A World Somewhat Redesigned
T he essential components of all medicine, active ingredients are chiefly manufactured in China and India, leaving Europe dependent on imports from the Far East. By no means a first-time development, recent restrictions on manufacturing and exports related to the pandemic, ‘zero COVID’ and other factors, have an immediate effect on supplies across the Old Continent. Bluntly put, patient access to some drugs is limited or outright non-existent.
In a similar scenario, Europe has until recently been well-nigh fully dependent on imports of cheap Russian resources: oil and gas. We are all well aware of how this has impacted the energy market and European economy – our experience of the issue having become even more visible given the current war in Ukraine.
Though the examples are abundant, can we truly imagine a situation in which Europe or the United States, driven by criteria that are purely economic in nature, would dismantle their own defence industry, ordering tanks, cannons, UAVs and aircraft, and all the necessary spare parts in China or Iran, for example? And while sharing with them all the technologies that are useful in the manufacturing of the most effective weapons, to make the symbiosis more complete and rewarding?
Collaboration is a good thing, any related profit being bilateral and usually exceeding the sum of individual gains. This is why globalisation has been and remains, in principle, a good thing, at least under circumstances conducive to its flourishing, i.e. in conditions of openness, peace and trust and relations based on the same, also in trade. In the face of profoundly mismatched interests extending beyond the economy, and the resulting disputes, conflicts, or even war, the whole thing becomes a different story altogether.
The old adage ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’ has been quoted remarkably often in recent times (in the Russian-Ukrainian context, regrettably too late). Yet, if attempting to confer a more universal meaning upon it, one might well claim that if you want to achieve the deepest and most profitable economic cooperation, you have to prepare for it to be hindered, limited or rendered unfeasible. Possibly only then do you become a truly desirable – and, more importantly, valued and respected – partner.
The pandemic gave us, ostensibly, food for thought. In the context of war in Ukraine, we have been given even more to ponder. One proposition is as unquestionable as it is recurrent: the architecture of European and world security has to be redesigned – and, in all likelihood, largely recreated from scratch, the alliance of liberal democracies (albeit regrettably not all, or not in equal measure) and western values potentially its single lasting building block. The architecture and mechanisms of international economic cooperation, also in globalisation terms, will require in-depth analysis as well – not only within the scope we have been forced into, e.g. by Russian politics, but much more broadly. It goes without saying that we are about to face a very dangerous moment. Whenever the world needs to be somewhat redesigned, we can never be sure how the one we have become used to will end – or what the one we are designing will ultimately look like. Yet we have no other choice: we want peace, defined as broadly as possible, and productive cooperation. This is why we have to prepare for war. And, essentially, before it breaks out. ©℗
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