While everyone has their eyes fixed on Syria, there is someone who does not lose sight of what is happening in the rest of the world. The new champions is the title of the new number 49 of EAST, available on newsstands from 1 September 2013. In its dossier, the spotlight is aimed at the BRICS, without losing sight of the core of the magazine: Europe and the difficult path towards greater political integration.
In a difficult moment for international diplomacy, when the winds of war begin to blow again towards the territories of the Middle East, in a moment in which France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy never seem to have been so divided, EAST asked the former premier and vice-president of the Treaty for the European Constitution (later rejected by the referendums of France and Holland), Giuliano Amato, a contribution on how the Old Continent is preparing for the new electoral challenge for the renewal of the Strasbourg Parliament. Will it be possible to start the path towards a federal Europe? In his speech, Amato hoped that the Socialists and Populars would stop the advance of the anti-European forces by finding the courage to focus on "more Europe": a more integrated Union that would return to growth without betraying its social model. Here is an excerpt from Amato's text:
“There are different expectations around the European elections next spring. A higher than usual abstention rate can increase the weight of the most anti-European votes. A Parliament could come out of it in which for the first time the populist movements contend for the traditional hegemony of the Populars and the Socialists, with consequences unpredictable up to now. I don't know how well founded this prediction is and how much it is a nightmare destined to be canceled by the facts. But here the second expectation appears, that is, that Socialists and Populars, in order to counter the forecast (or the nightmare), insist a lot in their electoral campaign on social issues and growth, in the knowledge that for the vast majority of voters Europe has ceased to be attractive because it has ceased to offer something more than nation states, it has ceased to defend its social model, it has ceased to take steps to ensure that no one is left in the street.
[...] It is more than desirable that the traditional parties, beyond the different emphasis on the austerity policies followed up to now (the Socialists are more critical, the Populars are more firm, who with Chancellor Merkel have assumed greater responsibility for them), converge in the 'engage in the growth and safeguarding of social rights. [...] We would need - as they say - "more Europe" and more precisely more resources and more skills at the European level, which would allow it to fulfill that anti-cyclical role, which is essential to mitigate and balance the cyclical effects of austerity which the Member States cannot escape and which they cannot compensate for themselves. [...] Everyone, however, is reluctant to make it an electoral campaign theme, because the widespread hostility towards Europe as it is can make any message translatable into "more Europe" unwelcome, even if "more" means not an additional ration than we have (more of the same), but a more integrated and better Europe. [...] In short, what should start - or restart - is a new cycle of integrative steps, in the absence of which we risk remaining in the bottleneck in which we find ourselves, prey to populisms that capitalize on the inevitable discontent and yet incapable of get out of it, because they are paralyzed by the fear of discontent itself.
It will not be by preaching sociability and growth that European parties will overcome this paradox. They will have to have the courage to explain and share what it takes to recover both. And here it is then the decisive ingredient, the one that manages to make things happen that don't happen by themselves: courage. We cannot place it in the context of expectations and forecasts on the next European elections. But we can hope that there is”.
And "More Europe" is also what Giuseppe Scognamiglio, deputy general manager of Unicredit, is asking for, who in his speech explains why national democracies have no future, and how the Union can emerge from the "global storm" only with greater financial, fiscal, economic and political. Towards federal Europe.
Furthermore, the new issue of EAST reflects on the Middle East and the reasons for the fall of President Morsi in Egypt in Shyam Bhatia's Chronicle of a Failure: Were the Muslim Brotherhood preparing to form an Islamic militia? The complex path of the Arab world towards democracy is in the analysis of Fadi Elhusseini. Who is the new Iranian president Hassan Rohani, the moderate who replaces Ahmadinejad, says Farian Sabahi instead.
The "new champions" of the world economy to whom the title of EAST 49 is dedicated are not only the BRICS, but also the MISTs: Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey. The in-depth dossier in this issue analyzes its successes, weaknesses and contradictions: the protests in Istanbul and the relocation to Mexico of the factories that had moved to China. The global triumphs of Seoul, between technology and Gangnam Style, and the anger of Rio de Janeiro at the World Cup and the Olympics. The Indonesian boom and Russian capitalism oppressed by corruption, bureaucracy and state interference. Because, Flavio Fusi writes in his editorial, «the “new champions” are rich but also very poor, they are tough but fragile […]. A furnace of social and political contradictions.
From Europe, Croatia's entry into the Union, which could lead the rest of the Balkans. The risks of the referendum on Scotland's independence from London, scheduled for 2014. The housing emergency in Spain. The identity crisis of a France crushed by comparisons with Berlin. And Italian abstention seen by Eric Jozsef.
From Japan Two hundred years of manga, the Japanese comic called the "ninth art", which has had a profound effect on the society and customs of the Rising Sun.
And then the revolution of 3D printers, for which a 750 billion euro market is expected by the end of the decade. A disruptive technology that could change the world balance and usher in a new industrial era: goodbye assembly line?
