The Three Crises

All of the countries situated in the zone influenced by Wall Street and the City of London are threatened. The United States, in debt from head to toe – the government in particular, finds itself in a situation that some believe has no exit. The City, which weighs heavier on the British economy than on Wall Street in North America, seems more directly affected due to, in particular, the international investments of its old imperial power.

In turn, for countries in the Eurozone, the volition of China and the United States to maintain their currency, the yuan and the dollar, at a low or undervalued level also represents a direct threat that inevitably attacks European exports.

Parallel to the problems of the economy, ecological problems oblige us to make very difficult decisions. The great global Copenhagen conference has given us a disquieting image of the difficulty in reaching agreements. Given that the United States has shown that it is determined to make only insufficient efforts, again it is Europe who is being asked to make a supplementary sacrifice. Poor countries, or those that are less wealthy, demand that Northern countries pay their debt, 150,000 million annually, since for years and years, only they emitted greenhouse gases. The North now sees itself as cautioned to change its consumption very rapidly. On the other hand, China gives little importance to judgments from the rest of the world, so it continues to extract the majority of its energy from carbon, and time passes. Between now and 2020, China would need to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions not by 20 percent but by 30 percent – maybe even by 50 percent – and Europe would have to reach 80 percent before 2050.

In only a few lines, it is evident that instead of waiting for the end of the financial and economic crisis from one month to the next, we find ourselves facing fundamental economic and ecological problems that demand a difficultly-achieved effort from all of us. We need to recognize that we have reached the limits of maintaining our lifestyle under current financial management methods. The sum of our economic and ecological problems puts us unarguably before a great catastrophe.

Along with this, a third crisis needs to be added: that of political action and more precisely, of political expression of discontent, redemptions and denunciations. Who is responsible for the crises? Surely it is not a social crisis or a crisis that confronts two categories of social classes, for example. Some ask that the Northern countries pay for the conduct of their ancestors. Others want to defend the interests and rights of our successors and of those who live, generally very badly, in regions of the world distant from ours. The conflicts exceed the social world; they can only be understood by their opposition to a financial and economic system that has been placed outside the reach of all social and political interventions.

An opposition like this cannot establish itself in the defense of a certain social category; it should be universal and a matter of defending the ensemble of humanity. We appeal to human rights against economic globalization. Such is the principal transformation of our social life. It is so profound that we find it difficult to perceive and above all, we lack the necessary institutional means to resolve our problems. Can NGOs replace parties and syndicates? It would be paradoxical to say that non-governmental organizations can replace governments. NGOs play an important role in the awareness of the population, but this should grant it new means of action that are political in nature.

This manner of approaching the problems of our future is not the approach of economists; I am not even sure that it is the approach of politicians. It should be that of sociologists because a situation is more the result of an action by men and women than the effect of economic forces that impose upon society the rational search of interest as an absolute priority. In the present case this is even clearer. Thus, facing economic and not human forces, the resistance cannot come to the defense of specific interests; it can only come to the invocation of universal rights that are trampled on when humans die of hunger or are deprived of jobs or liberty so that the financers can continue increasing their benefits.

This uprising in the name of the defense of humanity’s most basic rights and therefore more universal rights is the only effective way to oppose the interests of the hard and pure financers. It is not very likely that the uprising will materialize, because the contradiction, in my opinion, between financers and citizens does not seem capable of materializing as a subject for popular protests. It is the ecological thinking that gives the protestors what they themselves do not possess, a positive objective of vital importance: save the atmosphere and impede or limit the consequences of the climate changes that can be catastrophic.

However, this is all uncertain in the time after the close of the Copenhagen negotiations, “the last opportunity conference.” In the near future, maybe even in ten years, we run the risk of being victims of new economic crises, ecological risks and even worse political confusion.

If we had to say today which is the most probable future – the worsening of the crises or the conception and construction of a new type of society based on the respect of the human rights of the great majority – we would have to respond sincerely that the pessimistic hypothesis has more likelihood of taking place than the optimistic hypothesis that places its confidence in the capacity of human beings to save their own future.

Is it possible to deduce an implosion of the economic centers that have dominated the economic lives of the world for various centuries? If the Europeans are supposed to be left enslaved by the Chinese-United States axis, which opposes the revaluation of the yuan and the dollar, this scenario cannot happen.

Here, we arrive at our central hypothesis: the construction of a new society of actors and governments depends, above all, on our conscience, volition or even more simply, our conviction that the risk of our economical, ecological and political problems is real and close to us, causing the need for us to act. However, this conviction does not form in every human being by itself. Our political representatives at the highest level discuss this possibility and imagine what could occur in 2020 or in 2050, through speeches that do not convey urgency or the need for action.

We find ourselves before three crises that reinforce each other mutually and nothing guarantees that we are going to be able to find a solution for each crisis. In other words, instead of irresponsibly dreaming about a solution that could reveal itself all too happily in the renewal of bank benefits, we should wake up to the need to renovate and transform political life so that it is capable of mobilizing all energy against deadly threats.

Alain Touraine is a sociologist and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies of Paris. Translation into Spanish by José Luis Sánchez-Silva.*

*Editor’s note: Original language of article unknown.