The changing world order

The world order (if there ever was such a thing) is changing, and not in a good way. Of course what seemed stable when I was young was simply a function of not having lived through very much change. The 1970s saw Britain grappling and coming to terms with its diminished role in the world. There was the joining of the European Economic Community (EEC), the joining and departure from the European Monetary System (EMS), the decision not to adopt the single currency, and finally Britain's exit from Europe.  There was decimalization and the first supermarket to arrive in Steyning. There was the end of Franko's dictatorship in Spain, Solidarity in Poland, the collapse of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification.  More recent was the delegation of power to the central banks and the control of inflation.  So it hasn't really been all that stable. But there was a sense that in terms of international relations, we were moving towards greater economic integration and away from large scale military conflicts. There were the small "skirmishes"; the Falklands, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, then Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, but nothing on the scale of the two world wars, and since 1946, no use of nuclear weapons. So until the first early twenty-first century, things seemed to be moving in a generally in positive trajectory. There were hiccups like the 2008 financial crisis, but economies recovered.

Today that optimisms seems harder to sustain. Tension between China and the West over Tiwan, between Russia and the West over Ukraine, the resurgence of authoritarian regimes in Turkey, Hungary and Poland, not to mention the climate crisis, are beginning to cast a long shadow. The proliferation of a fragmented media landscape and the growth of social media is turning politics towards a toxic focus on identity devoid of a shared set of facts, let alone shared values. The collaboration of authoritarian regimes, swapping ideas on how best to stay in power and beat back pressure from the world's well meaning democracies is setting up a battle not between the ideologies of communism and capitalism, or between state run economies and market economies, but between competing systems of control, democratic representation or authoritarianism, between faith in institutions and faith in (or obedience to) personalities. And while democratic regimes believe they hold the moral high ground, their increasing inability to deliver, either economically or politically, will lead to more frustration and a further decline in trust in institutions, putting democracy itself at risk. It seems that for the twenty or so years I have left, the future looks pretty bleak.