery.

This leads to a final point. A truly mature civilization at the upper plateau would necessarily, because of the change in values needed to reach it, be highly developed ethically, spiritually, culturally, artistically, and intellectually. There are no limits to growth in the mental realm. This type of development would more than compensate for the necessary limitation Of economic development, and would in turn reconcile us to the absence of consumer-type luxuries. We would no longer crave these, since far greater spiritual treasures would be widely accessible and freely available to all.