what a century.

correct me if I have missed anything, but my, what a time we are living in.

princess di dying. (less mouth to feed..not a royalist)
world trade centre
concorde crash
berlin wall
E.U. integration

for starters..

to come...dominance of china and india as economic force....russia if they get their act together..

decline and fall of G.B., no longer great, just cool,)ie cheap crass pop, celibrity culture, obsessed with trivial wealth and gossip) no national identity now. Political correctness die soon.....

ad lib....

 

Wasn't the Berlin Wall last century, around 1990? And I would say that the EU is a long way from integration, because major nation states will not surrender sovereignty to a central government, unless something extraordinary happens - the French and Germans may make European noises, but as soon as their national interests are threatened, they remember who elects them and Europe gets kicked into touch.

It's interesting to look at the last century, at 1904. Everything was apparently nicely settled, with only a slight hint of the catastrophe to follow 10 years later. The British and French, having got over the Fashola incident and the Boer War, had signed the Entente Cordiale, Wilhelm II of Germany was just starting the naval buildup that was to lead to the first ever arms race (the British Government talked of "the battleship gap" the way the Reagan Administration talked of "the missile gap"). The Schlieffen Plan (the German plan to knock France out of a war by invading through Belgium) was already 10 years old... Czarist Russia was locked in absolutism, just a year away from the disastrous war with Japan, which led to the sinking of the entire Russian fleet at Tsushima. Turkey, "the sick man of Europe" continued to retreat from the Balkans, and the fatal takeover of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary was still 3 years away.

The rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. Nearly all land in England was owned by the gentry, and they and the rising middle class were having a very nice time, thank you, which is more than could be said for the underclass. Britannia ruled the waves (with just the abovementioned and still future disturbance from Germany) and one-quarter of the globe was red.

All the Europeans wilfully ignored the fact that there had arisen on the far side of the Atlantic a country that was in fact a rival continent and that was, even then, outproducing them all put together in the things that counted in those days (coal, steel). And the fact that a couple of clever bike mechanics from Dayton, Ohio had just flown.

Things have changed a lot in that 100 years. Barring miracles, I won't be around in 2104, but I'm sure that, as unexpected surprises awaited people in 1904, we'll have just as many.