As mankind approaches an indelible landmark, Quentin Peel takes stock of the globalisation trend and assesses the challenges ahead

If there had not been a millennium bug, we would have had to invent it. The fear that millions of computers and their programmes would grind to a standstill on January 1 2000, has brought the date home to peoples around the world in a far more effective way than any proselytising from the pulpit.

It also fits into the category of those essentially unprovable fears that marked the last millennium in the Christian calendar, in the year 1000: it is the perfect modern superstition.

The fact that computer users far beyond Christendom have had to check their programmes for the Y2K problem - the failure to recognise that the two-digit date 00 is 2000, not 1900 - is also a graphic illustration of how secular and globalised the world has become.

The calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 for the European Christian world has become universal, thanks to computerisation.

It may be an artificially created moment, but it still provides a good time to take stock, to reflect seriously on what has gone before, and look forward to the greatest challenges ahead.

Computerisation is not all that has changed the world. The end of the 20th century will be seen as a watershed, regardless of the date.

It has brought the end of the Cold War, that sterile ideological confrontation that provided a certain stability to international relations for the last 50 years. It seems to have resolved (we can't be quite sure, yet) the century-long conflict between liberal capitalism and state-controlled socialism, and seen the triumph of democratic values, and the cult of the individual.

The whole century has seen a dramatic process, through two devastating world wars, of power passing from the European continent to America. European empires have crumbled, and the American empire is coming into its own.

The era of military colonisation has passed. But the gap between the rich and poor of the world remains as wide as ever, with the poor often as powerless in their political independence as they were in subjugation to a foreign conqueror.

Debt and disease have become the new instruments of enslavement, in spite of the abolition of slavery in all but a few corners of the globe.

European colonisation, launched by the great explorers from Spain and Portugal, Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, has been replaced by an even more effective cultural colonisation. The attitudes and values of the United States, rooted in European culture but now with an identity of their own, are becoming well-nigh universal.

The question for the 21st century is how long that American domination will last, and how soon it may be threatened by new cultural challenges, most likely from Asia.

The extraordinary technological leap into a new age, with the advent of the internet to complement television as a universal medium, underpinned by ever swifter physical travel around the world, has reinforced the primacy of American perceptions and attitudes.

The "global village" first conceived by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s has become a reality for many millions more people, exposed to CNN broadcasts, MTV and America On Line.

Globalisation has enabled a culture stemming from Christianity, born in the Middle East but nurtured in Europe, to become the predominant influence, far beyond the reach of Christian teaching.

It won't last, if history has anything to teach us. Much of the Christian world is plagued by self-doubt, and infected by secularism. Islam is proving to many a more vital and attractive religion.

"Asian values", which place social obedience and responsibility above individual rights, represent a powerful contrary force.

On the other hand, the combination of Christian values, scientific advance, democracy and the respect for individual human rights has produced in western Europe and the US an era of broad-based prosperity and well-being.

The post-second world war generation in the western industrialised world has known an extraordinary combination of peace, material wealth, steadily improving health and greater longevity. Why should it not last, and gradually extend to the rest of the globe?

Never before have we known so much about the world around us, about the laws of physics and of nature, about the most obscure peoples in forgotten corners of the globe, what they believe in and how they eke out their existence.

Never before have we been able to communicate so easily with each other, regardless of distance, and travel around the world in hours, not days or weeks or even years.

Never before have borders meant so little, and never has one language been so universally understood. The nation state is ever less relevant, and supranational entities - bureaucracies, broadcasters, businesses, banks - set the international agenda.

Never before have secrets been so difficult to keep, as satellites scour the airwaves and the fields, listening and watching, quite capable of monitoring the minutiae of human life.

And yet in spite of our wealth of knowledge, there are still bloody wars being fought over obscure historical grievances, or differences of ethnicity and religion, in every continent.

Today they are more likely to be civil wars than conflicts between nation states. That much international peacemaking institutions have achieved. Yet those civil wars may prove more intractable to resolve.

The end of the Cold War has seen an explosion of ethnic conflicts kept suppressed since the second world war.

Even as travel and technology break down borders, national identity and tribal loyalties have reasserted themselves.

One cause was the collapse of the old empires, and the resulting power vacuums: not just that of Russia in the last decade, after its life was artificially extended by Stalin for 70 years, but the earlier dissolution of the neighbouring Ottoman and Habsburg realms.

Even the relatively peaceful liberation of the British empire could not prevent the confrontation between India and Pakistan.

Africa's continuing wars owe much to the arbitrary frontiers of the colonial era, cutting across tribal boundaries, and forcing different ethnic and religious groups into cohabitation.

anaging human diversity remains one of the greatest challenges ahead, says Chief Emeka Anyaoku, retiring secretary-general of the Commonwealth. It is not just a challenge of resolving conflicts between long-settled peoples in their own lands, but also of defusing racial hostility towards new immigrant minorities moving from the poor developing countries of the south to the wealthy industrialised nations of the north.

Indeed, the second great source of tension will be that north-south divide, which has if anything got wider even as the world as a whole has become more prosperous. The combination of poverty and ever increasing information flows may prove to be an explosive mixture. The better educated in regions such as the Indian sub-continent and north Africa will be tempted to migrate in increasing numbers to Europe and the US. The only way to stem those flows is to bring economic development to the south.

The third great challenge will be to ensure that the combination of advancing technology, material consumption and population do not leave the world environmentally uninhabitable.

The challenge for the next millennium will be to ensure that the advances of science and technology, of medicine, and human knowledge, do not divide and eventually impoverish the world.

If all the technological advances are concentrated in comfortable, rich nations, the world is likely to become a less stable place, not a more peaceful and prosperous world. Globalisation has to be put to the service of all mankind.

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