The ‘integral security’ evoked by Pope Francis (La Stampa, 16 October 2022) opens up innovative perspectives. It is a question of choosing complexity.
Peace, justice and security are part of an inextricable mosaic. None of the three processes makes sense, nor can be realised, without the others.
If history is back, with all the contradictions and conflicts that belong to us as human beings and subjects-of-history, the crises we knew have become inseparable parts of a gigantic de-generative megacrisis (in the ongoing recomposition of power relations). This is why we can no longer deal separately with the issues of war and peace (and which war and which peace), climate change, food insecurity, global health (emerged and emerging pandemics), inequalities, technology competition, demography, human mobility, strategic importance of cities and territories (and their government through the use of geospatial technologies), competition for strategic raw materials, competition in outer space, increasingly clear separation between rich and poor worlds, cost of living, value chains, social cohesion and violence, ’emptying’ of democracies, return of identities. Up to the totalitarian risk (with, in the background of our reflections, the real risk of the nuclear weapon) that lives in the semi-darkness of our lives.
It is right to introduce elements of creativity into the return of a politics that has to come to terms with an increasingly ‘metaverse’ world, but which is no longer able to dialogue in the ‘flesh and blood’ reality of the deprived and humiliated lives.
The de-generative megacrisis, if governed politically, offers us the chance to open up new and geostrategic perspectives: for new principles of coexistence, for a culture of inclusion, for a complex politics (mediation/negotiation/dialogues and historical vision in the beyond), for an economy of ‘cooperative competition’, for shared rules. All this by rethinking globalisation into ‘glocalisation’ in the continuous mediation between national interests and global issues.
If moral appeals are good for the soul, governing the transformations of reality requires politics.
