“A new social-federalism remains to be invented as a response from democratic states to the challenge of empires”

NWe have changed times. Of course, it is difficult to foresee what the emerging world will be like. But some trends are unmistakable. The kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Donald Trump’s desire to get his hands on Venezuelan oil resources, like the threat to Greenland, are not isolated acts and are already part of a series of actions and declarations which seem to mark a lasting evolution and deep of our world-system.

We are undoubtedly entering a new era of imperial conquests and what the economist Arnaud Orain called the « capitalism of finitude » marked by a growing rivalry between powers for the appropriation of resources (financial, natural, labor, etc.). For what duration?

What we know about this glimpsed world is that sweet commerce and international law are no longer relevant. This new regime of capitalism is characterized rather by the monopolization of resources and the capture of value in the light of national interest and the reason of the strongest.

He sacrificed “weak zones”, political and economic, relegated to the rank of vassals or colonies on the outskirts of the imperial centers. In this new emerging world, the European Union (EU) is the lamb among the wolves.

A form of public helplessness

The shift of the United States to the side of the autocratic powers of Russia and China revealed the deception: “The European king was naked.” And what’s more, it seems immobile or almost… because paradoxically the European Union does not have the malleability that the framework of a long history gives to empires. If it seemed to react in the recent pandemic and financial crises, it is without changing its fundamentals forged in the era of “liberal capitalism” and which we know have organized in law a form of public powerlessness.

Overall, the Union was gradually established on a “liberal-federal” logic: a single liberal market, free and undistorted competition, free movement of capital, independence of the Central Bank, free trade agreements, a very low budget, a forgetting of industry and sovereignty in the name of the American umbrella. The shift in the world we are witnessing makes all this liberal-federalist paraphernalia obsolete.

You have 63.82% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.