Return of the Cold War

The TikTok crisis is the latest incarnation of an online Balkanization

Impossible peace, improbable war. Raymond Aron summed up the Cold War era with this now-famous adage. A paralyzing, traumatic interplay from 20th century history that the TikTok debate has brought up to date, but this time not with the empire of ideology at the center, but the empire of data.

There’s no intention here of taking a stand on Donald Trump’s threat to ban the Chinese social network in the United States. If the risks of large-scale espionage are genuine, Trump’s extremist pre-election nationalism is very suspect as well. That said, the Chinese government is simply getting a taste of its own medicine. It has banned the use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China since 2009 to the advantage of its national conglomerates, Baidu and Tencent.

Even so, in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Huawei crusade, the two economic giants’ techno-nationalism fuels a no less devastating dynamic.

First, devastating from an economic point of view. Last century’s Cold War divided the world in two, with roughly separate spheres of influence, which is not the case today. Now, thanks to globalization, countries’ interests overlap and are more integrated, so the collateral repercussions can be tallied against both warring sides or even the whole world. High border tariffs caused by the trade war remind us of that.

Second, it is devastating from a social point of view. The TikTok matter is only the latest incarnation of an increasingly advanced online Balkanization, which has already been condemned by one — Barack Obama. The former American president lauded the re-creation of this shared space which, according to the philosophy held dear by web pioneers from the outset, aimed to avoid the development of increasingly divided worlds, shut off from others and reinforcing their own biases. Where Obama once spoke of the segmenting underway in our societies as a fervent generator of extremism, we can well see how much his analysis applies today when a digital Chinese wall curiously mimics the Iron Curtain. We can also see how great the genuine risk that the impossible peace, the improbable war once harshly suffered by our societies, may again paralyze the world for decades.