Journalists Must Return to the Field

It's not a little, of course, but that moment didn't even question the elements on which international stability was raised after the loss of Nazism. Nobody contested multilatheralism. Rather, we felt that it would be reinforced toward the end of the antagonism between the free world and the Soviet bloc. Since then, the Atlantic alliance that united Western democracies (European and North American) has accepted other states. The European Union has expanded and consolidated through the common currency. Democracy has spread to five continents. Someone even thought China would become a democracy, thanks to improved quality of life.

A Deeper Change

After 1989, the world seemed more united than ever, strengthened by common or uncontained values, such as the universality of human rights, free exchange, and the obligation to try and solve all conflicts, political and economic, through negotiations for which the World Trade Organization and its rules were a perfect example.

The wake of Donald Trump, Brex, the rise of nationalism and the rebirth of the extreme right that has taken power in some EU countries, a bastion of democracy, are signs of an age-old change, deeper than the one that was at the origin of the Wall collapse.

The US president, the richest and most powerful democracy, has no scruples when he removes children from their mothers' arms, on behalf of the fight against immigration, or sets up customs duties for steel and aluminum produced by his European allies, as well as attacking NATO, accusing it of being too expensive and essentially useless.

At a moment when China manifests a unique military force and new economic powers contest and weakens Western domination, which dates back to the time of birth, the American president is not reluctant to dismantle the western front.

For him, the alliance does not matter, because Europe's defence does not care and will not have hands tied by any agreement. Only two things matter, in Trump's eyes: US interest and the power relationship with China.

Meanwhile, the list of powers, large and small, that no longer want to follow common rules continues to extend: China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Hungary, the United Kingdom two years ago and now the end of Italy.

The UN secretary-general can insist on the fate of Ringya, the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, or the drama of migrants fleeing from war and misery, towards the European coast. The United States does not give a shit about their public debt.

There is no longer a trace of hypocrisy in international relations, no “homage that vice makes to virtue”. Terrible words that from Washington to Rome and Budapest call immigrants germs are not too banal to shock.

The change is not just political. There's also a cultural rift in the period 70, when everything that remembered fascism and racism was taboo. Basically, we are discovering a new world that cannot be analyzed with old instruments.

For a journalist, this era is no longer the editorial, but field research, clinical observation of a century in conception. We are not necessarily before the return of the thirty years, and there is no Hitler or Stalin on the horizon, but the chaos that is emerging to remind much of the pre-war period of 1914.

These are the reasons why I'm interrupting, after 27 years, my Géopolique radio feature, which I've loved very much, but which I want today to replace with a walk around the world, through journalistic investigation and books.