A Roadmap for Politics in the 21st Century (Part 1 of 2)

Politics is an ever changing game. Politics today, as we enter the third decade of the third millennium, is very different from what it looked like 100, 50, 20 or even just 10 years ago. Things change at neck breaking speed and political science and political theory must adapt to those changes.

My intention here is not to provide comprehensive or in-depth analysis. Such undertakings are better dealt with in the realm of academia by political science and political philosophy professors. I am but an observer who wishes to record some of his observations in an informal way. Hopefully these observations might prove interesting to other interested observers of world events and politics, but even if that is not the case, writing down one’s thoughts has the minimum value of helping to solidify and crystallize one’s ideas.  

I’ve always been intrigued by the nation of creating a roadmap for the future. The great visions and ideals have always appealed to me a great deal more than the finepoints and the minutia of details. As such, in line with the personal tendency of the writer, this simple essay deals with general points rather than specifics. The general idea here is to provide an approximation of a roadmap for politics in the times to come.

I’m also not particularly interested in the political struggles and bickerings of a specific nation, but of the whole world. As I see myself as a citizen of the world, I cannot help but regard politics as being a global affair, concerning all the men, women and children of the world, not just those of a particular nation. In fact, out of all my notions, none is more prevalent than this idea of politics as a global phenomenon and all the things that it entails.

The Globalization of Politics

For better or worse, the history of mankind in the past 500 years has been marked, most and foremost, by a process of globalization. After millenia of relative isolation, practically all the cultures in the world have in the past five centuries been inevitably linked to each other in one way or another, economically, culturally, technologically, militarily and politically.

Five centuries ago. Give or take, the world was divided, geographically, culturally and politically, in a number of more or less self-contained areas or civilizations. Previous to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492, all pre-columbian American civilizations were completely separated from the rest of the world and were carving their own civilizational path that had begun over 10,000 years ago or so when the first humans crossed into the Americas for the first time from Northeast Asia. Even amongst pre-columbian American civilizations, there was a considerable degree of isolation imposed by the great distances that separate North, Central and South America. The indian tribes of North-America had little contact with the more advanced meso-american civilizations and those in turn had likely little contact and knowledge of south-American civilizations in their varying degrees of development. Even in South America, the more advanced civilizations of the west would probably have little or no contact with the predominantly hunter-gatherer tribes of the eastern part of South America such as the Tupi-Guarani in the territory of modern-day Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. Also, in the North-America that predated Columbus’ arrival, contact was either minimal or inexistent between civilizations of different territories such as the Caribbean, the Arctic or the Central Plains region.  

In the world pre-1500, relative isolation was a feature not just of the American civilizations but of most parts of the world. Before the first European traders and explorers reached the shores of India, China, Siam, Japan and Indonesia, there had been minimal contact and interaction between the civilizations of Europe and Asia. Up until then, contact between Europeans and Eastern Asians had been almost null and mediated by the Middle Eastern kingdoms and empires that stood in-between them. Sub-saharan African peoples also remained out of the grasp of Europeans up until the mid to late 15th century, when the first European explorers, mostly Portuguese and Spaniards, were able to overcome for the first time the difficulties of long-distance sea exploration and reach further and further into the southern top of Africa and beyond. Australian aborigines remained in isolation even longer, not having come in contact with European explorers and settlers until much later in history. When they did, unfortunately for them, the more advanced Europeans relegated them into a state of subservience at best and annihilation at worst, much like what had previously occurred in the Americas.

If the world before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was marked by the development of many different and relatively isolated civilizations in Europe, the MiddleEast, America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia, the european explorer-conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would change all that. European colonies were established in North and South America, the great mesoamerican and andine civilizations of old swiftly fell to the Spanish conquistadores, and the initial Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch trade posts in sub-saharan Africa, India and East Asia eventually morphed into full-fledged European colonial empires and a global network of war, trade and cultural and technological exchange. 

Since the great period of exploration and discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, two major political cataclysms have changed the nature of global politics. The first was the eclosion of political and cultural revolutions that transformed the whole world in the late eighteenth century, namely the American and French revolutions. The second, and even more significant disruption occurred in the first half of the 20th century, as two world wars and one great global economic crisis gave rise to fascism and communism and provoked the fall of the great European colonial powers that had ruled the world for five centuries. As the British, French, Dutch, Austrian and German empires collapsed, the newly formed communist union of Soviet republics and the capitalist American super-power took the mantle of world leadership in the second half of the 20th century. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decade of the past century, the world entered a new millenium led by a powerful United States of America and with liberal-democracy fully implemented in most of the world.The nationalist and fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth century, namely those in Germany, Italy in Japan were obliterated by means of warfare in WWII. In spite of a later resurgence of fascism in the form of military dictatorships throughout Latin America and surviving fascist regimes in southern Europe, the later half of the 20th century would be marked by the uneasy coexistence of two world views. In the West, the world became increasingly capitalist, democratic and globalized. In the East, under Soviet leadership, the world was communist and totalitarian. In any case, globalism and not nationalism won the day and shaped the fortunes of most of the world going into the twenty-first century. A global system of international trade and diplomacy emerged and globalization has advanced politically, economically, culturally and technologically.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, it seemed that liberal-democracy, globalization and capitalism would become the guiding lights of the 21st century. Francis Fukuyama famously celebrated the End of History and the struggles of the human race. 

This, of course, was not to be. The new Russia grew increasingly authoritarian and anti-Western under Putin. China, under a neo-communist totalitarian regime, became a new super-power and has emerged as a credible alternative to Western liberal-democracies. The Middle-East has become engulfed in war and religious extremism and is becoming increasingly anti-Western. Capitalism is no longer an unquestioned model, especially as a major economic crisis in 2008-10 and in current times have put the system to the test and global economic inequality has gone rampant. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, in several European nations and in the United States the far-right has gained ground, to a great extent bolstered by increasing anti-immigration and anti-globalization feelings. Nationalism has made a comeback and new leaders of important western democracies were elected on nationalist platforms, with Donald Trump’s “America First” policy and Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit and anti European Union stance leading the way.

As I write this, in the middle of a global pandemic and during this unprecedented economic crisis, neither liberal-democracy, nor globalization nor international cooperation seem like safe bets anymore. Nationalism, xenophobia and isolationism have once again seized the day and the future is uncertain once again. There is no doubt that the globalization process of the last five centuries cannot be reversed. We live in a global world whether we want it or not. The only question is how we react to this fact, either by resorting to isolanist and nationalistic policies or by embracing internationalism.

It would be a mistake for us, humans, to go back to the past and make the same mistakes that our ancestors have made. The rise of nationalism and its hyperbolic form, fascism, in the first half of the past century ended up in catastrophe as events such as World War II and the Holocaust attest to. Almost as a way of reminding us of the dangers of nationalism, the Yoguslavian wars in the last decade of the 20th century, extremely nationalistic, also resulted in genocide and widespread misery for all of those involved. Even more subdued fascist regimes such as those in Portugal, Spain or Greece resulted in decades of loss of personal freedom and repression and are generally thought of as a very bad experience for those nations. More recent fascist regimes, mostly in Latin America, have also led to human tragedy, albeit perhaps not to the degree experienced by Europeans in the thirties and forties. Even so, to this day hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Argentinians, Chileans, Brazilians, Peruvians and other Latin-Americans remember the atrocities they or their families and friends had to endure under the rule of the Latin-American fascist regimes of the mid to late 20th century. 

Democracy is far from perfect. Modern liberal democracy certainly has its flaws. Yet compared to the alternatives it is probably still our best bet by a long shot. As Churchill said, our democratic systems may be terrible, yet they are still much better than the alternatives.

One could also make the argument that nationalism must not necessarily lead to its more extreme form. Perhaps we can have nationalism and democracy, a situation we have seemingly now in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Hungary and Austria. Yet it is much too soon to know if such an arrangement is possible on the long-term or if nationalism, as time progresses, naturally reverts to authoritarianism as it has in the past.

However, looking at the foremost current nationalistic leaders of democracies such as Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, it is easy to see authoritarianism tendencies displayed both in words and deeds. We should not take democracy for granted as people did in Spain, Germany, Italy or Portugal in the first half of the 20th century. Even though our democracies today are older and stronger than those of the early 20th century, like the Weimar Republic or the Second Spanish Republic, nationalism and fascism have destroyed democracies in the past and could do it again in the future. Even the oldest of republics can die as history, going as far back as the Ancient World can teach us. Democracy died in Athens and Rome millenia before Mussolini and Hitler were born. We must always be in the lookout for the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the future and stop them before they get too strong.

There are, however, even deeper reasons why our future should be determined by organizations such as the United Nations and the European Unionand not by isolationist and nationalistic demagogs. In a world that is as globalized and interlinked as ours today, insisting on isolationism is as foolish as it is dangerous. Problems such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics such as the current one, international terrorism or even international economic crisis such as the one we are about to face, must be dealt with not by nations individually but rather by international cooperation. Global problems can only be solved by all the nations working together to reduce global carbon emissions, enact measures of social distancing during a global pandemic or reduce the amount of nuclear bombs in stand by in the world’s militaries. The more globalized our societies become the bigger the need for global mechanisms of political action is.  

On a slightly more philosophical note, it is also important to acknowledge that moving away from national interests in favor of humanity’s interests is also natural and desirable from the standpoint of our evolutionary journey. As we become more enlightened as a species we must necessarily move from the tribe, to the city, to the country, to the world. Technology has allowed us to greatly enlarge our scope as individuals and the widening perspectives that we acquire as individuals must be reflected on our political institutions. 1000 years ago the ordinary person would probably never travel much farther than a couple hundred miles from where they were born their whole lives. As such, it made sense that their vision of the world was quite small and firmly rooted and determined by a small number of people and by few and simple ideas. Today, however, most people have the opportunity to not only travel to different continents and live in different countries than they were born in, they are also able to access the knowledge and the culture of the whole world simply by browsing the internet, going to the local library or even by turning on their smart TVs.

As our consciousness evolves, it makes sense to acknowledge our common humanity, regardless of one’s place of birth, color of skin, native language, religion or nationality. Specially as globalization accelerates our experiences as humans become increasingly connected. Today an American boy who grew up watching Anime and playing video games will probably have more in common with his Japanese counterpart than with the football player he goes to highschool with. And regardless of our differences and our similarities, there is nevertheless tremendous value in acknowledging that we share a common humanity which transcends nationality. As such, we are better served by taking a humanist approach of the future, rather than one that is nationalistic, and politics should be a reflection of that.

Fortunately, for the first time in history, we are in a position that allows us to effectively conduct policies of government that favor all of humankind and not just a portion of it. The only thing we need is the political will to pursue this course of action, but the foundation for international cooperation and global governance has already been laid out.

Much of that was a direct result of the bloodiest and most costly event in human history (both in lives and material possessions). World War II showcased the dangers of unchecked nationalism and the absolute necessity for some sort of mechanism of global governance in the age of industrial warfare and nuclear bombs. The millions of lives lost in the war bought the necessary goodwill and awareness that led to the creation of the two most important and most powerful international organizations in human history, the United Nations and the European Union. These mechanisms of international governance have been successful so far in establishing tools that allow the different countries in the world to solve their conflicts in a peaceful manner and to work together in order to solve common problems. This should be seen as the first step in our journey to develop a system of global governance that prevents world wars from happening and allows for the protection of human rights worldwide. 

If humankind is to have a long and prosperous future, then we need to think beyond the nation. We need to think and act globally, both as individuals and as governments. Global cooperation and supranational organizations are the future. We must work together in order to solve common problems and not fight against each other. The foreign policy of modern liberal-democracies, and in fact all the nations in the world, should pursue this goal as its primary objective.