What’s the Way of the World, Millennium Goals and «Politics’ Deficit»
Roberto Savio
If considered with the eyes of violence, the past century is full of horrors: two world wars, Gulag, Shoa, the occupation of politics by two totalitarian ideologies, nazifascism and stalinism. But, at the same time, it is the century in which democracy and development have been recognised as fundamental values and the United Nations system has been established. After 1989, the world entered an era marked by three dangerous trends: the «Washington consensus», that is a model of economic development imposed by the concurrent policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US Treasure (some kind of «single thought» as theorised by Ramonet); the retour to unilateralism, and the storming of christian and islamic fundamentalisms.
The author argues that a sustainable and effective humane governance requires to counter those trends by meeting the positive challenges stemming from the UN strategy relating to the Millennium Goals, human rights, and environment. But to this purpose what he calls the «politics deficit» should be urgently addressed with both pragmatism and idealism.