Though Thomas Hardy liked taking a gloomy view of mankind’s prospects, he and others of a similar cast of mind assumed that, despite the horrendous destruction brought about by industrialised warfare, humble folk would carry on as they had done for thousands of years so that, deep down, everything would remain much the same for a very long time to come. This was the theme of one of his best remembered poems, ‘In Time of The Breaking of Nations,’ which was written half-way through the First World War. The title of the poem alluded to a passage in the Old Testament in which the prophet Jeremiah said “Thou art my battleaxe and weapons of war, for with thee will I break in pieces the nations,” but Hardy took comfort from the thought that, somehow or other, people would continue to play their allotted parts in the personal dramas it was their destiny to live through.
From ancient times, periods of relative stability in which one big power was strong enough to maintain a semblance of order in the region it dominated have alternated with others marked by strife like the one we appear to be sliding into right now. The belief that, for mainly internal reasons, the United States is in full retreat is dismaying its allies and encouraging its enemies and would-be rivals who want to make the most of what they see as an opportunity to rise in the world. Unless we are very lucky, the next few years, perhaps decades, could be as tumultuous and ugly as were the first half of the 20th century, the era of the Napoleonic wars, or the even worse years that accompanied the rise and then fall of the Roman Empire. It is not much of a consolation to suspect that if anything helps restores peace, it will be the collapse of the birth rate.
Right now, many nations are in line to be broken, whether by Jeremiah’s battleaxe and weapons of war or, as in much of the West, by the suicidal fecklessness of members of their ruling elite. In the United Kingdom, France and elsewhere in Europe, there are plenty of pessimists who fear that their country’s long history is fast approaching its end because the future will be so different from the past that about the only thing connecting them will be a name on a map.
In other parts of the world, the immediate outlook is even more dispiriting than it is in Europe. Several weeks ago, Donald Trump threatened to put an abrupt end to Iranian civilisation unless what was left of the theocratic regime the United States has been bombing did his bidding. Unimpressed by Trump’s fiery rhetoric or, it would seem, by the damage that was inflicted on their country by the Israeli and US air forces, large numbers of Iranians continue to chant “death to America and to Israel” – if the fanatics ruling the country manage to get their hands on the means to carry out their threats, they will not be deterred by the knowledge that a nuclear exchange would have quite devastating consequences for their own country.
Another prime candidate for the knacker’s yard awaiting failed states is the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because he wanted to go down in history as the great man who restored the Tsarist Empire, but the failure of what allegedly were the second-most powerful armed forces on the planet to overcome the far smaller ones of a neighbour he regarded as too poor, badly organised and corrupt to resist a conqueror like himself could easily lead to the dismemberment of his own country. In places like Chechnya, there are many separatists who can be relied upon to take advantage of Putin’s inability to defeat the troops of Volodymyr Zelenskyy who, by developing a wide variety of drones, have revolutionised warfare at Russia’s expense.
Worse still, from a Russian standpoint, has been the rapid increase of Chinese influence in sparsely-populated Siberia. Should Putin fall, as would in all likelihood happen were the Ukrainians to succeed in retaking Crimea and if they continue to subject Moscow and St. Petersburg to large-scale drone attacks, the Chinese would be sorely tempted to remind whoever replaces him that they have not forgotten those “unequal treaties” their 19th-century predecessors were forced to agree to because they were too weak to do anything else.
Like their Russian neighbours and current allies, the Chinese have long taken it for granted that they would never have to worry about a shortage of manpower because their countries had larger populations than their main rivals. As a result, they thought that, in a military emergency, they could always repel enemy forces with one “human wave” after another. This may have worked in the past, but as Putin is finding out, Russia is fast running out of warm bodies he can feed into “the meat-grinder” because the Ukrainians are killing more soldiers than can now be recruited from regions far from Moscow whose inhabitants are used to being treated like serfs and are so poor that the economic rewards for signing up strike them as being extraordinarily generous.
Russia is far from being the only country afflicted by a low birth rate though, for military reasons, its inhabitants’ reluctance to breed is having a more noticeable effect than is the case elsewhere. In this respect some others, notably South Korea and, it would appear, China are in an even worse position. Unless some dramatic changes take place fairly soon, within three or four generations from now they will resemble understaffed geriatric hospitals. If the social order survived until then, every person of working age would be expected to have to support half a dozen or more retirees.
Hardy clung to the idea that, while nations may break into pieces, dynasties fall and death stalk the land, the peasantry will continue to live much as before and that relations between ordinary people would always matter far more to them than the doings of the powerful. As things stand, that sounds a bit overoptimistic. The men and women Hardy had in mind are a fast-shrinking minority in most parts of the world who are as caught up as most of their fellow humans by the turmoil that, after a fairly long period of stability in the democratic West, is rapidly gathering pace.
