2024 promises to be a crucial year. Not on the basis of the increasingly complex optimism of the will, but as a consequence of two emblematic data. The first is that in 2023, for the first time in history, the West’s GDP fell below 50% of global wealth. We’ll see if this trend consolidates next year. The second is that in 2024 as many as 70 countries, or more than 2 billion people, will vote.
All eyes are obviously focused on the second part of the year and the elections in the United States. But the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mexico and the 18 million inhabitants of Taiwan will also go to the polls. In some cases, such as in Belarus or Rwanda, it will only be a matter of verifying the gap from 100% of the consensus for the outgoing President. In other countries, especially African ones, there is the risk of a return to a dramatic past, given the nine coups d’état that have occurred on the continent from 2020 to today.
However, many other electoral events will have to tell us two fundamental things: how solid the prospect of a “Global South” is, or of a new “non-alignment” and, secondly, what the future of democracy is.
It is now an established fact that democracy continues to be a minority political system in the world. The only slight reversal in trend, recorded in the years following the end of the Cold War, proved to be ephemeral. The world continues to be governed predominantly by autocracies or hybrid forms of “democracies”, formally democratic systems with strong limitations or violations of civil, social or political rights.
In this turbulent post-Covid planet we are actually witnessing the affirmation of multipolarism. An objective hoped for by many in the past, but which is gradually being achieved in the worst possible way, with growing traumas, conflicts and tensions. “Non-alignment” is becoming a powerful weapon in this sense. From Modi’s India to Lula’s Brazil, from Indonesia to the Gulf countries, the protagonists today have the means, resources and perhaps a new geopolitical awareness to achieve their objectives. It is a safe bet that they will use the instability caused by ongoing conflicts to their advantage and that they will probably rely on those industrial policy tools that we have experienced in the West in the last century: dirigisme in economics and political capitalism. As early as next year, it will be a question of verifying how attractive this model will become for the rest of the world.
Modi’s India is undoubtedly leading this new “non-alignment”. As the world divides again into blocs and sees a distribution of power, India’s strategy takes advantage of the divorce between China, Russia and the West. The Global South will represent three-quarters of the world population and 60% of global GDP by 2030. The ambition of these countries is to become regional hegemons and their belief is that only by not taking sides, but by taking advantage of the opportunities and weaknesses of the two fronts, can this objective be best served.
There is one terrain in particular on which the fiercest competition will be played in the coming years. It is the terrain of new technologies: 6G, nuclear power, Artificial Intelligence, life sciences, green technologies and semiconductors. Democracies are warned. If they stop working, jamming their mechanisms in what Fukuyama defined as a “vetocracy”, if they stop innovating they will condemn themselves to marginality, if not irrelevance. Protectionism is simply no longer the answer. We are no longer faced with a “rich versus poor” or “progress versus simulation” scheme. We have entered a very different context of direct competition, with all the consequences, even dramatic ones, that we can already experience.
For democracies this is an existential challenge, in which the two aspects are closely connected. The ability to make societies cohesive and political systems efficient today passes through a new awareness, that of still having much to say and give to the world. After all, just a few months ago, the fascinating and impressive story linked to vaccines against Covid-19 told us a lot about the West’s ability to innovate. It would be wrong to read the response to the pandemic crisis as a race between a “democratic vaccine“, undoubtedly effective and safe, and an “autocratic vaccine” about which we know little or nothing, due to the absolute lack of transparent data, never made available by China or Russia. But it is on that path of effectiveness, innovation and experimentation that democracies will have to continue to move if they want to demonstrate that they know how to combine values with the efficiency of instruments, even in this new century. On the other hand, only in democracies is the ethical dimension of Artificial Intelligence discussed today. But the response to the unknown must not be denial or censorship. Rather, we need a positive, solid ability to make that, like many others, an instrument and not an end. This has always distinguished different political regimes: innovation as a tool fuels social cohesion and distributes benefits; innovation as an end implies general and forced mobilization and restricts opportunities for a few.
Democracies are undoubtedly much more fragile today. They will be subjected, as early as 2024, to unprecedented pressure. It will come from within, due to the deterioration of social cohesion. From the outside, due to growing global competition and the impact of epochal asymmetric changes, such as climate change. They will have to know how to calibrate and manage a response that is not simple but necessary. From 2024 we will know if the path taken will be the right one.