There are symbolic pictures which mark the end of a world

There are symbolic pictures which mark the end of a world. This is the case of the "Socialist Kiss" between Gorbachev and Honecker shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, the demise of the GDR and the collapse of the Soviet empire promises. There are images which however mark entry into a new world. It is likely that those of the meeting which has just taken place in Beijing between Barack Obama and Hu Jintao enter the history books of the 21st century as one of the keys to our world symbols. "Finally equal!" Watch the pride not concealed from Chinese, the slight embarrassment behind American affluence. What is a triumph for the first is almost humiliating for the second. But how could it be otherwise when one accumulates debts and other debts

But the deep change of the psychological report and power between the US and China and the creation of a virtual G2 is not the only meaning of what is happening before our eyes. These are more than two centuries of history of the world dominated by the West European and the American West that close. A phase in the history of the world that opens with the conquest by Britain of the empire of India, which is accelerating with the decline of China from the beginning of the XIXejusqu' to the arrival of Deng Xiao Ping to power. Behind the new "equal relationship" between America and China, it is a new balance between the Western and the Asian world is born. We have lost the monopoly of the models and we are the heart of the world, we are only one of these poles. Recently in a debate in the Senate on "The States of the France", the boss of a large company French world leader in its field described the world as he saw with his strategic Committee on the horizon of the next twenty years. a world that was built around three sets; China, the India and the West, a set of slightly more than two and a half billion of potential customers for its products.

The rebalancing of the world for Asia is for us Westerners, a triple challenge; ideological, psychological, and course, strategic. In ideological terms, especially since the financial and economic crisis which we live, we no longer capitalism to give lessons. China isn't demonstrate us that we can advance economically without democracy by practising a Leninist type capitalism The lights can come from a non-Western world that feels not carrying a message of universalism and is not a "co-responsibility of the world" according to the formula recently used by a top Chinese leader

Psychologically America has difficulty to enter into a postaméricain world, where it is "a" and not "the" centre and it is probably more for a very long time "primus inter pares". Europe Paul Valéry described in the aftermath of the first world war as an "appendage of Asia" is difficult to perceive as the "weakest of the West". No longer have to be defined by report or face in the United States but in Asia requires a Copernican revolution, a transformation of our mental schemas.

On a strategic plan, can America afford to ignore Europe beautifully as it has for the election of Barack Obama And Europe can accept such offset between the ambitious message which is his own and "low profile" "messengers" that she has to choose as President of the Union and high representative... a title to spring for a personality who is not

We are in a between-worlds especially fragile and unstable where denial of realities of the West met the denial of responsibilities of the emerging powers. How long can it last