The key word is "spontaneuously". I was thinking 50,100, 200 years. You'll have to admit, there were a lot of naysayers concerning the European Union and yet they're having a go at it. Also, for this thought experiment I was assuming it would be the U.S.,Europe,Japan,Israel vs. China, Russia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Iran, OPEC, Turkey, South Africa, etc.etc. A military confrontation would end the world, since China, Russia and India would pass on nukes to all their compadres.
I'd bet the Third World would win a war of attrition, with help from you and me running around blowing up bridges and passing on technology to Mexico, right?
If there were a delinking of the First and Third worlds - an unlikely event - the ruling class would lose a potent weapon in the class war: the *threat* of moving production overseas.
But I think Doug made a good point: a good chunk of the Third World is marginalized, written-off, while the rest is overworked and underpaid (exempting the comprador class of course). Hitchens strikes the right tone in the following:
The Nation/Minority Report 5/27/96 Africa Adrift by Christopher Hitchens
At the opening of Robert Kaplan's book *The Ends of the Earth,* which amplifies the themes of his now-famous doomsday essay "The Coming Anarchy," he quotes from a letter written by "a friend, a U.S. diplomat in the region." This friend writes:
The greatest threat to our value system comes from Africa. Can we continue to believe in universal principles as Africa declines to levels better described by Dante than by development economists? Our domestic attitudes on race and ethnicity suffer as Africa becomes a continent-wide "Wreck of the Medusa."
Footnoting this suggestive letter, Kaplan says, "The diplomat was referring to an early-nineteenth-century French shipwreck, whose survivors were ravaged by starvation. The wreck was immortalised by the macabre painting of Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault, *The Raft of the Medusa,* completed in 1819."
Both Kaplan and his diplomatic friend have phrased this in such a way as to have it subtly but dangerously wrong. In June 1819 a convoy of four vessels, including the Medusa, left France for Senegal, which was then part of the nascent French colonial empire. Somewhere south of Tenerife the Medusa hit a reef and became stranded. Since there were not enough lifeboats, it was decided to construct a raft for the rank-and-file soldiers, and for a number of crew and passengers as well. One hundred and fifty persons, with light provisions, were placed upon the raft. An officer was appointed to command it, but at the last moment he refused to step on board. Nonetheless, it is recorded that as the ship's boats began to tow the raft of the Medusa, a ragged cheer of "*Vive le roi*!" went up. The sense of deliverance did not last long. Within a short time, the towropes were cut and the raft was abandoned to its fate. The officers pulled away to safety.
What happened next has often been described. (There is an excellent capsule summary in Julian Barnes's book *A History of the World* in 101/2 Chapters.) The castaways fought horribly among themselves. They disputed the scarce rations and the cramped space. They succumbed to delusions. They eventually resorted to cannibalism. They rolled the sick and the wounded into the water in order to avoid sharing the remaining rations. They drank urine and attempted to ingest feces. By the time the raft was spotted and rescued by another vessel, named Argus, there were only fifteen survivors of the original complement, and several of these expired not long afterward.
The Medusa became quite an *affaire* in France. Two of the survivors, Savigny and Corréard, published a narrative of the scandal and later opened a pamphlet house named for the ill-fated vessel. This address became a hangout for rebels and revolutionaries, who saw in the episode an emblem of Royalist and military callousness. Géricault interviewed the pair, researched the story in some detail and purchased a large canvas. He shaved off all his hair as an earnest of his intention not to see anybody before the painting was complete. When the picture was first exhibited, at the Paris Salon in September 1819, it had an effect analogous to *Guernica.* Never mind that it was titled *Scène de naufrage*, or "scene of shipwreck." Everybody knew what the subject was. Eugène Delacroix, who as a young man was employed by Géricault as a model for one of the stricken survivors, said that when he saw the painting, "The impression it gave me was so strong that as I left the studio I broke into a run, and kept running like a madman all the way back to the rue de la Planche, where I then lived."
Now see how magnificently we progress. Africa as a continent has been cut adrift. The great powers have no further use for it. It can be left to rot and crash. Every now and then a nation struggles up from nowhere -- like Eritrea, or like once-despised Uganda. And every now and then a people collapses into a Medusa-like spasm of Hobbesian war, the war of all against all. Liberia is a salient recent example. But the spectators do not have the delicacy or sensibility of Delacroix. They look on the disaster as a wreck, an act of god, a calamity -- as anything but a crime or an abandonment. They even know enough to mention the Medusa, without knowing enough to know that they are missing the point. The affected concern about "our domestic attitudes on race and ethnicity" is only a grace note, Pilate's shrug writ large. Shipwrecks are in vogue among conservative catastrophists these days. In his recent and infinitely worse book *On the Eve of the Millennium*, Conor Cruise O'Brien discusses the condition of the Third World and recites with relish a metaphor he has annexed from Nietzsche:
The hands of survivors cling to the sides of the boat. But the boat has already as many passengers as it can carry. No more survivors can be accommodated, and if they gather and cling on, the boat will sink and all be drowned. The captain orders out the hatchets. The hands of the survivors are severed. The lifeboat and its passengers are saved.
What a relief. Just notice, will you, that this example and instance is urged upon you by someone who feels himself to be well inside the lifeboat. Ask him what he was doing when the ax fell on the towropes, and the "survivors" were pitched into the water in the first place, and he will always arrange to be adequately uninformed. O'Brien, the darling of the neoconservatives, need not go so far as to suggest that the victims brought it all upon themselves. Nor need he inquire why the manufacturers of ships so seldom seem to have included enough lifeboats to go around. And of course, in conditions of panic nobody can be expected to demand the overthrow of the incompetent captain and the election of a new one. The sense of a threat from those less fortunate is all that is required. Like the officers of the Medusa, our favored intellectuals can congratulate themselves on their skill in achieving that necessary detachment.