Tribune. During the last edition of the Paris Peace Forum, in November 2020, President Macron proposed the launch of an international debate on the organization of the world after the Covid-19. He spoke on this subject of the advisability of defining a new international consensus – “The consensus of Paris or anywhere” -, by reference to the “Washington consensus” which prevailed in the 1990s in the context of the rescue of the economies of a number of countries, weighed down by their massive indebtedness – Argentina in particular.
We were then in the Reagan and Thatcher era. The “Washington consensus” enacted a set of measures inspired by neoliberalism: privatizations, balanced budgets, deregulation all the way, and so on. Mr. Macron is not wrong to argue that the management of the world economy must now respond to completely different principles. He cites two in particular: the fight against climate change, the reduction of inequalities. These two structuring factors of the current phase of globalization can no longer be considered as “externalities”; on the contrary, they must be at the heart of a global governance reformed in the light of the ordeal of the coronavirus.
Rooseveltian program
Five or six months later, it must be noted that the debate desired by the French president has not taken off. We can find at least two reasons for this. First, it is difficult to project yourself into “the world after” as the pandemic continues to spread death and desolation across entire continents. Then a new administration moved to Washington. At its head, a president not at all “asleep” but on the contrary dynamic, pushing a program of Rooseveltien type, and attracting to him the light.
With regard to world governance, it is advisable to stop on a kind of paradox: the Biden administration joins an agenda which in recent years has been that of Europeans, and of France in particular; it reintegrates the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization; it takes its part in initiatives such as the ACT Accelerator set up in April 2020 to share the tools to fight against Covid with all countries; it advances on corporate taxation.
“Even if their priorities relate above all to the confrontation with China, it is possible that the American leaders are anxious not to cut themselves off from Europe”
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