Candide's Garden: Visions of Europe in 2030

The age of globalization is over. The coming 30 years will be shaped by the logic of scarcity, resulting in a turn away from global trade and the creation of self-reliant geopolitical zones. But Europe is prepared for these challenges.

…The last thirty years have also had a world-historical significance with regard to the compression of global space: international mobility has become a mass phenomenon; the globe has become circumnavigable within 36 hours for every citizen and commodity of the industrialized world. This process will not just slow, it will be reversed. By 2030 the social, political, and economic significance of spatial distance will have increased. Put simply, the world will become bigger again.

This bigger world is the result of the second factor that will shape the future. The past thirty years have been a period of perceived resource abundance, particularly with regard to oil as the main resource of the global economy. It is oil that has greased capitalist expansion. By contrast, the coming thirty years — an uncertain transitional phase away from the oil economy — will be marked by a deficit of resources and a logic of scarcity. This will apply not only to oil and gas but also to more elementary resources such as food and, in particular, water. The ominous, globally shared perception of scarcity will allow an economic logic of protection to appear rational. Together, greater spatial distance and no smaller temporal distance will lead to a partial reversal of globalization.

Instead of a globalized world economy that crosses continental barriers with ease, we will see continental autarchic zones being formed that will be shaped by the military defense of the basic resources available in each zone. We will thus see the logic of imperial expansion replaced by an aspiration to autarchic inclusion (already the EU strategy). The internal market of each zone will reassume economic primacy. This process does not have to end in war. It could well take an ordered course and lead to a multipolar equilibrium, the stability of which — like that of the Cold War — is guaranteed by an awareness of what military options are not available.

Spiegel