dreams. This is simultaneously exciting and frightening, because man’s dreams contain everything, both the best and the worst, and we cannot count on science to distinguish between them. Science is morally neutral, at the service of human wisdom and human folly. In the future, just as in the past and the present, it runs the risk of being led astray, turned to the profit of tyranny, greed or archaism.
My second reason for hope is not free from worries either. I have already spoken of it: it is the fact that the most populous nations on the planet are resolutely on the way to emerging from poverty. It is possible that in the years ahead we shall witness a slowing of this process, serious disturbances and even armed conflict. Nonetheless, we now know that underdevelopment is not a given and that the eradication of centuries-old blights such as poverty, hunger, endemic diseases and illiteracy cannot be considered a naive dream. What has been shown to be possible for three or four billion people ought to be possible for six, seven or eight billion in a few decades.
From the viewpoint of human solidarity, open to the future, this clearly is a major milestone.
My third reason for hope has its source in the experience of contemporary Europe. It symbolises to me an outline of what the end of prehistory could mean in concrete terms: gradually putting behind us accumulated hatreds, territorial quarrels and ancient rivalries; allowing the sons and daughters of those who killed each other to join hands and conceive the future together; organising a shared life for six nations, then nine, twelve or fifteen, then thirty; transcending the diversity of cultures without ever seeking to eradicate them; all of this so that one day one ethical homeland will be created out of many.
Throughout history, every time someone has spoken up to say that the different nations of the planet should be reconciled, draw closer to each other, jointly manage their shared living space and think of their common future, they have been called naive for preaching utopianism. The European Union, in fact, offers us the example of a utopia in the process of being created. As such it constitutes a pioneering experiment, a plausible foretaste of what humanity, having achieved reconciliation, may be in the future and proof that the most ambitious visions are not necessarily naive.
That said, the European endeavour is not without its flaws. Everyone involved in it sometimes expresses doubts. I feel some impatience with it myself. I would like Europe to set an example of coexistence among both its founding peoples and the immigrants it has taken in. I wish it would focus much more on its cultural dimension and manage its linguistic diversity much better. I wish it would resist much more strongly the temptation to be a club of rich white Christian nations and dare to see itself as a model for the rest of humanity. And on an institutional level I would like it to dare to build a single democratic unit, the European equivalent of the United States of America, in which states are endowed with a greater cultural specificity and take pains to defend and promote them, but with federal leaders whose authority is universally recognised, elected on the same day throughout the whole continent. I am also worried about examples of timidity I see and a certain moral short-sightedness.
But these reservations do not in any way diminish my faith in the exemplary value of the ‘laboratory’ that the creation of Europe represents for humanity at this crucial stage.
A fourth reason for hope occurred in the New World at the start of the amazing year of 2008: the rise of Barack Obama, as a symbol and as a man; the return of a forgotten America, that of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin; in other words, the sudden reawakening of a great nation as a result of its economic crisis and military entanglements.
In response to the only other crisis of similar scale, which began in 1929, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, and it is indeed a new deal which the United States and the whole world need today. But it will have to be broader still and much more ambitious than that of the 1930s. This time it is not just a matter of relaunching the economy and restoring the importance of certain social questions. It is a matter of rebuilding a new global reality, new relations between nations and a new way of working for the planet which will put an end to the disorder in strategy, finance, ethics and climate; and in order for a superpower to commit itself to such a task, it must first recover the legitimacy of its global role.
I have said before that a people recognises itself in leaders who espouse its struggles. I would say the same thing applies at global level. For the world’s nations to accept the primacy of one of their number, they have to be persuaded that that legitimacy is being exercised to their advantage and not at their expense.
Of course, the United States will always have enemies, rivals and even implacable foes who will fight it with all the greater determination if they see the rest of the world rally willingly around it. But the majority of people and leaders in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America will judge it on its actions. If it acts on the international stage with subtlety and fairness, if it forces itself to consult other nations respectfully rather than handing down diktats, if it makes it a point of honour to apply to itself first what it demands of others, if it clearly distances itself from immoral practices which have too often sullied its record throughout the world, and if it leads the global mobilisation against the economic crisis, global warming, epidemics, endemic disease, poverty, injustice and discrimination, then its role as first power will be accepted and applauded. Even the use of its military power will not provoke the same reactions of rejection, as long as it does not become a reflex action but remains exceptional and abides by recognisable principles, and is not accompanied with a string of bloody blunders.
More than ever, the world needs America, but an America which is reconciled with the world as well as with itself, an America which exercises its global role with respect for its own values as well as others’ — with integrity, fairness and generosity. I would even add with elegance and grace.
We shall have to wait many years for an adequate evaluation of the true impact of Barack Hussein Obama on the United States and the rest of the world. However, it seems to me that his presence in the White House is not unconnected with the dramatic changes which began in the Arab world in 2011. The fact that these huge protests have, for the first time in decades, been devoid of the least hostility to the United States is due at least in part to the fact that the young president, his personality, African origins, middle name and his subtle choice of the words he uses and avoids using, made the traditional anti-American rhetoric that usually resounds in Arab streets irrelevant and even anachronistic. And it may be that it was the disappearance of this outdated alibi which led the people to attack their own governments, whom they now saw as being truly responsible for their debasement and the first obstacles to demolish on the path to renewal.
I have mentioned some factors that enable us to keep hope alive. But the task to be accomplished is huge and cannot be entrusted to a single leader, however clear-sighted and persuasive he may be, nor to a single nation, however powerful, nor to a single continent.
Because it is not simply a matter of putting in place a new economic and financial model, a new system of international relations, nor only a matter of correcting some obvious types of disorder. It is rather an urgent matter of conceiving an entirely new vision of politics, the economy, work, consumption, science, technology, progress, identity, culture, religion and history, and implanting it in people’s minds; it needs to be an adult vision of what we are, what others are, and the fate of the planet which we all share. In a nutshell, we need to ‘invent’ a conception of the world which is not just the modern version of our ancestral prejudices and which will allow us to ward off the decline that is on the horizon.
All of us who are living through these strange early years of the twenty-first century have the duty — and, more than any preceding generation, the means — to contribute to this rescue effort; with wisdom and lucidity, but also with passion and sometimes even with anger.
Yes, with the burning anger of the righteous.
Bibliography
Adams, Henry,
Adler, Alexandre,
Albiac, Gabriel,
Ansary, Tamim,
