Contrary to what the monotonous apocalyptics believe, the world has not come to an end – the world does not advance, it only turns, and still thanks to it –; but this Our world, the one that began in 1989 with the end of the Cold War, does seem to be at an end. The media complaint of the bouffons The conflict between Trump and Musk, for example, is the most grotesque part of a process of decline that has many faces. To summarize: the global expectations arising from the fall of the Berlin Wall were those of a great hegemonic power, the United States, surrounded by countries that, for one reason or another—economic, military, or technological—were heavily dependent on it. Twelve years later, however, the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent, more or less unsuccessful, armed conflicts that arose from it, revealed a very different reality. Six or seven years later, between 2007 and 2008, what had begun as a one-off crisis in the American mortgage system became a global crisis, the effects of which still linger, seventeen or eighteen years later. I invite the reader to recall—I fear bitterly—what their purchasing power was. real around 2005 or 2006, and what it is today, twenty years later. Around 1989, or even at the beginning of 2002, when the euro was introduced, all of this was almost unthinkable. What kind of world is going on down there now?
First, there is the question of trust in representative democracy. This erosion has been going on for a long time, as I tried to argue twenty-seven years ago in The twilight of democracy, and today it seems to have reached a point of no return after a cycle that, in reality, hasn't been that long. This isn't the first time this has happened. An example. Two skeptics about the potential of democratic freedoms, Josep Pla and Jorge Luis Borges (the Catalan was born in 1897 and the Argentine in 1899), experienced as young people the ravages of the First World War and the subsequent collapse of European democracies, especially the Weimar Republic. That collapse led to the Second World War. Although it may seem strange, paradoxical, or forced today, many people of that generation associated democracy with the rise of totalitarianism. Rightly or wrongly, today, a hundred years later, many young people and adults abhor the system because they associate it, in causal terms, with things they don't like and which they believe are harmful to them. It has happened in the United States with the second Trump, and it is happening in Europe with the unstoppable rise of the far right (Catalonia, by the way, will not be an exception to this change).
Secondly, confidence in the potential of a globalization that seemed so promising a quarter of a century ago has eroded. In the West, the relocation of industrial production to countries with 19th-century working conditions has led to the loss of millions of jobs, as well as downward pressure on local wages, especially in manufacturing. All of this has contributed to the decline of the middle classes and the impoverishment, and even the outright unviability, of strategic productive sectors such as agriculture and livestock, as well as a demographic that compensates for the near-zero birth rate with large, often irregular, migration flows. The result? Rising frustration, and even outright social resentment, which translates into anti-system votes on the far right or far left.
Finally, hardly anyone trusts a world order based on diplomacy anymore. The confrontation between communism and capitalism ended in 1989, but the tension between liberal and authoritarian democratic models has only just begun. Competition in artificial intelligence and other similar technologies, for example, now takes on a warlike dimension, and distrust in effective collective security mechanisms is driving arms spending to skyrocket. Hearing the unprecedented figures Europe plans to invest in defense over the coming years, one inevitably thinks of that naiveté about the end of history that Francis Fukuyama tried to incorporate into the post-Cold War mentality. In any case, what we have tried to explain in this paper cannot be reduced, as is usual, to a banal confrontation between optimists and pessimists: the problem is much deeper and demands uncertain and difficult decisions, not the usual dialectical nonsense to get by.
