Anniversary Edition

EDITORIAL

Precisely 20 years ago, the European Laboratory for Political Anticipation (LEAP2020) released the first issue of an unconventional UFO-like magazine, the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin.

Why “unconventional”? Because at the time, the Internet was disseminating a wealth of high-quality content completely free of charge. Because LEAP was an independent think tank with no support of any kind. Because we were anything but business people. Because the GEAB spoke of the arrival of a crisis in the entire post-WW2 global system at a time when no one was really able to imagine a non-American, or at least non-Western, world (“by nature, the Chinese only knew how to copy our techniques”, “the rest of the world dreamed only of becoming American”, “the emerging powers were just markets for our cars”, etc.). Admittedly, something was wrong with American finances, but the world would anyhow pay… Did it have any other choice? As for Europe, it was the Mother of the prodigal Child across the Atlantic, forever shielded from need and from attack as a result.

So the GEAB didn’t stand a chance… really? That was without reckoning with human reality — namely, you, our readers. The courage and rationality of the GEAB resonated with your own intuitions and reasoning. And for 20 years, you have thirsted for this different perspective that we bring to current events and the futures they promise, a perspective that resembles your own, more global, more questioning, more coherent, more tolerant, more reasoned, less self-assured, a historian’s perspective linking events together – aware that there are other ways of connecting them, the perspective of an observer who understands rather than a viewer who endures. The GEAB merely offers avenues of understanding to “your intelligence of the future”.

And for 20 years, together we have tried to avoid the rocks that stood in our way during our tedious climb to the summit of this “global systemic crisis”: the subprime crisis of 2008, the war in Ukraine from 2014 onwards, the rise of populism from 2015 onwards, Brexit in 2016, the coup in Turkey in 2016, Trump’s presidency in 2017, Bolsonaro’s election in 2018… all in all, the work was relatively easy. We had an effective interpretative thread, that of the transition from a Western-centric world to a multipolar world, and all the shocks of resistance, emergence and displacement to be expected in the context of this linear process of collapse of a system that was not only familiar but also simple, because it was hegemonic.

And then we reached the summit of this mountain, the tipping point of this crisis, with Covid precipitating humanity, all of humanity, into the “world after” that we had been talking about since at least 2009[1].

The ‘world after’ is one where everything has become imaginable, since a virus has led to the confinement of the entire planet. A manifestation of the extreme power of our governments, an event without historical precedent, the first shared memory of all humanity, the first full-scale test of a human society in which mobility is no longer synonymous with activity or productivity, the rerouting and multipolarisation of all supply flows… with the human collective emerging physically, structurally, psychologically and, above all, permanently transformed.

As if in a dream, when we reached the top of the mountain, a whole new landscape unfolded before our eyes. We felt as if we had reached the end of our efforts, everything became possible, everyone had been right… each to their own world, from their own home.

And then, time stopped its flight, and we began to descend the mountain, each filled with our personal dreams for the future, colliding with those of others: crowd movements, trampling, congestion, bifurcations, running, acceleration, dizziness, sudden stops, breathlessness, uncertainties… to the point where the “process” of Global Systemic Crisis turned into a “state” of Permanent Systemic War (here “permanent” does not mean “eternal”).

For 20 years, it was the systems of power that were under attack. But for the next two decades, we feel that humanity itself is in danger, constantly at risk of being trampled underfoot by the great cavalcade of new Lords waging war against each other. States, alliances of states, armies, NGOs, the Big Everything (tech, pharma, etc.), religious and ideological groups, criminal organisations… drones and other tools of democratised terror give them all a chance. And humanity, so fragile in the face of these war machines, will have to step back for a while for a better reassertion.

It is this arduous path towards a new Golden Age for Humanity that we believe is essential to set out in this anniversary issue at the beginning of 2026, embodied by this beautiful cover created by Beb Deum.

It will then be time for a significant change, allowing us to continue nourishing your thirst for lucidity as best we can.

Marie-Hélène Caillol
Managing Editor, Co-founder of the GEAB

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[1]     Source: World Crisis: The paths to the world afterwards, by Franck Biancheri, Editions Anticipolis 2009