The discussion on the future of Western economies and societies has been on the agenda of the US academic world for some time. Never before, as in this period, important magazines of international politics, are posing the problem of the new geopolitical order that will be defined starting from a balance of what has been and what has produced world globalization and what will produce the revolution technology that is literally transforming society with a speed unimaginable just a few years ago.
"History tells us nothing about the future except that it will surprise us" is the conclusion reached by Stephen Kotkin, professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University New Jersey and at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, in an interesting and articulate essay published in the American magazine Foreign Affairs entitled “Realist World – The Players Change, but the Game Remains”.
That's it. In reality, in the history of the world, the players change but the game doesn't change. The change of protagonists, the result of the contrasts that mark every historical period, produces new economic, political and cultural structures with which the history of humanity proceeds.
Every era and every economic-political system is considered the last and it is thought that there will be nothing different in the future. On the contrary, the progress of history advances through an orderly and continuous process or through more or less sudden tears which, in fact, can "it will surprise us" by defining, however, new balances which are not said to be more advanced.
The United States and the other western democracies are currently experiencing one of the most complicated passages in their histories. However, the crises they are going through are not, as happened in the past, the result of imbalances and clashes between the powers themselves or even between advanced democracies and countries of the so-called "third world", as it was, but have an entirely internal origin. Their ruling classes, in fact, in the last century have guided and favored a slow but impressive process of globalization which has produced vast social mobility, economic and cultural progress, realizing an advance in living conditions throughout the world.
After World War II, the United States and its allies worked hard to create an open world with ever freer trade and ever broader global integration. True, globalization has certainly produced wealth. It shortened the distance by making possible huge investments of the more advanced economies in the more backward ones by increasing economic efficiency, reducing production costs and increasing absolute returns. All of this has had a positive effect by reducing global inequality and making it possible for millions of people to lift themselves out of abject poverty. Truly extraordinary results if you look at how the world has changed over the past seventy years. Are you all right then? Not exactly.
While that process of globalization advanced, reducing inequalities worldwide, within those countries that have led the same globalization, especially starting from the end of the 80s of the last century, exactly the opposite happened. Internal inequality was accentuated slowly at first and then more and more markedly with negative economic and social effects, creating a new "periphery of the world" which, unlike the one known in the previous century, does not have a geographical connotation but an economic and social one and becomes "inner periphery".
Consequently, those same ruling classes who have guided the process of globalization are today considered by their own peoples responsible not only for the economic and social backwardness but also for the cultural one. They are seen as distant elites from an increasingly disillusioned population. A feeling of internal political betrayal has spread and, therefore, that ruling class has now become very vulnerable.
The mass political challenge, from the "bottom" of society, based on a nationalism that has become the majority, is successful in almost all of the West, starting with the United States, passing through Great Britain and even arriving in Italy. The phenomenon has also been accentuated by the fact that globalisation, inevitably intervening also on a cultural terrain, has produced the loss of ethical and cultural values which have become increasingly less secure and more relative.
A real sense of "cultural estrangement" has spread, producing, in the populations of the Western world, in those "internal peripheries", a lack of fixed points, loneliness and fear. Paradoxically, just when the West was winning and making its economic and cultural supremacy clear on the global stage by taking on the problem of global inequalities, it found itself extremely fragile and, in the crisis of identity and values, it also found itself having to face the toughest economic crisis in its history.
A counterproof of this is what happened in China in parallel. A country with an institutional political structure with a low rate of democracy, a substantially authoritarian country in which meritocracy and corruption, skills and incompetence coexist, mixing together, a political class that is certainly not interested in the fate of the world to combat its inequalities, has created an economic development of size and speed never seen before arriving at having an economy substantially at the same level, in terms of wealth, equal to that of the United States and, in the future, perhaps even greater. Now, if it is certainly true that the rise of the United States would not have been possible without China's weakness, it is equally true that China's race would not have even begun without the security and open markets resulting from US policy after the Second World War.
The evident crisis that the ruling classes are going through is therefore not without an explanation, nor can it be managed with an elitist and snobbish attitude simply considering it the fruit of an undefined "populism" that would have taken possession of the people like a virus , but it is the result of political choices which, by focusing on some objectives, have neglected the effects of those choices. Today, the technological revolution can be a good opportunity to get out of the impasse that the West experiences but on condition that its new ruling classes find a way to make their own populations benefit from this progress by rediscovering the validity and depth of the values of own culture.
°°° The author is the Secretary General of the National Association of Popular Banks
