I vividly remember driving past the shuttered customs buildings on the Franco-Belgian border in the mid-1990s. Paris-Amsterdam had become a freeway trip. Seven years later, colorful pieces of paper appeared in everyone's hands: the euro. Almost simultaneously, China entered the World Trade Organization. Anyone with historical awareness and access to live information from around the planet could have predicted what would happen over the middle term: the rise of inequality, the formation of a transnational oligarchy, extreme environmental degradation, the reemergence of far-right forces, and ultimately, geopolitical clashes leading to war. Yet even those who did predict such things experienced a utopian period of free international cooperation, creativity, travel, the formation of new kinds of communities and the chance to express a new spirit that had emerged after the end of the Cold War in 1989-92. In fact the entire neoliberal period, with market populism at its core, saw incredible flowerings of culture across the earth, something worth remembering and trying to interpret.
America's useless wars in Central Asia and the Middle East (supported by Nato in the former case) cast an excruciating light over this period, as did the inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and the corresponding failure to do anything about it. You'd have thought that the global financial crisis of 2007-12 would have put an end to all this, but instead it reinforced the oligarchies. Meanwhile, privileged people all over the world kept the party going. I was in Mongolia, on an amazing cross-cultural art junket in 2014, when a Polish artist agitatedly explained to me what I was not getting: Vladimir Putin's ability to run circles around Western governments and populations with the destabilizing techniques of what was then called "non-linear warfare" - while at the same time engaging in the real thing. No one knows where the current conflict will end, if war will extend beyond Ukraine's borders, how the crucial issue of Russian-Chinese cooperation will play out over the coming months, whether the unified world economy will split into rival blocs (Nato vs Shanghai Cooperation Organization), or whether a new, even more corrupt status quo will emerge that allows the EU to remain Russia's number 1 trading partner. As I write, the former SPD chancellor of Germany during the go-go years of globalization, Gerhard Schroeder, has not yet stepped down from his position as chairman of the board of Rosneft. Whatever the outcomes, everyone knows a divide has been crossed, and that the short and middle-term responses will be crucial. There's half a chance to purge the global financial / real-estate system of highly corruptive Russian money, and to quell the voices of those who see Putin's militarist nationalism as the model for a virile white authoritarian resurgence across the so-called West (I'll leave others to speculate about contrary possibilities). Maybe a live demonstration of what risk really means will convince politicians and populations to prepare more deliberately for obvious and pressing future challenges. Anyway, the giddy period that so many of us lived through ended long ago. Now, at least a decade too late, I think that period is both formally and functionally closed for the international system. It turns out Covid was just a prelude, or maybe an incubator. How to forge new ideas and pick up new tools in a radically different world? My heart goes out to all those hit by this war. Brian
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