To end these reflections on the Third World War upon a technological note may appear odd. It is unlikely to seem so to some future reader. Wars commonly produce an acceleration of technical advance. This one did more: it took the lid off Pandora’s box. We are now moving forward into a world which will be more and more dominated by electronic technology. It is likely to prove a very different world from the one we knew, the one which came so near to destruction in the Third World War. That war was fought, it is true, under the shadow of the threat of nuclear devastation. On the basis of NATO’s rediscovered confidence and hastily repaired defences it was largely won by electronics. We cannot begin to guess how our lives, and even more our children’s lives, will be influenced by the possibilities which these swiftly developing techniques are now opening up. An unfamiliar, perhaps uncomfortable world awaits us, very strange and new. We can only be thankful to have survived, and wait and see.
CHAPTER 28: The Beginning of the Future
We believe that later historians who write the history of the Third World War will not drastically alter our conclusions about its causes. However, we are writing very shortly after the end of the war and can only provide the best predictions we have about its effects — and we are very mindful of the anecdote with which this chapter concludes. History is not an exact science. And ‘the historian of the future’ is as much artist as scientist or academic. But the futurologist cannot be taken lightly. He bases his conclusions on perceived trends, and his predictions themselves may possibly have some effect on the future: in helping either to prevent his predictions coming true or to realize them.
Nobody can be sure which of the many meetings and international position papers of the first three months of 1987 will prove of lasting significance to the world. At least one of these papers, we suspect, may have begun to paint the picture of the future.
It was prepared for the meeting of the EEC heads of government at Copenhagen. It had been collated in the Council of Foreign Ministers. This had not been a recipe for meaningful documents in the past, but this document may be destined to play a role in the history of Europe more significant than the past treaties of Rome, Versailles, Vienna and Utrecht put together. What it embodies has already become known as the Copenhagen doctrine. It is a lengthy document, legalistically expressed. A detailed summary of it appeared in The Times of 15 February 1987, and we quote this in fulclass="underline"
1 At the end of the 1939-45 war there were two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1985 war, there are again two superpowers: the United States and the China-Japan co-prosperity sphere. The difference for us this time is that Europe does not lie between them.
2 America and China-Japan will face each other — we hope in amity — across the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific basin will become more important to each of them than the Atlantic is.
3 The most extreme version of this emerging Pacific superpower isolationism is already being expressed in the Schneider memorandum, from the American General Art Schneider, who was most angry when President Thompson allowed European political instincts and fears in 1985 to delay the invasion of East Germany which Schneider (popularly known as ‘young blood and guts’) had expected his own army group to spearhead. Schneider, who may be the Democratic candidate against President Thompson in next year’s 1988 presidential election (and failing that will almost certainly win the now almost as important office of Governor of his native California), has written:
‘Henceforth we should let Europe and Africa stew in their own tribal wars. It will not be worth the death of a single American soldier to prevent them, especially as (a) the Birmingham and Minsk bombs have shown that the whole world is not contaminated by single N-blasts and (b) it will be possible for China-Japan and the US to quarantine smaller countries’ N-wars from afar by saying that any country which launches an N-weapon will immediately have a neutron bomb from us homed in by missile to its president’s palace.’
It is possible that within ten years an even more tempting weapon for such quarantining may become available to countries with the technological capability of the US and Japan. They may be able to announce the setting up of a telecommunications ‘ring fence’, for the state of the art will then permit those capable of developing the appropriate technology to take charge by telecommunication of the guidance system of any missile in flight and redirect it at will. This would mean that any country launching a missile could find it reversed upon a reciprocal course and turned back to land and detonate at its point of launch. The advance in telecommunications during the technological spurt caused by the threat of war, even more than in the brief duration of the war itself, has been greater than in any other technology except that of energy.
4 It is therefore important for us in the EEC to see that the sort of Europe we rebuild during this peace should not be one liable to ‘tribal wars’.
5 The rest of Europe, both East and West, will be frightened if the two Germanies unite. They would then form too dominant a European power. It is therefore important that each Germany should be a member of the EEC, and be united within the EEC to the same degree as France and West Germany are, but no more than that.
6 The same applies to all the former communist states, including the European states of the former Soviet Union. The EEC now needs to extend its boundaries in the way that Charles de Gaulle once envisaged. The European Economic Community should become a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.
This document was accepted at Copenhagen with some relief by the governments concerned, including that of the Federal Republic of Germany. Charles de Gaulle was now seen in retrospect as a prophet, where in life he had more often been regarded as a prickly and tiresome man. Two new issues were strenuously discussed at Copenhagen. One concerned the best rules and aims for the new, enlarged EEC; on this there was a note of innovation, excitement, enthusiasm and intellectual daring — an attractive throwback to the European spirit of the late 1950s which had seemed to be sleeping since. The second issue was what on earth to do about the politico-strategic problems on the long southern border of the new EEC; on this there was a note of near-despair.
First, the governing mechanism of the new EEC. It was recognized that free trade in goods, though to be continued, was likely to be much less important to rich countries in the future than freedom for international and transnational telecommunications. Now that factories (except in low wage areas) were bound to become more and more automated, people in the rich northern one-third of the world would mostly be in white collar jobs where they would be working with their imaginations rather than their hands. But people in such jobs would not necessarily need to live near their workplaces. What should be the nationality and tax position of a Belgian dress designer who lives in Monte Carlo and St Moritz in the winter, at Stratford-on-Avon in the spring, and Corfu in the summer, and does his work by daily telecommunication through a portable console to colleagues and computers at the largely automated textile factory at Volgograd where he works — who becomes, in fact, a tele-commuter?
The EEC ministers at Copenhagen began to grope towards the concept that the European citizen of the future would need what the West German Chancellor called ‘triple nationality’, but the Luxembourg Prime Minister significantly called ‘triple tax status’. Let us use the Luxembourg terminology; it is more novel and, for that reason, in this fast-changing world, easier to understand.
First, each.citizen would have to pay some taxes to the area in which he lived; this would maintain purely local government services there. There is here the obvious danger that all the rich might then choose to live together in areas with low social security costs (because there were few local poor around) and thus low tax rates, while the poor might find themselves huddled together in areas which needed a lot of social expenditure but with no local rich to pay the taxes. In order to avoid this ‘ghettoization of continents’ in the telecommuting age, the ministers at Copenhagen were beginning to realize that much wider governments (in this case, a central government of the EEC itself) would probably have to become responsible for what might be called the ‘welfare’ or ‘transfer incomes’ roles performed by national governments in the pre-telecommuting era.