There has been little enthusiasm for the results of the Annapolis Summit.  Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were bounced into a bland agreement designed to meet the needs of their ‘patron', the United States of America.

All the parties have struggled to get what public relations benefit they could from the start of yet another ‘process’ of earth-shattering ennui for the non-specialist. Secretary of State Rice dealt with Israeli security concerns by appointing retired General Jones, former NATO Supreme Commander in Europe, as Special Middle East Security Envoy. The very need to provide such a comfort factor indicates that something important changed in the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv this week.

Perhaps the most significant development took place a day later. Remember that Ehud Olmert arrived in Washington not so long after a personal tour of many of the other significant players in the international community. 

He will have been in constant touch recently with the political offices of countries, from the UK to Russia, that have always been keen to stress their support for Israel's right to exist. So, anything Olmert said to his people on his return from Annapolis would, very definitely, have been considered in the light of whatever passed for consensus in this same international community.

The message that he brought back to Israel was that failure to reach a settlement with the Palestinians would lead to a ‘South Africa’-type struggle that might result in the end of the Jewish State. Wow!

Truly remarkable stuff. It implicitly positions the right wing, especially Netanyahu and the associated ‘hawk’ element in AIPAC, as little better than ethnicists or racists fighting the logic of history. Olmert has, overnight, conceded some serious moral high ground in a rhetorical move that indicates the political bankruptcy of the mentality that had led to the 2006 Lebanon invasion.

Olmert seems to want to claim a place as a visionary looking to deal with a Palestinian Mandela (a very unlikely role for Abbas). More to the point, you can hear behind this the co-ordinated messages of allies and friends - "this cannot go on, you no longer have the necessary moral authority to command our uncritical support, you are making the problem of insurgency worse, you must find a way to get your people to understand that things have changed ..."

Unfortunately for the allies, even if Olmert is himself so persuaded, the vipers’ nest that is factional Israeli coalition politics means that he cannot speak for his community in the way that, say, F. W. De Klerk could do.

Olmert may have been strengthened by the announcement that Israeli police did not have sufficient evidence to bring a criminal case against him on alleged corruption but he is still under investigation in two other cases. These police investigations do not indicate that he is guilty of anything but they do indicate that he can be undermined domestically on grounds other than his policies. His is a very weak base from which to effect a political revolution.

Even so, what he had to say may have significance far beyond the ability of the man to be the agent of change himself. Olmert’s apparent fear was that liberal and democratic values in the West would lead inevitably to an irresistible call for equal rights within Israeli territory for Palestinians under occupation and that this would remove the dominance of the Jewish majority.

This fear is not going to impress hardliners but you can almost hear Western diplomats developing this argument as the only means of helping Olmert sell something that is otherwise unpalatable. Ghaddafi has argued for a secular republican state for both Arabs and Jews under one law and this is hard to argue against from first democratic and liberal principles - but this is not what Zionism is about. Olmert is trying to tell Zionists that the two-state solution is the only alternative to the Ghaddafi model which would spell the end of the Zionist dream.

Already the Israeli Government (in an air of panic) has sent emissaries to former Soviet Jews in Central Europe to persuade them to locate to Israel. Getting numbers up is buying time and it represents the defensive strategy of all powerful ethnic groups with internal minorities who have higher birth rates and time on their side. But not so many Jews as formerly are going to be keen to abandon liberal democracies in the West for the strife-ridden Middle East.

There is only one way to interpret all this – that the balance of power within the West has moved firmly against traditional defensive Zionism and that ‘reform’ Zionism will have to concede something to buy time to survive - or risk becoming a pariah state within a couple of generations. It means that the ethical terms of trade in international affairs are changing and that merely being democratic in comparison to one's neighbours is no longer good enough - Israel will have to be as democratic as its allies to earn their support.

Olmert claimed (in order to persuade his domestic audience) that the Jewish power base in the US would move against Israel rather than accept discrimination against Palestinians. This, of course, is nonsense or, rather, the Palestinians would have to so completely eschew their liberation theology that no excuse was left for most political Jews to ignore their rights. The Palestinians are just not going to make it that easy for Olmert.

What he also means (but cannot say) is that, in his opinion, if Israel does not adapt to new conditions, the global Jewish community will split into liberal-left and nationalist factions. Jewish power in Western politics depends on its staying united against perceived external threats and yet Jewish politics are, by their nature, intense, factional and intellectual.

The current squabbles within Labour Friends of Israel, the perpetual infighting in the Israeli Cabinet and the factionalism this writer observed in the 1990s within the Labour Finance & Industry Group all indicate something that is highly indicative of (though obviously not exclusive to) Jewish politics - its internal competitiveness.

Only shared threat or shared aspiration can hold together factions that would otherwise be metaphorically tearing each others' throats out. Already there are signs that quarrels are breaking out over policy towards the Peace Process throughout the diaspora. These will intensify as the Peace Process starts to require compromises that go far beyond what security 'hawks' consider acceptable. If liberal Jews and 'hawks' no longer agree on the nature of the threat and on the solution to what threat they do perceive, they will start to turn on each other.

This, in itself, could break the dominance over US political life of AIPAC. This is the ‘feared’ split in the ruling order’ to be found in any revolution. American politicians might struggle free of an uncomfortable relationship. Israel might even start to lose its role as sole natural focus for international Jewry. The cry that to criticise Israel is to be antisemitic may no longer be Holy Writ on Capitol Hill.

This is all about Zionism. The Zionist vision is less than 150 years old and it only became truly dominant in Jewish thinking as a result of the Shoah narrative. Zionists still hate to be reminded that in the 1930s, some strains of it had fascist connotations and that one faction even briefly tried to 'cut a deal' with the Nazis. Certainly, to be Jewish is not necessarily to be Zionist and the conflation of the two only became politically ‘essential’ after 1945.

What was created in 60 years could be undone in half that time so that it is as a thinking Zionist that Olmert is trying to get his people to bow before what he thinks is the inevitable - the maturation of Israel away from an ethnicist nationalist ideology that no longer entirely holds water in the modern world. This is now a matter of buying time to establish Israel as the predominantly Jewish State in a multicultural Middle East.

The biggest effect of Annapolis may thus be surprising one – a political power struggle in Israel that either swings it sharply to the Right or brings into a new relationship with moderate Arabs and the Peace Process.

It is impossible to say now which tendency will win out, but the possible coming split in Jewry is not going to be confined to Israel. It will spread across the Western Jewish political community. Whoever loses in Israel will still try to retain a power base in the diaspora.

These are going to be fascinating times for observers of the politics of an articulate and sophisticated community deeply embedded within several different Western political communities and with narratives of awesome complexity.

Above all, this surprising irruption into political revisionism must be interpreted in the context of growing pressure on Israel from its 'friends' to stop being the problem in a war against a threat that is now far bigger than any theoretical Arab attempt to push it into the sea - that of insurgency.

Until the Palestinian issue is sorted out, the region will not see the system of state co-operation that is necessary to unravel this wider insurgency. Denial of Palestinian rights merely ensures a degree of state support for the insurgents and splits the international community. Since military or security solutions to 'state sponsorship of terror' are no longer on the agenda (though the 'hawks' will disagree), deals have to be struck.

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In our work over the years, we have seen a very different British pattern of Middle Eastern involvement in politics to that of the US. There is no AIPAC as such. Alleged Saudi influence has only recently become nationally controversial. Both main political parties have been split between pro-Israeli and pro-Arab elements and the balance between sympathies has changed over time.

There is also no immediate assumption in British political life that Israel is always right (as was demonstrated by widespread public horror at the 2006 invasion of Lebanon). Quite frankly, peace process issues are of no great interest to most of the political class, let alone the general public, and, while evangelicals tend to be pro-Zionist as they are in the US, the religious role in politics is sharply reduced compared to the United States.

A Little Bit of History (Simplified)

Labour’s Left was traditionally pro-Israel for reasons not dissimilar to the instinctive cultural support for the country in the US. Israel was founded by pioneers with socialist or liberal principles, the Arabs were conservative and right-wing. Israel's leaders were tough, fought their way to settlement and 'made the desert bloom'.

But the generation of the 1940s and 1950s was a generation of working-class activists who loved cowboy movies and considered civilising 'savages' to be part of the process of social progress. The Palestinians were as disregarded as the Amerindians. The horrendous treatment of the Jews by the national socialists trumped every other consideration. Jews had also played a major role in the construction of the socialist critique of capitalism.

The Atlanticist Right within the Labour Party quite separately adopted a pro-Israel position against the Soviets. It developed attitudes similar to those of the US in the Cold War where any WASP anti-semitic sentiment soon got displaced by fear of Bolshevism.

Israel, originally a moderately socialist state vaguely in the Soviet camp, switched sides to the point that it was trading technologies within thirty years with the last remaining racist state, South Africa. Odd world!

A pivotal figure in the Labour commitment to Israel was the highly pro-Israeli figure Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It is now known that his administration played a material part in the provision of technology that enabled Israel to become a nuclear power - an error in British politics that may be second only to signing off on the Balfour Declaration without proper consideration of the effects.

In the 1970s, the Socialist Left adopted a strong pro-Palestinian position, partly as a reflection of a renewed commitment to 'national liberation' in the wake of the evenements in France, partly as a revolt against the concept of the anti-communist West central to establishment thinking and partly as a genuine discovery of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession.

What Happened Next

Given the undermining by the European Left of the cruise missile programme against the Soviet Union and of Libyan engagement in support of the miners' strike, 'Zionist' interests (represented in part by the US and Israeli Embassies in London) took an undoubtedly close interest in recovering ground for the Right of the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s – some say (if you believe the conspiracy theorists) that this led directly to the otherwise inexplicable ‘poodle’ policies of arch-Atlanticist Tony Blair.

But the New Labour programme has always had a very strong Zionist element in its own right. Often internally factionalised by North London and Leeds Jewish competition for status, it nevertheless was coherently Atlanticist and it had been loyal to the Party when other business interests had departed for the Social Democrat Party in the early 1980s. 

To be fair, British-Jewish support for New Labour was never a matter of command-and-control from Tel Aviv Central. It was natural for many British Jews of ashkenazi descent to support a Party that represented Enlightenment principles against a strain of Toryism that could be partly, if privately, anti-semitic up until the early 1980s. Those who wished to appease Hitler did not suddenly disappear in 1940.

These Jewish business groups were intimately engaged in raising funds both for the ‘Project’ (the recapture of the Labour Party by its internal right wing) and its subsequent maintenance of power within the Party.

Meanwhile, the Left crumbled under pressure largely because of its own remarkably inept organisation. It has even lost its strong anti-Islamist, neo-communist, minority to the Atlanticist project in protest at the threat to Enlightenment values that it perceives from the likes of Al-Qaradawi and Al-Qaeda. The war between left-wing Mayor Ken Livingstone and the London Jewish community is, in itself, a paradigm for a fundamental split over values within the metropolitan Left.

Pro-Arab sentiment in the centre-left is still there, but it is divided and increasingly lodged in the Liberal Democrats where it has exceedingly shallow roots and is tempered by an aggressive distaste for conservative dynasts and failures in human rights policy. 

The most active element in the pro-Arab Left, which peaked in the anti-war movement, is now lodged on the fringes of politics within a divided RESPECT movement. It has far more interest in getting out the Bangla Deshi vote in the East End of London than in Palestinian liberation. 

New Labour as State has now developed a fairly cynical and pragmatic commitment to the pro-Western dynasties which is deeply upsetting to its liberal base. This pragmatism now includes support for Israel's right to exist but not its right to behave with impunity. Its position on the Middle East requires alliance with regimes that constantly embarrass it on liberal grounds (as we have seen with the current controversy over the Saudi rape case).

Tory Responses to the Middle East

Americans must understand that the British make a clear distinction between anti-semitism (which has no place in public discourse) and criticism of Israel (which is regarded as legitimate so long as it is not hysterical).  There is none of that automatic conflation of the two attitudes that allows AIPAC to silence any American political criticism of actions taken by the Government in Tel Aviv.

The Tory Party was primarily imperialist and sometimes secretly anti-semitic in the first half of the last century. This anti-semitic element, never dominant or perhaps significant, was steadily reduced to a racist rump between the 1940s and the 1980s. It certainly has no purchase on the modern party. Those few who are minded to dislike Jews just because they are Jews have long since migrated towards the BNP. 

A far greater number of Tories remain Churchillian. Anti-semitism's association with national socialism and Israel's association with Atlanticism have come to make Churchillians fairly stalwart in defending Israel's right to exist. 

Otherwise Israel is largely an irrelevance to Tory thinking. As was the case with many on the postr-war Right in Europe, any anti-semitic aristocratic distaste for Jews as mere traders or as migrants was fully replaced, over time, by an admiration for Israel's democratic nationalism, its participation in the ‘West’ and its crusade against communism.

Jewish-British business figures and intellectuals also played a prominent role around Thatcher, in Government and as senior advisers. Out of that era, a strong right-wing Atlanticist wing has emerged even if it is not now quite so dominant within the Party now as then.  

Such 'Thatcherite' figures represented themselves within a code of British national-interest thinking in which being Jewish was merely a fact to be proud of. It was not necessarily a reason to try and impose Zionist thinking on a Government that was unlikely to be opposed Israel's core security interests. However, sympathy for Israel could and would be mobilised 'in extremis' to place pressure on government and often across party lines.

The more liberal, aristocratic and vaguely European wings of the Tory Party [‘High Tory’], on the other hand, have tended to admire Arabs, especially dynastic Arabs, because of the experience of empire (Nasser notwithstanding). This is the romanticism of the Travellers' Club.

There is something of a revival of ‘High Tory’ sympathy for the Arab interest, especially the interest of the Palestinians and of the conservative Sunni Arabs. The irony of high bourgeois Tories and low life Leftists converging on an analysis of American incompetence and perfidy is one of the delicious ironies of our time - as delicious as mainstream New Labour converging with neo-conservative hawkishness.

The tide began to flow the Arabist way in the wake of the Iraq War, more so after the Lebanon War. 'Arabism in the national interest' was also a convenient stick with which to beat New Labour, without diminishing a natural commitment to the 'idea of the West' or directly attacking Israel in anti-semitic terms.

The High Tories retain a strong commitment to the Atlantic Alliance but they want it to include more traditional ‘spheres of influence'. In this, they are thinking well within the mainstream of the new realist security thinking in Washington by which the West becomes a global 'values concept' rather than just a mere geographical expression surrounding just one ocean.

These Tories have also resisted the implicit republicanism of the wilder shores of the post-Thatcherite Liberal Right. They see the preservation of an ‘empire of conservative values’, rather than the actual extension of liberal values, as the appropriate concern for contemporary policy-makers.

Shifting Sands

The pro-Israeli element in Government has had a near-monopoly on political influence until recently, although conservative Arabs retained the ability to influence matters diplomatically and through the imperfect mechanism of bilateral dynastic links to the House of Windsor.

The Iraq War and the War on Terror changed the game by introducing the need to win 'hearts and minds' but it was the Lebanon invasion of 2006 and the subsequent departure of Blair that most changed the terms of political trade between the factions.

Israel overplayed its hand in Lebanon, which followed the US invasion of Iraq in testing the allies’ patience beyond its natural limits. 'Arabism’ (much disliked by Thatcher and ignored by Blair except as a means to the end of dialogue over ending terrorism) was also well embedded in the FCO and in sections of the security services. The ultimate Arabist triumph had been the Al-Yamammah project which brought much needed jobs in high-value engineering. 

So, there has always been an alternative advisory focus to the 'plucky little Israel' view of the New Labour establishment, while shifts in Saudi policy, including attempts at internal reform in response to 9/11, have constructed a pragmatic British-Arab alliance that now makes some pro-Zionists a little nervous.

Much of the tactic of the US and Israeli foreign offices and of their security operations before and since Suez have been directed at countering this Arabist influence, which is accordingly much more pro-European and even ‘nationalist’ (though this over simplifies a complex situation) than other schools of foreign policy thought. 

Within the West, a US-Israeli nexus and a British-Arab nexus may be seen as two sides of the same collaborative coin or as competitors for strategy, depending on where one sits.  Winning influence over the elected British Government, as counterweight to the 'imperial' tradition within the establishment, has to be a constant concern of both the State Department and Israel for different but compatible reasons.

Although played out periodically in the media, these struggles between Middle Eastern factions pass most of the public by. Whether Israel or the Arab world (and now Iran) get this or that advantage in diplomacy is decided ultimately by bureaucratic and political decision-making rather than by public opinion. The Middle East does not seem to win or lose elections. 

We should certainly not make the mistake, however, of believing that ‘Zionist’ influence has collapsed with the rise of the need to do business with conservative states like Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister are very much part of the New Labour ‘liberal-Western’ and Atlanticist tradition. They merely want to bring Israel into line with current regional realities.

Saudi Arabia has moved further into the Western camp under Abdullah than Israel has moved into the 'peace camp'. Saudi policy is concerned with strengthening the conservative Arab position against radical new arrivals on the bloc like the insurgencies and Iran. The UK simply wants Israel and the Kingdom to join one single Western alliance for peace and free trade in the region. This is a view shared by the more enlightened elements in the State Department and, we believe, the Pentagon.

How Much Will Change If Gordon Falls?

Overall, in British politics, there is no machinery yet in place by which wealthy Jewish interests can pressure candidates for office on the question of Israel (as AIPAC has been described by recent US analysts). There is unlikely to be such a machinery in the future simply because the British system does not work like that.

The Tories are unlikely to behave much differently from New Labour in office. Much, of course, will depend on who might become Foreign Secretary in a Tory Government. Hague (the current Shadow) is a classic realist whereas some figures such as Fox are closer to the ideological make-up of a Congressional Republican.

What we can be assured of is that both camps, Arab and Israeli, with one leg in the UK and one overseas, will continue to try and exert formal and informal influence in ways that are not nearly as co-ordinated within their respective camps as conspiracy theorists like to think.

Inter-Jewish rivalries in British politics and inter-Arab diplomatic rivalries tend to weaken both sides' ability to send any coherent message that is much more than a slogan once it leaves the refined language of diplomacy.

The peculiar informal influence of Zionists within the New Labour Right, largely based on the occasional relatively small-scale funding of the Party's leadership groups by independent business interests, is a historical anomaly, but no more so than US and Soviet dabbling in British politics in the Cold War.

Jewish business money does not buy the Party. The politicians in which it takes an interest are already supportive of or at worst indifferent to Israel. Having somewhat overplayed their hand by backing Blair to the exclusion of all alternatives, and in defiance of public anger against his overseas policies, Jewish interests may continue to retain strong informal influence on both political parties through their energy and funding but they will never do so to American levels and they have limited ability to do more than push at an open door.

The real difference between Zionists and Arabs in British politics is an important one. The Zionists are used to democracy and can work within the system as British Jews, whereas British Arabs are relatively disorganised, mostly talkers rather than doers, and over-reliant on the patronage of High Tories. Their overseas elites still think that you can fix British politics by having ‘prince speak unto prince’.

It is a matter of emphasis. British politics is as much run by small cliques within elites as any other system but the Jewish interest understands the mechanics of such operations far better than their Arab counterparts. Arab interests tend to over-intellectualise, over-theorise, over-emotionalise and under-organise. At the higher level, they fail to understand that leading figures are constrained by customs and rules very different to those that constrain a prince.

As the Saudi Visit to London showed recently, a lot of things can be fixed between leaders as national interest issues without either side caring a great deal about what the media and the activists in the street think, but a failure to meet British cultural norms half-way means that every Arab Visit is an opportunity for a foul press. The Israeli Embassy no doubt plays its small part in generating this negativity but Arab diplomats are deluded if they think that every critical article derives from some Zionist plot. There are deeper cultural issues at work here.

Direct elite-to-elite contacts on British soil, without adequate cultural preparation, create the conditions for the release of negative news from interest groups, political embarrassment to the host, puzzled reactions from those not used to being criticized and a sense that any deal is contingent and not based on anything other than temporarily shared economic and security interests.

While Israelis may be paranoid on occasions, they know that in the UK (albeit to a lesser extent than the US) their narrative is embedded in the prejudices and feelings of important elements within the wider culture. In general, Jews are admired (Israelis less so). There is little prospect of the British political system ever working against core Israeli security concerns and anti-semitism does not have to be legislated against to the degree that we see in Europe because such attitudes would be social and political suicide.

Such deals as those with the Saudis may make Israel nervous that it will be ‘sold out’, increasing its paranoia and reluctance to compromise, but British Jews (like British Arabs who should perhaps be listened to far more by their home country elites) are generally forces for compromise, dialogue and reform.

They do have some positive influence back home, albeit that they are likely to be seen as ‘wimps’ by the Netanyahu element and within AIPAC (as Arab reformers can be seen as irrelevant talkers by hardline Baathists and dynasts alike). So the influence is not just one way ... British soft power is happily often targeted at getting British Jews and British Arabs sending compromise or reform signals back to Tel Aviv, Damascus and Ramallah.

The British National Interest

The question for British people who are not of Middle Eastern or Jewish descent is whether money or connections (whether between dynasts or between co-religionists) is exerting undue influence at the expense of the indigenous public interest.

There have been times when not only these interests but the Cold War powers have exerted such undue influence. The fault actually lies with the naivete and lack of vigilance of the British people, press and political class. The real 'scandal' is how particular domestic interests can take money and influence from marginal elements and then use them against their internal enemies. It is not the conduct of British Arabs and British Jews that should be monitored as much as that of cash-hungry British politicians of all parties. 

Sleaze scandals in both parties in the last decade have often had implicit Middle Eastern policy elements that have proved immensely hard to pin down. Yet it is the politicians who lack a moral base far more than anyone who has sought to influence them. 

What often happened in the past was that X or Y needed relatively small sums to sustain a short, sharp campaign against rivals inside the Party or to sustain a credible office function and someone somewhere (always a British citizen) was available with a bit of bunce, never requiring anything in exchange - apparently.  And it is true, nothing is ever asked for ... and no piece of paper would suggest otherwise ...

This informal system is quietly dying off under increasing media scrutiny but the issue (we believe) is less the generosity of the donors and more how political parties and the political system are run in such a ramshackle way that these funds are ever required in the first place.

There are also honest questions to be asked about whether a Briton can properly have an allegiance to the interests of another sovereign territory. There are even deeper questions about what the interests of a sovereign territory are and who should arbitrate on those interests.

The ultimate test is always the question of what is treachery and what is a traitor. Although clear in wartime, questions about divided loyalties between those who live in a territory, become its beneficiaries and then may lobby for the interests of their old homeland or for a homeland’s special interest have been allowed to float in the air without a clear resolution. Perhaps this conspiracy of silence has had nothing to do with the Middle East per se but shows a greater fear of opening up a can of worms related to South Asia.

The UK is no different from the US in seeing various attempts to manipulate its national interest by Middle Eastern and other factions. However, both main Middle Eastern factions should be seen through a different prism in a British context – through different visions of precisely where Israel fits within the West and the relative regard to be given to the security of the Atlantic sea lanes or to the management of Continental Europe, and to ideological issues surrounding the advancement of liberalism and the ‘national interest’.

Israel has some powerful emotional attachments from within important parts of British culture (enough to secure its basic position as a legitimate State in most British eyes), but mainstream policymakers are far more interested in its utility as forward base in preserving or undermining Western liberal values and British national interests than in its rights in other respects.

Its current difficulties within the UK, such as they are, arise entirely from its conduct in undermining those core values and interests because of its worsening treatment of Palestinians and its disastrous incursion into Lebanon. Its influence in the UK will decline or rise to the degree that it addresses the question of Palestine.

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TPPR was published on the business utility of blogs in the Letters Column of the Financial Times on 16 November. This letter was then picked up by Freelance News. Other commentary on the new media that may be of interest can be found at:

http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/10/21/working-the-facebook-system.html
http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/9/10/second-lifes-consequences.html
http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/11/2/on-sexual-honesty-web-20.html

It strikes us that there are two separate sets of project for analysts who want to go beyond exploring the technically possible and assess what is going to be commercially, socially and politically effective. It is their effectiveness and not their technical possibilities that will dictate where business opportunities within the new technologies will lie.

The first set of projects is the identification of micro-uses of web 2.0 that will enable current needs to be met and which will segment markets into niches with sufficient critical mass to hold real capital value.

The second analytical process (a very different set) is to predict how the availability of new tools will change how society is structured - and so the nature of individual and social needs and wants. 

This is the long term question about what new markets will arise - and how traditional businesses will need to adapt in the longer term. Above all, what sort of 'creative destruction' will we witness in the next cycle? 

Commentators often confuse the two sets of analysis but quick fix problem solutions within this cycle may not be enough for longevity of enterprise in the decades to come.

Our instinct is that we are about to shift radically away from 'market services' to the provision of 'public services' (much as we shifted from 'manufacturing' to 'market services' and from primary production to manufacturing production in previous long cycles). 

Raw materials are still required and they need to be made into things but the proportion of the economy devoted to these tasks has declined relatively in favour of services. Just as types of manufacturing displaced each other and then were displaced by services, so types of service will displace each other in the next cycle.

As for social change, our assumption is that the new technologies permit mass and individual wants (mostly, in fact, emotional needs and not invariably benign) to be satisfied far more easily and with diminishing customary and community constraints. 

The new technologies will accentuate emotion and cheapen reason just as, in a previous cultural cycle, reason was accentuated over faith by the technology of print. This is going to be a world where wants will over-master needs or will become confused or identified with needs. But a world where business no longer creates needs and wants as in the consumer era proper but has to meet demands that may be cultural, social and political as much as economic.

The political logic is for the public, as it becomes more demanding, to prefer 'guided democracy' that delivers results in preference to any form of politics that presents itself as democratic and yet rules incompetently or makes claims to some abstract legitimacy that no longer stands scrutiny except on a high emotional level.

It is not political authoritarianism but traditional liberal democracy that will be most challenged by a technology base that favours populism, quietism and anarchy in equal measure. Political skills are likely to be defined as effective to the degree to which they balance emotional appeal with actual service delivery. 

But all this is speculation ... and only the beginning of the journey.

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