Point to ponder:
From about 1815-1914, the world was arguably more globalized than it was now. The political elite was if anything more closely tied among the Great Powers (to be fair when half the rulers of the then-dynastic empires in Europe were grandsons of the Queen of England....). The political system was limited to the United Kingdom, France, the German Empire, Austria-Hungary/Austria/the big loogie on the map, Russia, the United States, and Japan by 1914. These Great Powers were extremely intimately tied, so much so that a book written in 1912 argued economic ties were so close together to render any prospect of a significant shakeup of the system infeasible.
The date the book was written? 1912.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Illusion-Norman-Angell/dp/1502477246
Worth noting, too, is that just like today, the system was repeatedly shaken by major crises, with two disputes over Morocco in 1905 and 1911 actually producing a climate more directly likely to have led to war if people had actually gone whole hog than was the case immediately in 1914, and two minor wars in the Balkans. Also with the collapse of the Qing Celestial Empire and the Europeans and Japanese and USA swooping in like vultures on an elephant carcass. In each of these cases, the globalized system averted war by narrower and narrower margins, which is something sometimes omitted in the comparison and saying "if they didn't over Morocco, why the fuck did they over Sarajevo?"
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~salvador/Spring%20thru%20February/World%20War%201/Causes%20of%20World%20War%20I,%20Pre-war%20crises.pdf
Why, there was even a European Spring beginning in 1905, when an epic failure on the part of the Tsar of Russia led to a brief swansong of Russian democracy cruelly murdered by Lenin and Pornstache in 1917. Germany, too, experienced new waves of democracy when the anti-Kaiser movement known as the SPD happened to win a majority in the Imperial Reichstag, leading to Junkers pissing themselves and scrambling for an easy route to throw sand in the faces of the masses of the Empire.
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUS1905.htm
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1912/no-90-february-1912/german-elections
For all the promises of this era, of course, one damn fool shot another damn fool in a backwoods city in the ass end of nowhere and the world erupted in flames that culminated in even worse ogres succeeding prior generations who weren't that great a recommendation (obviously, or they wouldn't have fallen without much mourning or effort to restore them) themselves. The lesson here, of course, is that globalization isn't a necessarily unstoppable force. The primary real difference between now and then is that in an age of ICBMs and nuclear-armed submarines able to strike anywhere they please with dead man switches, the Great Powers have the assurance, not merely the probability, that a new total war between all of them makes the cockroaches very happy.
Capitalism was arguably even stronger in 1913 when its only real rival, the Social Democratic movement, still took for granted working within the system instead of piling up the corpses to build up a new one. And yet all it took was literally one damn fool shooting another damn fool to collapse what a century built. The warning here is not to think that simple trade is all it takes to make humans make nice to each other. Sure, humans are greedy and cowardly a lot of the time, but we're still perfectly capable of shooting ourselves in the foot with an RPG.
I don't expect that a Third World War will happen intentionally, as the 1914 crisis did. But 101 years ago sends a clear warning not to take for granted that instilling ties for trade and happiness among people is a viable plan or to expect humans to kiss and make up purely because wallets are being stuffed all around. Too, the 1905-1933 trends in some countries reflected illusions of where they were actually going to go. Nobody looking at Europe in 1913 would have predicted the end of Tsarism would have led to Stalinism or that the Kaiser would be overthrown for a halfassed democracy culminating in Nazism. The future is incoherent and chaotic, and all prophets are infallible in hindsight.
We should not expect, either, that all trends are guaranteed to change for the better. We are still paying the price 101 years later for the errors of our ancestors in thinking this way, after all!
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Globalization-First-era-of-modern-globalization-to-1914.html
The date the book was written? 1912.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Illusion-Norman-Angell/dp/1502477246
Worth noting, too, is that just like today, the system was repeatedly shaken by major crises, with two disputes over Morocco in 1905 and 1911 actually producing a climate more directly likely to have led to war if people had actually gone whole hog than was the case immediately in 1914, and two minor wars in the Balkans. Also with the collapse of the Qing Celestial Empire and the Europeans and Japanese and USA swooping in like vultures on an elephant carcass. In each of these cases, the globalized system averted war by narrower and narrower margins, which is something sometimes omitted in the comparison and saying "if they didn't over Morocco, why the fuck did they over Sarajevo?"
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~salvador/Spring%20thru%20February/World%20War%201/Causes%20of%20World%20War%20I,%20Pre-war%20crises.pdf
Why, there was even a European Spring beginning in 1905, when an epic failure on the part of the Tsar of Russia led to a brief swansong of Russian democracy cruelly murdered by Lenin and Pornstache in 1917. Germany, too, experienced new waves of democracy when the anti-Kaiser movement known as the SPD happened to win a majority in the Imperial Reichstag, leading to Junkers pissing themselves and scrambling for an easy route to throw sand in the faces of the masses of the Empire.
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUS1905.htm
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1912/no-90-february-1912/german-elections
For all the promises of this era, of course, one damn fool shot another damn fool in a backwoods city in the ass end of nowhere and the world erupted in flames that culminated in even worse ogres succeeding prior generations who weren't that great a recommendation (obviously, or they wouldn't have fallen without much mourning or effort to restore them) themselves. The lesson here, of course, is that globalization isn't a necessarily unstoppable force. The primary real difference between now and then is that in an age of ICBMs and nuclear-armed submarines able to strike anywhere they please with dead man switches, the Great Powers have the assurance, not merely the probability, that a new total war between all of them makes the cockroaches very happy.
Capitalism was arguably even stronger in 1913 when its only real rival, the Social Democratic movement, still took for granted working within the system instead of piling up the corpses to build up a new one. And yet all it took was literally one damn fool shooting another damn fool to collapse what a century built. The warning here is not to think that simple trade is all it takes to make humans make nice to each other. Sure, humans are greedy and cowardly a lot of the time, but we're still perfectly capable of shooting ourselves in the foot with an RPG.
I don't expect that a Third World War will happen intentionally, as the 1914 crisis did. But 101 years ago sends a clear warning not to take for granted that instilling ties for trade and happiness among people is a viable plan or to expect humans to kiss and make up purely because wallets are being stuffed all around. Too, the 1905-1933 trends in some countries reflected illusions of where they were actually going to go. Nobody looking at Europe in 1913 would have predicted the end of Tsarism would have led to Stalinism or that the Kaiser would be overthrown for a halfassed democracy culminating in Nazism. The future is incoherent and chaotic, and all prophets are infallible in hindsight.
We should not expect, either, that all trends are guaranteed to change for the better. We are still paying the price 101 years later for the errors of our ancestors in thinking this way, after all!
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Globalization-First-era-of-modern-globalization-to-1914.html