Humanity is facing three serious threats: a crisis of governance, the return of great-power competition and global warming. In the next ten years we will need to find political solutions to all three.
The last of these is, of course, the most serious: left unchecked, climate change could eventually threaten our extinction. But it is hard to imagine humanity moving to a post-carbon future without first having restored sanity to our politics and embraced a new era of global cooperation.
When it comes to governance, it is tempting to focus solely on the crisis of western democracy. But the world’s political challenges span east and west, rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian. Governments of all description face a continuous crisis of legitimacy. This applies as much to China as it does to the US.
Part of what makes governing so difficult nowadays is technology – and, more specifically, social media. Social media is disintermediating our institutions, parties and media, which used to act as our gatekeepers, and this subjects governments to an almost continuous losing referendum on their performance.
Effective governance requires an ability to shut out the noise and make decisions that will last beyond tomorrow. But nowadays the racket is getting much louder and, partly as a result, our trust in institutions is in freefall. Faith in governments is falling everywhere. And without it, democracies cannot function, and autocracies fall back on repression. China’s political loosening, for example, has gone into reverse in the last few years.
There is no easy way out of this morass. But nothing good will happen unless we can begin to roll back the sharpest rise in inequality we have experienced since the end of the 19th century. Concentration of wealth – which is increasing across the world – leads to monopolisation of power, which in turn deepens our rage against politics. Again, this applies as much to China, which is a communist plutocracy, as it does to the US, which has become a billionaire’s playground.
Fairer distribution of wealth is a precondition of more stable politics and this must also include enforcing rules of competition and breaking up monopolies. (This is particularly important in the technology sector.)
In the coming decade we will need to work towards this more inclusive populism. The alternative, social populism, offers a downhill path of racial hatred, misogyny, extreme nationalism and ultimately war.
Boosting the stability of governments will also make it easier for nation states to reinvent diplomacy for the 21st century. Right now, we are heading towards a dangerous new era of great-power competition.
Under Donald Trump, the US is loosening the global network of alliances that gave such force to the Pax Americana. Other powers, notably China, are rushing to fill the vacuum and the risk of conflict is rising on around the South China and East China seas as well as on Russia’s borders and in the Arabian Gulf.
This decline in global democracy will continue if Trump is re-elected in 2020. A US president with a more global view, by contrast, will find the goodwill to recreate the global cooperation that has underpinned many of the advances of the past 70 years.
Which brings us to the third big challenge of the next ten years: global warming. If we fail to confront the changes that are taking place in our environment, we will see an increase in competition for resources, south-to-north migration and the likelihood of war.
Doing so, however, will require a better kind of politics. In the past year we have seen some positive developments, including US Republicans’ proposals for a carbon dividend, which would reimburse taxpayers with proceeds from a steep carbon tax, and the electoral success of the Green Party in Germany. In the next decade, we will need more of these, with politics being reinvented with the ultimate goal of keeping our planet habitable.
Edward Luce is US national editor of the Financial Times
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
