Every year, in keeping with tradition I venture, with more or less success, to anticipate the main economic and geopolitical events of the coming year. The exercise is increasingly necessary: we need more and more powerful headlights to venture on a road increasingly icy surrounded by ravines deeper and deeper.
And yet, the exercise is, each year, more difficult because of the growing interdependence of events more numerous and complex: no place, no area is isolated any longer; for each is connected to the other. Total sovereignty, absolute independence, total freedom, have become inaccessible utopias.
2012 (year which I have already described in a column of July 2005, without making too many mistakes, especially on the situation of the public debt in Europe and the current threats to the euro), the events that will take place are so numerous that we need to focus on events of global importance: five elections, five stakes, five threats, five main hopes are before us. And every one of us would have to cultivate five personal attributes to face them.
- Five elections: French and American presidential elections; the change of leadership in China and countless other emerging countries, including Senegal and Burma will be the most significant.
- Five stakes: the reduction of the public debt and the consolidation of the financial system in the United States and Europe; the control of the real estate bubble in China; the reduction of mass unemployment in the West and Africa; the overthrow of unbearable dictatorships in Syria and in other countries; the control of the emissions of greenhouse gas.
- Five threats: the dismantling of the euro; the collapse of the dollar; the return of dictatorship in the countries of the Arab spring; the terrorist use of surface- to-air missiles stolen in Libya; natural disasters linked to climate changes.
- Five hopes: progress in the European political integration, which we can hope that they finally allow us to have institutions worthy of us; technical progress on network capacities, from which we can expect the first signs of a return to growth; discoveries on stem cells, which could upset very quickly treatments and especially organ transplants; a better governance in Africa that might engage a strong growth there and make it a driving force for the global economy; the Olympic Games in London, which we can hope that they will be honorable distractions.
In order to better manage this unstable situation, every one of us will need, especially to those who rule the world, five main personal attributes: competence to understand; empathy to feel; courage to dare; will to resist discouragement; altruism to share.
Finally, 2012 will be dominated still otherwise by the number 5: it will be, according to the Mayans, the year of the end of the fifth cycle of 26,000 years in human history, opening maybe to a new, “Itza Age” made of Light and Wisdom ….