America between freedom, violence and vulnerability. The analysis of prof. Lombardi (Catholic)
The analysis by Marco Lombardi, director of the ITSTIME research center of the Catholic University and professor of Sociology, published on the website of the Catholic University of Milan
It will be chaos.
What happened will be a huge vulnerability for the whole world.
The perspective I take to read what happened on Capitol Hill is partial and concerns the aspects I deal with. To be a person who moves between Syria and Somalia, Afghanistan and Libya, and so on, where I participate in tables where Americans have traditionally played the role of the democratic power, which aims to lead often difficult transitions towards mirages of peace: I imagine the comments in Kabul and Mogadishu, the Chinese giggles. I imagine that the problematic interlocutors of those "tables" will say from now on. This is a major jolt to the stability of the world. Very big.
The global shock is therefore enormous because it shows some hypotheses that are now consolidated trends and redefines operating conditions in the most difficult contexts in the world.
First of all, tonight the transition of 1989 was "finally" completed, improperly experienced as an American victory: after thirty years the two blocs show that they have failed in their attempt to deserve global hegemony, without being replaced by anything else. Trump, the proponent of what happened, thought he would take advantage of the explosion triggered by a long threat that started back in presidencies.
And all this has nothing to do with recent American electoral events: it is the result of an increasingly radicalized world which lacks adequate government leadership.
The dream of globalization, which standardizes and directs towards a common destiny, promoter of necessarily democratic reticularity, has acquired the seal of "crap". It is now clear that globalization and reticularization are different and parallel processes, which produce a world that is increasingly dense with relationships in the face of the multiplication of the nodes of the network, whose diversity is increased.
Other than homogeneity: the new government is the challenge to maintain positive relations between diversity, in an increasingly unpredictable context of interdependencies. The America called by the old world, which did not want to understand how the changes were more radical than those narrated, to continue to act as the political regulator of traffic, has failed, and Trump, paradoxically, has celebrated the failure in the attempt to save the States United, taking the burden of global power off their shoulders.
It could only go wrong, because the Americans could not take off what the rest of the world attributed to them, without a strong discontinuity.
This opens up the possibility of a new order to be negotiated and deserved.
Secondly, the world is living in a climate of widespread and pervasive violence, which manifests itself punctually in Paris, Hong Kong, Santiago: the processes of radicalization, which we have studied dealing with terrorism, now characterize the growth of many young people and not only. Several factors, in recent years, have contributed to the radicalization of the world. For example, the haste that is the result of the sense of uncertainty and the consequent lack of horizon, reinforced by the pandemic emergency that has been the booster, the accelerator, of the processes already underway. For example, the disappearance of the intermediate bodies that guaranteed negotiation and confrontation, therefore mediation, without giving the possibility of immediately reaching the final recipient accused of our ailments.
Life is not a shortcut, because every result must in any case be achieved "sooner" otherwise you are "late", without however having the possibility of measuring the temporal distance on the basis of a shared yardstick: far be it from me some celebration of "Slow". But instead, mine is a suggestion to reconsider space and time as the two constituent variables of every scenario and situation, to which to recognize an overdetermination with respect to our operational capabilities, therefore aware of the limits of each of our strategies.
Precisely on this last operational level, the one that often leads me to try to mend interrupted dialogues between communities in conflict, I imagine the biggest shocks and the greatest turbulence. If a few years ago, just before an election session in Kabul, at dinner with an Afghan minister and the American ambassador, I could make people smile remembering how "example countries" of democracy could live well with a low voter rate, all this for promoting Afghan political participation, I imagine now, that same table, where the images of Capitol Hill will be consumed for what they show, for what they look like, even before for what they are. And so it will be in many similar tables, where by now an interlocutor who seemed “stainless” shows the rust that has affected all the democratic systems of the world.
And the Chinese smile , which is a good laugh for them.
The attack on Capitol Hill will unfold like a black shadow over the possibilities for peaceful governance of the global world. That world in which America is called to play a pivotal role. Which today has dramatically undermined.
The attack on Capitol Hill first created a problem for America to which, somewhat salvifically, we had entrusted the government of the world, and consequently to all of us: that we will be called to roll up our sleeves.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/attacco-congresso-stati-uniti-stabilita/ on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:48:37 +0000.