Esteban Hernández, author of 'How everything begins': "If China has risen so powerfully, it is because of Western stupidity".
Esteban Hernández, head of opinion at 'El Confidencial', political analyst and author of several books such as 'The End of the Middle Class' and 'El tiempo pervertido' deals in his new work 'Así empieza todo' (Ariel) with the change of hegemonic powers in the world, the rise of a reinforced China and the appearance of "the hidden war of the 21st century": the clash and domination of a financial system against the economy of production and daily life.
How did the idea of writing the book come about?
In general, almost all books, and this one too, is the result of a series of questions I ask myself about what is happening. You see some circumstances, transformations that are taking place and you don't succeed in explaining them or at least the explanations you receive are not very convincing and you start to look into this. From these questions you see connections, tendencies and possibilities for the future, and this is where the book comes in.
What are the main geographical blockages that you address?
In reality everything is connected, there are a series of structural transformations that are occurring in Western societies, Spain is part of them and sometimes they are the lucky part of those transformations, but the changes are general nowadays, they occur at a geopolitical level, within States in the territorial differences because there are globally connected cities, there are intermediate areas or cities which are the rural ones that are losing weight, and it also occurs in the field of social classes, there are people who win and people who lose.
Although the book is structured in this way, it does not lose its unity because there is something flying over all this and pushing changes in one direction.
Do you talk about the conflict between winners and losers?
The concept of winners and losers is very present in the book because it is generating strange transformations because, for example, the United States has taken a turn away from the international order to try to gain more advantages. This is an example of a winner, because it is the world's leading power, which is trying to achieve a better position by transforming the international rules.
But all this has to do with an underground war which is what the book refers to as the huge tensions produced by the enormous drive of the financial sphere vis-à-vis the productive sphere. When I talk about the productive sphere, I am referring to the type of people who carry out an activity, which can be a gentleman who delivers on a bicycle, a small businessman, a shop owner, a salaried worker, all these people among whom we include the majority of society are the ones who are losing out in this world turn towards a much more financial system which has nothing to do with the everyday economy and which is substantially damaging it, but which is the one making the changes.
So are the values that companies have on the stock exchange fictitious?
The pandemic is a perfect example of this, you look at the US stock market and it's at maximum levels, while society is experiencing a very complicated economic situation and they have had to receive a lot of aid. How is it possible that this area is still functioning so solidly, and even better than before the pandemic, while the rest of society is suffering from a very complicated health and economic situation? There is a fictional point to all this.
Do you think that financial bubble will burst at some point early on?
Not at some point early on, but in the course of the stock markets, which undergo ups and downs, I look at the effects it generates on societies, I mean what it can have for people like us, the effects it generates on States, on relations between States and on the economies of each of them. There, if tensions are going to be produced, they will not necessarily be good or have a positive resolution, but neither should they come out on the wrong side, although everything points to us coming out on the negative side.
How do you see the electoral race in the United States?
There are two levels: one in the international order, where there is not going to be much difference because this is a general transformation and is not going to depend much on the type of president they have; one can favour some aspects more, and another, others, but the dynamic is going to be the same.
But the internal situation of the United States, which has a highly polarised society, very much at odds with, let us say, two different worlds, is not only an American situation but also a Spanish and Western one.
We have a society that has become polarised with the pandemic, was already polarised and has become more polarised, where there is a lot of discontent and sometimes it translates into a tiredness and distancing from politics and, on the other hand, people who are politically interested become polarised.
And this can be seen because if Sánchez is president of the government right now it is because of the rejection of the right in a certain sector, but the only alternative that the right is proposing is in turn the rejection of the left. There are no positive and common ideas regarding what Spain should be like or its future, nor are there utopian ideas such as ideologies, there is no clear vision of the future, but rather two opposing blocks in which each underlines the bad in the other.
This polarisation is here and in the United States and is a huge problem because when regimes have internal weaknesses and this lack of unity they are of course always much more vulnerable; it is a product of a Western decline that is quite clearly manifested in political-electoral struggles.
Does this alienation of people from the political elite affect the image of the country abroad?
Of course it affects us because we are a losing part of the world of transformations; Spain's fundamental asset is tourism and services and this is what is most affected by the pandemic and it also affects us especially because we are a country with little international power and great difficulty in gaining space for influence and in this context lack of power is a huge problem.
Can tension within a country lead to it being played off against others?
For example, there is a very curious situation with China in which everyone is talking about a new Cold War. China has been singled out as the new enemy by the United States and we are entering into a dynamic in which the world's major power is trying to distance itself from the second one and prevent it from developing. But we should not forget that in this confrontation there is, first, a fairly clear link between the two countries that is difficult to unravel because, for example, China has a large amount of US debt and, second, because many of the companies that produce there generate profits precisely by producing in China and that goes to Wall Street. Decoupling completely from China also means a difficulty for the financial environment; these are things that are a bit tangled up there.
Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that if China has risen so powerfully and has gone from being of little relevance in the international arena in the 1970s when it was in the rankings in the 80's, to being second in the world with enormous strength, it has been precisely because of Western stupidity. We have given them everything they have; work, technology, resources... and they have taken it up; and through the management of their leaders they have known how to channel it towards a terrain that was favourable to them, but they have done so by doing just what the West did decades ago, which was to plan, organise, be cohesive, have a vision of the future and strategy... all that which the West had and which has disappeared or is much less relevant, China has taken it up and used it to its advantage.
Has the Western perspective of thinking that China was not a threat been naive?
It has been very absurd because China has successively given signals that it was taking a very clear direction of internal-external strengthening, but when that happened from the West it was underestimated. We used to say "well, when I have more purchasing power the middle classes will ask for more democracy, they will steal our technology, but it doesn't matter because we will manage to enter the Chinese market which is 1.4 billion people..." and so on.
Bringing the factories there means that the standard of living of Western populations will deteriorate a lot, but it doesn't matter because people thought that it was a regime with internal weaknesses and that at some point it would explode and so on until this moment. It's also the result of Western stupidity because not only have we given it to them, but when they warned us, we ignored it because we thought it was more convenient to continue with this system in spite of this; because now we have the confrontation.
Where does this global set of changes leave the Middle East?
The Middle East is a particularly complex place with entangled interests where China is also attempting to develop on the basis of alliances with Iran, where Russia with Syria also plays a role, where Turkey has begun to play an important role, with the USA obviously linked to its projections in the area and to energy resources. It is a hornet's nest which has been given very bad solutions over the past decades and has no signs of improving.
It is a struggle of the old empires from before the First World War, Turkey is attempting to play its trump cards like China and Russia, but at the same time as they have common interests they also have different ones and China is attempting to reduce Russia's influence in certain areas of Asia. That is, as everyone is playing their trump cards in that space, it is very difficult to anticipate a solution in which all this is resolved because it is an open stage.
For the time being, what we have seen is that there is a huge lack of structure, there are players who are changing pace and sides and in which everyone is playing their interests; this is no longer the unipolar or bipolar world of the Second World War, where the USA had a clear direction and the international consensus accepted it; this is now a world of different players in which each tries to win for itself at the expense of the others and this opens up scenarios that are very difficult to predict.
What social movements can be expected from this situation?
Right now what we have seen is that left-wing populism has disappeared, the left in Europe counts for very little, we have Spain and Portugal left, but they are very standard scenarios and not very breakable. It doesn't occur to anyone that Spain or Portugal want to break with the EU, and what is growing is right-wing populism.
Irrespective of whether Trump wins or loses the elections, the United States has made a turnaround, Le Pen is leading the polls in France, the United Kingdom has left the European Union, and Italy has a complex scenario. On that ballot, it seems that the right wing has a more ruptured vision than the left.
Can we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
What awaits us is what we build, the future is not written and we can see the trends, the places where it leads, but it is not something inevitable. For example, we are going to see a way out of the pandemic that is bad for most people and bad for Spain. It may be otherwise, but it is something we have to build. Although the horizon is leading us to a bad place.
For example, the end of the First World War brings together a very bad diplomatic and economic solution in the confirmation of the international order and all these instabilities generate Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, instability, social differences, few resources, with the USSR growing. However, Roosevelt appeared in the United States, who, after a Great Depression, completely changed the pace and led the country towards a much more democratic and fairer territory.
These are countries that are experiencing similar circumstances and have very different outlets, and that is the point at which we find ourselves: the future can be anything linked to any of these options or to others; it is evident that transformations are going to take place, but these are also yet to be built; societies are not mechanical; it also depends on what we do within that space and it is up to us to promote the options we create that are best.