Comments 6

暗淡新世界

Sep 25, 2014 Javier Solana

马德里—全球转型并非新鲜事。但是，随着全球化和技术进步，这些转型的速度和规模显著增加。在未来几十年中，这一趋势还会加强，巨大的动荡可能也随之而至。

20多年前，萨达姆·侯赛因的伊拉克入侵科威特，结果联合国安理会几乎全体一致地通过决议，要求伊拉克撤军。萨达姆拒绝接受这一决议，于是34个国家组成联军支持美国所领导的被称为“沙漠风暴行动”的空中打击，将萨达姆军队逐出了科威特。

这是1991年，苏联已经解体，美国成为世界唯一的超级大国。但今时已不同往日，如今国际社会对于类似的领土入侵反应一片混乱就是明证。

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Javier Solana

Writing for PS since 2004
91 Commentaries

Javier Solana was EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Secretary-General of NATO, and Foreign Minister of Spain. He is currently President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Europe.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 6 in all 6 Comments on this article

Irina Muhina Oct 1, 2014

I think the article is missing big on the essence of global instability.
Today BBC news was that " The world has lost 52 percent of its biodiversity since 1970, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
announced in a study released today on the state of our planet.
Two problems were highlighted their:
1 . The problem get worse as more of the world adopts or aspires to the levels of consumption common in richer countries.
"If all people on the planet had the Footprint of the average resident of Qatar, we would need 4.8 planets," the report says.
"If we lived the lifestyle of a typical resident of the USA, we would need 3.9 planets." -
( Remember ?! -west has only consumption economy model no alternative )
2. "High-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, but low income countries are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses," Keya Chatterjee, WWF's senior director of footprint said in a press release.
"In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion."
My conclusion:
China and Russia do not want to be a territory for waste and resource depletion anymore !!!!
Ukraine and Hong Kong are beginning of the end !!!
Question need to be addressed and not even mentioned by author - Is it end of the planet or is it end of the western financial capitalism ?
Curtis Carpenter Sep 28, 2014

I certainly agree with the proposition that it is high time the EU began to express some leadership in those affairs which most directly involve its own self interests. But I confess that this view is driven in part by a desire to see people like Hari Maidu (below) complain about some institution OTHER than the U.S. government's handling of international problems.

Meanwhile, that the "US has rushed to form a confusing coalition..." in respect to the Islamic State now is surely to be preferred to a "Go it alone" approach that essentially didn't bother to mount even a pretense of a multilateral approach to Iraq. Or am I missing something?

Too many of the world's governments seem to not have stumbled to the fact that multilateral approaches involve actively shared planning, shared execution -- and shared blame when things go badly, which they do at least half the time.
hari naidu Sep 26, 2014

Javier is not day-dreaming - taking into account his background and experience - it took him some time to put his ideas to print because he can't see a way out.

Multilateralism is EU game plan - not US Congress and its domestic politics of indifference or ideological resistance.
And, as long as the political paradigm in US politics doesn't change in direction of more multilateralism, the danger is that this chaotic scenario of Javier will not only echo the end of globalization; but regionalism will replace WTO.

Asian 21st century may be the critical salvation for the global economy, if Sino-Indian relations move towards greater and more intensified economic and financial cooperation, including FDI investment in Indian infrastructure and energy sector by PRC... and EU FTA.

In final analysis, the global apple cart may be upset by Putin's Russia should het succeed (ultimately) in moving Berlin towards his policy direction in Europe...thus preserving German FDI in Russia.
Ariel Tejera Sep 26, 2014

The question remains whether Western nation states will have any powers left to confer, to any external organizations.

Per current trends (ultra nationalists, government indebtednes, no military draft, government shutdowns, etc), there will be none.

It seems instead that balancing the successfull and de-facto globalizations of finance, commodities, manufacturing, etc, now logically follows the globalization of the individual, through the overwhelm of smartphones, internet of things, and google/facebook/etc enablers.

Soon political and government entities, different to traditional nation states, will emerge. For example, punishments and ostracisms will take the form of the current punishments to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, but targeting instead individuals or groups of individuals, wherever they happen to be, physically.
Zsolt Hermann Sep 25, 2014

I think we can look at this writing as a landmark article pointing out a very fragile, volatile state which needs aware, proactive input otherwise we will sleepwalk into something terrible.

Indeed humanity is at a crucial crossroad, and for the first time we have to make a conscious decision instead of following natural instincts, knee-jerk reactions.

Up to this point all our development, changing of civilizations, evolutionary jumps happened unconsciously, automatically. As the actual state has become intolerable, we "jumped" through some violent reaction, revolution, war, and then started building a new state.

The last such "violent jump" contained two World Wars with terrible loss, and it is not difficult to make a "prophecy" that with the present tension, the present accumulation of WMD's, the inescapable paradox of global inter-dependence and maximally developed self-calculating, egoistic human nature the next explosion could wipe out most of humanity.

I fully agree with the writer that only global, mutually complementing, supra-national cooperation can help us avoid such scenario, but it requires us going above our inherent nature, above our instinctive selfish and egocentric individualistic or nationalistic reactions, action.

And since such action is almost "super-human" we have to learn and devise a very special practical method, education, trying to use our present nature with positive motivation but in a way that leads to a gradual change in world-view, perception, human inter-relationships.

We need a method that starts using our healthy, self-centered, egoistic attitude, offering a better life based on mutual responsibility, mutual cooperation, leading to a changed, more altruistic, collective minded nature.

On one hand we are starting a perilous journey, but we embark on it together we can unlock humanity's potential in a way that is unprecedented, since the human species , working as a "single, mutually complementing organism" has infinite potential.
- hari naidu Sep 26, 2014
  
  Do you really think US Congress will take your intuitive intelligence into political consideration and act accordingly?
  Methinks it's US Congress that has nullified multilateralism because it wants to dictate outcome of globalization process - certainly a self-defeating strategy.

http://prosyn.org/YevFsQD/zh;

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