Here in Europe, of course, and in the euro area in particular, we faced significant challenges that required unprecedented action by central banks and governments. So the current resilience and broad-based strengthening of the global economy represents a welcome change for policymakers, here and in many other parts of the world.
But it also risks making some policy debates narrow and context-free, and fostering identities based exclusively on the narrow local community or on ethnicity, feeding fear or hatred towards those outside a restricted group. The explosion of social media and of new ways of sharing information and ideas, unfiltered by political and cultural elites, is also likely to have played a role.