Today, more than ever before, a serious exercise in globality should acknowledge five well-known concerns:

1. Risks and obstacles facing mankind’s survival;
2. States’ commitment to solve them;
3. Global collaboration;
4. Recognizing civil society as a main actor of the world stage;
5. Developing the consciousness of planetary solidarity.

What we see right now is that international institutions are either impotent or contaminated when confronted with the populist surge in politics worldwide.

The sieve that normally separates intentions from the tangible facts is not as effective as it should be.

Two decades ago, Professor Mircea Malitza had seen what we see now:

«The frequently occurring crises of the political elites derive principally from a lack of knowledge, of capability to select information, and even lack of some “skills” which people who are busy overhead and live in an environment of grown complexity should have at hand. »

In a society desperate for certainty we have more and more leaders who claim to have it. But certainty is an unforgiving taskmaster. Certainty is dogmatic and the intellectual certainty is the dead end. We should not be afraid of certainty. Living with the uncertainty is to know our limits. Meaningless disorder is to be challenged, not feared. We can be overwhelmed or we can be emboldened. A man-made problem could have a man-made solution; the will to solve it has to be powerful, not nearly powerless. A paradox is at work: our world is a world about which we pretend to have a huge and increasing amount of information but seems to be increasingly devoid of meaning. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. From Toma d’Aquino, we have that “ the certainty of the knowledge derives entirely from the certainty of the principles.” Yet, knowledge does not guarantee wisdom. The great Russian mathematician Kolmogorov stated that information, randomness and complexity are fundamentally equivalent. «These three powerful abstractions are like secret lovers. »

Between the “trivial” information and the impossible information (like “the markets are gone”), there is a very thin layer. There is there where we discover some truthful quantitative relations and useful trends.

Borrowing from David Hilbert the same questions he put about mathematics and use them for economics (is it complete? is it consistent? is it decidable?), the answer is obviously no. Yet, it might conceivably be decided by external rules (and logic), that is an outside referee; a decision defined in terms of the lack of something better.

We are well aware now that there is no automatic continuation of the liberal world and its way of life as it started in the early 90’s. The risks can only grow and the results become more and more unpredictable.

The flexibility dictated by global capitalism is clearly not enough.

We can lose the quality of changes if they are not enshrined in some rules. That is possible if we add a flexibility enacted by the people themselves.

Market values are not the only values there are. In education, culture, family, religion, markets have little or no part to play.

Being confronted with a potential crisis of dissolution of the global institutions, the answer could be to reverse the present mantra: not the individuals through the society but the society through the individuals.

All these are not contradictory to the fundamental concepts set out by Fernand Braudel: the advantage and superiority of capitalism consists in the possibility of choice and the superior game of the capitalist economy is precisely the possibility to pass from one monopoly to another. These concepts are quite different from the largely spread concept of the ”capacity of capitalism to survive by adaptation.”

Adaptation is too often seen as the essential quality of an institution but the environment is on the move and a successful adaptation today is obsolete tomorrow.

We should rather seek methods by which we can maintain the dynamism and the ability to change. The institution of globalization is the network. The first requirement in order to become a part, a knot, or a point in a network is the condition of excellence. Any true industrial revolution is strong enough not only to destroy the old equilibrium but also to open the gates to new dynamics of transformation. There isn’t a calamity just around the corner; there is a new way we didn’t identify yet. It is surely there, maybe not where we expected it to be or think it ought to be. We live within a multitude of troubles and conflicts in a world which lacks predictability. But there is or should be the power of (political) behaviour to order a disorderly world. The global system is not self-correcting: it requires concerted political action. We need an affirmative vision beyond the divisions.

If there is a law of unintended consequences I would say it is that on the existing unpredictability, rooted in the very nature of things, consequences may seed confusion across the global economy. This is substantially more negative under the pressure of populist political decisions.

Experts use every day an analytical frontier between the surface area of the global economy (the stock markets for example) and the economy in depth (i.e. productivity, competitiveness, innovation, creativity and trust). What if there is no such clear frontier but a free frontier? I point to an analogy with the liquefaction physical process: the surface of separation between a solid world economy and a close to liquefaction one. That surface is a free frontier.

The present world is also (of course) beautiful. I wish to think of it as it is the industry of a Formula 1 race: we see permanent improvements which seem to be just nuances based on very sophisticated analysis of every part of the car and every physical process surrounding it. The result is financially sound races which raise a hugely emotional public interest and formidable advertising related to the big automobile industry.

Two centuries ago, Edward Gibbon in his wonderful work “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” envisioned what can always save the civilization: to reconcile and unite the love of pleasure, the thirst of knowledge and the fire of ambition.