Source: SIPRI.
Environment
Citizens were consistently concerned about pollution. In 1990, long before Greta Thunberg started the school strike against climate change, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered on the Mall in Washington, DC to celebrate Earth Day. Movie star Tom Cruise addressed them: “We see many walls come tumbling down this year. With the walls down, we can all see what we have in common: our planet.”4
That same year, a Swiss physicist proposed to mitigate global warming by putting a mirror in space to deflect the sun’s heat. “How to solve the CO2 problem without tears,” scientists challenged themselves.5 In 1993, Bill Clinton was one of the first presidential candidates in the United States to embrace climate change and the environment as key themes in his campaign. But the CO2 problem was not solved. Since 1990, CO2 emissions grew by about 70 percent and the CO2 efficiency of the world economy hardly increased (figure 1.12).
Or consider transportation. Globalization was often said to be a more efficient way of production. But one factor that was seldom considered in measuring its success concerned transportation. Transportation is a key emitter of polluting gases, but it also causes traffic jams and requires a lot of space for roads, warehouses, and so forth. Between 1990 and 2019, figure 1.13 shows, the global economy became significantly less efficient in terms of transportation. There were thus more ships, container stacks, trucks, vans, and warehouses for smaller gains in production.
Figure 1.12 Fueling economic growth: Global US$ of GDP per kg of CO2 emitted and kg of fossil fuel consumed (kg/constant 2010 US$)
Source: WDI.
Figure 1.13 Global US$ of GDP per kg of transport (kg/constant 2010 US$)
Source: WDI.
A final indicator that hints at the limited impact of innovation and technology is the disposal of waste. We do not have consistent data for the total global waste pile. We do know that the disposed waste in European countries decreased, that it remained stable in the United States, and that it increased spectacularly in many developing countries. We do have data, however, for global plastic waste, summarized in figure 1.14. While recycling of plastic waste was almost negligible in the early 1990s, the global share of reused plastic waste climbed to slightly below a quarter in 2020. Yet, the total disposed plastic waste, burned or put into landfill, almost trebled. Overall, the world economy became less, not more, economical in using plastics. The global production per kilogram of plastic waste decreased in the 1990s and remained flat in the following two decades.
Figure 1.14 GDP per kg plastic waste (kg/constant 2010 US$)
Source: WDI and UN Baseline Report on Plastic Waste.
Perspective
In sum, the question is not so much whether there has been progress in the post-Cold War period. The question is rather how we evaluate the degree of progress in spreading democracy, social dignity, security, and sustainable production in comparison to the spectacular high tide of economic globalization, the opportunity to exchange technology and ideas, and so forth. Progress optimists often magnify the positive trend by comparing everything with the growing world population. Compared with the growing world population, fewer people get killed. Compared with the growing world population, one can mitigate many trends. But if we really care about progress, it is fairer to ask whether we advanced enough in comparison with to the economic opportunities that were present than to ask whether we advanced in comparison with the number of people that live on the planet. From that perspective, many curves remained remarkably flat.
Notes
1 1. Steven Pinker, 2018. Enlightenment Now. London: Penguin.
2 2. Hans Rosling, 2018. Factfulness. New York: Flatiron.
3 3. Yuval Noah Harari, 2016. Homo Deus. New York: Penguin.
4 4. C-Span, 1990. Earth Day 1990 Rally, April 22. Available at: https://www.c-span.org/video/?14203-1/earth-day-1990-rally
5 5. Cesare Marchetti, 1989. How to solve the CO2 problem without tears. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 14(8), 493–506.
CHAPTER 2 A DOUBTFUL VICTORY
“IT IS IN OUR HANDS TO LEAVE THESE DARK MACHINES BEHIND, IN THE dark ages where they belong and to press forward to cap a historic movement toward a long era of peace.”1 This was how American President George H. W. Bush described the end of the Cold War. Technology was overwhelming tyranny, he reasoned, so that the age of information would be an age of liberation. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher echoed his optimism: “Our policies have brought unparalleled prosperity.”2 As McDonald’s opened its first franchise in Russia, Hollywood movies were tolerated by the theocracy in Tehran, and crowds kept descending on the Berlin Wall to hack pieces of concrete as a souvenir, liberalism appeared to become an irresistible guide to world politics.
This chapter captures the mood in the West at this decisive moment in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It measures its advantages, but also traces back worries, about the neglect of infrastructure, the decadence trap, with wealth decoupling from virtue, economic growth predating on the environment, the prospect of decline if the West did not respond to the ambitions of new competitors. The victory of the West, we will discover, was perceived as a doubtful victory. Some of these challenges, indeed, were present at an earlier stage. The 1970s formed a watershed between the 30 years of growth after World War II and a subsequent period of decay. Yet, still, it was at the end of the Cold War that the West had its hands free to address those challenges.
The Cold War
But what was the Cold War in the first place? In the early 1980s, a soldier in a bunker near Moscow was alerted to an incoming American missile. The alert came at a sensitive time. For months, the United States had been testing the resolve of the Soviet Union by deploying nuclear-capable bombers and submarines close to its borders. A Korean passenger plane, mistakenly identified as an American military aircraft, had just been shot down. Now, this soldier in his bunker saw an intercontinental ballistic missile heading toward his country. That was at least what satellites and computers made of it. The incoming missile was in reality nothing more than the sun reflected by clouds. Luckily, the duty officer also assumed it was a false alarm. This was the Cold War: the permanent threat of mass destruction by tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Close calls like this were common. They showed that if the war between the two superpowers ever became hot, the whole world would burn in a nuclear apocalypse. This threat hung over the world like a permanent storm cloud. In its shadow, the global order remained a patchwork of