CULTURE

 

In the uncertain economic environment following the American recession, a new destabilizing element appeared: the shift in the ratio between young and old. In 2003, Italy's population of persons sixty-five years of age and over passed 20 percent of the total; Japan followed in 2005 and Germany in 2006. France and Britain arrived at this figure in 2015. At the same time, global life expectancy was rapidly growing. As life spans increased, fertility rates in the developed world plummeted. As recently as the 1960s, the worldwide fertility rate (the average number of lifetime births per woman) was at 5.0. By 2000 it stood at 2.7—a figure fast approaching the replacement rate of 2.1. In the developed world, the average fertility rate declined to 1.6. By 2000, Japan was projecting a population decline of 20 percent in the ensuing two and a half decades. In Germany, where the rate had fallen to 1.3 by 2000, fewer babies had been born each year in the 1990s than in Nepal. In the United States this development had been masked by large numbers of immigrants, who included families with higher fertility rates than those of native-born Americans. The looming demographic crisis pitted young unemployed persons against taxpaying workers against pensioners. As a result of this tricornered struggle, by 2010 the politics of social security reform became effectively paralyzed. Governments were forced to make severe cuts in defense spending, infrastructure maintenance, and finally in health benefits.

These developments—unemployment, social tensions among groups, and a recession that followed government cutbacks—brought to power a number of reform-minded governments determined to protect the youth who had elected them. To invigorate their economies—and mindful that falling population rates could not be made up by productivity gains—states in the developed world followed the U.S. example and began loosening their immigration rules. These immigrants brought with them higher fertility rates and lower labor costs, forcing a revision of state-regulated employment practices that had stifled growth. In Germany, foreign workers rose to 40 percent of the workforce by 2025 and dominated cities like Munich and Frankfurt. At the same time, governments began encouraging higher fertility rates and investing more in the education and the productivity of future workers. In the high-tax states that followed the managerial market-state model tax credits were offered for taking intergenerational responsibility within families, including home day care for the young and residence care for the elderly. Because these popular measures directly attacked the existing social contract and affronted entrenched ideologies and interests, they opened up the politics of these states to reform; and because such policies brought youth into the reform camp, the parties of the past with their addiction to state ownership withered away.

The economic turmoil leading up to this revision and the demographic crisis that brought it to a head were certainly critical factors; so also was the growth in knowledge about how other people live and how other social systems function, which fueled immigration. The core E.U. was now powered by two late twentieth century developments that had appeared to be a drain on the E.U.: the takeover of East Germany, bringing a well-educated workforce into the capital system, and the proximity of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine, which enlarged the E.U. and provided cheaper labor and a vast new market for consumer goods once they were assured that their national cultures would be respected. Indeed it was the ability of the managerial market-states to recognize the rights of cultural minorities—including the United States with its decentralized constitutional system of federalism—that ultimately provided a key to success.

One important constitutional tool in the institutionalization of this respect for minorities was the relative ease with which devolved partial states were created. Regions in Italy (the northern industrialized region centering on Milan and Lombardy), Spain (Catalonia and the Basque region), Canada (Quebec and the city-state of Vancouver), and the United Kingdom (Wales and Scotland) all “devolved” into new states with varying defense and trade relations to their parent states or, like the two partial states that emerged from the breakup of Belgium, sheltered within the economic and defense community of the E. U. The results were generally positive: the new states retained the role of reinforcing the historic culture of their peoples (something the market-state had been in danger of losing as it became more meritocratic, more multicultural, and more secular). As one observer noted:

In social policy terms, regional organizations allowed different ethnic groups to choose their own cultural policy. In Europe, for example, demands for Basque language schools subsided as it became apparent that, while the Basques were not happy to be schooled in Spanish, they were perfectly happy to be schooled in English with Basque as their second language. By 2025 all of Europe and much of Asia had accepted the policy of “English plus two,” meaning that primary and secondary school students were taught in English and two other languages, usually their native language and one foreign language.13

 

In the United States, cultural groups were allowed, by constitutional amendments that altered the application of the 14th Amendment, to transform states to their own liking. This led to considerable migration within the United States as its citizens sought congenial states that catered to religious, ethnic, and political preferences. All these new “states” retained an open trade relation with the rest of the United States much like the one that prevailed in Europe within the E. U., and all adhered to a common defense policy with the rest of the United States under a much-shrunken defense establishment. Only their state constitutions were radically different: some permitted a union of church and state; some allowed the prosecution of “hate speech” and forbade books and movies that reinforced racial or gender stereotypes; some reintroduced corporal punishment, while others forbade capital punishment. There were feminist states where women were given certain affirmative benefits, including requirements that a certain number of officeholders and corporate board members be women; there were religious fundamentalist states that forbade commercial transactions on the Sabbath, required prayer in schools, and outlawed the sale of alcohol; there were ethnic states where English was a second language; and so on. In short, the new states permitted a closer match between the values of a certain polity and its legal rules—a reaction, it may be said, to the market-state's indifference to cultural values.

This ability to decentralize not only liberated the political evolution of the highly developed states; it also led to a recognition of the economic, social, and environmental interdependence of states. Green tariffs—which penalized imports from states that did not obey Kyoto standards for environmental protection—date from this period. States in The Park were well-positioned to create the World Environmental Organization in 2008 as a follow-up to the Rio de Janeiro initiatives of the late 1990s. States were able to agree, as they were not at Rio, on principles of allocating environmental property rights. The WEO administered these rights, sometimes arbitrating, sometimes auctioning off rights. The largest step forward occurred in 2012 when the WEO won agreement on rules for tradable licenses to water, fishing, and emissions rights. The introduction of fungible carbon dioxide emission rights had come somewhat earlier. Thus different regions were able to achieve environmental targets in differ-ent ways, while bartering development and pollution rights globally.

The creation of other multinational institutions followed: the World Commission on Biotechnology in 2010 and the World Commission on Internet Privacy in 2013. In some quarters, these commissions were viewed as high-handed and stifling of innovation, but the general view was that the society of states was better able to manage a new generation of multinational institutions in The Park than under other global approaches.

Finally, though total wages grew more slowly than in The Meadow, wage disparities within the states of The Park were far less. Indeed, the relatively high wages in the developed world tended to encourage growth in the developing world. The Asian Industrial Prosperity Conference and the North American Free Trade Association were able to raise wages to such a degree that multinational corporations looked to Africa to reduce their labor costs. This resulted in a slowing of migration to African cities as factory complexes were sited beyond the supercities. This allowed Africa to avoid the flight to the coastal cities that plagued The Meadow, with the consequence that hygiene and sanitation were sufficient to mitigate the health threats that had haunted Africa.