It was a time when the world seemed simple

It was a time when the world seemed simple. It was almost twenty years ago. It was an eternity ago. The iron curtain that was Europe in two came from falling into a formidable dust of rust. The opening up of China enacted a decade earlier began to be felt. Finally, we would become all brothers. Democracy would become the horizon of the world. The summer 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama talked about "the end of history". In the weeks that followed, large masses of demonstrators met in East Germany hammering a single slogan "wir sind ein volk" ("we are A people") to bring down the Berlin wall. A fall which symbolically marked "the ultimate point of the ideological evolution of humanity and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human Government," the words of Fukuyama was itself the expression forged two centuries earlier by Hegel.

For years, the countries of the world seemed to converge on the market and democracy universal paradise. Marginal player in the trade, there is a quarter of a century, China is becoming the world's leading exporter. It opened its doors in large investors from around the world. The Poland, the Hungary and many other nations in Eastern Europe are now part of the European Union. The Russia a real election and also real billionaires who purchased clubs football in England, the properties on the Côte d'Azur and lavish yacht. The Internet revolution had irrépressiblement to the free speech at the four corners of the world.

This degree of convergence was a myth. September 11 showed the rise of radical Islamism, and a possibly irreducible difference. A myriad of signs shows the divergence, as the return of the veil on the female faces or the progression of Islamic finance in many countries, where it played until now only a marginal role. But if it is critical, this divergence is centred on the Middle East political and economic role secondary in the conduct of the Affairs of the world.

Otherwise all with the return of the empires, which will be probably as the geopolitical of 2008 event. Because these empires or these autocracies such as political scientist called neo-conservative Robert Kagan, are major players in the world. They each have their seat at the United Nations Security Council which has but that five permanent members. These empires, it is of course the China and the Russia, whose brilliant return led to military intervention in Tibet on one side and Georgia on the other, by Olympic exploits and political reels, by the assertion of a strike even more financial and economic force, at a time for saviours potential of a Western failed finance. A return after three decades of Eclipse for one... and two centuries for the other.

During most of the 20th century, the major nations were divided into two camps which had two competing logics. On the one hand, admittedly imperfect but free and open democracies in the world, developing exchanges between them while attempting to build common rules in the GATT and now WTO. On the other, dictatorships folded on themselves, of Stalin's USSR pulling the iron curtain on half a continent to Mao's China, which had "on its own forces" from the Spain of Franco or the Nazi Germany of Goering théorisant the virtues of isolation. At the end of the century, this incompatibility, which seemed eternal, has disappeared suddenly. Soviet power was dissolved with the collapse of the USSR. China is open. Hence the re-emergence of an "end of history"... but also illusory that at the time of Hegel. In 1989, there was the fall of the Berlin wall, but also the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Today, there is again clearly two camps. For one, still the major democracies, trying to play together in the same global game with the same rules of the game (which does not prevent cheating, the menteries and blows in fresh). On the other, nor dictatorships closed on themselves, but the empires open on a world with which they reject yet essential rules. This new order is severely unbalanced. To feel the danger, simply imagine the score of one match where a football team take another which would be arrogated the right to play with the hands. In the absence of any referee, because the arbitrators have disappeared from the field. The United Nations is systematically overwhelmed on major conflicts, the IMF fled by its customers, the WTO weakened by the failure of trade talks.

The risk is not only potential. The relationship between empires and democracies are already asymmetrical. If Chinese and Russian sovereign wealth funds target companies in the West, a major oil may be expropriated any time in Russia. An American Internet portal accept censorship anywhere, except in China. Russians buy Breton forests while the Bretons would have difficulty to buy Russian forests. Opponents of the regime of Moscow die under unusual conditions. China is to return the American actress Sharon Stone on his remarks or to erase Tibetan flags on the course of a demonstration in Paris. It exports its dangerous food products cut to the melamine milk. The oil and gas are handled as of strategic weapons. In other words, empires began to export their act in democracies with bare hands. Military power is of little use in offensives to be political and especially economic. Of course, the worst is not imminent. But the naïveté becomes Sin mortal. For large democracies, the challenge of the pre-placement empires will be may be more difficult to meet than the challenge of the cold war.