Australian Leadership Retreat: Learning to cope in a world with fewer people

Greg Copley calls it zigzagging ­towards the future. So forget about straight-line thinking when it comes to human progress. If history worked that way, he says, the Romans would have invented supersonic air travel in the 15th century and heaven knows where we would be today.

But as Copley points out, life tends to get in the way of the linearists, be they optimists or pessimists. “Nothing really continues in an unbroken line,” the internationally regarded strategic analyst from Perth says. Otherwise there would have been no Dark Ages in Europe to subsume the grandeur and ingenuity of Rome and no Renaissance, ­either, to usher in the age of reason.

When we gaze into the tea leaves for what’s to come in our uncertain world, all we see is more: more people crowding the planet, more technology-driven disruption to society, more geopolitical strife from the rise of China and the supposed eclipse of the US as a superpower state.

Copley’s view, in an opening address to the Australian Leadership Retreat on Queensland’s Gold Coast, is at odds with this orthodoxy. While the relative position of the US-led West is yet to be determined, he ­argues that neither China nor India “in their present forms” as population giants will necessarily dominate. Instead of a “balance of power” globally, it may be better to think about a “balance of weakness” between the big players. “We are in a very fluid period,” he says.

Global population shifts are unquestionably creating totally new social, economic and tech­nological frameworks for the 21st century, but not in the way you may think. Copley says the orld’s population is approaching a tipping point — within a ­generation it will peak at about 8.5 billion, then decline rapidly, he argues. Depopulation, as ­opposed to overpopulation, could become the concern, especially in the ­urbanised West and a fast-greying China.

Donald Trump’s election as US President is no aberration, as he sees it. Identity politics is the new force at large, transcending technology and wealth-creation as the driver of change.

You don’t have to look too far back to see why. The bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was a “triumph of emotionalism and identity politics over the benefits of modern, co-operative society”, Copley says. When he looks at the rebirth of Russia as a strategic power, he sees past the strong arm of Vladimir Putin to the nationalist passions that were unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Let me ask, why is it that futurists, including strategic planners, are failing to account for the profound, underlying impact of reversals in population growth, growing urbanisation and transnational migration?” Copley says.

“They emphasise the impact of technology and economic stability as though exponential evolution and transformation are automatically going to occur.

“Strategic projections into the medium and long-term future tend to forecast either apocalyptic descent into the maelstrom of chaos or warp-speed super­highways into an unrecognisable ­future dominated by technology.

“Both approaches involve linear extrapolations of just fragmentary trends of human experience, based on short-term historical ­evidence. They are, in other words, unrealistic guides to the strategic future.”

In setting the scene for this weekend’s Australian Leadership Retreat, a brainstorming get-­together of leading thinkers, policymakers and experts supported by this newspaper, Copley contends that our modern age is challenging but by no means unique in history. This is not the first time globalisation has divided societies or technological change has let rip income ­inequality, social tensions and ideological extremism.

Far from it. As Ian Goldin of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University points out, Europe was transformed five centuries ago by the same tumultuous mix of intellectual innovation, internationalised trade, migration and social friction — so much so that he argues we are in the “second Renaissance” and fumbling through it as badly as first time round.

Before speaking at the conference yesterday, he told Inquirer: “It’s no wonder that people are angry with globalisation when they see globalisation as more of a threat than an opportunity. Though the benefits are dramatic, they are less evident than the risk people perceive. The pushback, as represented by Trump in the US, is very significant.”

Copley says the impact of ­urbanisation has not been fully ­appreciated. The baby boom that followed World War II supersized cities, starting a virtuous cycle that in turn delivered better healthcare, lower infant mortality, ­improved nutrition, longer life ­expectancy, all entrenching population gains. In the West and Westernised Japan, however, the countervailing trend was to ­smaller families. Birthrates are now so low in the developed world that the population no longer ­replaces itself.

This shortfall has been “disguised”, he argues, by trans­national migration. But the underlying problem has been ­exacerbated by wealth-related diseases such as diabetes. One in every 11 adults on the planet has some form of diabetes, Copley ­explains. Along with stress-related illness, it’s the curse of 21st century living. “It’s just starting to impact now and we will see this increase dramatically increase. It’s a pandemic,” he says.

The “64 million dollar question” is when and where population decline will occur, not if it will happen. Copley insists that UN projections of a global population of 10 billion by mid-century are unlikely to be met. The fall will be uneven but there are signs it is not far off. According to the UN, China’s population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2028, but with a projected birthrate of only 1.1 — down from 1.24 — the count could drop to 600 million people by 2100.

The upshot, says Copley, who is president of the Washington-based International Strategic Studies Association, is that predictions that the 21st century will belong to China or Asia may not turn out to be so neat after all.

The “One Belt, One Road” mega­project launched last weekend by President Xi Jinping to build ports, railways and pipelines across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, may turn out to be such a vast undertaking that it constrains China, instead of projecting its power. “China’s automatic growth should not be taken for granted,” Copley says.

The country already has problems feeding itself; catch-up industrialisation has destroyed its water stocks and swathes of arable farmland, opening a door to Australia to become China’s foodbowl as well as its quarry. “If I was going to gamble on something, I would put money into agriculture because China is going to be importing so much food over the coming decades,” Copley tells Inquirer.

Goldin says the “new normal” represented by the election of Trump, Brexit and the sidelining of the established parties in France by come-from-nowhere President Emmanuel Macron is here to stay, meaning that “the rules of the game have changed”.

It’s no surprise the politics of protectionism has taken hold when the established order has proved so incapable of handling risk, he says, be it to the financial system during the global crisis of 2008 or last week’s trans­national cyber ransom attack. The lesson of history was that great success can also lead to great ­failure: ­wit­ness the terrible price that ­Native Americans paid after the “new world” was colonised by ­Europeans.

Copley says the opportunities for Australia today are immense. Numerous “pathways” are available, and it doesn’t need to involve a binary choice between “putting all your eggs into the China” trade basket or reinforcing security ties with Washington. “The way forward is going to have to be something entirely different,” he predicts. “Probably it will be a much more responsible path for Australia … where Australia will take more responsibility for its own strategic position in a very much more multipolar world.”

Like they say, the future ain’t what it used to be.