Was the last 100 years considered an anomaly in history (WRT to International laws, the middle class, small numbers of expansionary wars, and stability in NA and Europe ) and could this continue?

8 comments

1. The article (well a transcript) states that there is a similiar trend of power exertion in the recent decades, yet there has been quite a few decades of relative peace, order and stability in regions of the world. Could this show that the peace and order was an anomaly in the grand scale of history? Especially with international law existing. Furthermore could this trend of peace and stability continue? Or is it on its dying embers?

2. More like a cooling period so things can get started again it seems.

3. The Gaza war isn’t symbolic of anything other than Netanyahu and Hamas’s stupidity, but Ukraine and likely Taiwain by the end of this decade do suggest that the Authoritarian regimes have no issue with conquering new territory.

4. I think as technology becomes more advanced and countries trade with each other more often, wars become less profitable and affordable, so they will be less common. That being said war is a very human phenomenon and it will never end, it is likely there will be another big war some time in this century, we just don’t know when.

5. Fairly old article, but even this undersells the stakes.

   Democracy itself is ~100 years old outside of the UK/US. Since we’ve largely killed ‘nationalism’ it would be expected the nation-state is next.

   But what follows that? A return to multi-ethnic empires?

   Representative democracy may be the anomaly

6. I don’t think we can compare the last 100 years with anything else in history. Wars now are not the same wars from the past. Wars used to be for conquest. Now everyone has an identity and ideology. In many parts of the world, borders have been artificially drawn in the past century. And everyone is settling into the new reality. So, there will be a period of readjustment. Secondly, we have just now entered an era where even the greatest powers are thinking they can’t just take another country. Unless the stakes are existential, it’s usually just not worth the cost.

7. Yes, although not in this specific way.

8. Humans, have increasingly sought more sophisticated political unions. We started with clans and tribes to large political units till we got to nation states. Now we also have multilateral treaties, international aid funds and all sorts of close cooperation across humans on this planet. At each step, sovereignty went up the chain. I don’t think this basic equation has changed in hundreds of years.

Comments are closed.