tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861605.post6128296242421191851..comments2024-03-24T11:01:27.668-04:00Comments on Resource Insights: Anxiety turns to fear: Markets, energy, Pan and the ZeitgeistKurt Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05330759091950742285noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861605.post-10174158692446834282015-08-31T10:28:20.701-04:002015-08-31T10:28:20.701-04:00Mike,
You are certainly correct about the many mi...Mike,<br /><br />You are certainly correct about the many minor wars in Europe during the 19th century. And, of course, the Civil War in the United States was no small affair. But, my point is that the balance of power remained basically intact in Europe with borders of leading nations changing little during this period. The same could be said for the post-World War II era. There was war in Korea and Vietnam. There were wars in Africa. There was war between the Indians and the Chinese over border issues and between Vietnam and China. There were the war in the former Yugoslavia and later in Chechnya. The fall of the Soviet Union was certainly a central event during this period. But through all of this, the basic systems of finance and trade we see today remained intact and in fact, expanded rapidly, especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union.<br /><br />So, probably I overgeneralized a bit. But I think that we are entering an era where our fundamental assumptions about economy, trade, finance and geopolitical stability will all be challenged. Nonstate actors such as ISIS are becoming more and more powerful and disruptive. The internal cohesion of ever larger transnational institutions is under increasing centrifugal forces. The best example is Europe.<br /><br />I probably need an entire essay just to scratch the surface on this thesis. But, of course, that piece would have to characterize carefully the relative stability of the eras I cite versus the chaos of World War I and World War II, which I think is a defensible position.Kurt Cobbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05330759091950742285noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861605.post-88839210337199591492015-08-31T08:20:24.641-04:002015-08-31T08:20:24.641-04:00"The first one lasted from the end of the Nap..."The first one lasted from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914 (interrupted only by the brief Franco-Prussian War)."<br />Actually, the middle of the nineteenth century was characterised by several wars between the powers: France and Britain against the Russians in the Crimea; France and Austria-Hungary over the issue of Italian unity; Prussia and Austria Hungary over which should lead and unite Germany; the war between the Confederacy and the Union in the US; and the Franco Prussian war. Add on the French invasion of Mexico, the war between Prussia and Denmark, several clashes between Russia and the Ottoman Turkey, and the British/French assault on China in the opium wars, to say nothing of the Indian Mutiny and the Balkan wars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No, the nineteenth century was not by any stretch of the imagination a period of peace. One might instead declare it a period of increasingly industrialised warfare made more intense by the availability of cheap fossil fuel - coal. And it might be worth remembering the coal age did not start in the mid to late nineteenth centuries; the Industrial Revolution started inthe 1750s in Britain, and was seeing the opening up of the Franco Belgian coalfield in the 1830s, and the Ruhr a decade or so later.<br /><br />MikeMikenoreply@blogger.com