When the world was institutionally organised around the United Nations after the end of the Second World War, there was this idea in the western side that democratic models, and their different trends, which some called liberals, would eventually work as a kind of benchmark and sooner or later most States would tend to move that way.

This attitude enshrined a clear paternalism and the belief that reason was on the side of the West. And this was clearly there in the tolerance towards certain regimes of authoritarian nature (such as the Portuguese dictatorship), spared by the “realpolitik”, as if taking it to the sheepfold of democratic order was just a matter of time, after a preparation “stage”. The way Africa and even some parts of Latin America were looked at was incorporated also some kind of arrogance, which morally pleased those who saw themselves as close bearers of the redemptive political truth.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, with the ideological and practical defeat of communism, the strength of the market economy and its affirmation as the natural order of things, reinforced this illusion of the “end of history”, or, to use the Marxist slang, the end of the antagonistic contradictions that blocked the course of humanity.

Everything thus seemed to lead the world towards democracy, with more or less differentiated models, within a framework of a global economy that imposed itself as obvious and everyone would end up winning given the huge impulse to growth that the new order would necessarily generate.

For good and bad, History has more imagination than men do and all of a sudden some surprises appeared, just around the corner.

Globalization did not go exactly as planned. It generated naturally huge advantages and growth, bringing new geographies and sectors into the global economy, reducing poverty and offering opportunities.

But, contrary to what many believed at the time, this expansion of the market did not lead, in many regions, to a benevolent evolution towards democratic formulas for the management of political power.

On the contrary: in some cases, and China is perhaps the most striking example given its success and its clear importance in the global equation, what happens is that a model of State economy placed, so to say, the use of advantages of the market at the service of the power of that very same State and the apparatus that controlled it, keeping the totalitarian machine more or less unscathed and making it, perhaps, even more effective.

By this, we mean something that seems clear today: the prevalence of the market is far from being able to guarantee, in itself, an automatic increase of freedom for the general population.

But the big poison in that very same market was yet to emerge. What was not on the cards on “this side”, that is, in incumbent democracies, was the fact that economic globalization could generate “disaffected people” in its midst, something Stiglitz had been talking about for two decades.

This serious disaffection, with political consequences, involving large sectors, given the results obtained, turned out to be the other side of the very same coin that had generated success. Because some people had been left behind in the process, caught between the opening of the markets that drowned out old comparative advantages and the technological failures that came to ruin their traditional means of production. The liberal remedy was not there for them and they did not enjoy from transformative advantages of “creative destruction”, as some claimed.

And given that with the exchange and relocation of goods and services there was also an increase in the flow of people and workforce, along with identity-related tensions – cultural, religious and ethnic – this resulted in a magma subject also to social media without control of untruths, with myths and fears dominating the public sphere, a true crisis ‘cocktail’, with protectionist drives and attitudes far from generous, as seen in migrations and refugees.

The broth of culture that resulted in Brexit was somehow the result of that, Trump is the embodiment of the expression of this despair, the “gillet jaunes” are proof of the revolt before a world where “proletarians”, the ancient engines of History, are moving away from the picture the leftist literature drew of them.

The great risk that the new world (dis)order entails is the fact that, with the rise of an authoritarian China, along with the multiplication of models of totalitarian drift all over the world, a new matrix of political legitimacy is spreading, based on economic efficiency, on the simplistic response to fears and myths, placing the values of freedom in a degree of some relativisation. And the main problem is that this model, morally acquitted by economic success or by its demagogic acceptance, may someday assert come up in the eyes of many peoples as an alternative equivalent to its democratic counterpart.