The warning from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is clear: economic stagnation combined with worldwide inflation is to be expected.

Worse still, the international order that had been relied on for 75 years threatened to collapse.

This order was based on rules that states and their economic agents adhered to because it was to their advantage.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The global division of labor is based on cross-border trade, it thrives on a commitment to the (social) market economy and knows that tariffs and other trade barriers reduce prosperity.

You can call this the fundamental law of globalization, which since the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 and the end of the Second World War has lifted many people out of poverty and brought them peace and freedom.

The common belief was that world wars threaten freedom and prosperity and are outlawed.

The "turning point" that we are currently experiencing is turning this order upside down: we live on the threshold from a rule-based to a power-centered world order.

If that were the case, it would be a civilizational relapse that would lead straight from the postmodern to the archaic.

Friends of progress may not imagine that such a relapse could become possible.

Not only because this contradicts all rationality, but also because most people today have always experienced a development for the better in their lives.

A frightening example from antiquity

Now we know from school lessons that downfalls happen: in 1914 a liberal European peace order collapsed;

a warlike 20th century followed.

The British and Roman empires collapsed, although generations of Britons and Romans probably never could have imagined it.

Over the Easter days I was in Mycenae, located in the east of the Greek Peloponnese in a barren, hilly landscape.

After Troy, Mycenae was the second major coup that the German adventurer Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) landed.

In 1876 he, an ardent admirer of Homer, discovered the tomb of Agamemnon there and, with successful excavations, unearthed huge treasures of gold and precious metals.

Scholars dispute that Schliemann actually discovered the tomb of the Homeric hero.

But that's not my issue.

Ever since the tour of Mycenae, I have been fascinated by the question of why this civilization suddenly and immediately disappeared worldwide.

Archaeologists call the Mycenaean culture the Mediterranean world of the Bronze Age, which encompassed the entire Levant coast: not just the Peloponnese, but also the Aegean, Crete, Cyprus, today's Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt.

There were powerful palaces everywhere, connected to each other by trade routes.

A world that can be described as a global society.

Even then, the Peloponnese was covered with millions of olive trees.

The oil obtained from it was exported in large cans to Egypt.