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Picking up the pieces of the new world (dis)order
Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said that the world has fallen into a "great strategic puzzle." It is unclear who could pick up the pieces and reassemble them, says DW's Christian Trippe.
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Maybe we’re living in an age of perplexity. Everything had started so well. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War. The collapse of the communist world of states in 1989/90 marked a turning point of epochal significance. But what has happened since then can hardly be analytically explained. The words are literally missing to describe the new world (dis)order. Too much has started to shift, including certainties, alliances and power structures.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the constitutional, democratic state model seemed to have triumphed. The West assumed the role of asserting itself wherever anti-liberal systems had previously suppressed their citizens. To visualize this through the lens of cybernetics: The power that had slipped from the old rulers' hands was now in need of new holders. Power seemed to always attach itself to the victors of history but history itself was a thing of the past. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama postulated, both smugly and prematurely, the "end of history."
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Ongoing disputes between the US and China are fueling global political anxieties
However, this thesis failed. In retrospect, the violent crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in China was a signal that the world was not developing as described by the Western handbooks on the craft of political statehood. China, which so brutally ended the triumphal advance of democracy, has shown the world that economic success, prosperity and development do not necessarily go hand in hand with the existence of political freedoms. Today China is the world leader in many technologies of the future.
Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said that the world has fallen into a "great strategic puzzle." It is unclear who could pick up the pieces and reassemble them, says DW's Christian Trippe.
Maybe we’re living in an age of perplexity. Everything had started so well. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War. The collapse of the communist world of states in 1989/90 marked a turning point of epochal significance. But what has happened since then can hardly be analytically explained. The words are literally missing to describe the new world (dis)order. Too much has started to shift, including certainties, alliances and power structures.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the constitutional, democratic state model seemed to have triumphed. The West assumed the role of asserting itself wherever anti-liberal systems had previously suppressed their citizens. To visualize this through the lens of cybernetics: The power that had slipped from the old rulers' hands was now in need of new holders. Power seemed to always attach itself to the victors of history but history itself was a thing of the past. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama postulated, both smugly and prematurely, the "end of history."
Ongoing disputes between the US and China are fueling global political anxieties
However, this thesis failed. In retrospect, the violent crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in China was a signal that the world was not developing as described by the Western handbooks on the craft of political statehood. China, which so brutally ended the triumphal advance of democracy, has shown the world that economic success, prosperity and development do not necessarily go hand in hand with the existence of political freedoms. Today China is the world leader in many technologies of the future.
