Wednesday 30 October 2013

Is power shifting eastwards or westwards?

From Free Critical Thinking:

Financial capitalism and the ruling elites, which control it, have no national loyalty or interest, they move to reap the fattest harvest.

Thus in the 19th century, the British empire was the vehicle for world domination until Britain's demise in the 20th century shifted attention westwards to the USA. Now that America is in decline, focus is shifting eastwards to China.


Nope.

The oldest empires were Asian or Middle Eastern, then came the Egyptians and the Greeks, then the Romans, then the British Empire etc, the centre of power (if by that you mean the capital cities and trading centres such as major ports and harbours) was clearly shifting westwards at a leisurely pace.

Then came the "American century", which had also been colonised from east to west.

The next shift was from America to Japan and possibly Korea in the latter part of the twentieth century, which is clearly another westward shift (across the Pacific - presumably Hawaii was the world centre of power for a few months in 1973).

Those two countries are now also in relative decline and we observe the rise of a massive state-cum-conglomerate trading under the name "The People's Republic of China" run by a nominally Communist Party, which is based on mercantilism, land speculation, political and financial repression, intellectual property theft and most of all, slave labour, which from Japan and Korea's point of view is yet another shift westwards.

So presumably it will be Russia's turn next and give it a century or two, the Europeans and then the British will be top dogs again.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm. Seems like the rise and fall of empires is attributable to the rotation of the planet though in the opposite direction. Edward Gibbon was clearly wasting his time.

Lola said...

What I have been saying. And all those empires were killed by parasitical bureaucracies, bad money and 'socialism' - aka doing less for more.