-Analysis-
PARIS — The Allied soldiers who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, were not only liberating France and Europe from the Nazi occupiers: they were also laying the foundations of a different world order for the decades to come. As the number of D-Day survivors grows smaller, this vision born from World War II is disintegrating — both under the battering of its revisionist adversaries and simply because the world has changed.
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The leaders present in Normandy today are expected to publish a transatlantic declaration, which they have been discussing for several days, renewing the principles and values upon which the post-war international order was founded.
The problem is that those who signed previously embodied a dominant Western world in 1945, with the Soviet Empire as its sole competitor. Today, the West is contested globally, and its values are disputed even within its own societies.
Living in the past
First, we must remember what the world was like at the end of World War II. The great colonial empires were still powerful: “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” as the saying goes. The United Nations was founded in 1945 in San Francisco with only 50 member states; today, there are nearly 200.
The Security Council was designed around the “victors” of the war, with five permanent members: China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and the USSR. Nearly 80 years later, the economic and political hierarchy has profoundly changed, and those left out, such as emerging countries such as India or Brazil, or economic powers such as Japan, feel this acutely. Yet changing anything has proven impossible for decades, as unanimity is required to amend the UN Charter.
The world order can no longer be that of 1945.
International financial, commercial and political institutions all bear the mark of the Western-created order — a state of affairs that creates palpable resentment today.
It has become even more difficult to get away from this order because powers such as China or Russia use this resentment to their advantage, positioning themselves as fierce advocates for a change in the world order, even by force.
Moving forward
Westerners are in an increasingly uncomfortable position, as they are accused — not without reason — of having ignored, when it suits them, the famous values they will be reaffirming today in Normandy. The Gaza war has reinforced this sense of double standards, deepening a divide that is poorly understood in the Western world.
So how do we move forward? First, by recognizing that the world has changed and that while these values remain relevant, the world order can no longer be that of 1945. Failing to do so gives justification to totalitarian powers that want to turn the tables to their benefit.
It is reinventing a world with greater equity — not reinventing Western domination — that the heirs of the June 6 allies should be thinking about. It is an existential question.
