The World Is Changing: New “Mental Maps” Are Needed to Understand It

Giampiero Bordino
Professor in Contemporary History and Political Analyst. President of the Einstein Center for International Studies

Adriana Castagnoli
Terre di mezzo (Middle-Earths) (in Italian)
Il Sole 24 ORE, 2023

The need for new mental maps to properly look at the new world as it has taken shape in the last years, emerges clearly and vividly since the first pages of the new book by the economist Adriana Castagnoli. In regard of the world order established at the end of the second world war, and also of the one more recently originated by the end of the East-West bi-polarism and the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its empire (1991), we can observe today a great fragmentation, a strong and pervasive instability that affects all the actors, and a growing difficulty in understanding the direction of the game the actors are playing, even by part of the actors themselves, beside the observers and scholars.

The United States and Europe, the hegemonic West of the post-World War II period, often appear uncertain and deprived of sense of orientation when faced with the new role of the emerging Global South. In fact, they have given up trying to continue to exercise their hegemony, not only economic or military, but also in terms of planning and culture. The Global South itself, first and foremost the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), appears in turn uncertain, fragmented, with multiple interests and visions, and without a coherent and common strategy. Great fragmentation, few alignments, nothing truly stable for anyone: this seems to be the emerging scenario. A sort of collective disorientation affects the actors, in the absence of visible, recognized hegemonies, democratically legitimized or not. As a result, our most consolidated mental maps are to some extent upset.

The West appears to be in difficulty in its search for some adequately shared and at the same time effective platform for dialogue, capable of somehow containing the assortment of possible antagonists. The G20, in this framework, may be seen as an attempt to build and manage a possible platform for meetings and dialogue, gathering the main large geo-political and geo-economic areas of the world: the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, India and so on. In this context, moreover, new countries emerge on the scene, such as, in particular, those located in the Central Asia area, on the Silk Road, like – not only for its energy resources – Azerbaijan, the main former Soviet republic, located in a strategic position between Asia and Europe. The Central Asia area, between Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, appears increasingly decisive, but the West, the United States and Europe, do not seem to have adequately grasped yet the decisive importance of this area.

In fact, the West does not display an adequate planning and propositional capacity, similar to that which, after 1944-45, had allowed it, at least to some extent, to try and govern the world and also to promote, albeit with limits and contradictions, the liberal democracy. The result is fragmentation and geo-economic and geo-political crises, instability, difficult and uncertain predictability of the processes underway. In this context, becomes apparent the crisis of the models and experiences of liberal democracy, which tend to be reduced in Europe itself, where the opposite model of illiberal democracy finds today explicit defenders, such as the Hungarian Prime Minister Orban, and where new forms of fascism manifest themselves both on the cultural and on the political and institutional level.

In this situation, the need for a new project for the world, capable of reducing and regulating its complexity as far as possible, appears evident. At the same time, both peace and democracy, the two fundamental values for coexistence that truly make life worth to be lived, are at risk. A regulation structured on multiple levels, capable of corresponding to the articulation of the ongoing problems and challenges, is the horizon that must be pursued. Consequently, political leaderships are needed that are truly capable of thinking about complexity, beyond the short-term goals useful only to round up consensus for electoral purposes.

What project then for the uncertain, transitional, disoriented world we live in?

This, in short, is the fundamental question that the political leaderships in power should try to answer, at their different levels (from local to global). To a possible answer to this question, the federalist reflection too can offer a significant contribution, combining the prospect of an institutional regulation of conflicts able to ensure peace, with the prospect of a thorough, transnational, liberal democracy. Rethinking this tradition in the context of the middle (between old and new) world we live in is a difficult but inescapable commitment, if we want to contribute to the construction of a new, peaceful and shared global order.