What is going on in the world right now? How to live in a system with no rules?
Enrico Tomaselli — Magmart festival Art Director, graphic and webdesigner. He has been researching conflicts and wars both from a historical, political, strategic and tactical point of view
What is going on in the world right now? Prognosis. What will happen next? What will the new order look like?
From the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has lived in a condition of bipolarity: two great powers – the USA and the USSR – have faced each other for decades, even if that condition was a balance, mutually useful, as the existence of the ‘enemy’ served perfectly to keep the respective areas of influence more or less calm. When the USSR collapsed, and therefore one of the two powers on which the world balance was based failed, the illusion took over that instead of a unipolar world, that of globalization, which we saw as substantially the triumph of the West, but which turned out to be a papier-mâché scenario, miserably collapsed in the rubble of Mariupol.
The fact is that decades of the Cold War had made us believe that the clash was exclusively ideological, between capitalism and communism (Soviet or Chinese), while it was also geopolitical, and ideologies were its temporary vector. For this reason, when the West won it, it was thought that the triumph of capitalism would have determined a picture of substantial homogeneity, and therefore harmonious coexistence. Double mistake, because not only geopolitical interests (and conflicts) are always there, but capitalism is an amplifier of them, conflict is written in its DNA.
In the words of Marx, “the tendency to create a world market is contained in the very concept of capital”.
What, therefore, seemed to be only the confrontation between different political-economic systems clashes, was in reality first of all a geopolitical one, between a thalassocratic power – the United States – and a continental power – the USSR. This was the core of the conflict, to which ideologies have acted as a veil. And, again, to mutual benefit, because it serves the US / USSR conflict as the clash between liberalism and socialism it served perfectly the purpose of hiding the strategic interests of the two powers and thus ensuring that these perceived interests were an as coincident defense of the two powers. universal ‘values’ advocated by the two different ideologies.
With the fall of the wall, the ideological veil that covered geopolitical interests also falls. But this was not immediately perceptible, also because – in fact – at first the idea was affirmed that, with the disappearance of the socialist ideology, a new era without conflicts was affirmed. While as in reality as embers under the ashes, the strategic interests of the large (and small) were not always all for the disappearance, but were just waiting for the opportunity to flare up again.
What the Russo-Ukrainian war tells us, therefore, is that the era of ideologies will also be over, but not the geopolitical one. And above all, it tells us that the illusion of a single empire is precisely a tale. Moreover. The global victory of capitalism has made the multipolar world even more unstable than it has ever been. Because – unquestionably – capitalism offers an opportunity for economic growth such as real communism has never had. And this growth feeds needs and ambitions, and therefore, inevitably, feeds the military instrument. And what unquestionably presents itself in the world today is a framework in which the three great powers in global eyes – the United States, Russia and China – despite the diversity of political systems, are however united by the same economic model, the capitalist one.
What is therefore looming is not simply a multipolar world, where at least three great powers face each other, but a world that becomes narrow for all three. A world in which there is no stable condition of equilibrium, but in which competition tends to rise.
The risk of being a serious threat not only to the men and women of the world but to the planet itself.
The world, after all, is small. In the history of mankind, so many empires have clashed, followed one another, and then disappeared. In the golden age of European colonialism, Great Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, Holland, Germany, Italy … even Belgium its colonies, its domains. Throughout their history, they have faced each other several times – Europe today seems to us a war-torn haven of peace, but it has been an ongoing battlefield for centuries.
However, then there was space. Even in the early 1900s, we were less than two billion on earth. Today we are four times as many.
We consume more food – more water, more land, more energy. We all consume everything. The anthropogenic pressure on the planet is constantly growing, our needs are growing exponentially. And we have a problem.
While all this grows, the planet always remains the same, and its resources are consumed. The world is becoming small, and we should be concerned about achieving – and quickly – a balance, between us as a species, and the planet; and even before that, among us humans, among the forms in which our social life has crystallized.
Because if something doesn’t change, something radical, in the way we consume the planet, it will get tighter and tighter. And we have a problem.
Three great imperialisms, in a shrinking space, are a problem. Because the expansive thrust is unavoidable. But these three imperialisms are an even bigger problem.
And it is precisely the capitalist nature of the three contemporary empires, beyond the differences, even marked, that distinguish them, the element of greatest danger. Because they compete on the same ground, they have very similar needs.
The world we face is in some ways reminiscent of the United States of the second half of the 19th century. The southern states represented traditional capitalism, based on large estates and the exploitation of the slave labor, the northern states represented modern capitalism, based on industry and the exploitation of wage labor. Both perceived themselves as bearers of different values because each society builds its weltanschauung, but beyond these differences, however marked they may appear, and however much they could be subjectively perceived as fundamental, south and north were two models of capitalism, and it is precisely for this very reason that they entered into conflict. The American Civil War was a war for the supremacy of one capitalism over another, not a clash of civilizations. In this sense, I use the expression “global civil war” to describe the scenario of a planetary conflict, which takes place within a single economic system, and in which the main stakeholders compete for dominance.
The Russian-Ukrainian war officially opens the season of global civil war, one in which three models of capitalism, centered on three superpowers with a strong geopolitical connotation (and vocation), will compete for domination over the planet’s resources.
The near future will therefore be characterized by a traumatic recoil of international relations, by a climate of substantial relaxation and cooperation (albeit still competitive), to one of the mutual closures, isolation and mistrust, and a surge in tensions between the large powers, and therefore, consequently, over the whole world. To make the international situation even more complicated, there is also the relative speed with which events have taken place.
The USA, which at least since the end of the nineteenth century felt invested with the ‘mission’ of leading the world, found itself having to face, in rapid succession, initially two world wars, thanks to which they completely ousted Europe from a role as a global protagonist, then decades of the Cold War, at the end of which they believed they had almost completely achieved the goal, only to discover that – the ideologically enemy power having fallen – the geopolitical power was resurrected, that the Chinese power had impressive growth, and that (not least) its role as a superpower was already in decline.
All this makes the picture even more unstable. And therefore, it can be said that there is no ‘new order’ on the horizon, on the contrary, a long season of world disorder is envisaged. Moreover, a global order can be affirmed exclusively through the rules imposed by a winner (and at the moment no one is in sight), or as a result of an agreement between two or more ‘dominant’ subjects (and this is also absolutely not to the agenda).
Game with no rules: how to live in a system where rules and regulations have ceased to be effective?
On closer inspection, even in the world, we have left behind, the rules were – at least in part – little more than a facade. A whole series of international commitments, of which the League of Nations first, then the UN, have been the plastic representation, have actually worked in fits and starts – and even a little comfortable. There are countless cases in which the rules have been ignored, or circumvented, or even blatantly torn apart, by one or another subject; and above all, of course, by the strongest subjects. The result was that soon almost everyone had their own violations, and therefore a mutual interest in never effectively sanctioning them took place. Which, moreover, in many cases was simply impossible.
In essence, therefore, the world from which we come was a world in which the rules of the game applied to those who were unable to violate them with impunity, but which, in any case, constituted at least a formal framework to refer to.
Surely, the world that opens up before us is, instead, a world in which even these formal references will be increasingly ignored, and in which international relations will be regulated on the level of power relations. One thing, this, obviously does not necessarily mean that the strongest (militarily, economically, or politically) always prevails, since the strategic dynamics are in reality more and more complex and articulated, so that at certain times it can also happen that the ‘weak’ prevail over ‘strong’. At the same time, this does not mean the advent of some kind of ‘law of the jungle’; on the contrary, it could mean the affirmation of a system of non-formalized rules, but precisely inscribed in the logic of power relations, which if on one hand it could appear a harbinger of disorder and instability, on the other it could turn out to be more solid, precisely because based on real data and not on abstractions.
Of course, this generally means that the position of the weaker countries will be even more vulnerable, and this could in turn push towards a multiplicity of regulatory systems, each more or less linked to one of the major powers, consistent with a new division of the world in ‘sides’. Probably, the first terrain on which this multiplication of international ‘regulations’ could be exercised is the economic one – think of what is already happening around the BRICS+, or – in other respects – of what Russia’s exit from the SWIFT system will entail.
In any case, the dissolution of the old order, and the lack of a new one to take its place, will characterize a long phase of interregnum; in the words of Gramsci, “the old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And monsters are born in this chiaroscuro.”
If we look, once again, at the Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a litmus test, which brings out the evidence of the situation, we realize what are the crucial factors of global competition. Net of speculative maneuvers, which, for example, have invested grain supplies, we know that today’s world food production is even in excess – even if the distribution is highly unequal – while the decisive factors are energy (gas, oil, nuclear power), and access to some fundamental raw materials. In addition, of course, to the possibility of expanding into new markets.
From this point of view, Russia becomes a central element; both in the sense of its energy export capacity, and its median position in the Eurasian continent, a real ‘bridge’ between Europe and Asia (China).
The big game to be played in the coming decades, therefore, is fundamentally on the international realignment, determined mainly by the impact of access to energy. Given that in the short term, the pattern is what we are already seeing (therefore Europe that ‘detaches’ itself from Russia, and which pays dearly for the consequences on the economic and political level, while Russia itself turns to the East – China, India, etc), in the medium term it will be necessary to see if the United States will in turn be able to ‘hold up’ – both economically and politically – a West that will find itself increasingly isolated. And, consequently, if Europe will accept for a long time a condition of impoverishment and marked subordination, or if instead – perhaps taking advantage of a moment of further US weakness – it will not be able to free itself from it. In this case, it may be precisely starting from old Europe that a process of rewriting the rules for coexistence between nations begins.