by Giuseppe Cucchi

New risks for the global order … but which global order?

If an element has characterised the twenty- ve years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact – and thus the end of the bipolar balance – it is the progressive and seemingly uninterrupted disintegration, in theory and in practice, of all that had managed to give the post-1945 world at least a semblance of order and precarious security.

A development that has proved to be in stark contrast with the hopes and dreams of the late 1980s. The triumph of liberal democracy and free markets has been apparent and short-lived and has not at all heralded the “End of History” that Francis Fukuyama foresaw. Even the so-called “peace dividend”, from which the countries emerging from the Cold War and its MAD (mutually assured destruction) equilibrium should have bene  ed, turned out to be much lower than had been hoped.

In this sense, the only fundamental change that has been actually good for the West is the elimination of mass conscription, a practice that had already become obsolete and poorly tolerated and that the new conditions rendered completely useless. However, over the medium term, the shift toward military structures composed exclusively of career personnel ended up not only o se ing any savings that had been achieved in other areas, but also created an increasingly disharmonious relationship between expenditures for personnel, for materials and for the implementation of each defense task. Moreover, this imbalance has tended to grow so much over the years that so far it has been absolutely impossible to reduce or at least contain it.

It is important to remember that a few isolated voices did speak out immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall to caution that the triumph of one system over the other was not at all a de nitive end in itself, however good liberal democracy might be and as bad as communism had been revealed to be. None of these voices was louder and carried more moral and political prestige that of the Holy Father John Paul II. In one of his encyclicals at the time he reiterated, with great realism, that even our liberalism and our market economy were anything but free of serious defects, which sooner or later were destined to come to a head.

AN UNGENEROUS PEACE

The peace between East and West that followed the end of the Cold War was also a ected by the fact that the winner appeared to have decided from the outset to set the terms unilaterally, without listening to the voice of the defeated side1. With the bene ts of hindsight, this lack of generosity bordered on stupidity. Recent history (but maybe history tout court) shows that, in fact, the only peaces that are destined to be stable and last are the ones that do not leave behind indelible grievances.

Besides this, the two camps showed a complete lack of strategic vision and intent, as well as the inability to put the real common problem on the table for discussion. In a certain sense, the overall framework continued to be dominated by mutual apprehensions and to this day the deep fears that inhabit the two camps remain unexpressed.

The West never proposed to the USSR, and later to Russia, to jointly evaluate what could be done to curb the irrational fear of its eventual o ensive return, to bring back under its dominance all that had been lost in Central and Eastern Europe. And yet this, far from being a secondary concern, is so fundamental and deeply-rooted that still today it dominates the foreign policy of many northeastern Europe countries. At the same time it also a ected the eastward development and orientation of the Atlantic Alliance, producing occasionally poisoned fruits like the clashes in Georgia a few years ago and the still-ongoing Ukrainian situation.

The Russian side, on the other hand, failed to communicate its fear of aggression from the West that has been obsessing Moscow for at least four centuries. The scars of Napoleon and Hitler, no less than the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, had led the Soviets to justify their nearly half-Century occupation of half of Europe with the need to hide behind a bu er that would have cushioned an a ack, were this to materialise.

Instead there was only, and solely on an informal basis, an exchange of ideas on the possibility that NATO might expand eastward and eventually include Russia. It is not surprising that this did not produce any o cial results, although Moscow continues to cite it as a disregarded promise.

So, although the desire for “a free, democratic and prosperous Russia” was continually proclaimed, nothing was done to help Moscow choose the right path. Instead, it was abandoned to face a period of humiliation and internal convulsions that lasted more than a decade and from which the country and its leaders emerged devoid of any faith in the actual good intentions of the West.

ATTEMPTS AT RECONSTRUCTION AND NEW PROBLEMS

Our excuse, and especially the excuse of Europe, is that the 1990s were a very di cult decade. On one hand, it was indeed marked by the last coherent a empts to confer a new and innovative shape to the world order; on the other hand, there were constant and repeated e orts to contain new tensions linked to the disappearance of the control network with which the bipolar order had trapped the world for a long time.

It was in those years that Bush Sr. tried to establish a “new world order” that assigned to the United Nations the monopoly of legitimising any action involving the use of force. Coalitions of willing states (the so-called “coalitions of the willing”), obviously led by the United States, would act as the armed branch of the new global system. This e ort took hold and seemed to be successful just for the duration of the  rst Gulf War, only to fail in the face of subsequent di culties. For all actors of the international scene, however, its only legacy remained the idea that an initial referral to a United Nations judgment should become a constant to be respected in any case.

The experiences that followed showed quite clearly how those who wanted to take advantage of their freedom from previous contraints in order to improve or change their own situation were many more than those to whom the most urgent need appeared to be establishing a new order, and to do this as soon as possible. Both old and new states took the lead, cultivating dreams of expansion and power that before had seemed forbidden. There certainly was no lack of casus belli, nor did the old repertoire fail to provide excuses and ethnic, religious, cultural and historical ghosts that could be exhumed from the dusty bo oms of closets.

In was in such a context that we were unable to prevent the explosion of Yugoslavia, and seven very bloody years passed before new sovereign states were able to emerge from her ashes. Yet much of the Balkans remained an area under “probation” and the e orts of paci cation still did not seem to have been completely and de nitively achieved. A situation that, unfortunately, even today does not yet appear to be completely resolved.

At the same time, the US  rst came to realise with surprise that, even during the period of greatest contrast, Russia had been more of a partner on the international scene than an adversary. For almost 50 years, they together controlled the force that was necessary to dominate the world, which now, with the disappearance of Moscow from the arena, Washington and its traditional allies were no longer able to exercise alone.

To this was added the fact that the American leadership, unchallenged in the bipolar period, was now being challenged by new emerging giants. In a horizon that until then had seemed far away, but which the beginning of globalisation suddenly brought very close, loomed the great shadow of China. The economy of the Asian giant, among other things, was growing at a double-digit pace that the West had long forgo en.

A few years later the world began to talk about the BRICs, the large emerging countries of various continents that seemed to possess all of the characteristics necessary to transform themselves into reference powers over time. Within the very heart of the West, the constant expansion of the European Union was beginning to be viewed with alarm by the US. In fact, Brussels was pursuing a process of enlargement and deepening, which Washington could not o cially oppose without undermining established friendships based on sharing of almost all values. The unmentioned fear, however, was that European growth could one day, even if not in the short run, force the Americans to deal with a second competitor for world leadership.

Luckily for the US, Europe itself was not able to keep up the pace that would have allowed the EU to further expand, while at the same time deepening ties between the Member States – two very di cult outcomes to pursue simultaneously. Other errors were later made in Europe when it moved to the common currency, as this allowed to happen just what the monetary union could and sought to avoid, namely the creation of a German Europe, rather than a European Germany. Subsequently the citizens and the government of Germany discovered with pleasure that the economic rules that had been set up were all operating in their favour, creating a situation in which, against all logic, the rich continued to take from the poor. This led Berlin to refuse to accept any real change and to the consequent gradual transformation of the Union into a conservative bureaucratic machine that was no longer capable of exercising any a raction for the individual European citizen. This was a mistake and the beginning of a process, which we have already paid dearly for with Brexit and that we risk having to continue to pay for with the advance of populist movements foreseen for the near future.

All of this occurred against a background that appeared to be constantly troublesome and where problems were piling up on problems and crises followed one another.

THE ERA OF CHANGE

Painfully, we ended up realising that we found ourselves in the eye of a real cyclone, that is to say in the middle of a transformation that is destined to last for a long time and to be unexpectedly deep. Among other things, it seemed destined one day to leave behind a world that is very di erent from what we remember and probably also from that which re ects our aspirations. However, this did not automatically give us the ability to apply new analytical rules and to accept previously untried schemes. We were, and still are, in a period in which the inadequacy of the old paradigm has been recognised, but without the capacity to create a new one yet.

For a brief time we also deceived ourselves with the illusion that globalisation, which was fast gaining momentum, could be a sort of universal panacea capable of coping with each and every problem. A hope that was immediately contradicted by the facts, when we realised how globalisation was very quick in providing a global dimension to needs and expectations, but was not able to cope with the new requirements and provide acceptable responses to new problems with the same speed.

Thus the advent of the third millennium found us struggling with di culties of which, like it or not, we were still not able to measure the precise extent.

The world’s population continute to grow at an impressive pace, and because of this, many countries ended up approaching the borderline conditions in which, in the words of an FAO Secretary-General, “There are no other alternatives: either one rebels, or emigrates, or dies”.

At the same time, the rising expectations generated by increased opportunities for communication linked to the advance of globalisation, combined with a transportation network that e ectively covered the entire world, began to trigger a phenomenon of “communicating vessels” that increased the human  ows from less favoured areas toward those that are economically more prosperous.

Everything seemed to move clearly in the direction of a progressive levelling that would generate an unprecedented mixing of peoples, cultures, skin colours and religions. And which we didn’t seem to be in a position to handle, at least for the time being.

One could say that we were facing a period, though at a decisively broader scale, that had characteristics that were very similar to the those that preceded the collapse of the Roman Empire, as successive waves of barbarians from the east came one after another. The speed that globalisation had introduced to all aspects of our lives made it useless to hope that there was enough time to allow global wealth to grow to the point that permi ed us to simultaneously deal with all of the necessities. In such a context, the tendency for the economy to get out of hand intensi ed. Thus we found ourselves in the midst of a long- lasting economic crisis to which the United States was able to react with an e ectiveness that the EU is still struggling to achieve today.

RELIGIOUS CRISES AND TERRORISM

Nor were the forgo en masses any longer willing to be forgo en in this context. In particular, the Arab world – that area to the South which Europe had for a long time neglected in order to devote all of its resources and energies to the East – began to explode under the simultaneous pressure of insu cient resources, overpopulation, lack of prospects for young people. A mixture which in itself was already explosive, but which the extremist religious movements, especially those originating from the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam sponsored more or less openly by Riyadh, provided a powerful trigger.

Thus at the beginning of the new millennium,  rst the United States, then all of the Western world, had to cope with another problem, which seemed to be new but actually has deep roots, as is now clearly being demonstrated by the di culties that have been encountered in eradicating evil. This involved being able to respond to terrorist movements and opinions that, rather than addressing the problem of adapting a seventh-century religion to the realities of the third millennium, actually chose to impose – where necessary by force – the solution of adapting the world of the third millennium to the seventh- century religion.

Furthermore, the crisis of the Islamic religion, centered on its absolute lack of  exibility, was something that it shared with all other religions, all infected by the same defect, albeit with di erent severity. Otherwise it would not be possible to explain what is happening in the Catholic Church, which for the  rst time in its history needs two Popes, one of whom is nearly a revolutionary, in order to respond to the need for renewal that is strongly felt by all of the faithful. Or in the Orthodox Churches, where perpetually zealous national segments of the same religion have begun to engage in dialogue with each other. Or in some of the Protestant sects, which have begun a missionary conquest of Black Africa with an intensity and collective fervour that has not been seen for some time.

Further complicating the situation is the manner in which the faiths, which at one time each had their own territory where the majority remained dominant when not excluding the other, are now also subject to and part of the new mixing of di erent populations in the same area where they need to reach at least a modus vivendi.

How di cult this can be might be seen when considering the e orts that need to be made in Europe in order to integrate into a single whole the Christians, for whom sovereignty belongs to the people (that is thus the only subject authorised to draw up laws by means of delegated bodies) and the Muslims, for whom only God can make laws. How di cult and dangerous this can be was shown by the con icts in the Balkan area in the 1990s. Although these originally had ethnic and political causes, they in fact also quickly assumed a religious colouration, which, at least in the case of Bosnia, came to be dominant. Or, even worse, it also characterised the manner in which the Sunni extremists of ISIS quickly started to eradicate the presence of other faiths in the controlled territories in the Middle East.

Yet also in the case of Islamic extremist movements, we have deceived ourselves, and perhaps still continue to do so, that they could be contained through the use of military force.

Moreover, as pointed out by President Obama in a speech to the cadets at West Point in 2014 “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail”. And for sure, the security and defence sector still remains the one in which the West, and particularly the United States, enjoys a considerable advantage over the rest of the world.

Washington and some of its allies thus engaged in three wars,  rst in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and later in Libya, only to  nd out that once the con ict had come to a victorious end, they absolutely lacked the means to win the peace. From the wars there arose an unstable situation in Afghanistan, where NATO has bled almost needlessly for a decade. Iraq, where sectarian divisions weigh much more than common sense, has also become the cultural broth that generated the Caliphate against which we are  ghting today. Finally, Libya remains o cially divided between two opposing parties, while real power remains in the hands of hundreds of di erent armed gangs involved in a con ict of everyone against everyone.

Meanwhile, due to the contribution of various factors, a general climate of instability has come to dominate throughout the Arab world and its peripheries following the “Arab Spring”. After the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War and the rapid successes achieved by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, no government appears to be  rmly in control any more of its population and of its territory. The motives for con ict appear to blend together in a crucible that quickly became hellish, generating con icts that in turn also ended up overlapping with each other. The  rst, most obvious motive is the armed confrontation between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam. This is in a certain sense a traditional con ict: over the centuries, some periods of acute tension have interrupted much longer spells of suspicious coexistence. In recent times, however, the confrontation has been exacerbated due to the progressive march of Iran towards becoming a nuclear power. This has triggered a Sunni containment reaction that led to outbreaks of armed con ict that rapidly spread to become terrible con agrations in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen.

Things were further complicated also due to the fact that while the Shiite world is fairly homogeneous and essentially refers only to the Iranian leadership, the Sunnis are guided instead by three di erent regional powers, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The result is a confrontation that has put them at loggerheads in their quest to become the undisputed guide of an entire branch of Islam. The rivalry forces them to engage in ongoing activism, which from a certain point onwards has also involved the two great traditional adversaries, Russia and the United States, forcing them to take sides. This resulted in commitments that, though limited at  rst, in any case would appear to be destined to follow the terrible logic of continuous escalation.

As if the general confusion were not enough, terrorism has also started playing a role in this confrontation, taking advantage of the weaknesses of some and the hesitations and the inability of others to occupy territories rapidly. This allowed a terrorist group to assume the form of a true insurrectional movement, ISIS, which was able to create a new state and to manage it with some e ectiveness.

It is only now, with the pincer o ensive on Raqqa on one hand and on Mosul on the other, that the forces that oppose Sunni extremism in the Middle East appear to be on the verge of regaining the ground that they had lost in past years, or at least part of it. A development that is unlikely, however, to lead to a stable peace, given the tensions that a ect the temporary alliance which for the moment is held together only by the urgency to crush the hydra of the Caliphate. On the other hand, the general instability in recent years has cruelly shown the impossibility of maintaining the current state borders in the Middle East, which had been de ned by the former colonial powers at the end of World War I and are now dangerously obsolete.

A EUROPE THAT IS INCREASINGLY TURNING IN ON ITSELF

Within this new world that is becoming increasingly unse led and prone to sudden changes, but also desperately seeking new anchors and new rules to guarantee the modicum of stability that is needed in order to make progress in facing great common challenges, the European Union seems to shine more each day in its constant invisibility in crucial places and events.

In all fairness, this crisis does not only a ect the European Union, but also other major international organisations, which in recent years have hardly met expectations or hopes. The United Nations, besides remaining a re ection of the world in 1945, failed miserly in revitalising itself and today risks total paralysis. It su ces to recall the way that Ban Ki-Moon, the outgoing UN Secretary General, reprimanded the permanent members of the Security Council in his last speech to the General Assembly. As far as NATO is concerned, after languishing for decades, thinking only about its own di cult survival, it now seems to have become the favourite instrument of those who seek to arti cially keep alive ongoing tensions between the West and Russia. The result is that the organisation is focusing solely on the problems of Ukraine and the eastern border, totally oblvious to those issues in the South that instead are beginning to make their mark on North Atlantic security and may become even more serious in the future.

Of all the supranational organisations, however, the European Union appears to be the one su ering the most from the current situation, without actually being able to  nd the strength to respond forcefully to the accumulation of concurrent crises in di erent areas. In a way, it is as if all of the errors that have been commi ed since its establishment and their outcomes are now being transformed into a series of problems that are all coming to a head at the same time.

We knew well from the beginning that the EU institutional structure was unbalanced, to the point that we were joking about it. How many times was it repeated that the EU is “an economic giant, a political dwarf and a military worm”? We have not, however, realised how perpetuating such a situation over the long run could leave us at the mercy of the giants of the world, still completely devoid of a common foreign and security policy. It is these other nations which will make history and impose their will, whereas everyone else – including us Europeans, unfortunately – are only destined to submit to it.

In establishing the initial rules of our partnership, we have been unable to look to the long term even in the economic sphere, thus favouring some countries at the expense of others. The case of Germany is quite particular; due to errors of others and to its own superior capacity, the country ended up being the great bene ciary of this situation. Under such conditions it is logical that Germany is now  ercely opposed to any rebalancing hypothesis, which is much needed but would end up a ecting it negatively, at least over the short term. Hence the risk to continue to be subjected for an inde nite time to rules that in practice have already proved to be too rigid. Or are even harbingers of negative outcomes.

Even the enlargement process, an undisputed success insofar as it has provided much-needed stability for the new Member States, took place without se ing for each particular case the parameters necessary to ensure that the co-opted behave in line with other members. Scarcely 15 years later, we are stuck in a situation in which all newcomers  ock to the front row when it comes to receiving bene ts, but very few of them appear to be ready to also share the burden of facing the di culties that arise from time to time.

Furthermore, the European Union has proven unable to project an image of itself that could simultaneously speak to the hearts and minds of the citizens of its states. In the absence of an a ractive model, the public debate has focused on the most negative aspects of the institution and its bureaucracy, which has come to be regarded as an unproductive caste of privileged people. There emerged a sense of rejection towards the integration process which, when added to other serious causes of structural di culties, has given fuel to political movements that most decidedly oppose the process of European integration. The most signi cant case was that of Great Britain, where the victory of the Brexit vote in the recent referendum paved the way to take the country out of the Union.

It needs to be pointed out, however, that both in the UK as well as in other countries that sooner or later will have to face electoral contests in various forms, no political party has been able to develop a truly new proposal that ensures progress towards changing the world. What has been o ered instead is a long litany of proposals to return to the past, to a sort of Victorian England, to the Germany of the D-Mark, to the France of Monsieur français moyen.

Europe, and through it the Union, thus remains a prisoner of its own decline and of the nostalgia for its past. A constraint that is likely to linger on as long as it does not manage to get out of the impasse between a new paradigm which no one seems capable of handling at the moment and an old paradigm based on the criteria and institutions of democracy, more paralysing than functional, that no one has the strength and perhaps even the desire to reform.

In the meantime, even if we delude ourselves that the illness is not serious and that there is still time to save the patient, the crisis of the West and of its democracies is rather acutely perceived by all of those countries and leaders that at one time were able to  nd inspiration in our political and economic trajectories. In this perspective it is no coincidence that the Arab regimes that were  rst a ected by the uprisings of young people in the “Springs” were our nearest neighbours and the ones that the West most closely in uenced. Nor is the proliferation of so-called “tough democracies” that, while trying to preserve some of the original elements of democracies, do not hesitate to turn to a strong man to rely on for guidance. Russia’s Putin and Erdogan’s Turkey are in this sense true “case studies”, as the United States of Trump may become in the next few years.

CONCLUSION

New risks for the global order?

Millions of people were killed between 1914 and 1945 in two world wars that had Europe as its main killing ground. Since then, a long period of relative peace has ensued – giving rise to possibly unrealistic expectations that a new state of nature where no wars are fought had emerged. May we be at a turning point?

Certainly the most serious risk is that we continue to not fully take into account the breadth and depth of the process of ongoing change in which all of us play a part. That we do not understand that many of the problems we must face – pollution, climate change, migration, overcrowding, hunger, etc. – are actually global problems that can be tackled only through a response of the same order of dimension, that is to say, global.

Against this background, it is deeply problematic that when it comes to developing new solutions, the most common response seems to be to turn to old solutions, which in practice would lack any real e ectiveness. Or they could even worsen situations that are already critical on their own.

Undoubtedly, the transition from the old, no longer e ective paradigm to a new one that is more responsive to current predicaments would be greatly facilitated by the action of more adequate leaders, no less than by a capacity to observe the foundations of our society with new eyes and a strong critical spirit. What has worked in the past, even as recently as before the great economic and  nancial crisis, is not necessarily the best possible toolkit for today and for tomorrow.

There are obvious dangers inherent to both sides of this argument. The search for stronger and diverse leaders by the masses, who instinctively perceive the pressure for necessary change, can in fact result in disastrous mistakes. In Italy, for example, another long period of change produced Mussolini and more than twenty years of Fascism. Moreover, the rebalancing of institutions in crisis is always a long and delicate operation that only rarely ends with complete success. Instead, it very often requires long and painful ongoing adaptations.

The new world further requires a tolerance and a capacity for adaptation which, at least for now, we seem to lack. This shortcoming prevents us from being ready for the time, which will come very soon, when not only the brassage of races, skin colours, religions and other elements reaches its climax, but in which we also will have to resign ourselves to the idea that the distribution of available resources will be di erent. A distribution which, at least for Westerners, will be much more unfavorable than the current one. Developments that we will have to accept as given facts and not as problems, for which it is possible to seek the best of solutions every time.

Finally, we have the duty to understand the necessity to act quickly every time the  eld of a neighbour goes up in  ames, in order to prevent the  re from rapidly spreading to our  elds and our homes. This is also an e ect of globalisation dynamics that do not exclude nor can exclude any domain, including those that we would have preferred to see excluded. This is something we have not done in a timely manner in the Middle East, and now we are paying a much higher price than what we would have had to deal with if we had been more solicitous. The same thing that is happening today in Libya, Ukraine, Yemen and the Sahel, and may also occur in hundreds of other places tomorrow. There are no limits to the folly of man, especially when disorientated by a situation of clearly perceived tensions, for which he is unable to identify remedies.

And what then is the greatest of our new problems? Obviously it is to be able to de ne a new paradigm that allows everyone to feel part of a world order that is capable of taking care of everybody’s security.

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Footnotes:
1. Of course given that the Cold War was “cold”, there was no normative need for a peace conference and for a treaty which could have provided the opportunity for a dialogue between former foes.

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* Speech addressed at:“Presentazione Rapporto Nomisma sulle prospettive economico-strategiche”, Nomos & Khaos on 04 May, 2017