He bowed. Slowly. With dignity. In doing so, he imitated American President Barack Obama in Shanghai and then again at a meeting on the sidelines of the nuclear security summit in Washington. In front of the unflappable Chinese President Hu Jintao, Nicolas Sarkozy had to silence any potential narcissistic resistance. Ultimately, it hardly matters whether the head of state, on this occasion, donned more presidential attire than usual or if it’s a skillful diplomatic consultation intended to engage China in a logic of tough sanctions against Iran in the upcoming Security Council meeting. Immortalized on the Web like a Doisneau snapshot, this conforming gesture of the two Western leaders signs off, in a manner reminiscent of medical examiners, the death certificate: the end of the “world of yesterday,” to plagiarize the elegant and fine description of this ailing Europe, the one between the two wars, by the unforgettable Stefan Zweig.
Let us favor raw realism over painful nostalgia. The center of gravity of the planet, as we know, has inexorably shifted towards Asia, which concentrates the bulk of economic exchanges and could soon host, according to a recent OECD article, 66% of the middle classes. Those through whom the scandal of progressive revolutions arrives. Despite its internal wealth—three times that of China, as Le Monde reminds us—Europe gives the impression of crashing, with an entirely aristocratic éclat, on the mishaps of a single currency: much to the dismay of the Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples, the blessed time of subsidized economies and public generosity is coming to an end. Strong in its obsessive rationality, evidenced by the syntax of its language—when one does not understand a word, it’s enough to dissect it to grasp its meaning—Germany has digested the lessons of its history to serenely assume its leadership in continental Europe. We can’t blame it: “80% of Germans are satisfied with their job” and “86% of them feel well treated at work by their hierarchy,” according to a survey conducted by the magazine Stern that must make France Télécom fantasize. The Rhine becomes almost as wide as the Yangtze. Yet, this is a Pyrrhic victory: Berlin saw its traditional top spot as the world’s leading exporter snatched away in 2010 by Beijing.
Belgium also collapses over linguistic issues, a diluted signifier of an insufficiently attractive societal model. It unanimously votes a law against the Burqa, an ultimate defense mechanism against an inevitable upheaval, a mere delaying maneuver against a deadline energized by underlying forces of disjunction. The fire always starts at the neighbor’s: on this side of the Scheldt, the smoldering fire is rather under the stones thrown at buses. One hesitates to diagnose a similar symptom for France.
Despite the rhythmic succession of increasingly solemn summits—G7, G7+1, G8, G20, then G2 of ChinAmerica—juggling with the symbolism of numbers in lieu of being able to curb the global misdeeds of those using them to speculate, one feeling prevails: Keynes and his advocates of tomorrow on establishing external governance necessary for market regulation have definitely lost the game. The desperate vision of the Austrian writer—which led him to suicide in 1942—eerily echoes the somber assessment of American biologist Jared Diamond, vigilant chronicler of the “collapse” of civilizations. Let’s be Darwinian: those which decline inevitably leave more space for those that emerge.
