The First Decade of the Century: A Balance Sheet

The geopolitical balance of the first decade of the 21st century reveals several major shifts. On the security front, global war has faded into the past. It has been replaced by nuclear proliferation, a greater risk of regional wars, and one major new challenge: international terrorism. In terms of global power, there is a definite geographical shift from West to East. On the economic front, capitalism has encountered its own limits at the very center of the global system. Major crises have moved from the periphery to the center, that is, chickens have come home to roost. The global South, on the other hand, has shown signs of development and growth, aided and abetted by the multi-polarization of power. Latin America, in particular, can no longer be considered as a unitary zone. Diversity is increasing, in part fuelled by the ebb of American clout and influence.Ten years after the millennium, the world is in full transition –from West to East, from an anarchic capitalism to a regulated one, from a type of development indifferent to the environment to one that is more respectful, from wars between states to a pattern of collective security, from closed ideologies to open-ended and pragmatic codes. In the area of geopolitics I venture a following provisional prognosis.

We have left behind the great tragedies of the twentieth century, but also many of its hopes and illusions. Socialism was unable to overtake capitalism, and failed as an alternative. Capitalism, in its turn, has been unable to overcome its contradictions. Democracy has spread around the world, but it has degraded its quality and faces a crisis of commitment and representation. Great wars are things of the past, especially a total thermonuclear holocaust. However, the risk of partial wars remains, and the use of nuclear weapons is likely on a regional rather than global scale, “Progress” has bee noted on many counts, but it is uneven, and its unintended consequences put the planet, and the life of our descendants, at risk. The world is too crowded, and mother earth is tired.

War and Peace

In these times war is asymmetrical and transversal. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by newcomer states makes them enter the logic of deterrence, which during the cold war was a guarantor of peace, albeit an armed peace. The change is one from a bipolar to a multipolar deterrence. The risk of a nuclear war by mistake has therefore increased in direct proportion to proliferation. But even in this case, the higher probability is of a local, not general, nuclear exchange.

There is another challenge, however. Nuclear weapons may fall in the hands of non-state actors, such as terrorist networks. The detonation of one or more such devices in the very heart of the “civilized”, highly “protected” world is a likely occurrence, precisely because the world is more interconnected than ever before. In other words, anything may happen anywhere.

The millennium started with the spectacular attack of 9/11, which was followed by similar attacks in various cities of the West and East. To date there has been no satisfactory response to these challenges and no effective –preventive or retaliatory—solution has been found. In asymmetrical warfare, the attackers use low-cost resources and can tolerate failure upon failure, because a single successful hit makes up for the unsuccessful ones. The defenders, on the other hand, are compelled to use immense resources with very poor results. Only 100% “success” could be considered “victory.” There is no strategic theory and/or doctrine capable of a comprehensive response to bellicose asymmetry. The high military commands of the world, and a great number of think tanks have libraries full of papers and books on the subject, but the vast majority have one problem in common: they were written by the losers.

The decade closes with uncertainty and ambiguity, exemplified by the speech delivered in Oslo by President Obama, on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. It was not a discourse on peace but on international security in the face of nihilistic, asymmetrical attacks. Just as centuries ago, peace meant pax romana, so today peace is redefined by some as a shared version of pax Americana. One should hope that this type of peace does not meet the fate of pax romana, denounced by the historian Tacitus, in the words of a “barbarian” (that is an outsider) in these terms: “Where they make a desolation they call it peace” («Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant»). Think of Iraq and Afghanistan.

East and West

When the former Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai (the faithful and aristocratic companion of Mao) was asked what he thought of the French Revolution, he famously answered “It is too early to tell.” And when a Western journalist asked former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru what he thought of the American civilization, he responded, “I think it would be a great idea.”

The vision of the world espoused by these great Asian leaders is very different from the vision of the West. Despite the stunning pace of change in East and South Asia, the inhabitants of these lands have a different sense of time and an ironic perspective on the impatience of the West. To them geopolitical oscillations come as no surprise. Far away and long ago they were at the very center of the civilized world. Later they lost ground to Europe and the United States, and now they are reclaiming much of that lost ground. The West has taken a step back; the East and the South two steps forward. The world is being re-balanced: ying and yang.

A special feature of the present oscillation is the speed and ease with which the peoples of Asia can absorb, adapt, and develop Western science and technology, without giving up their habits and, say, many post-colonial peoples in other continents, they do not seem to suffer a crisis of identity. Once, while I was in China, a high official of the government told a Western diplomat friend of mine that his country’s leadership consisted of pragmatic engineers responsible for the care and feeding of 1.3 billion people in a globalized world, fully aware of the challenge, but persuaded at the same time that “China is eternal.” His remarks suggested a unique combination of tradition and modernity, technocracy and forbearance, of speedy adaptation and the long view. In India the formula is a different one (it is after all the largest English-speaking democracy in the world), but it combines just as much the old and the new. I wish to press upon my gentle readers the following paradox: in our globalized world the emerging powers are not young nations but old ones. Older “new nations” (for example Argentina and the United States) seem somewhat out of place: they are too set in their ways to innovate, on the one hand, and too young to be wise on the other.

Verdict on Globalization

At this point in time the balance is ambiguous. After a decade in which the process has continued, the world seems like a body with overdeveloped limbs but a weak heart. From an economic standpoint, most of the periphery is poised to continue a sustained growth, albeit not as spectacular as it once was. Such growth will not depend as much as before on the Western locomotive. It will depend more on internal demand and on the incorporation of billions of people to the world of lower-middle class consumption.

In the center of the system, on the other hand, advanced capitalism will be characterized by idle capacity and high unemployment, by greater state intervention and by more regulation of the economy. In other words, the economy will be in rehab and walk on crutches. The West seems bound for a curious fate: it initiated globalism and is its principal victim now. Perched as I am in the United States, it seems to me that –contrary to other capitalisms such as those in Scandinavia, which are healthier but marginal, American capitalism has been the victim of its own success after the end of the cold war. The existence of a serious rival system had kept it more honest and disciplined. The disappearance of such enemy, and the consequent opening of hitherto closed areas of expansion in the former communist world, made American capitalism grow without controls: it displaced its productive base abroad, it became over-financialized, and in the end it crashed.

On the way to this sorry end, American capitalism managed to turn its illusions into a hegemonic ideological school. During the decade that has ended, neoliberals spread their creed throughout the world. In its wake they sponsored policies that disassembled hitherto structured countries East and South. But the reforms were incomplete, and left a number of nations, notably in Latin America, struggling to put themselves together again. A series of financial crises in those countries at the beginning of the past decade announced, unbeknownst to most, a larger crisis at the center by the decade’s end.

The Americas, North and South

In Latin America, the balance of the decade is mixed. In general terms there has been growth but not a truly sustainable development. Social inequality remains intolerably high, social disarticulation became worse, both inside and between the countries of the region, and dependency has not ended –it has changed partners and patterns instead. The perspectives for the region can best be described in Borges’ words, as a garden of forking paths. We can present such panorama as a series of questions:

What will be the future of Cuba, which remains today a living museum of the defunct soviet-type societies? How can we explain the strange resilience of Argentina, which grows driven by food exports while at the same time declines socially and political and resembles ever more a standard Latin American country? How can we evaluate the irruption of Brazil as a world power, though not a regional one, and the emergence of a massive new middle class? Where is this giant going, and why is it behaving –in the words of Andres Malamud, like “a leader without followers”? How to encompass in a single gaze the bunch of smaller countries, which are as different from each other as the larger ones: peaceful and mature Uruguay, democratic, economically correct Costa Rica, and banana-republican Honduras? Whither Venezuela, where “21st century socialism” has little in common with Cuba’s and where the oil blessing is also a curse, and an oil-fuelled corrupt party democracy has been replaced by a personalistic redistributive and plebiscitary one? What to make of Chile, which seems to belong to the Asia-Pacific area more than to its own neighborhood? Can Mexico backtrack from the choking embrace of NAFTA –so far from God, so close to the US? What will be the long-=term upshot of the political mobilization of the native majorities in the Andean societies –a process that both integrates and polarizes at the same time? What is the verdict on Latin democracies, which seem to have passed the test of time but still face a threat of coups and the “democratic destitution” of governments? The panorama is much too varied to justify a uniform perspective and a “vue d’ensemble”. Only minor bureaucrats sitting at a “Latin American desk” in the first world can think like that.

There is however a common geopolitical denominator under this bewildering diversity, to wit the vacuum of power left by the retreat of the United States as the single indispensable influence and point of reference. A voice from the North seems to whisper thus: “We are otherwise engaged, and you are on your own, my friends.”

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