– What does 2022 bring –

 

Time brings something, it accelerates, it thickens. Like a muddy flood, time envelops us, floods us, bringing around us faster and more unexpected news, events, events that need to be answered faster and faster – almost at the same time. From crisis to crisis, from danger to catastrophe, humanity bends before unexpected events – from pandemics to climate change. The world of the future is already concentrated on our palm, on the glittering screen – in the technology of mobile phones, each of which has a larger capacity than the entire Apollo space mission that took the first humans to the moon in the 1960s. The digital revolution is all around us, from school classrooms to insurance application forms. We are already living in a world from science fiction novels that some read in their youth. Time brings us faster and faster technological changes, while human consciousness is anxiously facing a new era of the rise of artificial intelligence and the prospect of a kind of symbiosis of the human individual and useful and intelligent machines.

Over the last two years, the world has faced a new type of general threat: the Covid 19 pandemic, which has significantly affected social and individual behavior, the economy – especially some services, the movement and gathering of people, politics, transport, tourism, and relations between countries, as well as their different reactions in a pandemic. Some countries have implemented a policy of zero tolerance of the infection, hermetically closing the borders, reacting drastically by closing the society or isolating regions and cities, even with a very small number of infected (mostly Asian countries such as China, Australia, New Zealand, etc.). Richer countries in Europe and the United States have focused on financing the rapid discovery of vaccines and / or pandemic drugs (which was also realized in an extremely short time) as well as on rapid and mass vaccination. However, regardless of the various anti-pandemic measures that varied from country to country or region to region, the waves of infection continue to sweep countries and peoples, the first strain of the virus was replaced by “delta” and the delta by “omicron”. Will 2022 bring an end to this plague? – it is still difficult to predict. Life with a pandemic has become a “new reality”. How many new behaviors, such as working from home, holding hybrid gatherings, even greater invasion of “online” culture into everyday life, will turn into something that will last? In December 2021, the Miss World pageant was even canceled because some participants were tested as covid – positive.

International relations as a whole are burdened by increasing competition from the great powers, primarily the United States, China and Russia. Multilateralism and the role of global organizations such as the UN or the WTO are weak, which has not been denied by large gatherings, such as the Climate Change Conference (COP25) or the G20 summit. The trend of tension and mistrust between the most powerful does not stop growing, in which the new American administration of President Joe Biden fitted in quite smoothly. The arms race – especially with new types of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles equipped with nuclear weapons, new types of planes and aircraft, nuclear submarines and more – is not stopping. Military technologies are being transferred to space as well as to the virtual cyber world, while new spaces, such as the Arctic, increasingly free of ice, are potentially opening up new opportunities for conflict.

The time of coming together and cooperation has been replaced by mutual threats and tensions. It seems that the leaders of the great powers are more focused on their own public, while they listen to each other poorly and understand each other even less. On two sides of the Eurasian continent – on the Ukrainian plain, as well as in the South China Sea, especially around Taiwan, the tension has increased so much that the possibility of more serious conflicts in 2022 cannot be ruled out.

In this climate, there are recompositions of various forms of alliances at the global level, especially in the Far and Middle East. The world is increasingly reminiscent of the “truce before the storm”, as it was at the end of the XIX century, ie. on the eve of the great war – only this time with the looming nuclear cloud on the horizon. Hybrid conflicts including cyber threats, civil wars (like the one in Ethiopia) and the threat of terrorism will remain a kind of constant reminder of the sensitivity and unpredictability of the world and the times in which we live.

The great and dramatic withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan and beyond from the Middle East leads to potentially significant changes in this always turbulent area. Europe itself is in a phase of recomposition – inside and outside the EU – after Brexit, that is. the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from European integration and in the context of strengthening the economic, military or geostrategic role of Russia, China and Turkey. It can be expected that in the European Union, burdened by internal quarrels, especially over the rule of law (and more broadly about the role of the nation state in European integration), after the formation of the new German government and after the presidential and parliamentary elections in France (April-June 2022) , new initiatives will be concretized that would lead to a somewhat larger “strategic autonomy” of the EU as well as small but significant institutional changes of the Union. Illegal migrations will continue to flood the European continent with greater or lesser intensity, because there can be no undisturbed area in a world of unrest and poverty.

The Western Balkans will remain burdened by traditional discord based on narcissistic complexes of small differences, which cannot be significantly influenced by some positive initiatives such as the “Open Balkans” or the Common Regional Market. The dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina will continue to tread in a place under the helpless mediation of Brussels, Bulgaria will continue to block the European integration of Northern Macedonia, while the focus of regional tensions and international attention will be primarily on Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In economic terms, measures to support and renew economic activities, based primarily on printing money, have led to the growth of already somewhat forgotten inflation (3.4% in the eurozone, over 6% in Serbia), but it can be expected that in 2022 this the growth should have slowed down, that is, the inflation “bubble” should have started to decrease. However, the world system does not yet have the right answers to the emergence of extreme inequalities in income, both individually and regionally, as well as the emergence of huge private Internet companies and financial conglomerates whose actions affect the state of humanity much more than the views of most countries.

On the whole, if we are lucky, 2022 should lead to a reduction in global disturbances caused by the pandemic. But the world and humanity need much more. In times of unpredictable unrest and uncertainty, only intensive renewal of global multilateral cooperation, greater solidarity between countries shown in practice (such as free distribution of vaccines to the poor, easing of intellectual property rules on drugs, etc.), as well as the orientation of great powers towards peace and resolving difficult global and regional problems (eg in Africa and the Middle East) such as climate change and threats to the environment, could restore optimism and give hope that humanity will avoid falling into the threatening abyss over which it plays and which is becoming, from year to year, all deeper and darker.