What do Macron’s arrival in New Caledonia, the recognition of the Palestinian state by three European states and the launch of a space weapon by Russia have in common?
Their common denominator is the compression of space-time where each political vibration accelerates the friction between geopolitical tectonic plates to generate high-speed chain reactions.
On the one hand, all of these events have taken place over the past seven days, overshadowing those of the previous week, and already giving way to those that will follow. We could add in this same time interval, in bulk: the death of the Iranian president, the attack against the Slovak prime minister, the demonstrations in Georgia, the failed coup d’état in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or even the displacement of the Argentine president at the high mass of the elite of the European extreme right in Madrid.
Launched on a helical trajectory, contemporary geopolitics has both feet on the accelerator.
On the other hand, today’s world is one of “polycrises” where geographically distinct geopolitical earthquakes interact like the volcanoes that surround the Pacific.
These frictional tensions are illustrated by the situation in New Caledonia, the meeting point between the old world and a new world. This confetti of South Pacific empire has been placed under the heel of France for almost two centuries… There is persistent colonialism (where the restitution of the skull of the Kanak warlord Ataï, “stored” in the reserves of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris only intervenes in 2014 – 136 years after his death), visible in 2021 when the last referendum on independence is organized while the Kanak minority is still burying the dead of the pandemic… and until ‘to the current crisis.
This is perhaps what explains the sensitivity of the archipelago to the anti-colonial sirens coming from the Caucasus. Because this string of islands, central to France’s Indo-Pacific strategy, rich in an immense exclusive economic zone and its nickel reserves which attract covetousness, is now in Baku’s crosshairs. Azerbaijan, angered by France’s pro-Armenian posture in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, has chosen to strike where the shoe pinches. A situation that Beijing observes, and feeds homeopathically, it is geographically (twice) closer than Paris. The periphery of the empire is now a centerpiece of the contemporary geostrategic game.
The times have changed.
It is also about shifts of tectonic plates that are at stake with the announcement by three European states (Norway, Ireland and Spain) of the recognition of a Palestinian state. Because they put an end to a certain status quo, defined by and with the United States. Because this approach is part of the redefinition of the European architecture which paradoxically combines the end of Nordic neutrality (with the integration of Finland and Sweden into NATO), and the rapid rearmament of a Europe which seriously considers the consequences of the disintegration of the American umbrella.
But this crisis goes even further, because it places the United States at odds, while they no longer have the comfort of the unipolar world of the 1990s nor the luxury of simultaneously being the champions of democracy. and the gravediggers of international law, at a time when the image of the West in the South is rotting.
This insistent feeling of a less secure world, of an unstable world, finds an echo in the words of the Polish Prime Minister last March announcing the advent of a “pre-war era”.
It is fed by tremors which could be a harbinger of other tectonic earthquakes. This is the case with Russia’s launch this week of a satellite which would, according to the Pentagon, be a “space weapon capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit”. This is not trivial. Because international law has prohibited the militarization of space since the 1967 treaty. In principle.
And in this context, we must remember that the treaty which prohibits the manipulation of the environment for military purposes is 40 years old… One tectonic plate can hide another, in the midst of an arms race. Last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending increased for a ninth consecutive year, and by nearly 7 percent — the strongest annual growth in 15 years and an all-time high in absolute terms. .
This is also part of a logic of redefinition of military and legal territorial limits. Because Russia is not only testing space or cyberspace limits… It is also testing air borders – the Norwegian Sorreisa control and warning system detected a record number of Russian strategic bombers in its border zone in 2023.
And, this week, maritime borders were on the agenda: only after Helsinki and Vilnius vehemently protested, the Russian Defense Ministry removed from its website a draft revision of the borders in Baltic sea. However, at the same time, China was carrying out military exercises, encircling Taiwan, in retaliation for the positions of its new president Lai Ching-te.
The current reorganization of the world increases the feeling of strategic, but also individual, insecurity, because geopolitical shocks are in direct contact with national instabilities, local fissures, personal uncertainties. The multiple insecurity indices reflect this acutely perceived vulnerability; this lack of confidence in the future, in the community, in governments, in global governance are documented; the feeling of helplessness crosses all levels of society. Hence this risk, stated more than a decade ago by Parag Khanna, of a tendency towards retrenchment, towards medieval entrenchment.
From the application of customs taxes to the erection of border walls, from the abandonment of global regulatory bodies such as the moribund World Trade Organization (WTO) to the modernization of nuclear arsenals – all phenomena without precedent since the end of the Cold War – everything seems to announce an imbalance in the world, a recomposition of which there is no consensus on the final outcome. The crisis, Gramsci wrote, represents this interim space where the old world continues to die while the new struggles to be born. In this dark interregnum, all we know is that we no longer know.