EWhat if the fate of our world had been decided in 1979? As essential – and unexpected in its modalities – as it may be, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 occurs in a landscape where the main developments that have shaped these last decades are already in place. And many of them originated ten years earlier.
Judge it: it was in 1979 that the election of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain launched the neoliberal policies that would win a good part of the developed countries, accelerate globalization but also widen inequalities. At the other end of the world, the economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping (announced at the end of 1978) sounded the awakening of a China which would henceforth grow by almost 10% each year, upsetting the global equilibria and causing it to follow l rise of emerging countries, especially in the 2000s.
It was the Iranian revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan which in 1979 upset the balances within the Muslim world.
On the geopolitical level, it was the Iranian revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan, which in 1979 upset the balances within the Muslim world, by precipitating the fall of the Soviet empire and bringing the world into the world. age of identity reaffirmation. Admittedly, it had been a few years since the ideological confrontation of the industrial age – Marxism against capitalism – appeared less central, and that in the West the new policy put forward communities rather than classes: young people, women, ethnic minorities and religious… The movement will only grow, until obsession.
But it was in the Muslim world that this strengthening of identity was most marked. Iran’s challenge from Imam Khomeini to Saudi Arabia results in an escalation of religious leadership, spurring the rise of Islamism. Certainly, political Islam preexisted, even in the struggles for decolonization, but as a force among others. From 1979, the Islamist referent will dominate, prevailing over Pan-Arabism or Communism. It is not even the most secular parties like the Baath, which, from the 1990s, did not seek religious legitimacy.
Antagonism between Sunnis and Shiites
Second consequence of the Iranian revolution of 1979: it made the antagonism between Sunnis and Shiites a geostrategic issue. From 2003, the American invasion of Iraq brought this country which had hitherto been in the Sunni orbit into the Shiite camp, exacerbating the hostility between Riyadh and Tehran which structures the present Middle East.
