The End of a Century, the End of an Era

Abstract

Ten years after the end of bipolarity, expectations that arose at first have gone unfulfilled. The lack of a conceptual framework that would allow objective analysis of the present situation has made an already confusing situation worse. Attempts to describe the future have in most cases been nothing more than statements of what is already past. Some writers have tried to propose thought structures that would help cut through the international haze we live in, but in most cases, they have, unfortunately, in most cases been overwhelmed by the hegemonic force of the one way of thinking based on a systematic, a priori dismissal of anything that does not give its blessing to the new world based on the purely economic criteria of globalization. Because of the unpredictability of the collapse of the old bipolar scheme, projects belonging to the past have gone on being implemented, one notable example being the euro. The issue is not the distribution of wealth but rather one of the concentration of wealth with the number of poor people in the world increasing while the world’s great powers fight to reestablish their independence in foreign policy in face of the of the predominant role of the United States. International organizations, foremost among them the UN, are being supplanted by other more or less informal venues (such as the G-8) where the world’s future is decided on the basis of economic power while the reality of a world population ever more divided into asmall nucleus of rich people and an ever greater number of poor people is ignored.