What to Expect from 2020: Heine Writes OpEd in Global Times

Amb. Jorge Heine, Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, believes that the year 2020 could bring ominous tidings; it may be “one in which the world will face many daunting challenges.”

In his new OpEd in Global Times (16 January, 2020), he suggests that it could be a “year of living dangerously” for many reasons, including (a) climate change, (b) a second Cold War, (c) an unraveling of the WTO, (d) a go-for-it Brexit, and (e) a proxy war riven Middle East. It will be a year, he argues, that will “put a special premium on the leadership of the rising powers of the Global South to keep the ship of global governance on an even keel as we enter an especially fraught year.”

An excerpt from the OpEd:

“…this is not by happenstance. As Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, “a crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” As the unipolar world that emerged at the end of the Cold War gives way to a new one, whose hallmarks are globalization and multipolarity, there is resistance and reaction against the newly emerging order. In many ways, the populist movements in the developed world are a reaction against the decline of the West and the rise of the Rest. Their disregard for the established rules of international behavior is part of the appeal to their electoral base.”

Read the entire OpEd here.

Ambassador Jorge Heine is a Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He has served as ambassador of Chile to China ( 2014-2017), to India ( 2003-2007) and to South Africa ( 1994-1999), and as a Cabinet Minister in the Chilean Government. A past Vice-President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), he was CIGI Professor of Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs , Wilfrid Laurier University, from 2007 to 2017, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).