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Since the calendar invites us to do so, let’s venture some prognoses for the next twelve months.
A priori, 2022 should be a very difficult year. By knowing this, by anticipating it, we can prevent it from being so.
It is fairly easy to draw up a worst-case scenario: a pandemic that escapes vaccination, a collapse of the financial markets, outbreaks of war right up to the borders of Europe, large countries such as Ethiopia breaking up, attacks, contradictory extremist movements, some calling for the erasure of all traces of past Western values from the world’s memory, and others calling for the rejection of all foreign influence. All this is possible. All this will happen.
Faced with this, the main risk for this year, everywhere in the world, is a loss of control by governments, companies, each of us, and more generally by humanity, over the course of things. With obviously terrifying consequences.
In France, we can fear the election of a president who would prove to be powerless, without a majority, unable to keep the countless and inevitable electoral promises. A country lost to a once again self-confident Germany, an Italy in full revival and a world in full reconstruction. It would then be another year of disillusionment and anger, with the country becoming increasingly lost in disputes about its identity, which has always been the harbinger of decline in the history of peoples.
In Europe, we can fear that the Union will become increasingly dependent on the United States for its defence, on Russia for its imports and on China for its exports, and that it will have to deal with possible aggression from Russia in the Ukraine, from Turkey in the Balkans, a wave of migration from Africa, overwhelming American technological, financial and legal domination, and the entry of China into the geopolitical arena in force. But it has no means of responding to them, buffeted by conflicting national interests.
More generally, one might fear that the world is powerless in the face of a pandemic whose thousand and one tricks we have not been able to control, in the face of climate disruption, inflation, terrorist violence, waves of migration, cybercrime, and many other forces that play on borders to attack our civilisations, the human race and life.
In other words, there is a risk that there will no longer be a pilot in the plane, or even a cockpit, in France, Europe or the world. And even if it’s only the steering wheel that doesn’t respond, that’s a death sentence.
On the other hand, 2022 could be the occasion for a new awareness, a new takeover, an open sovereignty. In France, with a little lucidity and calm, the electoral campaign can be the occasion for a real pedagogy on the great stakes of the country and on the answers that should be given to them: childhood, education, protection of minorities, social justice, secularism, security, tranquillity, defence, public debt, industrial renewal, health, food, climate, protection of nature; with a view to ensuring our cultural, economic, financial and geopolitical control and sovereignty. By understanding that the sovereignty of France is impossible without an open sovereignty of the Europeans gathered together. This can also be, for the European Union, partially under the French presidency, the opportunity to launch a real sovereignty project in all sectors of the life economy (health, education, food, renewable energies, sustainable mobility, agriculture, digital, defence and security). Finally, on a global scale, we can perhaps hope that the most selfish governments will finally admit that it is in everyone’s interest to be altruistic, and that, in particular, pandemics will only be eradicated if every human being is as well protected as the richest among them, and that, similarly, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that others have the means to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, we can hope that an alliance of researchers, entrepreneurs, social facilitators and artists, all potentially positive actors in the world, will be able to make people understand that there are solutions to everything, including what we have not been able or willing to solve for centuries; and that technological progress put at the service of altruism can still save the human race and our civilisations. We can finally hope that honest and demanding media will be the heralds of this.
It is not too late to remember this obvious fact, which has been hammered home for thousands of years by thinkers from all cultures, from the Mazdeans to the Egyptians, from the Hebrews to the Greeks, from the Christians to the Muslims, from the Chinese to the Anglo-Saxons, from the African griots to the gurus of Silicon Valley: The recipe for impotence is every man for himself. The condition of sovereignty is the conjunction of talents, resilience and tolerance.
j@attali.com