Contemporary World Settings. Contemporary world

World geopolitics has undergone major changes in the last 30 years. From the 1980s onwards, the successive dissolutions of socialist regimes in Europe, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the weakening of the Soviet empire, demonstrated that the configuration of international political relations after World War II was about to be restructure. In 1991, the Soviet Union, a country that conceived a political-economic project to oppose Western rule capitalist, was unable to resist the internal pressures related to multiculturalism and the fragility of its economy. Its decay decreed the end of the Order of the Cold War and the beginning of the New World Order, led by the United States and with a structure based on the North-South conflict: the interdependence between developed countries and countries underdeveloped.

The New Order is bound by the interests of the U.S. Holder of the world's largest economy, the country developed during the Cold War an entire technical framework to increase its economic, cultural and military influence around the globe. On the other hand, Europe bet on the formation of a very ambitious economic bloc, the

European Union, which involves economic and political relations around the ideal of solidarity and growth together. With the adoption of the Euro, in 2002, the bloc achieved the greatest of its regional integration objectives, creating institutions to manage this model of political organization. In the composition of the axis of developed countries is Japan, a country with a high degree of technological development, but which is going through many economic difficulties since the beginning of the New World Order, mainly due to the low accumulated economic growth and the aging of its population.

This scenario began to undergo some changes in the late 1990s, when the term ‘emerging countries’ started to gain space in the analysis of the world economic situation. The significant and continuous growth of countries like China and India, the economic recovery of Russia, the greater economic stability of Brazil and the development Korea's social and technological features offered a new feature to international relations: countries that only held a secondary position in the world capitalist system began to more actively influence international trade, gaining greater power in the decisions of blocks and organizations worldwide.

In 2001, economist Jim O’Nill at the investment bank Goldman Sachs coined the term BRICs, formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China and which currently also has the presence of South Africa. For O’nill, this group of countries would present the greatest potential for growth among emerging nations, something that was consolidated in the 2000s and which was absorbed by the countries in question, which promote annual meetings with the establishment of trade agreements and projects for the transfer of technology.

All these recent transformations lead us to the following reflection: after two great wars, the Pax American structured at the end of 2The Could World War be going through a process of deconstruction?

THE world economic crisis exposes the momentary weakness of the US economy. In addition to the cyclical nature, the economic difficulties of the US do not represent a decline in its ideology, which remains strong, much less in its military power and efficiency. No other nation-state emerges as a redefiner of values ​​and there are not even candidates for this post (disregarding the bravado expressed by leaders such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez or Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad).

The US must overhaul its surveillance, homeland security, and strategic planning systems to confirm the statuswhat geopolitical that was determined after its consolidation as a hegemonic power. Even China has limits on its economic growth and difficulties to build, in the short term, a consumer market capable of absorbing such growth. In the case of Europe, which has been hit most severely by the global economic crisis, there must be a change in the planning of its institutions, which still need to be strengthened before betting on the integration of countries that have more fragile economies and limited to less modern sectors or even few productive.

More than the transformation of Pax Americana, the reformulation of the UN. The current configuration of the supranational organization seems to be more in line with the historical moment that Europe lived between the end of the 19th century and the 2nd.The World War (redefinition of borders) and with the bipolarity imposed by the Cold War period. Debates about the organization's new functionalities must be based on adapting to these new times, in which extreme acts, individual or planned from of terrorist cells, become difficult to be managed by a geopolitical structure like the current one, still very concerned with the national private interests and regional. Global issues such as the environment, water scarcity, terrorism, violence, alternative energies, among many others require the abandonment of these obsolete political practices and the introduction of a new rationality based on values. universals. Even because a pinch of utopia is never too much.


Julio César Lázaro da Silva
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
Master in Human Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP

Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/geografia/configuracoes-do-mundo-contemporaneo.htm

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