The values of the G-77 are more actual.

• Author: Savio, Roberto

Asthe founder of Inter Press Service, which is also celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, let me share some reflections, which are of course my personal views, as I do not belong to the inter-overnmental system. If I look at the enthusiasm and hope that marked 1964, when we all hoped to build a more balanced and just system of international relations, when solidarity was a key word, and at the sense of gloom and stagnation that marks international relations today, I cannot but reflect on what went wrong. The fact that millions of citizens today in various Gallup polls worldwide look to the world not as an element of stability, but as a serious factor of incertitude, must be an important consideration. I will, therefore, present my personal opinion on what went wrong, and why we are in the present global incertitude.

At the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, everybody applauded the end of the Cold War, and the unfreezing of a world divided into two blocs, East and West. Many wrote about the peace dividends: reduction in armament would go to international cooperation. The only dissenting voice was Zbigniew Brzezinski, United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, who wrote that the unfreezing would open up a number of unresolved issues, leading to a long period of instability. He specifically alluded to the fact that, without two blocs, the Non-Aligned Movement would lose its identity, and the North-South divide would disappear. Professor Francis Fukuyama went further: he wrote that with the collapse of the so-called "socialist bloc", we had reached the end of history, because with the collapse of communism, no more debate was possible, and the world would be unified by capitalism.

We all know that the peace dividends never materialized. They were just absorbed into national budgets. The end of the Cold War did unleash a number of complex conflicts of adjustment, and the recent annexing of Crimea to Russia is just the latest case. States found it very convenient to use reduction of costs in armament to shore up their budgets, and international cooperation allocations in the North have been progressively diminishing to go back now to the levels of 1973. The North-South dialogue has changed into a multi-polar dialogue, and the world is in a quest for global governability. This is exasperated by the fact that with the passage from productive capitalism to financial capitalism, even the traditional powers have entered into a period of uncertainty. Finance is the only sector of society and of the economy that has no institutional control. Trade, for good or bad, has a regulating body, but finance has no such counterpart. For example, in the same day when total production of goods and services is estimated to be slightly under $1 trillion dollars, financial transactions can amount to $40 trillion dollars, largely out of control from the national and international systems. In other words, for every dollar of productive capitals, we have 40 times its volume in financial transactions generated by machines in a...