It goes something like this:
Once upon a time there was a species who, due to a particular confluence of environmental forces, learned to travel over short distances on their hind legs. This allowed them to hunt different prey in a different way and necessitated they develop more complex hunting skills. They developed the first ever repertoire of skill sets; using a range of different methods to accomplish desired outcomes, unlike most species who have only a single skill set which they nuance to suit their environment.
This (technically infinite) self adaptability and their physical adaptation to fully erect bi-pedal movement allowed the species to migrate in a non cyclical manor, unlike all other species. At this point all the land masses were fused and they explored, driven by a desire to find an environment which would allow long term static occupation. Their great migration was, ironically, motivated by a desire to stay still.
The species managed to find spots all over the landmass which allowed them to satisfy all of their daily needs and they settled. During this period the landmass separated into four major continental masses and a plethora of islands. The branches of the species, thus isolated, began to evolve along diverse lines.
Long term occupation necessitated the development of other skills. The settled peoples became aware of seasons for the first time and developed more and more sophisticated ways of making the environment continuously habitable. They began to husband crops and animals; controlling their environment rather than searching for naturally occurring sustenance. They had to produce complex solutions to complex problems in order to sustain a successful, sedentary, year round existence; they stored and preserved food, and after a long troglodytic (or cave dwelling) period they built dwellings and developed civic systems in order to allow for labour specialization.
These static communities were threatened by nomadic groups still incapable of sustained agricultural production who would take their stored resources, often in mounted raids. So they fortified their settlements, selected a group to train themselves as defenders and the strongest (or most tactically minded) became leaders, then, as the communities became more organized and militant and began to incorporate with other villages into larger city states, they became warlord-kings. For quite some time these city states rose and fell, still subject to the limits of their environment-control technology, political autonomy and geographical resources.
Individuals rose up who sought to forcefully incorporate as many city-states as possible into super-states or empires. Of particular note were the emperor Chin who created the Chinese empire, Ivan (the terrible) who consolidated Eastern Europe, The Roman Caesars, The Asian Moguls and the European kings and queens. Amongst the most significant of these was Henry the eighth of England. His enclosures of common lands act led to the corporate division of arable land and the growth of urban living. Cities rather than villages became the predominant population centers and a property based legal system emerged, as did a sense of social class. All of these factors would lead, ultimately, to the industrial revolution when a contractually disenfranchised rural working class and a socially aware cadre of urban philosopher/scientists together revolutionized the nature of material production with the intention of freeing the world from scarcity and social injustice. This technology spread to England’s trade partners and ultimately allowed those who possessed it to explore, map, colonize and control most of the world.
And thus it stood in 1914. These large, European originated trade-based power blocks stood together, shoulder to shoulder across the world. They had signed agreements and charters and treaties with one another, buying temporary quiet at the price of long term stability. Two major, associated empire groups had developed which intersected on the political border lands of Bulgaria and Serbia. And in 1914 (when Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand a nominal representative of one power bloc was assassinated on this borderland) the system split into two warring halves. The following Great War continued, with a cold war period, until 1945 when German militarism withered under the weight of it’s own monomaniacal belligerence and America dropped a nuclear bomb on it’s Japanese opponents. The empire system had shred itself and a nation-state based system emerged, with smaller often culturally, religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous nations, each defined by its military capacity, geographical disposition (or at the behest of their former empire lords) and organized around whatever point of apparent consensus its leading caste could conjure up.
This left the two largest power centers (America and Russia) intact. Power became bi-polar with one major empire (China) seceding from world power disputes altogether and the rest cowed by the nuclear capacity of the two major states. These covertly antagonistic nation states attempted to formulate a morally-based political community but were undermined by the fatalistic war mentality of the two major powers and by their own reluctance to erode internal sovereignty. Throughout this Cold War period the two power centers defined each other (and, by proxy, everyone else) ideologically and geographically but the Russian power bloc was quietly deteriorating due to internal political contradictions and a comparative poverty of recourses.
In 1989 the Russian soviet system finally collapsed. The bipolar cold war system became a uni-polar system. All nations understood that the American system of democratic capitalism was the only state model available and proceeded to negotiate accordingly. They used whatever particular material advantages and ersatz cultural postures they could muster to bargain for their place in the settling new order. Their citizens, their religions, their materials and their military became bargaining chips in a global system of top trumps, with each nation attempting to secure as large a share as they can of the global market while striking ideological poses in order to convince their citizens and the media driven world community that they are motivated by transcendent (if often bizarre) motives rather than by greed and fear.
That’s it. Any questions?
