The Shape Of The Future

By JOSHUA COOPER RAMO

We have answered so many astonishing questions in the century now ending--Can we put a man on the moon? How do atoms work?--that the unanswerable rankles a bit. But mysteries endure, and even after a century of Roosevelts, peppered with a Gorbachev and a Mandela and a Churchill, we are no closer to an answer for the greatest of historical questions: Where do leaders come from?

It's a lively question as we gaze at the pink morning of a new century, a question that vibrates with possibility and that engages both our hopes and fears: Who will be the Gorbachev of 2085? Will we have another Hitler? Who will rescue us from him? It's a historical tautology that leaders are generated by their times and that great issues produce great men. (One historian, in TIME's ranking of U.S. Presidents, observes that Calvin Coolidge was "unlucky" enough to live in boring times.) And while we can't predict the leaders of the next decade, let alone the century, we can at least glimpse the likely shape of their era.

While recent history was written at the intersection of ideologies--communism versus capitalism, fascism versus democracy--the end of the cold war has produced a collection of other, more subtle challenges. In places as diverse as Kosovo and Colombo, new history is being written in the blood of deep-seated ethnic panics. "Global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines," argues Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington. "Political boundaries are increasingly redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious and civilizational." At the same time, much of the world is being remade by a global economy that has linked political openness to economic growth. Democracy, always a moral high ground, turns out to be good for business. But the idea that we are moving toward a single global culture is both wrong and dangerous. Economic strength and social mobility will unlock a new, more complex balance of power as even simple ideas about how we live our lives come into question.

In the following pages we've tried to highlight the roots of those clashes, and to introduce people from around the world who are fighting, with careful passion, for their beliefs. They immediately present a host of nuanced, difficult questions. To what extent should we trade off our environment for our economy? How should the advancement of a secular global mentality make room for God? As the world becomes increasingly integrated by technology and communications, these questions will become more relevant. Economic shifts in Kuala Lumpur can, we have seen, trigger shocks in Phoenix. The destruction of Brazil's rain forests may kick off climate changes in North America. The world, as we are constantly reminded by our E-mail, our satellite dishes and our economy, is one interconnected place.

We are living in peaceful times, but short, temporary bursts of tranquillity have followed all the major wars of this century--think of the Roaring Twenties and the boom years of the 1950s. Our challenge now is to ensure that the current era of peace and prosperity continues long after the close of the cold war. It will demand as activist an agenda as that long fight did. The next 100 years will bubble with questions that are as difficult as the ones we have faced in this century. Perhaps, because of their incredible subtlety, these questions are even more difficult.

And our future leaders? Ultimately, just like Churchill and Reagan and Mandela, they will find the answers to these hard questions in their own hearts. If there is one lesson of the past 100 years, it is that conscience remains the truest guide. "A man does what he must," John F. Kennedy wrote in 1948, examining the nature of courage. "In spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures. And that is the basis of all human morality." Here are four people who are doing what they must.