John Lukacs: if the 20th century ended in 1989, as this excellent historian (now in his mid 80s) has wisely proposed, the 21st century must have begun somewhere around 1990.

You might say that we will enter the second decade of the 21st century on New Years’ Day 2010. So we should have an inkling of what it’s about by now.

Yet there is a pedantic definitional issue right away: “Most people assume that the 21st century starts with 2000, but a vocal minority insists that it starts with 2001.”Â  (Which would mean that the second decade of the century will not begin until New Years’ Day 2011!)

Then there are more subtle historical complexities. According to the Cuban journalist Alfredo Fernandez Rodriguez: “At midnight on December 31, the world will enter the second decade of the 21st century – but we Cubans will enter the third … Cuba’s 21st century began in 1990, the year that marked the collapse of socialism throughout all of Eastern Europe.”

A similar view was propounded for the entire global village by the Hungarian American conservative historian John Lukacs as long ago as 1993: “The twentieth century was a short century. It lasted seventy-five years – from 1914 to 1989. Its two main events were the two world wars. They were the enormous mountain ranges that dominated its entire landscape. The Russian Revolution, the atomic bomb, the end of the colonial empires, the establishment of Communist states, the dominion of the two world superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – the division of Europe and of Germany: all of these were the consequences of the two world wars, in the shadow of which we have been living. Until now.”

1. Age of the Internet

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web: one key to the 21st century (that really started in the late 1980s/early 1990s, etc).

The companion concept that our present era – the 21st century – really began in 1990, or the late 1980s and/or early 1990s, makes sense on several subtle grounds. The Internet we’re on right now, e.g., is one obvious key to the 21st century. And according to the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association: “The Internet caught the public’s fancy in 1993—94.”

According to the current Wikipedia article on Internet history: “In 1989 … Tim Berners-Lee invented a network-based implementation of the hypertext concept … For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium technology prize … A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team … led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from … the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill … In 1993 the US National Science Foundation … created the InterNIC to manage the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases.”

There is some inevitable Canadian local content here as well; e.g.: “From 1987 to November 2000, dot-ca domain names were assigned and registered by a dot-ca committee …headed by John Demco, former Computing Facilities Manager … at the University of British Columbia … UBC provided the technical and administrative resources to house and operate the registry.”

On December 1, 2000 the Canadian Internet Registration Authority [CIRA], “a not-for-profit, member-driven organization” with both John Demco and “a representative of the Government of Canada” on its board of directors, “became the official dot-ca registry.” It now “processes over 300 million requests per day to connect Internet users with over one million dot-ca Internet addresses” – including counterweights.ca, of course.

2. Islamic fundamentalism: the not so new global threat

The World Trade Center in New York City is hit by an (astonishingly lucky?) terrorist attack, masterminded by Islamic fundamentalists (mostly from Saudi Arabia), September 11, 2001:another key to at least the early 21st century.

Another obvious key to the 21st century so far is the kind of terrorism that so stunningly and rapidly and tragically demolished the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. (And, to keep us on our toes, we have just had a happily failed reprise of all this in the air over Detroit, Michigan – and Windsor, Ontario, right next door.)

Even here there are good arguments for tracing current dilemmas back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. Soviet troops, e.g., withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. The death sentence against Salmon Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses was issued the same year. Iraq invaded Kuwait in1990, prompting the first US-led Gulf War on Iraq in 1991. The World Trade Center in New York City was first attacked in 1993 (not as successfully as eight years later, but still a taste of things to come). And the same year saw the first publication of  Mohammad Mohaddessin’s book,  Islamic Fundamentalism: The New Global Threat.

3. What Is Living in Social Democracy?

Tony Judt – “a British-Jewish professor of European history at New York University.” And a man who believes that “whatever we can retrieve from the twentieth-century memory of social democracy” is still worth fighting for in the 21st century. Photo by Melanie Flood.

The big event of 1989 in the eyes of John Lukacs (and many others) was the fall of the old Soviet Union in Russia. And then in 1990 there was what Alfredo Fernandez Rodriguez calls “the collapse of socialism throughout all of Eastern Europe.” But has this come to mean that “socialism,” in one sense or another, is dead everywhere in the 21st century?

Some believe that the economic trouble most parts of the world have confronted since the fall of 2008 has revived at least some parts of the traditional socialist critique of so-called capitalist economic development, inherited from as long ago as the 19th century.

The British historian at New York University, Tony Judt, wrote in the December 17, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books: “It would be pleasing–but misleading–to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand.”

What seems to be the recently gained bare beginnings of health care reform in Barack Obama’s United States of America may be something like the kind of thing Tony Judt has in mind. And that does seem to be what those who attack President Obama for bringing socialism to the USA at last have in mind too. If this is true (which seems quite unlikely, in any deep sense the 19th or 20th centuries might recognize), it could be the current incarnation of American exceptionalism. The present mood in Western Europe at least seems more definitively to the right. (Though what about Japan, or India, Australia, Brazil, or even China?)

4. At least trying to do something about our ecological nightmares …

The Indian youth delegation at Copenhagen, December 2009.

Properly speaking, this collective scribbling is already far too long for a post “In Brief,” even on the edge of New Years’ Day 2010. But two more inklings about the 21st century are worth a quick mention.

First, another of Barack Obama’s last-minute half-achievements during his first somewhat rocky year in office, in 2009, has been described by the Times of India as  “A facesaver in Copenhagen scripted by US and ‘friends‘.”

Here too you can trace beginnings back to the (in this case later) 1990s – with the Kyoto Protocol. But in this case the “most notable non-party to the Protocol” was “the United States.” Whatever its many other weaknesses the 2009 “Copenhagen Accord, the first global agreement of the 21st century to comprehensively influence the flow and share of natural resources, was [finally] agreed upon by 26 most influential countries … in the snow drenched capital of Denmark.” And: “The US led the pack of architects.”

According to the New York Times, this “climate deal …may seem more than it is. With the Copenhagen conference unable to agree on binding limits on greenhouse gases linked to climate change, Mr. Obama settled for a three-page agreement with no short or midterm goals but a long-term commitment to prevent world temperatures from rising by more than two degrees by midcentury.” Still, this is some kind of step ahead, in the still quite mysterious new human struggle against our own human impact on the increasingly threatened ecology of planet earth. And it now involves all the major players in the current world economy – old and new.

5. The real impact of “globalization”: from the G8 to the G20

President Barack Obama (R) welcomes Chinese President Hu Jintao to the welcoming dinner for G-20 leaders at the Phipps Conservatory on September 24, 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The process behind the ultimate limited achievement of the Copenhagen Accord also illustrates our second final inkling about the scope of things to come in the 21st century.

The last half of the twentieth century (from the end of the Second World War, say, to the collapse of the Soviet Union) was, as John Lukacs has put it, marked by “the dominion of the two world superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union.” And in their shadows was the vestigial but still notable enough power of the once mighty continent of Europe, punctuated by the gradual but increasingly unmistakable economic rise of Japan in East Asia.

For a time in the 1990s and even in the earliest years of the 21st century it seemed to some that the United States had emerged from a cold war it briefly appeared to have won as the single global superpower – able to command the evolution of the world economy, and everything for which this economy remains a crucial base, all on its own. Yet by testing this proposition so aggressively, the eight-year experimental pax Americana of the George W. Bush Republican administration in Washington only showed its increasingly clear real-world limits.

Thus “in the end, the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord’ … was … a US-BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) accord.” And: “possibly the greatest loser of the new strategic geography is Europe.”Â  Still more to the point, perhaps: “At the climate talks, there may have been the G77, the Umbrella Group (the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand), the Aosis (Association of small island states), the LDCs (least developed countries) and the BASIC group, but over and above all these alliances, there was a G-2 universally acknowledged as holding the keys to any deal, comprising the US and China.”

We already had a prelude to much of this with the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, September 24—25, 2009. And we counterweights editors reported on the prelude in a post back then, called “G20 in Pittsburgh: where in the world are we going now?”

We can do no better here than end with a still relevant quotation from our earlier G20 post: “Canada will host a transition summit next year –  technically two summits back to back –  that will mark the shift of power from a club of wealthy nations to the major developing powers like China, India, and Brazil … Canada will still host a G8 summit …next June [2010], but a broader club, the Group of 20, is now officially superseding it as the world’s major economic forum, so a G20 summit will tacked alongside it …The decision to make the G20 the real power club was formalized at a dinner of G20 leaders at their summit in Pittsburgh.”

6. The idea of progress continues to progress …

President Obama greets crowds in Ottawa’s Byward Market, February 19, 2009.

Our very final short-and-sweet summing up on the 21st century so far is one of guarded optimism. Ironically, or otherwise, the planet’s latest bout of globalization, inspired by capitalist or at least “free market” economic development policies, actually does seem to be coming to mean that at least some crucial formerly “under-developed” or “developing” countries are now developing, with a vengeance. And in the best traditions of free and democratic societies everywhere, it is hard to see how this can be viewed as anything but real progress.

Meanwhile, there also seems some room to continue to believe that Winston Churchill was right, when he said that “the United States always does the right thing, after it has tried everything else.” You can feel the comfort of this room every time you see President Barack Obama on TV. The United States is not going to continue to be the sole global superpower that it never really was in the first place. But it remains the world’s largest economy, and it is going to at least try very hard to provide some benign global leadership, from the standpoint of free and democratic societies everywhere. And to us here at counterweights world headquarters, in the North American Great Lakes, on New Years Day 2010, that has to be viewed as real progress too.