The Last 21 Years: Year (2)000

(Source: wikimedia.org)

 

“Certainly, we live in a different world,” said the spy fiction writer Tom Clancy in 2000. “For the first time in all of known human history, we live in a world absent of the likelihood of superpower conflict. Now we live in a world in which there are superpowers, but we’re not butting heads all the time. That’s a very good thing for the world… but… there’s still a few bad guys out there.”

“A terrorist is like a buzzing mosquito,” Clancy continues, comparing the faded menace of the USSR with its “10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us” to a “big vampire bat.” From our new vantage point, nearly 20 years on from the shock of September 2001, this description starts to make more and more sense.

The year 2000 is a good starting point in terms of superpower competition because it’s an Olympic year. In Barcelona 1992, the former Soviet Union had topped the medals table with the USA second, Germany third and China fourth. In Atlanta 1996, the USA came first with Russia second, Germany third and China fourth again. In Sydney 2000, China overtook Germany to finish third. Four years later in Athens, they would overtake Russia to finish second and eight years later in Beijing, they would overtake the USA to finish first. Despite this being the year that India’s population passed the 1,000,000,000-mark, its performance at the Olympics was (as usual) amongst the worst of all the competing nations.

If athletes from Germany, France and Italy had been competing at the Olympics under a European flag, they would have topped the medals table. Adding the Netherlands and Great Britain, Europe would have been totally dominant. A ridiculous idea, clearly, but one that might have seemed slightly less so at the time, when it seemed that the EU was set firmly for ever closer union, the only questions over how long it would take.

The increasing connectivity of the new Europe was symbolised in 2000 by the opening of the Øresund Bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö (pictured above). Finnish firm NOKIA released its iconic 3310 mobile phone in the same year. Throwing caution somewhat to the wind (hindsight tells us), the European Commission recommended that Greece be allowed to join the Eurozone as its twelfth member. In a national referendum, Denmark voted narrowly against membership.

There was a tragedy in July 2000 at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle when debris on the runway caused a ruptured fuel tank, fire, loss of control and ultimately over 100 deaths during the failed take off of Air France Flight 4590. This was the only fatal Concorde accident in its otherwise very glamorous operational history but it seemed to symbolise a new uncertainty and pessimism (like the sinking of the Titanic). For the British also.

The biggest tech business success story of 2000 was arguably not the NOKIA 3310 but Sony’s PlayStation 2, which would go on to become the best-selling games console ever. This was also the year that fellow Japanese firm Honda unveiled its humanoid robot ASIMO. The cultural spotlight was also shone on East Asia with the release of Ang Lee’s Matrix-esque Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which received a nomination for Best Picture at the 73rd Academy Awards. China is described in the trailer as “a land of infinite beauty and eternal mystery.” The film has since been claimed, whether correctly or otherwise, as an example of “Counter-flow” — in other words, a sign that globalisation would be a process of “two-way traffic.” Pulitzer prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert was on the safer ground calling it simply “the most exhilarating martial arts film I have seen.”

It was the year that 47-year-old Vladimir (“There is no such thing as a former KGB man”) Putin officially became President of Russia, looking to provide an inscrutable figurehead and a stern hand on the tiller in a country that had been through a difficult ten years and was immediately plunged into a fresh sense of crisis following the sinking of the Kursk submarine in August 2000. Perhaps this disaster was a historic low point for Russia (and something which put its Olympics successes into perspective)?

Metallica filed a lawsuit against popular file-sharing company Napster after a demo version of its single “I Disappear” (scheduled for the soundtrack to the film Mission Impossible II) appeared on the site pre-release (along with their entire back catalogue). Drummer Lars Ulrich was subsequently given a frosty reception at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York by the new internet-savvy generation of “millennials” who perhaps felt entitled to download music for free.

If 2000 had a Man of the Year, in hindsight we could make the case for Jeff Bezos, who successfully navigated Amazon through the choppy waters of the dotcom bubble. “We want to be Earth’s most customer-centric company,” he told the New World program, “so we’re trying to build a completely new standard worldwide, raise the bar on what it means to be focused on customers and obsessed over customers. That’s our mission. … We’re not a book company, we’re not a music company, we’re not a video company, we’re not a toy company, we’re not an electronics company, even though we sell all of those things. Instead, we’re a customercompany. It’s a completely new kind of concept. … It’s about getting the right product to the right customer. My proudest moments hearing about customer experience at amazon.com [are] always when we’ve talked somebody out of buying something because we know that if we can help somebody make the right purchase decision, we’ll save them a huge amount of time and enhance their lives in some way.”

The internet, said Bezos, was “empowering to individuals” especially those living in rural areas. “We get emails from customers all the time saying, look, you’ve dramatically improved my life because I live 80 miles from the nearest big city and whenever I wanted to get a book or a piece of music, I’d have to drive 80 miles and now I can order if from you and a couple of days later it comes through the mail. This is a huge advantage. … As telecommunications get better and better and cheaper and cheaper, it’s going to be easier to live in — people are going to get to live where they want to live. Does this mean the end of cities? Of course not because people love to live near one another. Some do! I mean most do! Some people are going to want to live off in the mountains somewhere and that’s great, so this is going to support all the different lifestyles that people want to pursue.”

Australia, host nation of the Olympics, received its first Starbucks in 2000. This brought the total number of cafés (or “coffee houses”) in the chain to around 3,000 worldwide (a doubling in the space of a few years). The number would double again by the end of the following year (although Warsaw would have to wait until 2009). The following two quotes are from a Journeyman Pictures documentary, The Winners and Losers of Globalisation (2000):

Lester Thurow: “When we talk about globalisation, it means that when businesses look at the world, when they think about where to put their factories, they scan the globe to find the most efficient place to put their factories. And when they look at where they’re going to sell their products, they scan the globe to see where that is. … Now the interesting thing about globalisation of course is that every country is on the globe but every country is not in the global economy because there are some countries that just get dismissed. If you don’t have educated people, you don’t have infrastructure, you don’t have social organisation, nobody pays any attention to you. They never put factories there, they don’t try to sell to you. You’re on the globe but not in the global economy. So you can think of Central Africa is probably the biggest continuous area but large parts of the globe are not in the global economy.”

Francis Fukuyama: “Globalisation has essentially modernised a very large and important part of the Third World, which is a good deal of Asia and important parts of Latin America. And that is actually in a way closing some of those gaps and turning into winners a large part of the world that we thought were losers twenty-thirty years ago. … [And the losers?] Well, I would say that most of the people in that situation haven’t tried to play the game seriously and that those countries that have accepted the rules and the demands of globalisation and tried to do that seriously have actually succeeded quite well. These are countries in East Asia that have seen forty years of growth interrupted only briefly by the Asian economic crisis. These are countries in Latin America like Chile and Argentina and now increasingly Brazil that have figured out how to play by those rules. … If a company takes advantage of the fact that people are desperately poor and have no other opportunities in a peasant subsistence economy and actually gives them work, what constitutes exploitation in those circumstances when their alternative is to have no alternative in the modern sector of the economy at all? I’m not saying that I know what the answer to that is but it’s just not obvious that a multinational corporation that comes and actually gives people work and a job even at what we would regard as sweatshop wages is necessarily exploiting them.”

Of the world’s 25 busiest airports in 2000, 16 were American (including 4 of the top 5) and two were British, with one each for Japan, Germany, France, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and China (Hong Kong).

 

The world’s busiest airports (2000) by passenger numbers

 

 

Slightly more diverse was the list of the world’s 25 tallest skyscrapers with 11 in America, six in China (including three in Hong Kong), three in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), three in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, including the two tallest), one in Taiwan and one in Thailand. But whilst other countries’ 300-metre-plus skyscrapers were newly-built (less than three years old on average), America’s were a creaking legacy of its long 20th century rise, with completion dates of 1930, 1931, 1969, 1972, 1973 (x2), 1974, 1982, 1989, 1990 and 1993.

 

The world’s tallest skyscrapers (2000) by height, completion date

 

 

The US was not making big long-term investments in terms of replacing or modernising its infrastructure either. Indeed the year’s most talked-about book — Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — centred around Rudy Giuliani’s success as mayor of New York in keeping its existing subway system free of graffiti and its passengers safe from aggressive panhandling.

Two lines from the pilot episode of the Sopranos (first broadcast in 1999) speak to the growing sense of anxiety about Americans’ relationship between the past and the future. First Tony Soprano himself: “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” And then his psychiatrist Dr. Melfi’s response: “Many Americans, I think, feel that way.”

It was 93-year-old French-American historian Jacques Barzun who in 2000 published an 800-page history called From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western cultural life: “All that is meant by Decadence,” he said, “is ‘falling off.’ It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”

There was debate in 2000 over the use of SAT test results in American college (university) admissions, with conservative columnist Ann Coulter arguing that the SATs were meritocratic and that dropping them would lead to a new “tyranny of non-objectivity.” Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush likewise criticised “the soft bigotry of low expectations” in what he repeatedly described as “a land of immigrants.” It would become clear in the following years that the educational standards of the US were beginning to slide compared to those of other nations, at least in terms of secondary education.

Donald and Frederick Kagan were writing in While America Sleeps a comparison between Britain in the interwar period and the United States in the period following on from the Cold War. It begins with the words “America is in danger” and goes on to list some of the potential geopolitical threats: “No one can predict that a nationalist autocrat will soon seize power in Russia and begin rearming at a pace that will threaten its neighbors and the security of Europe. It is not inevitable that the Chinese military will take control of their country and launch a policy of expansion and hegemony in East Asia. Nor is it certain that Iraq will recover, rearm, and strike again, having learned the lessons of the Gulf War, or that Iran will take advantage of its neighbor’s weakness to seek a hegemony of its own. Precisely following any historical analogy is not wise. But it is no less foolish to be certain that such things will not happen…”

In his book Open Society: Reforming the Capitalist System, George Soros called for the establishment of a political alliance to complement the military alliance of NATO. “The membership of the alliance would include the United States, the European Union, and a critical mass of democratic countries from the periphery of the capitalist system … the most problematic member would be the United States, because at present it is unwilling to abide by the rules it seeks to impose on others. … [The alliance] would require a radical reorientation in U.S. policy from unilateralism to multilateralism.”

Perhaps this was the strategic direction an Al Gore administration might have taken but, after a close election (each candidate receiving over 50,000,000 but neither more than 51,000,000), it was the above-mentioned George W. Bush (a future Soros nemesis) who — eventually — emerged victorious.

And flying somewhere over the remote hills and mountains of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan (the “Graveyard of Empires”) in the Spring of 2000, one of 15 USAF/CIA Predator reconnaissance drones, equipped only with cameras and not (yet) weapons, managed (probably) to track down Osama bin Laden — the leader of an Islamist terrorist network Al Queda responsible for multiple US embassy in East Africa two years earlier and an upcoming suicide attack on the USS Cole whilst it was docked in Aden. Whether or not killing him in 2000 would have achieved much is an open question but this was certainly a strategic goal of the CIA and many in the outgoing Clinton Administration. Globalisation would indeed be a process of two-way traffic in more ways than one and 2001 would prove to be the year of the buzzing mosquito.

 

Autor

Thomas Riley

Thomas Riley runs the Flows and Frictions podcast for Strategy&Future. Originally from Manchester, England, he has been living and teaching English in Katowice since 2009.

 

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