Does this sound familiar?
Communities and even entire countries seem to have less and less control of their own destinies. Traditional power structures are baffled by below-replacement fertility rates, illegal immigration and massive currency flows.
They have unsatisfactory answers - or no answers at all - to the threat of large-scale redundancy in farming and manufacturing; they find it hard to prevent companies from relocating to other regions, or to muffle information from transnational TV and radio; they pause and worry at the implications of global warming…
And because the established structures are fumbling with these challenges, people are responding with resignation … searching for new structures … demanding protection from the global forces for change … and turning angrily against recent immigrants.
It’s from Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the Twenty-first Century. Published in 1993.
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