Abstract
A strategic and spiritual parallel can be drawn between the maxim attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, " Go and set the world on fire ! " and the motto of Philip II of Spain, Orbis non sufficit (" The world is not enough "). Both expressions mark aspects of what the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt described in 1860 under the apparently neutral title The Discovery of the World and Man, and of what later historical thinkers referred to as the " prise du monde " emanating from Europe.
While the gradual march of exploration, cartography, mission work and imperial occupation of many parts of the earth by agents of Europe's maritime nations marked the " history of the world " of the 16th and 17th centuries, it was from the late Middle Ages onwards, and in an amplified manner from the 17th century onwards, that the exploration and exploitation of the land by the European mining industry and its transatlantic subsidiaries began.
It is in this context that we can explain how we should understand the formula expressed by French President Emanuel Macron in the autumn of 2022, " the end of abundance ". The introduction to the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, known as Boccaccio - the book that founded the European literature of the short story and the novel - recounts the mass deaths of the inhabitants of Florence after the arrival of the plague in 1348-1349. It inaugurates an era of demographic sensitivity on European soil. After the " Black Death " wiped out almost a third of the population, the survival of people living in given communities became a political issue in its own right. Between the 15thand 19th centuries, the discipline of demography became an essential part of the art of governing in Europe. Populationism became a pre-political factor in the politics of the emerging nation-states, insofar as it promoted Europe's enormous demographic superiority as an agent of its claims.
In his book Sons and World Power, Gunnar Heinsohn attempts to show how the effects of the population policies pursued in Europe's dominant nations led to an explosive export of population, a phenomenon that could only be expressed in the colonialism of the sending countries.
Europe's entry into the era of post-colonial remorse implies the reversal of demographic dynamics on the planet. What Indo-American scholar Chakrabarty has called The Provincialization of Europe (2015) essentially refers to the appeasement of the world's former hotbed of unrest - accompanied by polemogenic birth surpluses in former peripheral regions of the world.
