The subject was an interesting one - the use of branding consultants for the promotion of emerging countries to the West. The Editor was interested in our rather tough view that such activities, if they are to be taken seriously, required a certain level of administrative capability in order to be successful.

The article speaks for itself and, in fact, there was no intention to criticise those who take on such contracts in good faith - they do their best and it is generally not their fault if the client (the sovereign country) has not invested in the systems that would make external communications a success.

This raises for us another interesting question that is often overlooked - the strategic imbalance of bureaucratic resources between the G20 and the rest of the world.

Many years ago, we worked on the campaign for a major pitch by one country's candidate to become Director General of a UN organisation on an independent reform platform. Our experience then and since was that small countries were the playthings of their donors.

Progressives in the West have tried to help by offering administrative expertise but this often fails to take hold because the donations are clearly linked to the strategic and security interests of the donors (otherwise they would be not get approval from legislatures).

Take the anti-corruption expertise where policemen are brought in to bring Western standards to 'assist' local elites and then come head-to-head with political systems that rely on clientage and patronage to function and where 'corruption' is, in fact, not always what it seems.

The other route to assisting the emerging world is by giving them the first benefits of aid and assistance to the developing world through the United Nations but here we face three problems, apart from a general backlash against aid that is laundered through local elites.

The UN is already overstretched, the West has undertaken a programme of recapturing control of what it pays for so that it reproduces the same model as its national administrative aid programmes and, of course, 'fairness' means that 'corruption' and clientage is re-imported into the UN by the back door.

So, when it comes to major multilateral negotiations, the emerging countries as sovereign nations have less capable, less well trained, underpaid and confused administrators who have little independence from the political class and can be treated as cannon fodder in the disputes of the big players.

What can be done? Certainly the West has less free capital to play with now and so national aid is likely to have more rather than less strings tied to it and be more directed at aid to the subjects of the sovereign rather than support for the administrators of the subjects of the sovereign.

There is, of course, growing pressure to reform the United Nations. This must come eventually but any reform is likely to focus on a reshuffle within its economic elite to take account of global shifts of power since 1945 and this may well reduce emerging country bargaining power through 'liberal 'reforms'.

In the end, emerging country ability to negotiate from strength is likely to have to rely on one of three methods ...

• a country effectively sells itself into the orbit of a greater power and trades what it can provide to the big power for the big power's patronage when serious discussions start - this is, of course, tantamount to a form of international feudalism;
• a country diverts its scarce resources to introducing the sort of administrative reforms that underpinned the British Empire and the US Federal State and puts its brightest and its best into a position of power over and against its political class - possible but expensive and not easy;
• a country begins to pool sovereignty with similar size powers and deals (much as the EU is trying to do with minimal success at the moment) with the international community as a bloc.

We have been somewhat of a 'bear' on the European Union precisely because the levels of development between its members is so different. This is the Germany-Greece problem that might yet break the Euro this autumn.

The European Union has not been bound together, unlike the US as Federal State, on war. There has been no War of Independence, its last major Civil War (1914-1945) took place before it was formed and there have been none of the low-level social wars that have been endemic to the United States.

If emerging countries are to build administrative capability without being client-states or drawing in on themselves as administrative party dictatorships, then regional blocs work for them as much and probably far more than they work for the members of the G20.

Such blocs might have come to be bound together through the free play of war but the West refuses to countenance this option. The UN exists, in any case, as permanent block to petty imperial expansionism so the alternative is negotiation.

The most honourable (not that honour counts for much in international affairs) approach for the West to take would be to encourage blocs of continguous and similarly sized countries to come together and create the sort of administrative capability beyond tribe and locality that it is promoting for itself.

Take Ratio's own country base - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and the de facto statelet emerging in Southern Sudan. This is a natural bloc that may compete within itself but which has interests in dealing with the West that might be better served through collaboration than competition.

Of course, collaboration does take place on issues of shared interest but the further formalisation of this process here and elsewhere as a positive policy aim might help focus dialogue over aid and security, assist in regional stabilisation and provide the basis for a consensus on reforms.

The United Kingdom should be a natural bloc of 'these islands' and is only stopped from being so by the idiotic legacy of its past imperialist approach to the Irish people. The Nordic countries adopt their own similar 'common interests' approach.

More of this in the developing world might be central to its continuing independence of action.

Be in no doubt that imperialism is back. Indeed, it has been back for some time but as a form of informal power struggle based on trade and aid with multiple players seeking to acquire spheres of influence without the costs of stationing troops - except where necessary to protect trade routes.

Small developing countries are like mice before cats and they may need to think increasingly collaboratively if they are not to find that they are simply out-stations for low cost transfer of natural resources to the industrial zones of the developed world.

But what we do understand is how the West has viewed and is viewing its position in Africa and the effect that recent economic problems in both the US (where instability persists) and Europe (which is deeply troubled) are having on the public acceptability of its forward engagement on the Continent.

There is a push and there is a pull in this. Both push and pull are driven by economic considerations that are beginning to overwhelm the 'idealism' that often gave cover to 'realpolitik' in the wake of the internal liberation of South Africa and derived from rage at examples of genocide and famine elsewhere.

The issues are complex and this is a note and not a paper. You could do worse than read Pasco's own on-the-ground assessments of the situation from an African perspective.

We have two sets of comment to make - first, about the very limited weight that progressive values now have for a Western policy that is definitely on the defensive because of resource constraints and, second, the limited ability of the West to effect its aims through its pivotal states strategy.

Pressures on the Humanitarian Impulse

Progressive and humanitarian drivers for Western intervention should not be regarded overly cynically. They were based on an ideological commitment within New Labour and this derived from the personal position of individuals whose political teeth had been cut on the anti-apartheid movement.

This British perspective would not have mattered in itself except that this progressivism 'worked' well with other drivers - Southern Baptist solidarity with Africa in Black America and a more general liberal determination in Europe that a colonial mentality must be replaced with a humanitarian one.

The high point of this general attitude was represented by liberals like Blair and Kouchner in France and to a lesser extent by Fischer in Germany and the Clinton administration. Adaptation to the opportunity presented for intervention by the Al-Qaeda strike on America was a natural one.

Unfortunately, after the initial success in Sierra Leone, liberal interventionism has undoubtedly been an expensive failure in the Middle East and West Asia while African states have increasingly resented the neo-colonial implications of what is essentially a centre-left imposition of values from the North Atlantic.

It is probable, though, that the policy could have struggled on so long as the electorates of the West were sentimentally directed to giving aid and assistance to their 'little brown brothers' - but that all changed with the near collapse of the complex economic system that underpinned Western largesse.

Three Realities

Three factors have now pushed their way to the head of the queue for Western policymakers: migration; growing disillusionment with the effects on the ground of intervention and of NGO engagement; and simple lack of hard cash and credit to disburse.

In each of these cases, the economic crisis in the West has played its role, taking the moral high ground away from the liberal progressives and returning it to those who question why scarce resources should be redirected to regimes that are now perceived to be capable of looking after themselves.

Migration is the most interesting because, although threats to the system from the nationalist Right have not emerged as serious electoral challenges except in particular conditions, the racist and nationalist underground is undoubtedly growing in strength and self-confidence.

Most migration and most terrorism is actually internally generated from within the West but, just as frightened Americans fear the flow of impoverished Mexicans from the South, so Europeans are unnerved by the flow of Africans into their cities.

The original progressive theory about this was that investment by Europe in Africa would create opportunities for Africans and the migrants would no longer need to flow North. To this was added the theory that Africans merely joined Asians, Arabs and Jews as the latest positive contributors to culture.

This was optimistic because, for many Africans, the poorest conditions in a European city were always going to be potentially more secure than conditions at home and the migrants were often 'post-modern': deracinated individuals rather than entrepreneurial pioneers for village communities.

The paradox of tighter border controls is that the criminal and a-social or desperate and trafficked elements are more likely to get through than families on the move and there has been a determined attempt by liberals to avoid an analysis of this lest it come up with 'racist' results.

But a great deal of the responsibility for migration into Europe lies with the greed and rapacity of Europeans themselves and Africans, with access to the internet as much as anyone else, have been educating themselves about radical interpretations of their own history.

Notoriously, Spanish industrialised fishing fleets have been raping the traditional fishing grounds of West Africa while the scale of oil pollution in some areas of the Nigerian Delta (greater than in the Gulf of Louisiana as we write) has been having similar effects on populations there for half a decade.

The Effects of the Crunch

There was always a faction of the liberal intelligentsiya that was relaxed about migration, seeing it as creating constant economic growth under globalisation. Another faction was ideologically perfectly happy to see Africans drive down Western wage rates as a form of global redistributionism.

The credit crunch of 2008 has pulled the rug out from both of these very influential factions (trickle down and redistributionist both) while the consequences of the crisis have affected the West and Africa equally in their relations with each other.

Inward migration from Africa was now a potential political threat (especially when overlaid with cultural and identity fears). The European electorate was not going to tolerate increases in expenditure overseas, to deal with the effects of recession in Africa, at a time of major public sector job losses.

Interestingly, and to widespread approval, Prime Minister Cameron in the UK has ring-fenced international development funds alongside health and education (helping to force even more draconian cuts elsewhere) but very much on the basis of more effective targeting and accountability.

What he was doing, as a 'soft' conservative himself, was taking aid off the political agenda for cuts until it needed to go back on again but also removing international development from its Blairite position as an integrated part of foreign policy and defence.

The days of doling out cash for political or strategic purposes are now over for the British and its humanitarian focus has been detached from grand policy in order to be treated as a moral imperative in its own right. If things get really bad in the UK, it will be cut because it will now be easier to cut.

Ressentiment

Quite separate from all this, there has been a growing distrust of NGOs and Governments as suppliers of aid. This is not coming from within the West (where critics have easily been pigeon-holed as right-wing miserabilists) but is the leaching back into the developed world of emerging world resentment.

Irritation with aid being used to patronise Africans alongside stories of waste, failure and of the 'fat cats' who appear as salaried do-gooders (from the perspective of some observers) merges with concerns about the tendency to use NGOs as soft power fodder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

The criticisms may not be wholly fair (but nor are they wholly unfair either) yet the suspicion grows that aid is a job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable Western graduates and for scions of the traditional middle class. Many Africans see this as District Commissioners by the back door.

Western policy towards Africa at this level is thus a confused mess, reminiscent of the patronising involvement of young EU officials as inefficient satraps in Eastern Europe as the communist bloc fell apart. Disillusionment spreads, then as now, back from field workers into the heartland.

Of course, the issues are not cut and dried. Despite the values agenda, the US in particular, including private sector philanthropists, have all undertaken major programmes affecting healthcare and life chances (especially for women) in a highly positive way.

But the impression remains for many in the West that, just as they are fearing for their jobs and homes, substantial resources should not be directed to supporting the middle classes of other countries when it is quite clear the help is not always welcomed.

However, it is important to note that there is no movement to end aid but only a growing indifference to claims of the need for aid and intervention that makes it much more difficult for political interests to direct public funds towards foreign policy or security ends.

Strains

So, if we see a drift of public interest (World Cup notwithstanding) away from Africa and African affairs towards a stance of relative unconcern (there is no animus in this towards Africa at all), economic pressures also limit what the West can do in terms of hard power.

In one sense, the Western public has grown up and the shifts show maturity and generational shift. Younger politicians do not have anti-apartheid activism and resentment of imperialism to worry about and can escape guilt as Middle Europeans are now escaping from Holocaust guilt.

African music is now established in the world music repertoire, African writers sit comfortably alongside Latin American magical realists on the shelves, Ghana was supported by many white British in the World Cup and racism is psychologically inconceivable as a concept to middle class kids under 30.

But, self-evidently there are less resources to play with - in Europe, where the engine of European growth, Germany, has found itself bank of last resort to economically maladjusted smaller partners in the European Union, and in the UK which is running not to face its own crisis in the next year.

In the US, Obama will not be thanked if he spends a great deal on Africa rather than on the Gulf Coast, now hit by two successive disasters in Katrina and the BP oil spill, while US unemployment remains high and may even be rising again.

Finally, the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are just not going to go away. Afghanistan is a true disaster, involving payments not only on military campaigns but to a corrupt and corrupting puppet regime and major subventions to Pakistan simply to keep its military on side and its economy from collapsing.

Pivotal States

US strategy in Africa (as pointed out by Pasco) was based on containing insurgency, controlling energy supplies (and we add the free access to mineral reserves vital for strategic purposes) and countering Chinese and Indian influence that might remove the continent from the Western to the Eastern sphere.

The methodology for control was based on 'pivotal states' theory - i.e. supporting strong stable states in each major sub-zone and encouraging them to go out and police the surrounding areas, presumably at their own expense but with Western aid and in alignment with Western values.

Placing the unusual Uganda/Rwanda complex to one side, the original postulated key states were Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa and all were expected, under Western guidance, to adopt liberal anti-corruption regimes and to manage their sub-region - later in an African Union context.

All three have been disappointments. The surrounding countries have gone their own way willy-nilly as either failed states or as independent countries following their own paths - they will go with the highest bidder, increasingly China. And, of course, Congo remains a great yawning gap in the system.

Nigeria has remained such an anxiety in terms of its long term stability that the US has now switched its attention to Ghana. At one point, before its recent troubles, Gazprom looked as if it would be taking a strategic position for Russia with the help of Libya and Italy by capturing control of Nigerian gas.

Ethiopia is the strongest state (perhaps) but at the cost of any programme of liberalisation, despite constant Western pressure, wheedling and largely idle threats.

However its intervention in Somalia was abortive - the African Union contingent sit in Mogadishu like rabbits in the streaming headlights of the insurgents.

South Africa seems to have been treated by Western liberals as if it owed them something for their support against apartheid. It didn't and it doesn't.

The peaceful transition to democracy was a remarkable achievement but its very tranquillity and compromise meant that serious issues of economic inequity have not been handled. Too many powerful interests had needed to be mollified. Now, as Pasco reports, the ANC is stirring again.

Capital accumulation by the new black elite was meant to result in trickle-down but the global credit crisis has put paid to that. An expectation of the West that South Africa would put scarce resources into a neo-colonial liberal intervention into Zimbabwe was thus disappointed and quite rightly so.

The Meaning of the US Presence

Africom, meanwhile, is now basically an anti-insurgency operation operating from enclaves which it controls because deals have been struck - Djibouti is effectively a grant from the rump of the old French Empire. It does dirty deeds in a war between the US and fanatics that passes most Africans by.

The US is now engaged in a process of constant and often very expensive negotiation that often comes down to little more than the containment of sworn enemies and the maintenance of the sea lanes that take oil and gas from the Gulf and West Africa to Western refineries and holding installations.

The lesson of all this is that there is no 'Africa' except in the imperial imagination of Westerners brought up on the carve-up at the Berlin Conference. There are many Africas - sovereign states with sovereign interests who still need to stabilise themselves before they start stabilising their neighbours.

A nightmare for the West might be a serious political collapse in a key state or a massive humanitarian crisis in a small state that the Chinese relieve faster and more efficiently than it can. The US and UK scuttled from dabbling in the recent Ethiopian elections for fear of precipitating such a problem.

This state of affairs - growing African intransigence at Western interference and Western economic retrenchment - will not last forever. Each of the pivotal states remain a potential partner of the West according to the original theory but the real aims of any African country must be a different from 'ours'.

South Africa can look across to Brazil and envy its inclusion alongside India, Russia and China as one of the BRICS. Nigeria and Ethiopia, too, would not want less status in the world than Australia. It might take thirty years but these three countries will want parity not patronage.

[These views are entirely those of TPPR and are not to be construed as those of Pasco Risk. For access to Pasco Risk featured articles now and in the future, go to their website]

PASCO RISK MANAGEMENT STRENGTHENS UK PRESENCE WITH CONSULTANCY APPOINTMENT

Pasco Risk Management, the Johannesburg based global risk consultancy with offices in London, Los Angeles and New Delhi has appointed reputation marketing specialists Pendry White as part of its strategy to raise its profile in the UK. 

Pasco Risk Management provides a range of due diligence, early warning and protective intelligence, risk advisory, and security and forensic services. 

With more than 5000 cases in over 85 countries on its books, the company specialises in operating in the more fluid and at times opaque environments in less developed markets.

CEO George Nicholls says:

Our people operate to the highest standards of professionalism in markets that are less developed and still making the transition to global standards of transparency and accountability. We are at the forefront of bringing these standards into less developed environments through the work we do. Our grassroots familiarity with these emerging market cultures is the added value we bring to assignments on behalf of clients from around the world 

Pasco Risk Management has worked for companies and organisations in aerospace and defence, construction and real estate, insurance, banking and financial services, mining, oil and gas, shipping, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. 

It is a preferred supplier to the English Football Association (FA) and is responsible for the England team’s security at the World Cup 2010.

Its subscription TravelSafe service provides early warnings, security advice, protection and crisis response to governments, corporations and high-net-worth individuals.

George Nicholls added:

London is the base of many multinational companies with global operations. We believe our specialist perspective in emerging market environments will be of particular relevance for these companies and their advisors.

Pendry White Managing Director, Roger White, commented:

Pasco Risk Management is an exciting new client that fits well with our existing portfolio of global professional services clients such as Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton International and Hewitt Associates. Pasco Risk Management are already the acknowledged risk specialists in the difficult regions where they operate.  Our task is to help them gain wider recognition and greater market share among multinational businesses in the UK and Europe with interests in those volatile environments.

For more information:

www.pascorisk.com
www.twitter.com/pascorisk

• Classed as Almost Certain
  The synthetic creation of life
  A Pacific earthquake
• Classed as Likely
  The cloning of a human - seen as extremely difficult but also probably inevitable.
  Machine self-awareness
  Polar meltdown
• Classed as 50:50
  The discovery of new dimensions as research develops out of the cutting edge of particle physics
  Room temperature super-conductors
  A deadly pandemic
• Regarded as Unlikely or Very Unlikely
  The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence
  Nuclear holocaust
  An asteroid collision
  Fusion energy

Of course, future research is rarely reliable as anyone who has studied the predictions of, say, the 1960s will know but it is not a bad starting point. The most exciting on the list for popular culture are those that are probably the least likely. We can quickly dismiss these.

The Blockbuster Events

It is fair to think that the sheer scale of space makes the alien visit hypothesis unreasonable (at least on the timescale of any reader of this posting) while international institutional structures are probably now robust enough to deter the use of nuclear arsenals by superpowers.

If scientists tell me that limitless fusion energy is unlikely in the next forty years or even a century, I am not inclined to disbelieve them but the small print on the asteroid collision is not exactly comforting.

No extinction event perhaps but an expectation that at least one asteroid hit could devastate the equivalent of a small city within the next 200 years.

This leaves us with eight scientifically-related changes that could reasonably affect our children's futures with five of those as probable. What would the world look like if they all came to pass?

Bear in mind that we are not including here what may be called changes in social reality - shifts caused in philosophical or spiritual perspective, by economic reorganisation or scarcity or through the cultural effect of earlier era technologies that are only now being fully implemented, such as the internet.

One of the few insights of Marx that has stood the test of time is that culture and politics are based on the economic organisation of society and that the economic organisation of society is fundamentally material in nature.

This is an over-simplification of the situation but science is about the understanding of matter and so scientific discovery or observation really does flow back into society and politics over the long term.

The type case is Darwinism which became Social Darwinism and was then perverted into racial politics. The scientists, in fact, were right about evolution but the extension of the idea was untenable. This did not stop its exploitation by non-scientists in disastrous ways.

Missing Jigsaw Pieces

Looking forward forty years, the message of Scientific American is that perhaps things may not change quite so dramatically as we think but the rational and sceptical mind-set of the Editors may fail to take into account how humans actually use information in their petty struggles for power.

Unaccountably missing from the list is the slow-burn effect of the discoveries in neuro-science and the cognitive sciences which could go in either one of two ways - towards authoritarian attempts to nudge us into social compliance or into radical libertarian reform as the cutting edge between brain science and philosophy confirms the insights of the phenomenologists and the existentialists.

Nor is there any mention of nanotechnology which strikes this writer as potentially as revolutionary as the internet on how we conduct our lives. To be fair, this is not an 'event' as such but the implementation of technology (like robotics) that is established already in its basics.

Similarly, the internet may seem as if it is now in its mature state of implementation rather than of innovation but the social and cultural effects of easy mass communications still look set to effect a cultural revolution as powerful and as uncertain as that instigated by printing.

Finally, there is the attempt at the application of the soft sciences (from psychology through to anthropology and political science) to problems of war, peace, policing and order.

The arms race in this area between authority and the street may lead to many new social and cultural forms and compromises. If the Editors of SciAm are sceptical of the status of the 'soft sciences', then so are we but warriors may still believe in their pretensions despite the rest of us.

Material Progress

But let's stick to Scientific American's hard science agenda. What will 2050 look like? This is our expectation based on their assessments of the science.

1. The security industry will have long since passed the stage where they manufactured threats out of synthetic biology to build budgets. Biological engineering of safer and less polluting household products and environmental services will be entering its mature, productive phase.
2. Human cloning is not going to be tolerated in the developed world even if cases will emerge in in permissive jurisdictions because the first 'experiments' are likely to horrify as cruel and unnnatural but the drive to clone will be part of a much broader range of discoveries in human healthcare. These will improve life chances and longevity in the West but increase emotional pain at those who die young or in pain at home and abroad.
3. Self-replicating intelligent robotic agents (AI) are going to present interesting 'human' rights and philosophical challenges that are likely to become political by the end of the period - less because they 'walk among us' but because we will be getting to the point where they may soon do so.
4. Even if room temperature superconductors are unproven as tools, the technology of energy production, distribution and conservation is already being driven by political as much as by free market conditions towards major innovation. The mature fruits of this will be well in place by 2050 and will probably have reduced much of the energy-driven instabilities in international affairs - at least in the West.

So, from a basic lifestyle perspective, scientific progress continues and the developed world is likely to be a better place to live in for most people - in terms of the environment, pollutants, waste, healthcare, automation and energy management.

New Philosophies

Where problems arise is where you would expect them - in the ability of people to find meaning as new discoveries cause the ground to shift from under their feet and in the debate over how much to 'give' in order to 'get' security from local under-classes and from less well served emerging populations.

This latter is at the heart of decisions about welfare provision and international aid.

Discoveries in particle physics that defy common sense, especially if matched by neuro-scientific investigation into 'spirit', may create new and paradoxical shifts in culture. Although by definition unpredictable, the logic is one of 'more spirit, less religion'.

This, in itself, may help to end the fruitless nineteenth century war between science and religion to replace it with a new tension between advanced thought and those wedded to both institutional authority and a scientific positivism that has become surplus to requirements philosophically.

The danger is of a major disconnect between the world views of the well-educated and the less well-educated that may create serious cultural and political tensions within the developed world and between it and the emerging world.

One suspects that Eastern culture is more adaptable than Western in this respect.

Aid as Insurance

Periodic natural disasters (not necessarily the 'big one' in California) such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are not going to destroy civilisation but they will encourage increased global co-operation, equivalent to welfare insurance, to deal with the effects.

The real beneficiary here should be the poorer countries in the world with a concomitant positive effect on mass production and improved organisation of cheap sustainable urban infrastructures and new development models.

However nothing will be achieved without a root-and-branch reform of the shamefully corrupted and mismanaged 'aid business' - UN organisations and NGOs have moved in recent decades from being well-meaning bumblers into inefficient sanctuaries for the over-paid global middle classes.

There is a similar issue arising with pandemic. H1N1 taught us two things - these things can come out of the blue and they incubate (assuming they are not a lab creation) in messy urban poverty.

The world is now in no state to deal with these issues because of the credit crunch but as recovery returns, the developed world is going to have to decide between globalisation and healthcare security.

The logic of the situation is that Western Governments will start finding the money to keep people at home in the emerging world and to start treating disease at source by treating the vectors of disease - poverty, overcrowding and insanitary conditions.

The contentious issue of climate change also has to be put in the pot. We are not quite sceptics but we are cautious given the hysterical claims of political activists. Still, the ice caps are melting and this means major adjustments in some countries and, awkwardly, improvements for others.

We already have issues of mass economic migration arising from dislocations caused by globalisation and (regionally) by war - to add dislocation caused by environmental degradation, both man-made and natural, suggests a time of troubles ahead.

2050 In The Round

Whether the planet as a whole will be cleaner and less polluted may be doubted simply because so many people in the world will still be working their way through development phases that involve large-scale traditional manufacturing requiring raw materials that will be harder to mine or extract.

However, assuming that there is no disaster involving a natural or engineered organism, the West and the advanced East (and the pockets of prosperity in the South) will be set to be less polluted and less wasteful.

A reasonable prediction is that the world, pandemics, localised disasters and asteroids notwithstanding, will be, on balance, a better balanced and more prosperous place in 2050 than in 2010.

But we should be under no illusions - the poor will still be with us at home and abroad and the capacity of the global community to deal with this will be only a little less limited than it is today.

From the tension between scientific advance within a culturally volatile developed world and a vast wider population beginning to taste the prospect if not the actuality of material progress will arise many of the insurgencies, violence and petty wars of the mid-twenty-first century.

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