The Season 5 Preview

Ladies and gentlemen, the Season 5 Premiere, the fifth and final premiere of the fifth and final season arrives on Thursday, February 26th. This series has gone by so fast, it is hard to believe it is already coming to a conclusion. Season 5, though, may just be the most chaotic yet. As I preview Season 5 here today, one must begin to wonder: What will future historians have to say about the last 100 years of human history? How will they interpret the wars, revolutions, economic transformations, new ideologies, technological breakthroughs, demographic trends, cultural changes, and all the other events and developments that took place? What part will recent events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 play in their accounts? How will they explain the seeming contradiction between humankind's stupendous achievements and abysmal failures? From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, no one can answer questions such as these. Future historians' views of our past will be shaped by events that have not yet occurred and by values and concerns unique to their own era. What seems of great consequence to us, therefore, may be insignificant to them, while developments we barely perceive may be important parts of their stories.

It would be surprising, however, if future historians did not note the importance of the dramatic shift in world relationships that we will witness take place in the middle of the twentieth century. The world of the early 1900s will be a Eurocentric world. Europeans will be the best-educated and wealthiest people on Earth, and a few European states--Great Britain, Germany, Russia (becoming sort-of European), and France, along the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, and a European offshoot, the United States--will be the masters of Africa and much of Asia. When one speaks of Great Powers during this time period, they will all be European states. Despite its new industrial might and a few colonies, the United States will still not be a major player on the world scene yet. After the Second World War, Europe's primacy will end. The Europeans' colonial empires will disintegrate, their paramount role in international relations will shift to the Soviet Union and the United States, and their economic importance will decline in the face of global competition.

Future historians undoubtedly will also highlight the phenomenon of globalization, a word and concept that will come into common usage at the end of the twentieth century to describe the unprecedented scale of integration and interaction that will come to dominate relationships among the world's peoples. Human interaction, of course, is nothing new. Long-distance trade, migration, travel, missionary activity, wars of conquest, and the diffusion of new ideas and technologies all have been part of history for thousands of years. But interaction on a global scale did not begin to increase rapidly until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Europeans first sailed to Africa, the Americas, and Asia and opened a new era in commerce, migration, and biological exchange.

During the twentieth century, however, breakthroughs in communications and transportation will virtually obliterate the limitations of time and space, and the exchange of goods and ideas among the world's peoples will reach undreamed-of levels. It will become the age of world wars, multinational corporations, global communication networks, the World Wide Web, and thousands of international organizations.

Historians assuredly will also note other developments: the ongoing rush of scientific, medical, and technological discoveries; the spectacular expansion of the world's population (from approximately 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6.7 billion in 2009); the decline of the world's rural population and the growth of cities, best represented by megacities such as Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Mumbai; and the emergence at least superficially of a shared global culture, symbolized by the Internet and the ubiquity of McDonald's restaurants, blue jeans, American popular music, and twenty-four-hour cable news networks.

What else historians will say about the twentieth century is open to conjecture. They undoubtedly will take note of inhumanities and cruelties that we will sadly witness in Season 5: its appalling war casualties, its use of torture, and its genocides, not just against Jews in World War II but also against Armenians in World War I, Cambodians in the 1970s, and Bosnians, Kosovars, and Tutsi in the 1990s. Will such developments be described as aberrations or the beginning of a new trend toward brutality and callousness in human relationships? Historians surely will discuss the emergence of over 100 new independent states in Africa and Asia after the demise of colonialism. Will their stories be celebrations of economic and political achievement or tales of failure and disillusionment? They will note that the twentieth century will be marked by signs of both growing religious fervor and indifference; environmental disasters and growing environmental consciousness; and the globalization of culture and the continued appeal of nationalism and ethnic identification.

In looking toward the future, optimists will affirm their faith in progress, holding fast to the dream that reasonable human beings are capable of shaping a future of peace, harmony, and a just sharing of the world's wealth. Pessimists will ponder population projections, inevitable energy shortages, worsening pollution, and perhaps a nuclear winter, and warn of the coming of a new "dark age." However things develop, Season 5 will launch humankind on new paths that will determine its future for years to come. Get ready, get set, and fasten your seat belts for the Season 5 Premiere on Thursday, February 26th!