Tuesday 30 December 2008
by: Jean-Jacques Roth, Le Temps
Jean-Jacques Roth sees two glimmers of light in our current situation: the possibility of concerted global action on the economy and the overthrow of greed as an ultimate value. (Photo: Simon / Santacruzin)
What a year! Wherever one turns: vertigo. Financial massacre, destruction of value unprecedented in human history, the unanticipated become an everyday occurrence, the most learned predictions trampled by phenomena deemed unthinkable just twelve months ago ...
If the essential purpose of crises is to incite us to think from scratch, this one should, by virtue of its scale, soon deliver a totally new world.
But for the moment, it's the absence of visibility that strikes the mind. A brutal, but short, fever, or durable chaos, soon to be matched by more serious disorders? We are en route to the unknown. No alternative is ready to replace the foundations of capitalism. No theory has appeared to clothe the disillusions provoked by the all-powerful market's turmoil with Utopias.
That's not bad news. In the past, too many dramas, too many wars accompanied economic spasms and the revanchist egotism of their nationalist managements or the adventurism of their revolutionary consequences.
The most precious gain of our era is therefore not only the progress in economic science since the 1929 crisis. It is in the awareness of a global world and in the presence of the supranational constructions that awareness begot. Whether the European Union or the World Trade Organization, these institutions have in common the action of checking the return of everyman for himself - the outcome of which is stubbornly tragic. Let us imagine for a moment what the present crisis would be like were the Euro and tariff regulations not there to prevent the competitive devaluations and customs protections that the past gratified us with!
But today we have a higher threshold to cross. The need for global governance to remediate the effects of global warming is already apparent. Today, it's the economy that must be reformed. The emergency is so striking that it is shaking up the inertia of the balance of power frozen in place by the victors of the Second World War. Through this unsuspected constraint, the rebalancing of the multipolar world could finally receive a decisive push on the accelerator.
That would be the first revolution of the twenty-first century, but it is not in itself a guarantee of effectiveness. At the WTO, we see the exhausting work a compromise between a multitude of more equal partners requires.
Will the regulation of the financial planet encounter the same roadblocks? That must be feared, should the return of politics limit itself to the invocation of having other people pay: the neighbors, future generations, but certainly not the yield on my government pension! The real requirement of the political is also to promote acceptance of the individual discipline and sacrifices that collective transformations demand.
It is obviously more convenient to wait for the bearer of hope - Barack Obama, of course. Will he be able to transform hope into acts and to become the president of a more reasonable world? His faultless career so far allows us to continue to believe it.
There's another reason to be gladdened in the short term. For this debacle will have at least defeated one fraud: that of a cupidity that had become insane, erecting its obscene fatuousness as a universal totem. We'll never be altogether done with it, of course, but will do at least two retakes before making it a cardinal value. In the tunnel we have entered, that's a glimmer at least as strong as the promises of concerted action on our common destiny.
So let us bet on the light: Happy New Year!
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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