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Review

The main storyline is that the Western nations and Japan will continue to grow, possibly lifting Eastern Europe into the orbit of prosperity "through the the full force of Western generosity", while the South will continue to languish.

Predicts an increasing distance between the privileged North and the marginalized nations of Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia, especially India and China. Conflicts arise as the exploited periphery seeks greater participation in the wealth of the North. In the increasingly violent world, "Lebanons may multiply." The big losers will be the inhabitants of the periphery.

Europe will emerge stronger, and together with Japan, overcome the US as world leader.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of competing ideologies, the desires of the world are more aligned, and with everyone seeking the same things, violence would increase.

As usual, most of the predictions have turned out wrong, most spectacularly with respect to China, but also about Europe and Japan, which do not seem to be in any position to challenge the US for world dominance. That China may emerge as a possible superpower could not be dreamt of in the cafes of Paris two decades ago. Reading it in 2013, that Europeans are suggesting that Europe will dominate, seems quite cliched.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the writing is elegant: 
	In restless despair, the hopeless masses of the periphery will
	witness the spectacle of another hemisphere's wealth. p. 14

Excerpts

In the next century, Japan and Europe may supplant the United
States as the chief superpowers wrangling for global economic
supremacy. Only a radical transformation of American society can
forestall this development and its political consequences.

the marginalization and misery of 3 billion men,
women, and children in Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia,
especially India and China, hangs heavily over the promise of
sustained prosperity and freedom in the privileged North. While the
green revolution has managed to contain starvation in most of
Asia and famine is now only a localized, if dreadful, scourge in
pockets of Latin America and Africa, the return of growth to the
North will further widen the vast gulf between the haves and the
have-nots.

Octavio Paz has said that "while primitive civilizations lasted
for millennia, modern civilizations, which idolize change,
explode within two or three centuries." Czeslaw Milosz worries
that the nihilistic indifference resulting from the constant flux of
change has left Western civilization running an exhausting race
"between disintegration and creativity . . . hardly surviving from
decade to decade."

Violence

[A good bit of the first section deals with violence: "we have never escaped
from the necessity to negotiate with violence."]

Ever since the first sedentary social forms—perhaps 10,000 years before our
time— there have been three ways to control violence: the religious, the
military, and the economic. The first mediates man's relations with nature
and the fact of death, the second the relationships between social forms, and
the third the relationships within each social form.  These three ways of
controlling violence define an order, corresponding to a certain type of
social form, or social structure.

These orders, which can also be called orders of the sacred, of force, and of
money, succeed each other, feeding on the one that preceded it. 20-21

Why the South will fail

China is engulfed in a long period of crisis and retreat as a
result of the Tiananmen tragedy and the subsequent decision to
pursue economic reform without political revision. This strategy
will ultimately fail.

If a miracle were to occur and [India, China and the Middle East, each with a
billion people], were to be fully integrated into the global economy and
market, all strategic assumptions underpinning my prognostications would be
overturned. That miracle is most unlikely.

The population of Nigeria, which doubles every twenty-two years, will equal
today's world population in 140 years.

By 2050, the number of people of working age in the world will have
tripled. More than half of the global population will then be urban, as
compared to one third today.

[Conflict over the environment:] Why should China or India, say, go without
refrigerators so that affluent white-skinned Northerners won't get melanoma?

In a world turned upside down by nomadism, the need for a scapegoat will
reappear. A half century after the end of the Second World War, the specter
of racism again haunts a forgetful planet. The new racism will have many
faces: it reveals itself in the opposition between Islam and Christianity,
and it can already be seen in the widespread hostility to dark-skinned
immigrants who search for home and hearth in the inhospitable North. If the
people of power in the emerging spheres of prosperity knew how to think in
the long term, they would watch carefully the peripheries at their doors.

[A decade before 9/11 (2001), the book hardly discusses terrorism.]

Product-driven economic growth

[Predicts an uncertain growth with services, seeking a product economy.
Under a service regime such as too many banks, "the number of jobs [grow],
but the health of the economy worsens" p.93] 

For example, consider the greatest innovation of marine technology of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the flyboat, an innovation that was
largely responsible for Amsterdam's ascension to the center of the world
economy in those years.

First developed around 1590, the flyboat was cheaper to construct than
previous ships of similar purpose.  According to K. H. D. Haley's
authoritative The Dutch in the Seventeenth Century, the Dutch were able to
accomplish this feat because of "relatively large-scale and standardized
production, with the aid of labor-saving machinery—cranes for handling heavy
timber, and, most important, wind-driven sawmills." The flyboat needed a
smaller crew and was much more economical to run. Haley writes: "A Dutch ship
of 200 tons might therefore need only ten men, while an English ship of the
same size might carry as many as thirty. If it is true, in addition, that
wages were lower and provisioning cheaper, the combined effect was to allow
the Dutch to offer freight rates a third to a half lower than those, for
instance, of their English competitors in the seventeenth century."

author bio

Jacques Attali was born in Algiers in 1943. A novelist, essayist, and writer,
he has been special adviser to President Francois Mitterrand since 1981. A
former professor of economics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, Attali is
currendy president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in
London.