L’heure des prédateurs
This work, recently published by Gallimard and penned by the novelist Giuliano da Empoli, former political adviser to Matteo Renzi, author of the best-selling Le mage du Kremlin, which bagged him the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française in 2022, takes us behind the scenes of international politics and lays bare the world of today as it really is. He shows us its unreconstructed autocrats, its disheartened democrats and tech gurus who are prepared to sacrifice the human race on the altar of profit. He depicts an unstable world with no limits on what can be done, up to and including universal chaos.
“When Putin occupied the Crimea in 2014, he broke a taboo that had been laboriously created in the wake of the Second World War, prohibiting countries from using force to make changes to their borders. The 2022 invasion made the message crystal clear, even to those determined not to hear it. War is back in fashion. Leaders who speak in its favour win elections. Some of them then pass decrees. Over the last five years, spending on weapons has increased by 34% at the global level”, the author observes (our translation throughout). Shortly afterwards, he points out that “in Libya, the Middle East, Ukraine: the outer edges of the continent that based its reconstruction on peace are now nothing short of a battlefield. And every day, war edges its way a little further inside Europe’s boundaries. In the last few months, Russian agents are suspected of having murdered a defector in Spain, having committed acts of arson in shopping centres and warehouses in several countries, of having placed booby traps in a number of transport aircraft and attempted to murder the CEO of one of Germany’s largest armaments consortiums [Armin Papperger, the head of Rheinmetall: Ed.]. That is before we even get to the large-scale disinformation operations, which are evolving into actual cyber-attacks [or hybrid operations targeting critical infrastructure: undersea cables, network infrastructure, hospital IT systems, etc.]. The media do not in every case have access to all the facts, but the election offices of most European countries, for instance, are systematically targeted by IT attacks coinciding with local or national elections”.
Pointing out that all throughout history, there has generally been a correlation between the increase in the number and intensity of wars and an acceleration in the development of offensive techniques in comparison to defensive techniques and a reduction in the cost of these, da Empoli stresses that “in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and throughout the Cold War, the nuclear deterrent made the cost of a large-scale attack prohibitively expensive. But developments in the geopolitical framework and technological progress have brought this phase of relative calm to an end: the attack on the Twin Towers that marked a new chapter in the story of war, which we had all believed to be over, cost less than a million dollars. Today, an aircraft carrier that costs the American government ten billion dollars can be sunk by two or three Chinese hypersonic missiles costing fifteen million. From the other point of view, it costs Israel a three-million-dollar Patriot missile to take down every two-hundred-dollar drone launched in southern Lebanon. And a cyber-attack that is capable of paralysing an entire nation costs almost nothing”. “And the price continues to fall. There are some people who predict that in the future, a single individual will be able to declare war on the whole world – and win. When you consider that a DNA synthesiser capable of creating new deadly pathogens costs around twenty thousand dollars, the same as a second-hand car, the prospect does not seem so remote”, the author continues, adding: “according to the company that produced it, the most recent model of ChatGPT launched in autumn 2024 has had the effect of significantly increasing the risk that artificial intelligence can be misused to create chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. This risk is now classed in the highest level on the scale established by the company, but that did not stop OpenAI from marketing the product, with no regulatory authority being able to do anything about it”.
“Our democracies still seem solid today, but there can be no doubt that the worst is yet to come. The new American president has become the leader of a motley crew of unreconstructed autocrats, tech conquistadors, revolutionaries and conspiracy theorists itching to do battle. An era of unlimited violence is opening up in front of us and (…) defenders of freedom seem singularly unprepared for the task that awaits them”, da Empoli argues.
“It is already ten years since Cambridge Analytica showed us the future by importing to Europe and the United States the information war techniques it had developed for the British army and intelligence services in Pakistan and Colombia. In a world in which the digital condition has become the first truly global experience, shared by all of the world’s population, the dynamics that are peculiar to the Internet and social networks can be exploited in more or less the same way anywhere in the world, and Nigeria is becoming an ideal base for a campaign in a Scandinavian country”, the author writes, in reference to the other dimension of the potential for future chaos to develop.
“What has changed over the last eight years is that the foundation of the old order has collapsed. If, in the mid-2010s, the ‘Brexiteers’, Trump and Bolsonaro may have looked like a group of outriders defying the established order and adopting a strategy of chaos, like insurgents in a war against a superior power, the situation has now been turned on its head: chaos is no longer the weapon of the rebels, but the M.O. of the dominant side. If, in the West, the first half of the 20th century taught politicians the virtues of restraint, the disappearance of the last generation born of war has allowed the return of demiurges reinventing reality and attempting to shape it in accordance with their own desires. If the old world presupposed safeguards – respect the independence of certain institutions, human rights and the rights of minorities, attention to international repercussions – none of this is of the slightest value in the era of predators. In this new world, all processes underway will be pushed to their extreme consequences and none of them will be able to be contained or governed in any way whatsoever”, the author predicts.
Da Empoli goes on to argue that “the window of opportunity that was open until yesterday for a system of rules to be set in place is now closed. The very idea of putting a limit on the logic of force, finance and crypto-currencies, snowballing AI and convergent technologies or the fall of the international order to the law of the jungle, is now outside the sphere of what is conceivable”. A pessimistic viewpoint? Absolutely not. Given the current acceleration in the way the political authorities in Europe, the European Union and its member states alike, are doing everything in their power, in frenetic rounds of meetings and endless initiatives, to try to save anything that can still be saved, it is vital to become aware of the chaos that is developing under our noses. To prepare to deal with it. Without giving in to panic. (Olivier Jehin)
Giuliano da Empoli. L’heure des prédateurs (available in French only). Gallimard. ISBN: 978-2-0731-1320-7. 151 pages. €19,00
Migrationshintergrund
Published in 2022, “Migration Background” is not an autobiography in the conventional sense, but, as the author explains in the foreword, a testimony or narrative of lived experience, with a mix of anecdotes, politics and history. This book by former member of the European Parliament Jannis Sakellariou, which is available only in German and in a Spanish translation, takes us to the heart of his story, which is also that of the European Parliament over the course of 20 years, between 1984 and 2004.
Born in Greece in 1939, Jannis Sakellariou died in Brussels in 2019. First and foremost, he tells the story of a European migrant, which gives the book its title. As a member of the SPD party, he is, as he succinctly puts it himself, a “German with an asterisk”, the asterisk signifying “not born here”, or in the Bavarian dialect, a “Zuagroast” (which translates as someone who arrived by train). For the author disembarked in Munich in 1957, where he had come to study engineering and electronics at the Technische Hochschule München… He was then employed by his old university as an assistant before finding a position at the Bayerische Elektrizitätswerke. In 1970, he joined the Young Socialists, as the SPD was then the only political party in Germany that allowed foreigners to become members, whereupon he had to leave his employer. He found work fairly quickly at Siemens, but he would once again have to resign once he was elected to the collegial chairmanship of the Young Socialists, which had a very poor reputation in the business world. Having been fired from a third company, a subsidiary of a French group, for the same reason, he became a taxi driver, then ended up finding a job, a more stable one this time, in the brand-new Bundeswehr Academy in Neubiberg.
And so it was while he was living in Bavaria that he learnt, on Friday, 21 April 1967, about the military coup d’etat that had brought a junta to power in Athens and would prompt him to become politically engaged, he explains, firstly as a member of the Panhellenic Anti-Dictatorship Front (Panellinios Antidiktatoriki Enosis) based in Munich, then of the SPD. His resistance to the military dictatorship led to the non-renewal of his passport, a fate that was shared by many of his countrymen. He would not be able to return to Greece until September 1974, following the fall of the military regime. In the meantime, he was granted German citizenship in January 1973.
11 years later, he entered the European Parliament. Shortly afterwards, the day before he was due to travel to Strasbourg for the third time, he was visited by three young Turkish men who had come to tell him about the murder of the brother of one of them in Turkey on the same day, asking him to raise the matter at the European Parliament. This would be a baptism of fire for the fresh new MEP. Still getting to grips with the institution’s procedural rules, the Socialist group and its President, Rudi Arndt, trusted him with an emergency resolution (which, at the time, were debated during the Thursday night session) and the amount of time given to the group to speak was just three minutes.
Much of the book, however, is devoted to the travel and encounters he would have the opportunity to make during his 20 years at the European Parliament. He tells of his visit to Andreas Papandreou with Egon Bahr, in late 1984, or the role of mediator he played in February 1999 during the Kurdish occupation (and hostage-taking) of the residence of the Greek ambassador in The Hague, following the kidnapping of the Kurdish leader Abdoullah Öcalan in Nairobi, when staying with the Greek ambassador. He has met that same Kurdish leader himself in Damascus in 1995.
Jannis Sakellariou also talks of Kosovo and “the legalisation of an illegal war” (our translation), a meeting with Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli and visits to Tunisia, Algeria and Lebanon. Finally, a large section is given over to Central America, particularly El Salvador, a country he visited three times, in 1985, 1992 and 2002, and Guatemala, where he met Rigoberta Menchu in 1998. The human rights activist was actually arrested during one of their meetings. Four years later, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (OJ)
Jannis Sakellariou. Migrationshintergrund – Erlebnisse eines Europäer (available in German and Spanish only). Verlag Dietz. ISBN: 978-3-8012-0629-1. 168 pages. €20,00