1.1 A matter of perceptions, choices and assumptions
The German philosopher, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, said that every man or idea, philosophical ones included, is a product of its epoch. We are children of our times, and so it applies to the related historical events.
When, during the mid-years of the Ming Dynasty in China, by the third decade of the XV century, the Empire took an inner-looking attitude, concentrating for nearly a century on its internal development and consolidation; when, in 1787, a group of men, without any outstanding leader or genius among them – despite original minds like Benjamin Franklin’s – decided to transform the 13 states originated from the former British colonies in the Northeastern side of the huge American continent into a version of democracy and federalism with strong future impacts in the world; when, in the aftermath of World War II (WWII), there was enough good-will among nations to accept a whole set of international institutions – some new, other remakes of previous ideas – that worked for about five decades; when, around the mid-1970s in the past century, a wave of authoritarian regimes started to fall, greatly due to economic failures; or finally when, in the post-1989 days, with the Berlin Wall becoming a rabble of stones to be sold as historical souvenirs, many people – some wrongly interpreting ideas of the very Hegel – saw the emergence for good of a unipolar world; in all these moments, the analyses, decisions, views and ensuing facts cannot be dissociated from the context of the epoch.
This book enjoys the same status, or shortcoming.
It is an appraisal of, or rather an essay on a short span of future years, starting in 2021, when the world will be living a (probably) last phase of a serious pandemic and rearranging itself for supposedly better times. It cannot avoid the heavy imprint of the recent events and reactions, their related dialectic – to bow to another of Hegel’s key contributions – and the whole context facing us.
In three to five years, many points here stated will have been either proven or disproven, but the value of the exercise goes beyond the number of its good shots. Building a framework of analysis for the coming times, even broad as in this case, obliges one to plunge deeper into the blurred day-picture, and identify, or rather choose the relevant actors, the key dynamics and the main axes able to condition outcomes. Reductions and simplifications are inevitable, and much ends up by being left aside. The gist of the exercise is to keep control of a small set of pieces – actors, structures, processes or ideas themselves – that allow to construct a feasible picture, or at least one that triggers, in other minds, useful thoughts and criticism.
To many, the coronavirus pandemic was a game-changer, to another large group, no: merely a catalyst for reactions that were either in progress or latent within the world system. A bit like the 2017–20 years of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as President of the US, the virus forced behaviour or answers that were hidden or unexpressed, disturbed alliances, convictions and expectations – many having revealed themselves ungrounded or much weaker than imagined, led to their bare limit situations until then apparently solid and stable. In other words, it changed the norm, the normal and the normalcy.
It is not the purpose of this short text to discuss details regarding the way to classify the true role of the sars.cov.2 virus. Other difficulties, like the different perceptions on the narrative and analyses presented, are already significant. Indeed, as with the problem of the narrator in fiction literature, the facts of concern assume here a different meaning and relevance according to the adopted vantage point; the individual or layman’s, the community, governments and organisations or a strategic thinker’s one. The author stands in a falsely neutral position, trying to deliver a kind of omniscient and super-imposed message on trends, major points and highly likely developments: a to some extent futile and contradictory task.
But many things that occupy our minds in an international context are equally contradictory. The idea of multilateralism, discussed in Chapter 3 and popping up in other parts of the book, is full of contradictions and failed, maybe unachievable goals. The very “aggregation of preferences” – something already proved impossible by economists, implicit when speaking of a country like India, the US or Brazil, though anchored in the presumption that this is what the respective governments will do – is a well-known fallacy; useful and acceptable sometimes, disastrously misguiding in others.
If one admits the above, one should also kindly accept, or trust, that the author tried not to take sides, and avoided an aggressive, partisan rhetoric, particularly when tackling hot pairs and issues like the US × Russia relations, Muslim world and culture × Western, non-Muslim creeds and culture, Chinese views on territorial sovereignty × Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea, and quite a few others.
Turning back to Hegel, as acknowledged even by Bertrand Russell, in his caustic and critical, popular account of his philosophy in Russell (1945), he, along Parmenides and Spinoza, among others, had the important view that reality should always be taken as a whole. His “whole”, however, was peculiar, perhaps innovative and certainly modern, as it was not to be conceived as a thing or a substance, but as a complex system, something resembling what was later called an organism. To concentrate on separate parts, disregarding this point, is to miss completely the right way to grasp reality.
Beyond the key actors in the context at stake, China and the US, other parts with a significant interaction with them have been incorporated in the debate, parts that could not be excluded from a minimalist, Hegelian “whole” that would give sense to the analyses. They resulted to be additional actors, middle powers and international institutions, and one concept, co-operation.
This essay thus claims that, armed with these elements, one can successfully draw schemes and scenarios helpful to understand significant global issues in the world corona changed, in the short to medium run. Holes and absences abound in the choices made, and the reader will be always – and perhaps rightly – able to say that, had country A or problem W been included, the analysis would have been sharper. The discussion of international organisations, in Chapter 3, does not address even one third of the existing ones, and deals extensively with principles and their justification or support.
The answer or excuse is that in the case of both countries and institutions, inclusion reflected the belief that those in are the ones which count most for the purposes of the essay. If a country, maybe an undeniable middle power, remained out, it means that, for the time frame at stake, and the level at which discussions and explanations are put forward, it does not count, or counts less; not that it is irrelevant, either per se or in a comprehensive world scenario.
Absence of a strict focus on certain themes and problems may also cause surprise.
There is no specific chapter on questions related to climate and the environment, though they enter arguments along the book. Both will surely regain relevance, supported not only by the myriads of photos and graphs showing significant improvements in air quality in the major cities and the re-appearance of wild animals and birds in the fringes of several conurbations,1 but also as a tool or excuse for economic revival and a different, positive global concern. The comeback of the US to the Paris Agreement will add more momentum to this, at least in media terms.
But will this debate, in a context of so many disputes and resistance to sensibly tackle global issues, with fractured political regimes and societies, higher social instability and scarcer funds, really prosper? The choice made here reflects a belief that, in the short to strictly medium run, not much progress will take place, despite the great fuss, hopes and even trust that, particularly after the presidential change in the US, the theme will return, top and foremost.
Nobody denies that things will happen but, besides the sweeping rhetoric that will pervade the media, speeches and promises, they will actually be second order in the face of the understandable revival of global public health questions, the mending of political and global governance fractures, the rescue of nearly destroyed economic sectors and the myriad of decisions and transformations – many either akin to the digital complex or left behind the door until now – in dire need of being addressed.
The “Green Economy” and “Sustainability” labels may be used as triggers for new infrastructure developments and manifold financial and tax schemes. Important as they are, it is doubtful whether, in the near future, they will play a role beyond that of incentives for certain actions, not all necessarily efficient in actually helping the dystopian world corona made. Holistic approaches, rightly embedding the environment in, or fusing it with health and labour, ultimately equity issues, may be theoretically appealing but demand a longer and careful reflection, perhaps not in wont in the coming times.
The fate of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, launched in 2015 by the UN General Assembly and to be fulfilled by 2030, will be a good check of the validity of the former statements. An encompassing view of the main world problems, with one explicit Climate Action goal, and at least five others related to same theme, the Goals have shown mixed success in the last years, achievements remaining below expectations and even the reasonably possible. The post-Covid renewed interest in some of them may end up as something a little more than a fuss, drowned by other concerns and deep practical disagreements on concrete actions.
Another reason, of a pedestrian character, is size: a choice had to be made between an entire chapter dedicated to either the environmental complex or the digital galaxy.
Broadly classifying attitudes and behavioural patterns during the pandemic as elastic or inelastic, the latter, opposed to the former, referring to those that will remain after the crisis is over, if not totally but to a sizeable extent, the digital complex is one of the realms where more inelastic and transformative patterns may be found. Coupled with its strong social and technological links, it is a mandatory factor for both conditioning and understanding the near future. Notwithstanding, this is a standpoint that may leave some unhappy or partially distrustful of the analyses to follow.
A second absence, even more dramatic, relates to the vexed theme of inequalities and the fact, in principle taken for granted at a first evaluation, that more rather than less inequality is to be expected. Many statistics and preliminary estimates support this view. According to the UN, 240 to 490 million additional people, in 70 countries, will enter or return to multidimensional poverty, a status comprising lack of several basic needs; of these, the UN World Food Programme estimates that 130 million will suffer from continued hunger, while the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) claims that starvation plagues more than 34 million people at this very moment. The World Bank (2020), in a somewhat different approach, estimates that 88 to 115 million people will be pushed to poverty, thanks to the pandemic.
As minorities are over-represented in the lower classes, universally more affected by the infection and the lockdowns, they endured huge losses in large, unequal countries as the US, Brazil and India. But the chain reaction of disasters seems unending: poor children suffered more with the closure of schools and, in some countries, resorting to digital teaching further excluded them, something to damage their future overall education, ensuing new disadvantages.
Dwelling deeper on this issue would require an enlargement of the economic discussion, which has also been reduced to a minimum, and may acquire strong nuances depending on the chosen region or country. The point is absolutely relevant and duly taken into account when the discussion concentrates on scenarios, and permeates other arguments, in different chapters. Nevertheless, in a way similar to the previous justifications, up to the medium run, it is hard to envisage major changes to the situation, broadly translated into higher tensions and greater likelihood of social conflicts. This unavoidable worsening of social conditions will affect most solutions, and negatively add to many scenarios’ conclusions, as those highlighted in Chapter 6.
A related topic, the expected behaviour of the financial system and its linkage to the recession or recovery patterns, has also been eschewed. Besides its more technical character, it was neither responsible for nor directly hit by the pandemic. Mounting fiscal deficits, many spurred by the rescue packages, elusive credibility of currencies and the way international capital is used and invested will naturally affect the state of the system and, depending on the instance, ...
