Le premier XXIe siècle
The former Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations (2000 – 2008) for peacekeeping operations pulls absolutely no punches in this analysis of the evolution of human societies in the beginning of the 21st century. And readers of this work will find it hard not to share Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s nostalgic sadness in the face of a world that is disappearing and his curious impatience, not without its worries, at the world that is taking shape before our eyes.
“We are (…) on the cusp of a new era, in which the political parties are losing their relevance and the invention of the Internet and the virtual spaces it has created are bringing about an upheaval in the way human societies function. They are becoming globalised even as they crumble”, writes Guéhenno, who continues: “faced with this upheaval, the structures that gave an institutional political form to human societies, nations, international institutions, are struggling and there is a change of political tone, within nations and between nations. What appeared solid has proven to be fragile and the veneer of faith that helped us to conceptualise the world is flaking away. The ideas of progress and the sovereign nation can no longer be taken for granted. Violence is rising, in word as well as in deed. As the structures that gave the old world its shape weaken, the future is becoming more uncertain, between the diffuse threat of everyday violence and the rise to the extremes of a major clash. This is what makes the current era so serious: we are going to have to answer the question of what type of society we really want” (our translation throughout).
The author devotes many pages to a description of individualism, which has become the dominant ideology: “the question of a ‘good life’ has been completely sidestepped, as has that of ‘good government’: the measurement standard of money allows us to give each thing, each situation a price and, on an open market, this price is necessarily the right one, as it reflects the combination of the preferences of the two groups of individuals constituted by consumers and producers, all seeking to maximise their income and optimise their expenditure. This is also the case in elections, where victory is its own justification. The debate is then deflected to market operating conditions, the integrity of the electoral process and the infamous matter of the autonomy of the individual, upon which nothing is allowed to encroach. Ontological egotism has become the foundation of society”. Guéhenno goes on to observe that “the contemporary individual is both very much alone and obsessed by others. He looks at others by looking at himself, because all he sees in himself is a void and he has no way of defining himself other than by comparing himself to others. This is why, in an apparent paradox, the contemporary individual seeking absolute autonomy endlessly measures himself against others. Society has become a hall of mirrors, staring into the abyss, one’s gaze lost in the infinite reflection of oneself”. He concludes that “in this way, the culmination of the individual’s triumph holds his annihilation in its dramatic reversal”.
Guéhenno shows how this individualism and the mirror effect that has become part and parcel of it, amplified by the information society and social networks, feed into the confrontation, identitarian reflexes and the “closing-off of society into inward -looking groups”. The author considers the effects of this development: “the growing brutality of political language, from President Trump to the Yellow Vests in France, can then be celebrated as a healthy return to honesty: attempting not to cause offence is the first step towards lying. The language of anger has become the language of politics in many Western democracies. Deliberately provocative, it is by way of revenge on the civilised hypocrisy of previous policy (…). To exist is to ignore others. Civility – respect for others – as an essential component of social life, an implicit part of society, its invisible backbone, is ebbing away. The shared space of reason, which has since antiquity been the pillar for democratic debate, is breaking up into many isolated islands of certainties that are incompatible and irreconcilable (…). We are losing interest in truth, not by referring to a higher truth, but because the very idea of truth has become dubious. It is a hangover from a world in which there was a common space, in which it was the horizon, never reached but always striven for. Communication specialists would say that truth is no longer ‘relevant’: it is no longer fashionable and what attracts people is controversy. The rocky road that leads to ever-problematic truth can no longer be trodden by a crowd frothing with certainties and the very idea that truth is a permanent quest comes across as a touch obsolete, ridiculous even. In the world in which we live now, the only truth that counts is the one with which we live, in the fortress of our certainty. The arrogance of ignorance responds to the arrogance of knowledge. This is a sad revenge that leads directly to obscurantism”.
“Inevitably, a new type of leader appears, with a profile reminiscent of those who emerged almost a century ago with the rise of fascism. The cult of the leader, the tough guy who will transcend the divisions of society is spreading. Trump’s narcissism, his pitiful need constantly to reassure himself by reaffirming his superiority is an echo of the histrionics of Mussolini, who was Hitler’s model before he became his parody”, the author continues, going on to stress firmly and lucidly: “in most countries, the masses do not insist that their leaders be superior to them, because they no longer believe in the demiurge leader who makes his mark on a strong State. Quite the reverse, they want a leader who resembles their own mediocrity as much as possible. They demand the right to vulgarity. Admiration is a sentiment that reviles them, as they see it as a diminution of themselves. The acolytes of Trump, Salvini or Duterte no longer expect their political leader to represent ideas, but to embody a character. And the more charismatic, provocative, outrageously excessive the character is, the more attractive it is, as if the excess of posturing gives a kind of symbolic revenge to everybody smothered by the fatility of the world. Instead of serving as a model, they expect their leader to be a mirror, the ‘selfie’ of shared mediocrity”.
“This uncomplicated display of strength is no longer shocking and, in some cases, we even get the impression that it is liberating, as if the world were tired of the dreariness of compromises, tired of seeing the horizon of an order of reason constantly getting further away. The word ‘war’ is in the air. I have showed how the political crisis led to the cult of leaders, reverence for tough guys people can identify with. These people do not exist in a manifesto, but simply by the unambiguity of their acts and confrontation defines them”, Guéhenno observes. He goes on to stress that “the ambition of an international order that seems to have defined the last decades retrospectively looks like the ideological veneer of the provisional domination exerted by the United States over the world. Once there is no longer the dominant power, the very idea of an international order is in doubt and war becomes the natural horizon of international relations”.
But “the arsenals still exist, a bit smaller perhaps, but enough, if used, to send humanity back to the Stone Age”, the author points out, adding: “a number of treaties that regulated nuclear dialogue between the United States and the USSR had been repealed, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and even when brought back, like the START Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, they may well prove lacking. The same is true of the limitation of conventional weaponry in Europe: these are no longer covered by a treaty which, by reducing the risk of conventional confrontation and bringing in trust measures, made nuclear escalation even less likely. At the same time, the development of multi-purpose hyper- sonic weaponry reduces warning time, while the line between conventional and nuclear is blurring, with the miniaturisation of nuclear weapons on the one hand and the possibility for conventional weapons to carry out strategic missions on the other. The distinctions that helped to give a certain stability to deterrence – nuclear/conventional, strategic/tactical – are losing their relevance with the forward march of technology. At the same time, cyber-war could well thicken the fog of war, by taking down communication and command lines. Looking at all of these developments taken together, one cannot but conclude that the risk of nuclear confrontation is as high today, possibly more so, as it was during the Cold War: the algebra of deterrence gets jammed in the strategic fog”.
And what is Europe’s part in all this? “The very success of the European Union robbed it of much of what makes it attractive to other Europeans: one does not rally behind a project if the objective has been attained and we are no longer afraid of the past, but of the future. By continuing to give priority to relations between Europeans rather than to relations between Europe and the rest of the world, Europe has shown stratospheric short-sightedness: it has continued to present itself as protection from old European demons which nobody is afraid of anymore, whilst ignoring the world around it, which is becoming a scarier place”, he argues. He adds: “Europe has been nostalgic and narcissistic. In its internal organisation, it has chosen continuity over reform. In its relations with the rest of the world, be it Russia or anywhere else on the planet, it has failed to imagine that any history other than its own could inspire other emotions and other expectations. Excessively confident in its own solidity, it has failed to take the measure of the impact of the end of the Cold War on relations between nations and on the nations themselves”.
“And yet”, Guéhenno goes on to say, “there is throughout the world an expectation of Europe, a reflection of the mix of resentment and envy inspired by ten centuries of global history dominated by it (…). Europe’s shortcomings today are felt more strongly outside Europe than in Europe itself. This could be because when they think of Europe, Europeans struggle to think other than in the traditional terms of power, whereas what makes Europe interesting are primarily its contradictions and tensions, a magnifying mirror of the divisions of many nations, and the original roads it takes to try to overcome them. Torn between the logic of memory that divides and the universalist project – itself the product of a mix of Christian faith and the spirit of the Enlightenment that inspired its founding fathers – which brings it together, between the logic of a huge marketplace and the logic of solidarity, both a technocratic project and the union of democracies, Europe remains a laboratory experimenting on new formulae – the European Commission, a hybrid institution that is both technical and political, is the most successful example of this. This complexity, fed by contradictions, is seen by some as the mark of an incurable weakness. It gives Europe a responsibility in the invention of the political institutions of the future”.
The remedy seems as ludicrous as the diagnosis seems correct. The author, who is opposed to any evolution of the European Union in a federal direction and has no wish to see the birth of a State continent, considers that the “Commission should remain the centre of expertise”. The European Council has its benefits as a “supreme body of political impetus”, reflecting the “fact that the European Union cannot develop at the expense of the nations”. “As for military power, it is neither useful nor realistic to try to mobilise European energies to make the EU into a major political power”, considers Guéhenno, who would rather see increased cooperation between the most powerful European states, possibly with the financial support of their “partners with less commitment in ‘military matters’”.
Yet “whether it likes it or not, the European Union cannot, as the United States did for more than a century, take time off from the world any more than it can shape the world in its own image”, the author states, adding: “Europe, therefore, will not be a major federal state like the United States, it will not be a civilisation-State like China, it will not be a multinational empire like Russia. Europe has a unique history, which mean that it can never look like any other political construction”. (Olivier Jehin)
Jean-Marie Guéhenno. Le premier XXIe siècle – De la globalisation à l’émiettement du monde (available in French only). Flammarion. ISBN: 978-2-0802-5596-9. 359 pages. €21,90
Israel in 2021: Boasting Six Arab Allies, but Facing the Six Armies of Tehran
Didier Leroy analyses the outcomes achieved by Israeli diplomacy in 2021 further to the establishment, over the course of the previous year, of diplomatic relations with another four Arab States. Amongst other things, he reports that in the space of 10 months, more than 200,000 Israelis visited the United Arab Emirates, bilateral trade passed the 354 million dollar mark and a museum in Dubai hosted an exhibition on the history of the Holocaust. On top of these achievements come several agreements, for instance for the joint development of military drones, and the prospect of the joint participation of Israeli and Emirate air forces in each other’s military exercises. The author considers that the Abraham Agreements have even passed their first stress test, as the uptick in violence in the conflict between Israel and Palestine in spring 2021 did not consign them to the dustbin of history. Despite these agreements, the Israeli “citadel” is increasingly under siege from the network of pro-Iranian militia, forcing Israel to take account of the scenario of maximum coordination of the enemy, which would expose it to sustained and synchronised fire from the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen, Leroy explains, considering that at best, the antagonism between Iran and Israel could generate new deterrence mechanisms or, in the worst-case scenario, degenerate into a major clash. (OJ)
Didier Leroy. Boasting Six Arab Allies, but Facing the Six Armies of Tehran. Royal Higher Institute for Defence, e-Note 35, 13 December 2021. 8 pages. The paper can be downloaded free of charge from the website of the Institute: http://www.defence-institute.be