The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the end of the West’s brief geopolitical dominance
The latest generation of technological innovation has an unprecedented leveling effect and will overturn the current world order
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not
Hillaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller (1898)
Most literature looks at the changes that Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technology makes upon everyday life, or warfare, industry, the economy or social relations, but it does not generally deal directly with geopolitics. This paper aims specifically at understanding how the technology of 4IR itself fundamentally changes the geopolitical world as we know it, in particular the very basis of geopolitical relations between nations and non-state actors. I argue that the new technologies associated with 4IR will upend the global geopolitical balance of power and end Western dominance (the West is defined herein as Europe and North America). Furthermore, the examination of the evidence also demonstrates that Western geopolitical dominance has actually only been very brief and that most theories of the ‘rise of the West’ are hollow.
You will see in the body of this paper, that it is technology which created the unprecedented Western dominance that we are living in the final days of now, and it is technology that is about to shake that geopolitical dominance to its very core.
Industrial Revolutions
Let us begin by placing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in its historical context.
4IR in essence, it is the exponential development and expansion of technology that we have been living through over the last decade. It is an idea promoted by Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, building on ideas about the ‘second machine age’ developed by MIT academics Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. In Schwab’s book on the subject, published in 2016, Schwab argued that 4IR is something singular and epoch-defining, a distinct new stage for humanity’s development. It is now a concept increasingly accepted by theorists and historians.
How is the Fourth Industrial Revolution different to the other industrial revolutions?
The first two industrial revolutions were defined by the use of energy. The First Industrial Revolution began in the mid 18th century in Britain with the utilization of steam power. Other developments went along with this — the enclosure laws in Britain which helped to force the peasants off the land and into cities, the growth of factories and manufacturing, the development of chemical engineering and so forth. But the use of steam as a form of energy was key — think of the railroads and all the industrial machinery which was powered by steam. The Second Industrial Revolution began in the late 19th century and was characterized by the use of electrical power. The highpoint of this was the Chicago World’s Fair, held in 1893, which was lit by Westinghouse using an AC current, marking the first major use of electric lighting in a public space and the beginning of the mass use of AC current to light our homes and streets. The invention of the telegraph and thus instant long distance communication was another outcome of this revolution.
The next two industrial revolutions have been defined by their enhancement of information technology and communication.
The Third Industrial Revolution began in the 1980s, built on the spread of electrical technology in the Second Industrial Revolution and expanded it into the digital technology revolution that replaced analog and mechanical means of production and communication and produced the personal computer and the internet in the 1980s and 90s.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution began around 2010 and is defined by such developments as Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), biotechnology, 3D printing, quantum computing, autonomous vehicles and instant worldwide, indeed humanity-wide, communication via social media.
Each one of these industrial revolutions is intertwined with the geopolitical realities of the age. Thus we should view the four industrial revolutions in the context of the last five hundred years of accelerated globalization, for technology and geopolitical power are inescapably intertwined.
The conquest of the New World: or, the dawn of the current age
But to understand how we reached this stage, we step back to the start of the current stage of globalization, which began before the first industrial revolution, in 1492, with the European discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.
The accepted wisdom, especially in the West, has become that this period of globalization was somehow ‘the rise of the West’, and historians tend to look for an explanation in specific cultural factors. The idea is that there is something inherent in Western civilization that guaranteed its successful dominance of the world for most of the last half-millennium.
This idea is not new. It has been around since the mid to late 19th century, at which time European writers, especially British writers, started to wonder why Britain and other European nations dominated virtually all humanity. We are talking here of writers such as Herbert Spencer (whose conception of evolution influenced Charles Darwin), Walter Bagehot, Joseph Conrad or Rudyard Kipling. Such writers looked back and assumed that the last 500 years had been a steady series of European (especially English-speaking) victories, culminating in the age in which they were living. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer tried to draw parallels between societies and nature to argue that these victories of European culture over the rest of the world stemmed from something inherent in European culture that had made it quintessentially better than other cultures.
But the idea of a natural Western tendency towards supremacy is based on a cultural determinism that is vague, unquantifiable, and as incorrect as the racial determinism from which it evolved (as we shall see below).
Beginning with the colonial adventure in the New World, we see that in the late 15th and early 16th centuries European disease created wastelands in the Caribbean and South America which enabled a rapid takeover of staggeringly wealthy local civilizations by Spanish and Portuguese invaders. Feasible estimates, based on historical accounts of the first European colonizers and extrapolations from the experience of other populations in places like Australia, Hawaii and the Pacific islands, put the death toll at 80–90% from European diseases like smallpox, influenza and the common cold, among previously unexposed native populations, as documented by Arthur and Bruce Spiess, Jared Diamond and others.
Where, however, local populations were eventually able to establish some degree of immunity to European diseases (as in much of North America after the initial contacts along the north-east coast), they were not at all overwhelmed by European settlers. For example, in the American Midwest, the Plains Indians adopted the horse from the Spanish and created a very successful pastoralist society, supported by its highly effective light cavalry, and which flourished for over 300 years while mostly fending off European incursions. Consequently, as part of the Columbian Exchange, while Europeans benefited from New World tomatoes and silver, Native Americans benefited from the introduction of the horse from Eurasia.
Hence, in the initial, pre-industrial, phase of colonialism, even in the Americas, when European disease was taken out of the equation, the balance of power between Europeans and the rest of the world was much more evenly matched than is often assumed.
Globalization post 1492 — not the rise of the West, but rather global connectivity
Outside the Americas, the rest of the world was also rapidly globalizing after 1492. To illustrate the nature of the globalization which began then one could look no further than the Acapulco Galleons. This is the trade in Spanish silver from the port of Acapulco, across the Pacific, to Manila, where Chinese traders brought Chinese goods for the Asian, South American and European markets in exchange for Spanish silver from Mexican mines. The trade began in the early 1500s, and lasted almost 300 years. To service this trade network, the Spanish built what were then the largest ships in the world in order to take their new-found silver to the Chinese traders in Manila.
The results of the Acapulco-Manila trade system were not just a flood of Chinese goods such as porcelain and silk into European markets, and a further enrichment of Spain, but also the creation of a ship market in the Philippines, the introduction of chili peppers from South America into Chinese cooking (imagine how different the world would be without that), and also the re-monetization of the Ming Empire and an economic boom in China (which was suffering from hyper-inflation due to its use of fiat paper currency) thanks to the influx of Spanish silver.
Another example that serves to demonstrate that globalization since 1492 was not just the rise of the West, but rather the rise of a globalized system that had both winners and losers in the east and the west, is provided by a quick review of Portuguese history over a couple of centuries. We can see clearly that this was a period of competition between nations, both West and East, and not a period of uninhibited European expansion.
The Portuguese had been one of the first to establish overseas trading networks in north Africa and then outside the Mediterranean, in the 15th and 16th centuries. But in the 17th century, they lost the Spice Islands in Indonesia to the Dutch (1605), as well as Sri Lanka and Malacca (Malacca is the port on the south-west tip of Malaysia which was the major port for trade between Asia and the Indian ocean — the same role played by Singapore today). Portugal’s port of Hormuz was captured by a joint British-Persian force (1622); the port of Hooghly (which was an important Bengali port now replaced by Calcutta) was taken by the Indian Mughal imperial forces in 1632; then Omani forces took the strategically significant Muscat in 1650, having taken Ras Al Khaimah from the Portuguese in 1633, and then the Omanis took Mombasa and Zanzibar in 1698.
While Mughals, Persians, Omanis and Portuguese were contesting the Persian Gulf and the trade routes around the Indian sub-continent, the Ottomans were expanding their empire, having dealt the coup de grâce to the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire with the capture of Constantinople in 1453. For the late 15th century witnessed two significant geopolitical shifts: the Portuguese and Spanish monarchs completed the recapture of the Iberian Peninsula from the remnants of the Arab Muslim caliphate and then took South America; and the Turkish Ottomans dealt the final blow to the eastern Roman Empire and then built on that success by swallowing up the provinces of the declining Arab caliphate through the Levant and North Africa and into Arabia and consolidating their hold over the Balkans and large parts of south eastern Europe. At the same time, the Mughals consolidated their hold over the Indian sub-continent, creating a textile trade network that came to represent 25% of world industrial output by the early 18th century.
As noted above, views of the period of globalization since 1492 have been invariably colored by the Western perspective, which has perhaps understandably seen it as the ‘rise of the West’. But it is more correct to see this period as one of intensifying globalization that affected both East and West. We shall see that this globalization reached a watershed moment in the mid to late 19th century with the Second Industrial Revolution (2IR) and the sudden European global ascendance which lasted until WWII.
The Industrial Age(s)
Beginning in the mid 18th century, the First Industrial Revolution (1IR) tipped the scales somewhat in favor of the Europeans. But 1IR technologies were often adopted by the non-industrial cultures that they encountered. As a case in point: 1IR military technology like flintlock muskets were rapidly transmitted to non-industrial militaries and used against Europeans. Throughout Asia, in the 18th century we see essentially pre-Industrial local militaries adopting European weapons such as muskets and mortars, as well as drill and tactics. Indeed, a musket is not difficult to operate and maintain for even very technologically simple communities, such as Aboriginal Tasmanians who are reported to have adopted muskets and used them against European invaders.
But it was with the 2IR in the late 19th century the scales were tipped definitively in favor of Europeans. It was technologies such as repeating rifles, dynamite, barbed wire, electric light, machine guns, all used by troops moved by trains running on steel rails and communicating with each other by telegraph, which defined 2IR and brought a qualitatively different level of technological sophistication, a level beyond the reach of the rest of the world; and hence from the late 19th to the end of WWII, the West dominated the globe without question (albeit often in alliance with local interests). As European geopolitical dominance became settled in the late 19th century, the theorists we discussed earlier were waking up to the incredible power of European nations and assuming that it was part of a long term historical process that stemmed from something essential to European (or indeed British) culture.
But the world has always had separate centers of power and civilization, in Asia, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. Suddenly, in the 1990s, as documented so well by Ian Morris, the cultural theories that said the rise of the West was inevitable, were exposed to doubt with the rise of the Asian Tiger economies in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the steady rise of China. As the inevitably of Western dominance was challenged by the resurgence of major Asian economies, we saw that the common belief that culture is determinative was challenged. While Asian philosophies like Confucianism had been seen by the European philosophers of the 19th century as as the reason that Asian societies were moribund and resistant to change, these same philosophies now came to be seen as positive for Capitalism because of their emphasis upon hard work, filial duty, social and community conscience, thrift and saving. Confucianism went from being incompatible with Capitalism to being a key component of Asian Capitalism — which just demonstrates how loose and dependent upon perspective is the idea of ‘culture’. The use of the concept of culture to explain human society is extremely limited. For while culture is important, it is almost impossible to measure or even clearly define, and for that reason alone cannot be viewed as determinative.
What has, however, been determinative in human history is technology. Humans are defined by their use of tools. Of course there is a cultural element to technology, but this cultural element is such an intangible, slippery concept that it becomes virtually useless as a heuristic tool. Technology, on the other hand, is physical and measurable.
Military technology and geopolitics
And here we necessarily turn to the question of military technology, because war and military technology have been the most important drivers of human history and geopolitics over the last 500 years.
We’ve seen that over the last half millennium of globalization, military dominance was only established definitively by Europeans with the 2IR of the mid to late 19th century with technology that had military applications such as dynamite, repeating rifles, machine guns (the Maxim Gun of Belloc’s poem), barbed wire, the telegraph and steel railroads.
Importantly this Western dominance was lost after WWII due to revolutionary movements in the third world that ejected the European imperial overlords. While some of the cause for the loss of the colonies was the damage done to the British Empire and Europe’s economies by the war, nonetheless this is not sufficient to explain what occurred, for remember that Asia in particular was also devastated by the war (Africa less so), and even when the United States, which was the one nation that was greatly empowered by the war, intervened on behalf of European empires against revolutionary movements (for instance to support the French in Vietnam), Europeans were unable to suppress the revolutionaries.
The primary reason is that, after WWII, anti-colonial revolutionaries in Asia and Africa were fighting European militaries on pretty much the same level of military technology, as had been the case before the 2IR in the mid 19th century. This was not to say that the conflicts were not often somewhat asymmetrical. But the asymmetries still led to a military capability balance or equality; unlike in the late 19th century and early 20th century where even asymmetrical warfare conferred no great advantage, so great was Western superiority. Post-WWII Europeans might have had some technological advantages like airplanes and aerial bombardment, but this was normally not decisive on the ground and was offset by leverage that the locals had, like the home ground knowledge advantage and support of the local population. Most often the fighting was on the level of infantrymen vs guerillas, with both sides using the same types of small arms. If you like, both sides had Maxim Guns.
This post-WWII colonial warfare is entirely different to the colonial warfare that occurred from the 1850s to early 20th century, at the start of the second industrial revolution when the technology was only held by Europeans. Then steel railways, the telegraph, barbed wire, the Gatling gun and repeating rifles, led to the final defeat of the Plains Indians in the US. Prior to that the military balance between the United States and the American Indian societies, especially the Plains Indians with their superb light cavalry, was much more equal.
The United States and its Western allies briefly regained their qualitative technological advantage at the end of the Cold War when the digital technological advances of the Third Industrial Revolution came into play. This was most obviously demonstrated in the first Gulf War (think of smart bombs and all those films of missiles going through windows and surgically taking out the enemy that General Schwarzkopf would show us on CNN) and continued through into the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts of the early 2000s, when American and Coalition soldiers had GPS, encrypted communications, shared intelligence databases with link analysis software creating a workable picture from masses of raw data, satellite imagery and Predator drone technology.
But with the beginning of the 4IR over the past decade, with its unprecedented democratization of technology, we find ourselves in a world where access to extremely advanced technology is not solely the preserve of the Western alliance. This often puts the average Western, NATO-standard soldier on the same level, qualitatively if not quantatively, as his or her adversaries.
Some of this levelling is asymmetric in nature; thus while very far behind the US in conventional warfare capabilities, China is leaping ahead in AI and internet surveillance technology; Russia has become adept at cyber warfare, using it not only to influence public opinion in the US and Europe but in recent years using cyber weapons to bring down Ukrainian government servers, to disrupt the Ukrainian power grid, and most notably used Android malware to disrupt, infiltrate and destroy Ukrainian military artillery units. Rogue states like Iran and North Korea possess massive arsenals of missiles (stand-off, autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons like missiles and drones being a hallmark of 4IR warfare) that can overwhelm missile defense systems if deployed en mass. So too do non-state actors like Hizballah. Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria have also effectively used the 4IR technology of social media as a platform for psychological operations. Likewise, they have utilized drones, hacking tools and the ability to encrypt their communications. Meanwhile, the ultimate non-state espionage organization, Wikileaks, utilizing 4IR technologies like encryption, the Internet and social media, has wreaked havoc on the military, intelligence and security institutions that underpin Western democracies.
As more of defense matériel production is devoted to 4IR weapons systems, from missiles to robots to cyber warfare, we will see that the production of that matériel will not only be carried out in the advanced defense manufacturing hubs of the US or Europe or even Russia; it will be increasingly carried out by a very wide variety of nations, many of which may even be emerging economies. Iran, for instance can produce good quality missiles, drones, and cyber platforms, as can North Korea. Pakistan and India have also demonstrated their 4IR industrial prowess and ability to assimilate new technologies. In the foreseeable future, much of the production of these items will be conducted by 3D printing, meaning decentralized production hubs could emerge and facilitate further geographical spread of highly advanced technology.
Again, as in the decolonization period after WWII, we now face a situation where everyone has the metaphorical maxim gun (or its equivalent).
We should be viewing geopolitics through this lens, rather than debating the economic vs military strength of Russia or counting how many aircraft carriers China has built; which in a geopolitical sense, are tactical matters. The more important question is whether the West dominates technology in the same way it did in the 2IR from the 1850s to WWII, and then briefly again at the end of the Cold War, and the answer is unquestionably that it does not. The question is not whether we are facing a post-Cold War multi-polar world, which is of course now a given, but how many poles there are and how to define those poles. In a world in which a micro-power like Wikileaks can act with virtual impunity for more than a decade against the sole Superpower, the concept of a poly-polar geopolitical world seems apt.
The policy community needs to ground its strategic thought on a new set of assumptions about the real-world context of 21st century geopolitics. To assume that — as in the days of colonial conquest in the late 19th through to early 20th centuries — Western power can almost automatically overwhelm a non-Western enemy and lead to total victory is to embrace obsolete vainglory. Clausewitz wrote that the first task in war is to break the enemy’s morale, a task made extremely difficult by this democratization of technology. A victory in the 19th or early 20th century over an enemy who did not have, and could not even imagine how to manufacture, advanced weaponry could break that enemy’s morale, leading to doubts even about their own identity. This is improbable now, because everyone has a Maxim gun.
Norman Ricklefs is Chairman of NAMEA Group, an honorary associate in the department of ancient history at Macquarie University, a member of Chatham House and a Global Thought Leader at the World Economic Forum. He has served as advisor to the Libyan Prime Minister and the Iraqi Interior Minister.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the end of the West’s brief geopolitical dominance
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