The Aspen Insight – The Future of the Liberal World Order
A Newspaper from the Future Glances at Possible International Orders
What could be potential long-term consequences of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election for the international order? At the invitation of the Aspen Institute Germany, experts from 17 countries explored this question under the guidance of the Bureau für Zeitgeschehen (BfZ). The scenarios form the material for a newspaper from the future: “The Aspen Insight”. As a supplement to the Berliner Tagesspiegel, the format reached more than 300,000 people.
The scenarios on the world order in 2025 contain both worrying and hopeful developments. Read from the “front”, the newspaper from the future paints a bleak picture of a future world order: confrontation and conflicts, exclusion, and compartmentalisation, winding up of the previous order – without having established an alternative system beforehand. In this way, the challenges of our time turn around and become existential crises – whether climate change, the rise of new or the decline of old powers, flight and migration, the upcoming economic restructuring.
Turning the newspaper around, however, reveals an optimistic vision of the future, guided by cooperation and joint crisis management; an innovative spirit that sees change as an opportunity for a new beginning. This positive world is based on a change of order: a world of mutually complementary and overlapping regional models of order – the “honeycomb order”. Both order models – the decline model and the innovation model – have their origins in the here and now. It is up to us to set the right course today. How? – You can read about this in the first edition of “Aspen Insight” from 25 October 2025.
