A lot is changing in Europe in many areas - and almost simultaneously. What is coming, what it means and what needs to be done.

Development aid shift

Why have three trillion dollars in 40 years had almost no effect?
Why can aid weaken?
How can inequities in climate, energy and commodities be redressed?
Why is China acting so differently in Africa?

Geo-political shifts

Are the USA and the EU also on the way to a post-democracy?
Will autocracies win thanks to AI?
How will the race between Big Tech (USA) vs. Big State (China) end?

Migration shift

How can immigration be secured?
Will a culture of arrival - nationally and in the city - become a competitive factor?
How do we create diverse integration cultures?
What role does education play?

Security shift

How long will the security of the EU be guaranteed by the USA?
Has the near-death of NATO been averted and does it have a future?
Is the Iron Curtain in the middle of Ukraine avoidable?
Are people aware of the cyber risks?
What risks can still be insured against?

Educational shift

Does easier access to knowledge require radically different didactics?
Does digitalisation only promote division or also democracy?
How can we qualify workforces and managers for high-tech and high-touch, i.e. more empathy?

Labour shift

Is New Work really coming after 50 years? And if so: because of Covid, Generation Y/Z, the labour market or out of resignation?
Are robots and algorithms really taking away the work we lack?
Will algorithms and robots have to pay taxes in the future?
What do sustainable trade unions look like?

Health and demographic shift

Will growing affluent societies become healthier, older or just more expensive to care for?
Will ageing become the fastest growing market or a public service task?
Is the Chinese population getting old faster than it gets rich?
Will the shift from expensive follow-up care to data-based preventive care work?
Will digital, individualised medicine lead to a desolidarisation of the health care system?
Will health professions be the winners on tomorrow's labour markets?

Climate shift

Planetary tipping points due to wars and capitalism
Civil society tipping points due to unprecedented radicalisation
Will the financial market become the most important climate protection instrument?

Energy shift

Will there continue to be wars over energy?
Are renewable energies over-regulated?
Will China continue to rely on fossil fuels?
Will nuclear power plants come back even without a final storage solution?
How much does the shortage of skilled workers hinder the energy turnaround?

Mobility shift

How do we achieve a 48 percent reduction in CO2 by 2030?
Can we manage the massive expansion of local public transport and the rail network?
How can we produce enough green electricity for electric mobility?
Are the incentives in tax and transport law adequate?
Can industrial, labour market and tax policies be harmonised?
What has priority - urban development, factory housing or public transport?

Digitalisation shift

What are the consequences of the increasing concentration of power among tech giants?
Will decentralisation through technology help against big tech - or do we need more rigid regulation?
How does the new geopolitics of the internet go - Moscow/China versus USA/EU?
Do we need a digital NATO?

Water shift

Are water wars coming our way?
Are dam projects always autocratic?
Will water be the next CO2 (with consumption shown on products like cars and food, such as avocado?)
Will the privatisation of water be banned?
Is it useful to classify water consumption by colour?

Agri-food shift

Is hunger becoming a weapon?
How do we curb meat consumption?
Should there be tax privileges for healthy food?
How do we change agricultural subsidy policies (subsidies for factory farming, monocultures, deforestation)?
How do we preserve biodiversity?

Note: No completeness of these shifts, their connections and conflicting goals.

Source: Stephan A. Jansen, Update Lecture 2016, brand eins Zukunftskonferenz.

Postmodernism is over

The great world narratives are over, at least that was the message of so-called postmodernism. And somehow you could believe that, because the shit is hitting the fan. Some examples:

Post-democracy is being discussed in democracies and is already being lived out in Hungary, for example.

Post-capitalism is being negotiated between regulation, civil society and business.

The post-growth economy is often already more reality than ideology.

Post-materialism is popular among the younger generation who no longer want to inherit the problems of their predecessors.

The post-fossil age is coming too slowly for climate change activists and too fast for energy demand.

The post-post-world war phase has been heralded by former US President Donald Trump, who has called on Europe to defend itself. The echo of this bell is shrill and terrible with Putin's war of aggression on Ukraine.

What comes next remains fuzzy and seems uncomfortable. And it is unstructured because too many watersheds are taking place at the same time.

Several watersheds at the same time lead to conflicting goals

Just three of the numerous examples:

1 Mobility shift, energy shift and labour market policy have different goals here in Germany - this can be seen when electric private cars running on coal-fired electricity stand around in urban car parks while public transport is waiting to be expanded.

2 Geopolitical and security shifts can be at odds with the climate shift if gas is now bought from Qatar for independence.

3 The agricultural and food revolution, which along with the mobility revolution is essential for limiting global warming, is in conflict with global demand and the fight against hunger, for which forests are still being cut down and pastureland expanded for more animal feed.

Conflicting goals are omnipresent and can only be solved together. Multiple turns at the same time require the simultaneous involvement of hitherto unequally treated stakeholder groups.

Reducing complexity is no solution

The 21st century saw so many black swans - i.e. "highly improbable events" as Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his book of the same name - that white ones could be taken as the exception. At the same time, state capitalism developed in China, causing not a few to doubt the European model. So is complexity only managed with even more complexity? Or is the simpler, low-variance autocracy the solution? Perhaps also self-learning, rule-based artificial intelligence (AI)?

At first, it looks like autocracies, SWFs and AI lead to the reduction of complexity - but it could also be that complexity is even greater afterwards than in the slow, inclusive democracies.

So how do we become more manoeuvrable in the turns?

MACRO: New institutions

The design of previous institutions at the United Nations (UN) or the G7 has been for isolated problems. This is why the concept of the Grand Strategy is being discussed in academic consultancies and at conferences. This refers to an overall concept for steering states through complex and uncertain times. Chairs on this can be found in large numbers in the USA, and current approaches to the foreign policy debate highlight many other aspects, from human and abortion rights, public health, climate, migration to religion.

The US approach, which is currently reinventing itself once again, could actually also be a geopolitical approach, beyond a G7, without Russia.

Russia's out-of-time war, which superficially appears to be from the past century, naturally also has hybrid forms:

a. The geopolitics of digitalisation is different from the geopolitics of the still analogue post-World War II world: On 28 April 2022, for example, a little-noticed "Declaration for the Future of the Internet" was published on the initiative of US President Joe Biden, which was signed by 32 other states in addition to the USA and the EU. It was a reaction to the Moscow Declaration on the Future of Cybersecurity, which China and Russia had already agreed on at the end of 2020 and which is tantamount to an agreement on trans-Asian censorship. Given the EU's reservations about US big-tech corporations, this is a perceptible turning point towards a digital-nato.

b. Digital commons: The question of private platform economies that have invaded almost all public infrastructures concerns private marketplaces like Amazon's and Alibaba's, purely private media without oversight like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or private currencies like Bitcoin. So far, digital capitalism with its data monopolies has hindered rather than enhanced our progress.

c. Fifth power in the separation of powers: Codes, algorithms, platforms or even social scoring systems are in fact just that - just not yet anchored in constitutional law. This is our task for society as a whole.

MICRO: new narratives

How can dreams of a future worth living come about? One offer could be the dream of humanity: Health - not forever, but at least for a long time in the sense of dignified self-determined ageing. Such a goal could connect many turning points and justify the need for changes in nutrition, water, climate, biodiversity or mobility. For example, the One Health approach - by the World Health Organisation, among others - relies on the understanding that human, animal and environmental health are interrelated. Not only since the Corona virus jumped from animals to humans has this been a smart idea that inspires companies in the health industry. There is integration power in this - from states, companies, civil society, the impatient environmental protection movements like the "Last Generation", from "Fridays for Future" and equally impatient "Grandparents for Future".

The little sister of the Grand Strategy could be the city. The thesis that cities are the transformation laboratories of world societies could at least make the conflicting goals there manageable. With compromises, with concessions and understanding that particular interests do not help. Alliances such as C40 Cities (a group of almost 100 cities around the world representing almost 600 million people and more than a fifth of the global economy) or the UN Habitat Conferences (held every 20 years with around 40,000 representatives of different interests) show this path as encouraging as it is still largely unnoticed.

NANO: radical designs

There are also provocative narratives to the integrating ones, and they will increase. For animal welfare, for affordable housing, against cars or climate sins, fists are no longer just raised, but stuck to motorways with super glue. Civil disobedience, which we have only known as calmed and administered resistance in Germany for several decades, seems to be making a much more radical comeback.

The cultural scientist and disaster researcher Eva Horn believes that the realisation of the necessary changes exceeds our imagination - with the consequence of inconsequence. The narcissistic mortification, as Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, would call it, that our laborious achievements of the post-war period have now become a problem - finally meat or cars every day for everyone - supports radicalisation. We should keep this energy in mind and allow other valves. Amsterdam, Helsinki and Paris can serve as models.

Solutions

According to our research, social innovations are based on three principles:

1 Involve stakeholders by rephrasing the question. Instead of: What do you need? to: What can you contribute?

2 Hybridisation of commercial, governmental and civil society organisations instead of privatisation and re-nationalisation in turn.

3 Systemisation of socio-technical solutions instead of mere products.

All the turning points outlined cannot be solved with even more growth, redistribution or technology. For all previous solutions produced the much-invoked collateral damage. In contrast, the turning points shown here are all behavioural turning points - at the state, corporate and individual levels.

One shift in thinking could be to switch from the seemingly unavoidable collateral damage to systematic collateral benefit. A thought exercise for this could be an extended Categorical Imperative: Always act in such a way that your counterpart gains an advantage for which he does not have to do anything.

Concretely

If you build a new building: What benefit (e.g. new infrastructure, synergies, better public transport connections) will it bring to the people living in the neighbourhood who will be burdened by the construction?

If you are developing a new product, what other benefits are there beyond those for consumers?

If you develop a new medicine: How can the world as a whole benefit from it - apart from the shareholders - without having to give up patents?

If you are a farmer: How can you save pesticides, increase yields and protect the climate?

If you are a grocer: How can you buy in such a way that not only your customers but also the farmers are better off?

If you build cities, how can you make them cheaper, more liveable and healthier at the same time?

These thought exercises put you in an insanely good mood, increase resilience in the community and are selfish altruism. Hence the phrase: happiness in adversity. The behavioural changes produce many positive additional effects, which the participants can report afterwards - and which they hardly believed in before.

From Brandeins via Kompreno translated with DeepL.