1979, one in ten were dead by the beginning
of 1981. In Africa there are still countries where
one child in four does not survive to its first
birthday. In Western society, too rich a diet has
led to dramatic increases in heart disease. In the
Third World, according to the UN secretary-
general in 1989, 500 million go hungry and every
year there are 10 million more. The Brandt
report, North-South: A Programme for Survival
(1980), offered an even higher estimate, and
declared that there was ‘no more important task
before the world community than the elimina-
tion of hunger and malnutrition in all countries’.
No one can calculate the figures with any accu-
racy. The world community has reacted only to
dramatic televised pictures of suffering and
famine, for example in the Horn of Africa, but
there is no real sense of global agreement on the
measures necessary to tackle the problem. Now
that the Third World is politically independent,
the former Western colonial powers are conveni-
ently absolved from direct responsibility.
The political independence of the once
Western-dominated globe represents an enor-
mous change, one that occurred much more
rapidly than was expected in the West before
the Second World War. But in many countries
independence did not lead to better government
or the blessings of liberty. Third World societies
were not adequately prepared, their wealth and
education too unequally distributed to allow any
sort of democracy to be established – although
this was accomplished in India. But on the Indian
subcontinent, as elsewhere in the former colonial
states, ethnic strife and bloodshed persist. Cor-
ruption, autocracy and the abuse of human rights
remain widespread.
In eastern Asia at the beginning of the century
the partition of China seemed to be at hand,
and Japan already claimed to be the predomin-
ant power. But China proved too large to be
absorbed and partitioned. The military conflict
between Japan and its Pacific neighbours ended
only in 1945. By the close of the twentieth
century it has emerged as an economic super-
power decisively influencing world economic
relations. China, economically still poor but
developing rapidly, remains by far the largest
and most populous unified nation in the world.
By the end of the century the last foreign out-
posts taken from it before the twentieth century,
Hong Kong and Macao, have become part of its
national territory again. Apart from Vietnam,
Cuba and North Korea, China in the twenty-first
century is the last communist state in the world.
At the beginning of the century Karl Marx
had inspired socialist thinking and, indeed,
much political action in the Western world. The
largest socialist party in 1900 was in the kaiser’s
Germany. But these socialist parties believed
that the road to power lay through constitutional
means. Revolutionaries were on the fringe – one
of them the exiled Lenin in Zurich – their
prospects hopeless until the First World War
transformed them and created the possibility
of violent revolutions in the East. By the end of
the century, in an overwhelmingly peaceful revo-
lution communism and the cult of Marxism–
Leninism have been discredited. Whatever takes
their place will change the course of the twenty-
first century. The unexpected revolutions that
swept through central and Eastern Europe from
1989 to 1991 were, on the whole, no less peace-
ful. In every corner of the globe the autocratic,
bureaucratic state faced a powerful challenge. The
comparative economic success and social progress
achieved by the West through the century proved
desirable to the rest of the world, as did its insti-
tutions, especially the ‘free market’ and ‘democ-
racy’ with a multi-party system. But how will
these concepts be transferred to societies which
have never practised them?
‘Freedom’, ‘democracy’ and the ‘free market’
are simple concepts but their realisation is beset
by ambiguity. In societies lately subjected to
autocratic rule, how much freedom can be
allowed without risking disintegration into
anarchy and disorder? Not every culture embraces
Western ideals of democracy as a desirable goal.
There is no Western country that permits a free
market to function without restraint, without
protecting the interests of workers and con-
sumers. These institutional restraints have taken
years to develop. How large a role should the
state play? Not everything can be privatised, and
certainly not instantly. How large a welfare system