Separate,Unequal,but More Autonomous: Technology,Equity and World Order in the Millennial Transition *

Abstract

On the threshold of the millennial transition of the next 20–40 years, the human community is confronted with four alliterative crises which will reach a crescendo in the 1980s: energy, environment, employment, and equity. Breakdowns in capital- and energy-intensive systems are increasingly likely in the industrially advanced countries of the North and in the so-called modern sectors of Third World economies. As pressure on non-renewable resources and the environment grows, more and more effort is being made through organized R&D in the North to find technological solutions or fixes to these problems. The revolutionary advances occurring in micro-electronics and biotechnology can have dramatic impact on life-styles in the North and South, and on the global political economy. The key issues of the millennial transition, however, will not be technological but economic and political, revolving around the question of control over these technological innovations. Greater economic, political and technological integration of the world will draw the periphery nations of the Third World more tightly into a web of continuing dependence; and therefore selective disengagement of the South from the North emerges as a ‘lesser evil’ transitional strategy, while the South seeks to strengthen its own local problem-solving skills to grapple with the alliterative crises of the 1980s. In this effort, the South must use more extensively its own existing survival technology - indigenously based knowledge and skills which most people in the Third World live by today - in judicious combination with new advanced technologies from the North, if it can exercise reasonable control over the acquisition and utilization of those technologies.