Into the Hottest Century and into Epochal Change

Abstract

The 21st century will be the hottest century in thousands of years, and the world’s social landscape is volcanic. Global politics and social relations will be dominated by two issues, the climate crisis and the US-China rivalry. This paper analyses their pas­sage through the «inequality pandemic» of Covid-19, weakening some pertinent forces and strengthened others, and further the contexts and prospects of the climate crisis and the US-China conflict. Governmental response to the pandemic terminated the global regime of neoliberalism and untrammelled market globalization, which have been succeeded by geopolitical conflict and great power domestic mobilization. The profound technological and social transformations needed to meet the climate crisis are likely to remain in the hands of politics as usual, with messy but hardly apocalyptic results. The historical context of the US-China conflict is the half millennium of Western world domi­nation, by a dynasty of states from Portugal to USA. The rise of China as an economic and technological superpower opens a third phase of the decline of the Western empire, after decolonization and the blowback from the failed attempts to westernize the non-Western world after the Cold War victory. The end of the Western empire will probably come in this century –short of nuclear war–, but what will succeed it is an open question.