Between 1970 and 1971 France and the German states led by Prussia fought a war that didn’t go well for the French. It brought down the Second French Republic and Emperor Napoleon III and ended the status of France as the preeminent Continental European power. Nonetheless, following this European upheaval we had a forty-year period of relative peace that saw the flourishing of the arts and science. Things were so good, at least for the elites, that this period went down in history as the Belle Epoch.
Then a shot was fired in Sarajevo, in 1914, enough to ignite a general conflagration in Europe joined by America and Japan and fought across the globe. This war did not go well for the Germans who had to make peace at onerous terms. Years later the rise of Nazism and the even deadlier world war that followed were attributed to those humiliating terms, primarily imposed at the behest of the French. However, what had driven the French was their own humiliation back in 1871, when they had to shed land and money to appease the Prussians.
Between the two great wars there was again a period of optimism, exuberance, and material advancement, especially in the US. But the “Roaring Twenties” were not destined to last into the ensuing decades. This time, and some forty million deaths later, it looked like we had learned something. We established the UN and international treaties on global trade, and the Western nations, led by America, bonded into NATO to eradicate old rivalries among European countries and protect liberal democracy. The founding and growth of the European Union was aimed to the same goal through economic integration and development.
During the preceding eighty years, we have avoided a global war, we have expanded human rights and liberties and no matter how unevenly we have distributed wealth more people enjoy a better standard of living than before. But now we again face turmoil as we leave behind the previous economic and geopolitical order and enter a period of nationalism and great-power antagonisms.
So, why do we experience these turns of history? One explanation is that we undergo generational shifts in culture and political attitudes. This is the Generational Theory popularized by William Stauss and Neil Howe. Within eighty-year cycles we move through phases that lead to significant historical changes. We start at a High point of optimism and trust of institutions, then we move to an Awakening point that challenges established beliefs and cultural ideas, which causes their Unravelling, which finally brings us to a Crisis point of upheaval and changes.
It seems that each movement and order of things bears the seeds of its own demise. As the circumstances that make an order necessary and successful change, it no longer meets the conditions on the ground and the expectations of the people or it starts to rub people the wrong way. The New Deal withered when it failed to cure the stagflation of the Seventies and the hand of the state became too heavy for some constituents. The neo-liberal order that followed answered the call for change by shifting the balance of power toward the private sector. But when the profit motive drove businesses to expand abroad and abandon their domestic production base and workers populism rose to pull them back to their national origins.
At the same time the relative power of states shifts in unpredictable ways that raise anxieties among the powers that are. Who knew forty-five years ago that China would abandon the communist model of its economy and adopt capitalist methods? And who could guess back then that this policy shift would prove to be so enormously successful? Forty years ago the geopolitical priority of the US was to contain Soviet power in Europe. Now the top US priority is to contain China’s advances not only in the economic sphere but also in science and technology. The war in Ukraine, China’s fast rise, the Middle East carnage and turmoil, and the Trump administration’s ambitions of geopolitical expansion pretty much highlight the crisis we are in.
So, the question is: Are we going to avoid another global hot confrontation with its terrible consequences? We could if we infused nationalism with the call for social and economic fairness and the pursuit of the common good. If we returned to the spirit and letter of the foundational principles of the UN. If we understood that averting climatic disasters requires a global cooperation. If we empowered governments to understand the risks of technological advances and prioritized public interest and wellbeing over private profits. If we asked that the proliferation of AI products that destabilize the national security interests of countries be treated with the same seriousness we treated nuclear arms proliferation.
These prerequisites for global stability are easier said than implemented. However, there are conditions that could work in their favor. Despite all the negative talk and actions against globalization, its roots are too deep to be reversed. China still relies – many argue in a destabilizing way – on international trade. It finished last year with a record one trillion plus dollars trade surplus. Many corporations around the globe have attained such enormous scale that cannot prosper by relying on their domestic markets alone. Scientific, cultural, and tourist flows continue to circle the world aided by technology and rising incomes. The wealthy elites have grown too rich and comfortable to allow their governments an all out confrontation with other strong countries. So, despite all the hectoring and posturing, it is more likely than not that the world powers will do everything to avoid a direct confrontation. And yet, who knows?
More directly though if we want these “if” listed above to become reality, we need the peoples of the world and especially the intellectual and spiritual leaders and institutions to show the way. That way requires that we have a new Awakening of humanism that articulates the enduring traits of our humanness and places guardrails of protection from invidious technological threats and myopic and destructive antagonisms.
That should be part of a new Enlightenment movement which this time is not the intellectual offspring of Western thought only but of all humankind.
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