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.