Global Complexity: Intersection of Chessboard and Web Trends
- Autores: Anne Marie Slaughter
- Localización: Notes internacionals CIDOB, ISSN-e 2013-4428, Nº. 147, 2016, págs. 1-6
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The chessboard remains a highly relevant metaphor for large swathes of international relations. But equally relevant, if far less recognized, is the web.
To see the international system as a web is to see a world of networks, intersecting and overlapping closely in some places and more strung out in others.
We are returning to a genuinely multipolar world in which powers engage with one another on the basis of simultaneous shared and conflicting interests.
Historians will look back and see the decade from roughly 2008 to 2018 as the EU’s equivalent of the American Civil War, a great internal struggle fifty to sixty years after its founding to determine the future and future shape of a European union.
The future, contrary to the federalist hopes of many of its founders, will not be a United States of Europe. Moreover, just as important for this evolution as its coming together is the coming apart of many EU component states.
Another web trend is the populism that is roiling European and American politics. As we have seen repeatedly over the centuries, massive economic disruption breeds political disruption.
The resulting tangle of people and problems make prediction folly; we are more likely to be able to respond and adapt than to predict and plan.
