What fun it is to predict the future! You can paint the most outrageous scenarios, and no one can prove you’re wrong because they haven’t happened yet.
This thought crossed my mind when I was reading Global Trends 2025, the report published last month by the US intelligence community. Here is the bit where they talk about the risk of a global pandemic: “Tens to hundreds of millions of Americans within the US homeland would become ill and deaths would mount into the tens of millions. Outside the US, critical infrastructure degradation and economic loss on a global scale would result, as approximately a third of the worldwide population became ill and hundreds of millions died.”
And they say Americans are optimists.
The report’s forecasts for the European Union are tame by comparison, but they have the ring of truth. The most important sentence goes: “Continued failure to convince sceptical publics of the benefits of deeper economic, political and social integration, and to grasp the nettle of a shrinking and ageing population by enacting painful reforms, could leave the EU a hobbled giant distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas and less able to translate its economic clout into global influence.”
To a large extent, the authors are merely describing the EU as it is today and saying that there’s no reason to think things will change much by 2025. This also goes for their prediction of “deepening ethnic cleavages” in western European societies, as the Muslim population grows but is disproportionately confined to low-status, low-wage jobs.
For a European reader, the report’s most startling prediction is surely that “crime could be the gravest threat inside Europe as Eurasian transnational organisations – flush from involvement in energy and mineral concerns – become more powerful and broaden their scope. One or more governments in central and eastern Europe could fall prey to their domination.”
I love the choice of the word “Eurasian”. The authors presumably have in mind Russian-led organised crime groups with political connections, but to call them “Eurasian” makes them seem much more sinister and slippery – rather like the bad guys in a James Bond movie.
As for what nation, or nations, might fall under the control of the dastardly Eurasians, it’s unclear if the US intelligence folk are thinking of countries already in the EU or countries outside. Inside, you would have to go for Bulgaria on present form – unless Dominique de Villepin can work his magic.
Outside, it could be any of them, from Montenegro and Moldova to Bosnia and Belarus. But of course, there’s no way of knowing. If only we could skip the financial crisis and recession and move to 2025 tomorrow!
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on