Happy birthday and where's your book?

Today is my birthday, I will be 35 years old and since some have asked me lately again and again, where my book now remains - here the state of affairs! Admittedly, with my many projects it is not easy to keep the central idea in view, so I provide comprehensive chronological clarification here:

2019 all started with Fridays For Future, this is where I stumbled upon the future and committed to writing, and I'm still writing. This manifest contrast between us melancholy Millennials and Greta's rebellious Globals ("Generation Z") captivates me to this day and has opened a gateway in an unexpected direction.

In 2020, in fact, my book research led me to a deeper systematics of orders that revolutionized my historical understanding: The history of humanity as a sequence of upheaval and decay, always oscillating between security and freedom, between progress and preservation. Since then, I have been analyzing these patterns with critical fascination, and as if by magic, this has led to the development of a rich theory that will take several more years to elaborate.

In 2021, everything suddenly makes sense: the curved, broken architecture of our time as well as the ruinlust and melancholy of the "lost places" - when I walk through the streets, I am immersed in the dynamics of history. I read about the upheavals of past eras in facades and street courses and learn from the search for forgotten places something for our "collapse of the old order". It is no coincidence that this has been the new title of the book since then; thanks to order theory, the location of our present at the end of a cycle emerges and thus explains the cascading crises as well as decay as the feeling of our time. We Millennials in particular are caught between the orders - the old one no longer works and a new one is not yet in sight - and are coming under increasing pressure while everything around us is coming to a head.

© Ralf Münch (Nordbayerischer Kurier)

In 2022, I received the first constructive feedback on my manuscript from a renowned literature agency, but at the same time with the indication that at present only very rarely new, unknown authors are accepted. So I decided to expand my publishing presence, which led me deeper and deeper into the "lost places" of my hometown Bayreuth. Behind places I have known for ages, I have discovered new meanings - a whole new way of experiencing history has developed from this: settlements and cities as dynamic processes, spreading out in spurts and cycles, along rivers and valleys.

From this cultural-geographical perspective, a whole new kind of museum - digital, connected, immersive - is currently being developed to tell the story of industrialization using Bayreuth as an example. An initiative that has gained an incredible momentum this summer - and thus unexpectedly shifts a considerable part of my time back to my hometown. Perhaps the Bayreuth network is a modest hill to climb, but one from which it is easier to take off!

So, to sum up: The "Sp(ü)ren" of upheaval is at the center of all my projects - the intellectual analysis through theory, the personal experience through book and article, and now also the practical-sensual perception through the future industrial museum. By the end of the year, I would like to revise the manuscript and start the second agency round, and who knows what the new year of life will bring?

The Old Order must fall

For some weeks now, Russia has been spreading a perfidious narrative in the world: it is an ally of the oppressed Global South and is waging an anti-colonial struggle against the West. Yet Russia - like the Soviet Union later - was and is a major colonial power that helped build the Old Order of the 20th century.

The Russian continental conquests from 1547 onwards, from the Baltic to Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, are in no way inferior to European overseas colonialism. At the height of the Old Order in the late 1950s the balance of terror from East and West - or rather the Global North - almost completely dominated the South. 

And it was the incipient disintegration of the colonial order beginning in the 1960s, decolonization under the sign of the Cold War, that even more escalated the East-West proxy wars. Without question, the West, the U.S. in particular, committed horrible crimes and betrayed its own values many times over - but the Soviet Union was no better in this regard; despite socialist liberation rhetoric, it too pursued its merciless politics of power and influence.

In the 21st century, the colonialism of the North must now end once and for all; the Old Order - fossil, national, colonial - must fall. A new era has dawned: digital globalization and climate crisis are forcing a historic upheaval, calling for a united world capable of action. The old hierarchy of nation states however - America and Russia First - is leading us back, with violence and terror to a past that has long ago ceased to exist.

It is high time for a new alliance of the once oppressed, a future climate and democracy club will be decisively led by the decolonized. By the young democracies of the Global South, but also by the equally young European Union, the vast majority of whose states were also once oppressed. Law instead of power, transnational integration instead of isolationist division - here the "small" states are network winners, the large ones network losers, which by the way perfectly explains the reactionary and anti-globalist forces in the former empires (France, UK, USA, Russia).

The West must end and with it its Old Order. We should not be afraid of it anymore, the old Industrial Order was never social, just or safe - it was only a colonial compromise, a segregative middle class society, a white welfare state at the expense of the Global South.

Fighting for a new order - sustainable, globalist, inclusive - will take years and decades, but it will succeed. Only in this way will freedom, security and justice for all people ultimately become possible. Ukraine is already fighting for this future today, and we must join them - for all of the oppressed and against the historic oppressor Russia.

The West at its End

How delayed the public's perception is! At the beginning of the Ukraine war seven weeks ago, shock and fear of Russian superiority were still omnipresent even when Ukrainian successes were already becoming apparent. Today, the mood seems to have taken a turn for the opposite: Russia is in retreat, Putin has already lost the war - although his counterattack is already in the offing.

What is clear is that the seven weeks will certainly turn into seven months, if not seven years. The Russian president is "all in", he has really put everything on the line, because the sheer existence of a sovereign and democratic Ukraine stands forever in the way of Putin's dream of a Eurasian world power - he will not and can no longer be satisfied with Crimea and Donbass.

And now that he has closed ranks, stabilized the ruble, and shut the first window of war shock, the grueling war of fatigue is just beginning. Unfortunately, Russian resources for this - both material (military) and immaterial (resilience) - are very high. Ukraine, on the other hand, can more than keep up immaterially, but its material resources look far worse.

Transformation war

It is essential that the West must compensate for this asymmetry. The analogy to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 is not entirely wrong, but Poland cannot be "the new Pakistan" in this alone; NATO and the entire EU - especially Germany - must restore the resource balance with weapons, weapons and weapons. If this fails to happen, first Ukraine, then the Baltics, and finally the whole European idea of freedom, equality and democracy will fall and fail.

And even these resources may not be enough in the long run. The world order is re-sorting itself in these years of global-digital upheaval; the West has fallen out of time. It is only a category of the Cold War, when the North still ruled the world and considered the Global South only a peripheral battleground - this historical injustice is now ending and with it the old industrial blocs.

New global currents are gathering regardless of compass direction and geography, the West must adapt, open up, even merge into such a new alliance of democracies - because it will no longer be able to win this transformation war alone. Russia has sought old (India, Iran) and new allies (China, Egypt) in the world who will sooner or later support Putin's autocracy. The West, however, is only slowly grasping this turning point; is it now finally ready to renounce its privileged, racist, indeed historical arrogance?

Globalization of democracy

There are only 18 months left until the next U.S. presidential election and who wants to rule out that the next president will not even leave NATO? For Putin's overall war strategy, unfortunately, this date is a conclusive vanishing point - and a risk for which Europe and the rest of the West must prepare. The U.S. is a torn partner, and so we must think the unthinkable today: without the U.S., how could the EU still defend itself against Putin and his allies?

Only if it finally deepens its internal integration and becomes a real federal state; only if it integrates its open flanks to the outside world - from the Balkans to Turkey (after Erdogan) to the Caucasus - and simply only if it also diversifies politically and globally gathers all democratic forces against the autocratic alliance. Trade agreements and defense treaties with India and Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, Argentina and Mexico - welcome to a globalized world, welcome to the 21st century.

A long war casts its shadow ahead, in the first truly global epoch of mankind, the existing West must end in order to save the universal idea of freedom, equality and democracy. However, despite all the horrors, this end contains a hopeful beginning: the globalization of democracy, perhaps even the democratization of the globe - and all thanks to the invincible courage of the Ukrainians.

The Birth of a new Epoch

How long we have ached for this moment of clarity! After three decades of asymmetry and confusion, Putin is finally giving us a clear villain again, against whose aggression hundreds of thousands took to the streets today in Berlin alone. Only a week ago, I was sure that he would not dare a military invasion of Ukraine, because the price would simply be far too high. He did it anyway and caused a horror from which the world is now slowly reawakening from its state of shock - stronger and braver than ever.

What at first glance looked like the mighty offensive of a great power is shrinking day by day into the last gasp of a regime still living in the last century. All the offensives that Putin has pushed since 1999 have in fact been mere defensive wars of a reactionary dictator. So also this time. Ukraine had already irreversibly decided in favor of an open, diverse and democratic society, but the Russian president - fearing for his own power - never accepted this and, completely misjudging the situation, has now launched an unwinnable invasion.

This desperate act is a sign of eminent weakness; Putin now stands before us naked, stripped and exposed as an inhuman warmonger. In our complex world, this new unambiguity is liberating and, in the postmodern confusion, provides a long-missing sense of unity, a gathering of all democratic forces, and that is just the beginning. The currently much-cited "epoch break" is not only the end of the old epoch, with its reactionaries from Trump to Erdogan to Putin - at this fault line the birth of an entire new epoch is taking place.

A new conflict of systems is looming on the horizon, one that leaves behind the identitarian fragmentation of recent decades but has little in common with the historic Cold War. The global compass needles are realigning themselves between the transnational forces of democracy and the isolationist forces of autocracy. This has already begun with the caesuras of 2016, in the wake of which the political camps in Germany also reordered themselves - between the transnational Greens on the one hand and the nationalist AfD on the other.

Putin's war mania is now driving the development of this conflict line further and doing a disservice to all his brothers in spirit, especially Chinese dictator Xi Jinping - since the price for this war of aggression on Ukraine could be regime change in Russia in the medium term and thus the new beginning of Russian democracy. An ally that the autocratic alliance cannot actually do without.

But there is still a long way to go, tonight rockets are hitting Kiev and other Ukrainian cities again, tonight the world fears again for Volodymyr Zelensky and all the brave Ukrainians who put their lives in the way of the autocracy. For democracy, for freedom - and for a global spring.

Life's work

2021 is coming to an end and it was definitely better than its lousy predecessor. Despite the never-ending pandemic, I made significant progress this year, both personally and in terms of my book project.

What once began as a reckoning with my conservative Millennial generation and then in 2019 became a hopeful narrative of the future, inspired by Greta Thunberg's Globals, has now evolved into a comprehensive theory of social orders. Exploring their rise and fall is a gigantic challenge and holds unimaginable potential - it feels like I've found my life's work. Because of these changes, a relaunch of this blog is overdue in the new year, stay tuned!

Another milestone of 2021 was my first article publications ever. ‘Lost Places' as traces of societal upheaval was a topic that came up almost by itself, as it reflects the core of my order theory. I started with my hometown Bayreuth, but articles about my Zuhause Berlin will follow in 2022.

Last but not least, I have finally finished the exposé and the extracts of "Generation Global - Der Zerfall der Alten Ordnung", so the new year will be all about finding a publisher. Feel free to get in touch if you have a contact to a literature agency or an author - it’s really hard to get a chance as a first-time author on this competitive market.

So far, so good. Thank you 2021 for all the new certainties and to all of us an even better year 2022!

Lost Places

The more I research the new global generation and its struggle for the future, the clearer it becomes to me every day how much we Millennials, in contrast, are the generation of decay. A childhood that, at least in the global West, was reasonably well-ordered, even stable and secure, has been contrasted, at the latest since September 11, 2001, by an experience of crisis that has lasted twenty years and is still coming to a head today.

This explains a lot: our omnipresent need for security, the return of smugness, the revival of religion, marriage and family - we strive for everything that promises us stability. The complete loss of control, the rendezvous with high-globalization produces a longing for peace and order that has not existed for a long time. Nostalgia and retromanticism are the most obvious reaction of our insecure soul. Whether it's an old apartment or a swing dance class, hipster beards or a vintage look - consciously or unconsciously, we seek our salvation in the identities of the past.

But alongside this compensatory nostalgia, a deep-seated melancholy also emerges time and again. Abandoned places, dilapidated houses and factories attract us magically - "Ruinenlust" is the English term for this phenomenon, the crumbling sites are like a mirror of our inner turmoil. As if our subconscious relives the loss of our own security with every ruin, with every lost place. As if the grim, the gone wild, the overgrown helps us process our Millennial trauma.

This is nothing entirely new. In almost every century, there have always been breakdowns of order and societal collapse. At the end of the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Classical period, and now at the end of the Modern era - and each time, exoticizing and historicizing nostalgias spring from these crises, to the point of fantastically grotesque melancholy. This dark romanticism has a tradition, and it is precisely for this reason that we should be aware of the dangers of such nihilism. We are not the first generation of decay, nor would we be the first to get lost in it.

For the moment the decayed places give us an indescribable feeling, I myself am always fascinated how much lost places can grab me. But we should not fall prey to the illusion that the past can be restored. The memory of decay is valuable, as long as it does not paralyze us or seduce us into believing that any lost places, lost times - and thus lost security - can be retrieved. If we become prisoners of our nostalgia, then we remain in yesterday and won't get our act together.

Everything comes to a head, today at the end point of the industrial order mankind has devastated the climate system, chaos breaks out everywhere. The hope, the rescue from this dramatic crisis cannot be drawn from the past, because it is responsible for the today. Security can only be found in the future, in radical change. And that takes us back to the beginning: we melancholic Millennials must join the global generation's struggle for the future before it's too late. Otherwise, in a few years and decades, there will only be abandoned sites and lost places.

I had Covid

Yes, I had a confirmed Covid infection to cap off this lousy year. It is unclear where I had contracted it and no, I had really followed the rules. Nevertheless one can get infected and that is why this disease and the pandemic as a whole is so treacherous. I found some of the comments from friends ("What kind of things you do!") a bit strange - as if the illness was my own fault. This encourages stigmatization and can lead to people hiding their infection out of fear.

Of course, there are the notorious deniers who are more likely to get sick - but the vast majority of people catch it unknowingly and through no fault of their own! My course was fortunately relatively mild and yet the short fever was fierce, the limited loss of smell and taste was stressful and I am today after 4 weeks still not in top form again. But now this damn year 2020 is finally history and I wish us all eagerly as never a better new year!

2021 will remain stormy and yet I personally hope to at least finish my book. In December I had planned to contact publishers and agents with an exposé, but due to illness this is now my January task. As always, here is a small reading sample that focuses on the core of my work as never before - the Collapse of the Old Order, the collapse as a sense of time of our Millennial generation:

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Brexit and Trump - under the pressure of digital globalization, the old order is collapsing at a rapid pace, and the Covid pandemic is dramatically accelerating this decay. Failing states and civil wars, corruption and natural disasters, every day our world is turning more and more upside down.

We are stuck in a postmodern crisis of singulation - the individual is everything, society nothing! For decades, the new-liberal creed has been demolishing any collective stronghold, leaving billions of people worldwide in existential distress. Despite the explosive global question of security and community, market fundamentalism continues unaffected to shatter the last institutions of the Old Order.

From their wreckage the ghosts of the past crawl everywhere, luring with false promises and selling their nostalgia dearly to the most suffering. Their right-wing folk tales conjure up the good old days of nations and borders - a time that's up long ago. An epoch whose demise we all feel every day.

Now even Angela Merkel, the pilot is leaving the ship; without our Millennial chancellor, my unsettled generation is only threatened with more chaos. Born as the last ones into a still partly sound order, we have been in free fall since our youth. We long for stability and clarity, for shelter in the Bio-Biedermeier, and look melancholically at the abandoned places and ruins of the past. The eternal chancellor was our last certainty, the bulwark against the world of yesterday. Everyone suspects: Here in Germany, too, the way is now open for a shift to the right.

All of a sudden a new generation, a new hope is entering the political world stage. The Globals are the first to grow up in chaos and no longer know any order. Marked by Trumpism and the pandemic, their future existentially threatened, they organize themselves into structures of solidarity and assume collective responsibility - for themselves and the entire globe.

From Chile to Hong Kong, from Sudan to Sweden, the youngest movement the world has ever seen is rising up. To survive, they are the first that must now find global answers - climate justice and anti-racism, global democracy and political freedom. As 'Fridays For Future' and 'Black Lives Matter', as 'March For Our Lives' and various democracy movements, they are fighting as passionately as hardly any of us Millennials dared. United behind the science, the Globals are the embers of the next enlightenment, the fire of transformation. They have nothing to lose, only the future to gain.

A frontier decade has begun. The old has not yet entirely perished and the new is literally still in its infancy - this decade will be crucial to the survival of human civilization. Under the pandemic shockwaves, past and future will brutally collide: fundamental conflicts, continued collapsing and accelerated chaos. And in the midst of it all, we Millennials who actually just want our peace of mind. 

The 20s become our greatest imposition. First the unprecedented Covid restrictions and finally the all-decisive climate crisis - also in future we should get used to putting our egos, our private happiness aside for the common good. If postmodern singulation does not end, then every single one of us will end. We have to leave our comfort zone permanently, take sides, and yes even commit ourselves - exactly what we have avoided all our lives. Because peace and security, stability and order can only be found in the collective, in the society, in the future.

Crisis means decision, the clock is ticking! For us Millennials, the time has come to decide - between national and global, between nostalgia and hope, between the world of yesterday and the world of tomorrow. The globals are our second chance.

Birthday Update

You haven't heard from me for a long time, but unlike last winter, this is good news this time! This pandemic year has unexpectedly given me, like many short-time workers, far more time than expected. And after the long stagnation of the dark months, I was able to read and walk more in the last half year than ever before in my short author's life. 

Through the input of many smart books I was able to expand and deepen the concept of Generation Global, so that I can finally work on the continuous text of the first 3 chapters. Of course, the completion by August 30, 2020, which I hoped for 12 months ago, didn't happen, but in spring 2021 it seems to be achievable - subject to renewed winter blockades!

Originally, I had planned to finish it at the end of August, mainly because I'll be 33 years old today. And that's not only one of my favorite ages - writing a book is also on the list of things I would have liked to finish when I was 33. But well, the big party has been postponed until spring due to corona, force majeure. So I have a second and much more realistic chance to check this off at least this year of my life.

For you now, as always, a small sample from chapter 1:

After the uproars and upheavals of the 60s and 70s, the West Germans had slowly become accustomed to the wall and the division in the 80s. An optimistic Star Wars escapism, a staid chancellor from Oggersheim, and the new private television were to make them forget the unsettling of the last two decades. The protests against the arms racwe ebbed away and people arranged comfortably with the stable block situation. A new normality of saturation and boredom, a new generation shaped by consumption and brand mania laid the ground for the carefree 90s. In these two boomer decades before the turn of the millennium my childhood took place.

Even though Gorbachev visibly spread hope, not even the boldest people on either side of the wall believed in a rapid political transformation. And that is exactly why the surprise, the collective euphoria after November 9, 1989 was so great! Everything changed with the European Revolution. Nothing else was the fall of the Iron Curtain but a revolution of the European population - starting in Poland and Hungary, through the GDR and Czechoslovakia, to Romania and the Baltic States. The implosion of an ailing world empire, for the moment almost non-violent, the complete collapse of the old order happened totally unexpectedly and without precedent. Even still too young for any memories, the descriptions of that time, the remembered feelings of those days always seem to lead to one thing: the unexpected happy end of the devastating 20th century.

Although the European Revolution is obviously still unfinished today, it has formed the economic and monetary union of our time from a rugged, unfree continent. This epochal turn was not without good reason followed by euphoria and rush, but the unexpected redemption with the promise of salvation of flourishing landscapes occasionally even took on quasi-religious traits. How else should one call the publications in which the U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama conjured up the Hegelian world spirit and the end of history anew?

But of course, after the manifold, worldwide revolutions, transitions and democratizations of the 70s to the early 90s, there was also some persuasive power on his side: Portugal, Greece, Spain; Peru, Argentina, Turkey, Uruguay, Brazil; the Philippines, South Korea and large parts of Europe; finally Paraguay, Chile, South Africa and even the former Soviet Union! Who could have contradicted Fukuyama with irrefutable certainty? Was the universal victory of democracy and capitalism, of liberalism and market economy not really the probable end of the human system history? The happy end of history?

Inspired by this impressive domino dynamic, he has reformulated an old tale. In a way, he has turned Marx respectively Hegel from his feet back to his head: Instead of socialist world revolution, Fukuyama now proclaims the inevitable new-liberal world revolution to capitalism and democracy - in this order. No doubt he had hit a nerve with this, especially on the other side of the big pond, because no interpretation of world historical events fitted better to the new imperial claim of the United States.

The windows to digital globalization, to high-globalization, had been opened and the American Dream had been made into its grand narrative, even elevated to the whole Western dream. The telling was very simple: freedom and prosperity for all, no walls, no borders, and all this thanks to and through the new unbridled capitalism, freed from all regimentation. As if by an invisible magic hand, the domino of democracy would continue as markets were unleashed and state intervention suppressed. Truly a Western dream - too good to be true.

So while we Millennials were still living through our largely carefree childhood, this dream was baptized and dreamed a million times. We were prophesied a seemingly endless party.

Foreword

Yes, I'm a fair weather writer - at home, in winter, in cold, wet, bad weather, I just can't be creative, I can't write, I'm like blocked. That's why nothing has happened here for months. But since March, things have been moving at great speed, thanks to the sun I can walk a lot, I can literally walk my book.

I'm jumping wildly through the 8 planned chapters, adding here, condensing there, reading new books every week for research and would like to present you here and now the first version of the foreward, so that you will believe me :

8th grade, first day of school. I turned 14 years old a few days ago and started right after school with Viktor to creatively embellish our class photo - with the help of a monstrous scanner and paint. Time passed, we changed to his home, neither at my place nor at his a TV was on. On the way back around 4 pm I took Smarties and a can of Coke with me at Schlecker's and arrived home shortly before the second tower collapsed. It was September 11th 2001 and I will never forget that day. I will never forget that I was at Viktor's, bought Smarties or stared at our tube TV all evening.

Of course, at that age I didn't know what terrorism was, what the political consequences of this act would be, but I felt the magnitude of the event, I felt the shock - which was to become the primal shock of my generation, the millennials. Another four disinterested years passed until I finally discovered my passion for politics and history as a first-time voter, at the latest from then on I slowly began to despair of my peers. Where was their rebellion? Why did nobody take to the streets?

Though with school there was a demonstration against the Iraq war in 2003, my first one, but then came the antisocial Hartz laws, and nobody of my age was interested. So many grievances here and in the whole world, but somehow nothing happened. There followed financial crisis, debt crisis, Euro crisis, Fukushima, the so called "refugee crisis", Brexit and Trump. And above all, the looming climate crisis. To be fair: Yes, there were small protest movements here and there, such as Occupy, in which some young people also took part, but even these isolated attempts at resistance to the crisiscascade ultimately petered out. Everything only got worse.

I as well have always been able to find hope now and then in these two decades - as an observer or even as a protagonist. In 2008 I followed the US primaries and Obama's election night intensively until dawn, a historic president! In 2011 I cheered the Arab Spring and hoped for more and more free and democratic countries, a historic rebellion! Then in 2012 I was elected chairman of the Saxon Pirate Party, a new progressive party in already four German state parliaments, historic! But the 10s quickly destroyed all my hopes. Instead of Obama, Arab Spring and Pirate Party it was now: Trump, Syrian Civil War and AfD.

No matter what was tackled, it just kept getting worse. For the vast majority of my co-millennials, this must have felt like a confirmation: we can't change anything anyway, we have enough to do with making progress in life ourselves! And so, over the two decades, their need for hold, for security, increased to such a conservative level that they rightly speak of a new bourgeoisism. Suddenly religion and homeland, tradition and marriage are back in, local patriotism and regionalism return, children and bars get hip old German names like Emil and Lisbeth. Lumberjack shirts, horn-rimmed glasses and beards on every corner, the newest German wave on Spotify and every Sunday evening the Tatort! My generation Praktikum is really looking for any kind of hold they can get in this crisescascade.

The New Biedermeier era was their logical reaction to the general and lasting uncertainty. Directly proportional to the intensity of the crisis, their longing for rest, for security in a confusing, over-complex world grew. The end of grand narratives, the end of history and the beginning of nothing. Post-industrial, post-materialist, post-heroic, post-ideological, post-structuralist, post-imperial, post-truth, post-democratic - much before and little after. Old certainties replaced by a disorientated prefix, a fundamental and omnipresent postmodern crisis.

After our party-political failure, the few millennials that had at least tried to do so here in Germany ultimately withdrew into the private sphere. Some also went to other parties, but large parts of the environment that shaped me and really politicized me disintegrated. In Dresden, my university town, the situation finally became unbearable: the AfD was now sitting in the state parliament, for which even I had been a candidate, with more than a dozen members ; the Pegida mob dominated the city and the German media. When I was only asked about this at the class reunion in 2014, it was clear: I have to get out of here. That was too much. With similarly disillusioned friends* I left Dresden's nostalgic doll's house idyll and fled to the freedom of Berlin, this dancing metropolis at the pulse of time. From now on our global enclave in the storm of emerging nationalism.

With every year the right-ward shift became more intense. What began at the latest with the Tea Party, Orban and Sarrazin's racist bestseller in 2010, led from Xi's rise and Putin's return to the presidency, to the founding of the AfD, the end of the Arab Spring by El-Sisi's military coup and the suppression of the Gezi protests by Erdogan. In almost every country, forces of the right-wing spectrum now won the elections, provided there were elections. In Poland and in India, in Argentina and in the Philippines - from right-wing conservatives to right-wing radicals.

Most of these events were not directly related, but indirectly the electoral successes of these often astonishingly like-minded populists did influence each other. The global media public and the direct digital exchange brought, what irony, especially the solitary nationalist forces into worldwide interaction with one another. From once isolated authoritarian splinter groups, movements and outsiders, a Nationalist International was formed, with a frighteningly similar agenda - Fake news! Close borders! We are the people! - from the Americas to Europe, from Asia to Africa. All of this culminated in the shattering year 2016, for the whole decade we were whispering "winter is coming" - and then winter really did come and blew every imagination away.

After handing in my bachelor's thesis, I was on a round trip when I stared at my mobile phone in disbelief on an early June morning: Completely unexpectedly, a narrow majority in Great Britain voted for Brexit, the withdrawal from the European Union. How could that happen? Only 4 months later I was quite sure again - yes, I would have put my second hand in the fire that such a person could never be elected President of the USA. Maybe it would be close, but the election of this authoritarian egomaniac, this racist post-democrat was simply unimaginable for me. Together with friends I sat the whole night in front of the beamer and we became more and more speechless. At Trump's victory speech in the early morning hours of November 9, 2016 I was just paralyzed with shock.

The political winter had come, a cold spell like nobody saw coming, the biggest political shock of my life. "A breach of solidarity with all those who are not counted among the so-called majority society", as a friend wrote. Yes, this trauma has burned itself into my memory as deeply as September 11, 2001, but this time I was in full possession of my political consciousness. So the tragedy of 2001 returned as a farce in 2016 - that was when our insecurity began, this was now only mockery and derision of any commitment, any attempt to fight against the downward spiral.

Here I slowly began to understand my co-millennials. After more than 10 years of disappointed hope and futile effort, the frustration was so strong that I buried my political activities and decided to write this book. As a self-therapy of another overstrained millennial - a critique, a reckoning, an analysis of my passive, conformist generation. I mean, we were already so desperate to cheer on Angela Merkel, how could it have come to this?

But then something amazing, unexpected, hopeful happened: they bear the names Emma, Greta, Joshua - new heroes suddenly enter the limelight, the political stage of the world. They fight for life and diversity, for future and climate justice, for freedom and democracy. And this book takes an unexpected turn.

What we millennials were not capable of anymore, disinterested and disillusioned, encased in our domestic cocoon, that's what 14-, 16-, 18-year-old students just start up. Liberated from the ballast of uncertainty, with the courage of desperation and despite Trump, a new generation is forming as the resistance that we could not and would not be. Today, the latent crisescascade has turned into existential threats. The first global generation is now fighting for its freedom, its future, its life - it has nothing more to lose. Everything will no longer get worse, it can only get better!

After the terrible school shooting in February 2018 in Parkland/Florida, the surviving students did not remain in mourning - no, they organized themselves, they used the digital tools they were born with, founded an anti-gun NGO and initiated a nationwide mass demonstration with several million participants called the March For Our Lives. It was here that 18-year-old Emma Gonzalez gave such a moving speech that she became a symbol for the fight against gun violence and hatred, for the fight for life, even for survival. A "Generation Columbine", grown up with the perverse normality of recurring school massacres, turns their pain to the outside world and transforms their injuries into commitment to others.

Only 6 months later, in August 2018, the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg went on strike for the first time in front of the Swedish parliament for the climate and therefore stayed away from school lessons - inspired by the same Parkland students who initially used the school strike as a means of protest as well. From then on she went on strike every Friday for her future, for the future of her generation and the whole planet - Fridays For Future was born. Within a few months, this commitment to the common good also turned into a mass movement, even a global one, and to this day Greta Thunberg is the symbolic figure of a new rebellious generation that is taking to the streets again and assuming collective responsibility.

Finally, in June 2019 Joshua Wong was released from prison. At the age of 14 he had already organised and led demonstrations and occupations against the creeping assimilation of Hong Kong by China's dictatorship. Again and again he was arrested and temporarily sentenced for his participation in the umbrella protests. Just in time for the new mass movement, he was released and travelled around the world to wake up the global public to the precarious situation of his city state. Even more than the other two, he stands for the part of the global generation that has yet to fight for democracy or whose precarious freedom is threatened as a whole - not only in Hong Kong, but also in Sudan, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, Chile and many other countries of the Global South. Also, or precisely because the individual threat in this constellation is much more direct and acute, it is all the more impressive that so many young people are taking such personal risks - for their ideals and the future of their societies.

These 3 young heroes stand as the first global names and faces of their generation, behind which masses have already gathered. But also the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner and children and women's rights activist Malala Yousafzai, who survived an assassination attempt in Pakistan at the age of 15, or Zulaikha Patel, who as a 13-year-old in South Africa rebelled against racism and discrimination of black students have become global symbols - and many more will follow in the coming years.

Symbols of the largest generation the world has ever seen, as the Globals include the most fertile age groups in history. While here in Europe there is usually only talk of ageing, never before have so many young people lived on earth. Round about 2.5 billion, or a good third of the world's population, belong to the first global generation - and they will increasingly connect, organize, unite across the globe. For the Globals are being threatened, robbed of their future by a common enemy.

Grown up in the digital high-globalization, cross-linked across continents, they can and must be the first global generation to cope with unprecedented emergencies - and in doing so they are confronted with a globalized economy without political counterweight, with corrupt heads of state who deny science and facts, with nostalgic nations who seek their salvation within borders and selfishness.

The worldwide right-ward shift and the nationalist internationalism are only superficially this common enemy. Yes, they are the concrete beneficiaries, they profit from the multiple crises, they exacerbate, they aggravate and accelerate all emergencies - and that is why they must be stopped, fought, on the streets, in the squares, in the hearts, in the heads! Stemming them, resisting them wherever possible - but all this will not be enough.

The New Right, the Alt Right, the Nationalist International and all the many not-yet-right governments that are rushing to stop taking refugees and closing off borders - they are all just symptoms. The cause, the real enemy, is the postmodern crisis itself, a dead end into philosophical nothingness, the greatest geophysical catastrophe. A material crisis of action, economy, health, climate - and an immaterial crisis of thinking, identity, truth, future. This epochal crisis has torn a vacuum, brought comprehensive disorientation, a world in chaos. 

So for the long term, permanently, sustainably, the world can only be saved if this nothingness is opposed by a future, the emptiness filled with meaning, vision instead of vacuum. The postmodern aberrations must be corrected, only this way the catastrophe can be averted - united, not fragmented, with a global draft of society, which brings poor and rich, north and south, economy and politics, mankind and nature back into balance. 

Only the new generation has the courage, the collective responsibility and the understanding to face and overcome the end of history and all narratives, the postmodern crisis. But the Globals are not going on a march through the institutions; no, they have to create the new institutions in the first place. Formulating a narrative, composing a symphony of life and diversity, of future and climate justice, of freedom and democracy. This is what the world has been waiting for!

First, however, we are all facing a new, stormy boundary decade, the 20s. A decade of transition, of overlapping, of interference - the old has not yet gone down and the new has not yet been born. The past clings to power and the future is literally still in its infancy. In the coming years, these poles will collide repeatedly and thus manifold conflicts will break out.

Just at the beginning of the new decade we are now confronted with another historical crisis, the global corona pandemic. It may be the decisive postmodern gamechanger and catalyst for the future, but it is certainly the fire accelerator that fires up the conflicts and interferences of the 1920s on an unimaginable scale; that sets divided societies ablaze and further fuels the postmodern crisis. A world in chaos, full of descent and misery, suffering and death, full of false reports and conspiracy theories, borders closed, globalisation stopped, welcome to the world of the right-ward shift.

There could not have been a more important, a better timing - the rebellious Globals are replacing the adapted Millennials at exactly the right time! In contrast to us, they recognized the global connections early on and are not paralyzed and overwhelmed by their complexity. Whether 2016 or 2020 - they are not unsettled, not paralyzed by these shocks, on the contrary. We didn't want to risk our privileges, but the Globals know: Anyone who wants to have a future on this planet at all must act, provoke, revolt - there is nothing left to lose. And so they rebel, organize and fight - for a future after the crisis, for an order after the nations, for an age after postmodernism.

They are our second chance to finally take responsibility for more than just our own résumés. I have never been happier than in these lockdown days that this new generation exists. Online and offline, global and local, every day we can take a closer look at the mosaic of future. In this book I want to pursue this hope.

Let us not be deceived by authoritarian setbacks and national simulations - the seeds have been sown, winter’s been counted, spring has begun.

April 2020, Fl0range

Commitment for future!

Originally posted on 04 August 2019

It's time, I'm writing a book.

After all these years of brooding, one topic has finally inspired me so much that I'm here in front of you in all public committing myself to write: about ‘Fridays For Future’ and other global youth movements, about what connects them, why they are the first ‘Global Generation’ and why my Millennial Generation, unlike them, has remained so passive.

On this blog I will document my progress, post excerpts and from time to time I will certainly connect a current issue to my project. Some of you know that constant writing is really hard for me - that's why I've now taken this leap to commitment. It is high time to act. I believe that words are my strength and that I can make my contribution to a better future through this.

I’m looking forward to your comments, questions and every now and then a little nudge that will help me to overcome the procrastination of writing!