Welcome to this brand new series of my column. In #TourSeries2016, there will be a series of articles talking about the international affairs, about the changes and turbulences happening or forming in 2016 all over the world, and the issues that drive the changes. Our view will travel across Europe, Asia & Pacific, Middle East, Latin America, and back home in the United States.
Today, the base of consensus politics in the West is no longer that consolidate because their solutions fail to handle the challenges we face. At the same time, the rest of the world is reshuffling in response to external impacts, internal evolutions, their history and historical narratives. The globalist platform for the whole world is reconsidered by many in different areas for different reasons. The views from traditional authorities, like globalist elites and liberal scholars and technocrats, are never further away from the reality and what the people really think. Identity politics is replacing left-right consensus. Flat globalism and multiculturalism ebb, with the rise of nativism accompanied by more fundamental changes in constitutional systems. The earth is moving, but the traditional framework cannot tell exactly how it is.
Changes are taking place in many ways, including the way things change. The world is not flat; it never was, and never will be. The driving forces shaping this world are always diversified and multi-leveled, though they may be largely ignored most of the time. So without realizing the complexity of this world, any simple, plain, view of it, no matter how well-meaning it claims to be, will fail to explain the changes and challenges ahead.
And in this column, I am trying to draw my picture of this world that comes to the dawn of a new era.
