Posts Tagged ‘world order’
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”*…
… for many, this phrase from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci sums up the current crisis of world politics and world power. Adam Tooze unpacks the oddity– and potential danger– of these lines becoming one of the soundbites of the early 21st-century…
… I want to put this conceptualization of our current crisis in question. Gramsci’s notion of interregnum may have served him to illuminate his immediate context. But, it transmits to our era a philosophy of history that actually obscures how we got from his moment of writing to our present day. It thus stands in the way of thinking hard about the challenges and opportunities of our current moment.
The currency of Gramsci’s lines today today should give us pause. After all, if we take Antonio Gramsci seriously as a historical thinker, as we absolutely must, we should also acknowledge the huge gulf that separates him from the present. He was a Communist who paid with his life for his commitment to the cause of world revolution. His lines on interregnum, now the stock in trade of after dinner speeches and think tank meetings, were composed in November 1930 in a fascist jail. Gramsci was thirty-nine. He would die at 46, his fragile health irrevocably broken by harsh imprisonment.
With morbid symptoms Gramsci may have been referring to fascism. Alternatively, he may have been criticizing the turn to the ultraleft of the Italian Communist party under pressure from Moscow. His medical language evokes Lenin’s famous denunciation of left communism as an “infantile disorder”.
Wondering about the popularity of Gramsci’s lines today, I’ve come to think that it may have something to do with the way in which they combine drama – crisis, birth, death, interregnum – with an undertone of reassurance. If this is true, it is a deep historic irony. Gramsci derived his fortitude and belief from his Marxist understanding of world history. Today his words serve very different purposes.
First of all, Gramsci’s quote implies a definite direction of historical travel. We know what is old. We know what is new. We may currently be in crisis, but it is only a matter of time before “the new” will eventually be delivered.
A transition from old to new might imply significant change, which could open us up to thinking about radically different futures. That might be good news. But it might also be disturbing. Once again reassurance is provided by Gramsci’s definition of the crisis as interregnum. The present is an inter-regnum, because it a period between two orders. It may be messy now, but a new era is on the way.
This kind of historical thinking is not confined to Gramsci. It is nicely illustrated, for example, in this conventional chronology of modern economic history.
Once cast in terms of the sequence of regnum-interregnum-regnum our current disorder becomes merely a passing moment. Given this sequence, who could doubt that a new white bar lies ahead of us. In this graphic, the grey phase of interregnum that began in 2008 already has a right-hand demarcation, even if no date is, as yet, attached to the endpoint.
A further point of certainty amidst Gramsci’s interregnum, is that we can confidently distinguish what is morbid from what is healthy. This again implies a superior vantage point, something that one might think would be in jeopardy in a true moment of crisis.
The obvious question is: what is the basis for Gramsci’s judgement? This troubling question is especially pressing if Gramsci was, in fact, applying the label morbid not to fascism but to those he disagreed with in the ranks of the international communist movement. Was this a medico-technical diagnosis? Or, was his judgement, like Lenin’s, a political act, an act of polemic, stigmatizing disagreement? In which case the naturalized conception of crisis is, in fact, disguising a political clash.
Finally, and most fundamentally, Gramsci’s diagnosis locates the current crisis within history imagined as a natural cycle of life, of birth and death…
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… Models of this kind gesture to the confusion and terror of interregnum, all the while reducing that phase of disorder to something temporary, recurring and predictable. The model gestures to historical development – the upward step of phase after phase – but actually reduces radical change to repetition. After one hegemony what we look forward to, is simply another.
This line of thinking is not just simplistic. In the current moment it is dangerously so. To the drama of America’s evidently waning hegemony it adds the intensity of the follow-on question: who comes next? This question – far from necessary – is framed by the assumption of historical repetition – hegemon-interregnum-hegemony. In the current moment there can only be one possible answer: CCP-led China. That in turns eggs the flailing American elite on to a more intense rearguard action. But why assume that in the 21st century there will be a successor to America’s 20th century power?
Any serious examination of the foundations of modern power actually suggests that this kind of cyclical or sequential view of history is misplaced.
Take GDP as a proxy for power resources and think about the kind of intellectual gymnastics which are necessary to turn history as depicted by GDP below into [a cyclical] sequence…
As for the long-run continuity, global GDP prior to the 19th century is so low that it can not be sensibly depicted on the same graph extending into the 20th century. This is also true for economic heft and destructive power. Of course, there were highly destructive wars, in the 17th century for instance, but their violence unfolded according to a very different logic from that in the 20th century.
And as for the pattern of change, what we see is not a neat sequence of substitutions in which one hegemon displaces another, but rather something more akin to “piling on”. This is history not as repetition, but in Mark Blyth’s wonderful phrase as a “one-way trip into the unknown”…
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… I see the construction of global hegemony in the 20th century not as a repetition of something familiar, but as itself a venture into the unknown. To put it simply, I see global hegemony as a 20th-century problem…
Of course, the distinctive 20th-century visions of global power had precursors. They had preconditions. Something had first to constitute our modern conception of globality. This happened through the global system of power, communication, transport and commerce created by the British Empire in the 19th century. This constituted for the first time what Michael Geyer and Charles Bright called the “global condition”. All too often this encourages thinking in terms of an Anglo-American sequence. But again this underestimates the power of accumulation and overlay. Compared to US power in its mid 20th-century pomp, the British empire was a thin mesh of networks. The British empire maintained its grip with extremely limited resources in large part as a result of the weakness of its rivals…
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… But by 1916 it was clear that only the United States had the power to manage the new configuration of global forces. The weird architecture of global mobilization in the first phase of WWI could not be sustained without at least the approval of the government of the USA. This is the story of my book, Deluge.
The economy, as measured by novel statistics of national income, would be America’s trump card. But that in itself is not an obvious fact. It was an effect of particular circumstances. 1916 is a pivotal moment because with the inconclusive battles of materiel at Verdun and the Somme, following the “hunger winter” of 1915/1916, it became clear that purely military operations were at an impasse and this meant that war production and home front stability would take on a new and central role in determining the course of the war. War became a new kind of totalizing war. It was also an election year in the USA, arguably the first formal democratic event (as opposed to a revolution) to matter on a global scale. Certainly, it was the first US election that was watched with baited breath by political classes around the world.
It was out of the historically specific, financial and economic urgencies of World War I, that a new American-centered network of power emerged. This was something new, something architected and built to meet the urgency of the moment. There was no womb of hegemonic logic from which the US power was born to replace a dying British global order. It was not the inevitable sequence of monetary logic that ground through its inevitable development to make the dollar replace the pound sterling. It was war and war finance. The dollar in the 20th century would play a role quite different from sterling under the 19th century gold standard. Furthermore, America’s global power did not substitute for British power. It overlayed Britain’s own efforts, first in World War I, then in the interwar period and finally during World War II, to master the new hegemonic problem. In crucial areas, notably the oil fields of the Middle East, it was not until the late 1960s that the US finally took over…
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… America’s age of hegemony was not an answer to an interregnum. It truly was new. It was thus not the latest iteration of some familiar form of power. It did not replace the British empire. The British empire was reinventing itself too in response to the new challenges of the early 20th century. It was overtaken by the US and nested itself under the wings of that power. It was not something born. It was built.
And if that is true for the early 20th century the question of how 21st century global power will be organized should be considered no less open. Certainly, our problem right now is not that the old is simply dying. Things are far from that simple. In certain crucial respects “the old” is hanging around and indeed seeking to mobilize new strength. At the same time the principal challenger may be “new” in the sense of unfamiliar. But the CCP-regime draws inspiration from a first successful century of ascent, evokes ancient Chinese history. And what its underlying drivers are, is a matter of contentious debate.
What is old and what is new, what morbid and what vigorous, what the underlying generative logic of history actually is, these are all questions that are at this moment up for debate. We are, therefore, experiencing a crisis of confidence and a period of uncertainty, that is far deeper than talk of an interregnum à la Gramsci implies. To be clear this does not necessarily mean more lethal or more tragic than the epoch that cut short Gramsci’s life. Our normality, however catastrophic, may be manageable. The environmental clock is ticking, but the majority of us are no longer poor. We live longer. Today, Gramsci’s life could probably have been saved. There are gigantic technological resources that democratic and progressive crisis-management could draw on. What we must let go of, is the false mantle of confidence and historical clarity that evoking the concepts of an earlier epoch entails. Abandoning talk of an interregnum may rob us of certainty. But rather than a council of despair this is simply a demand of realism. What that promises, is the chance to trade historic phantoms for new projects and the exploration of the actual possibilities of the present…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Built not Born – against “interregnum”-talk,” from @adam_tooze.
And what might we build? For a reminder that our options are perhaps broader than we might think: “The Gap at the End of the World,” from Cynthia Cruz in @LAReviewofBooks.
* Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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As we keep our eyes up, we might recall that it was on this date last year that a new kind of cultural phenomenon burst onto the scene, surrounding the simultaneous theatrical release of two films, Warner Bros. Pictures’ Barbie and Universal Pictures’ Oppenheimer— Barbenheimer, as it came to be called.
The simultaneous release was an instance of counterprogramming. As the release date approached, discussion from rivalry to the prospect of watching the films as a double feature. Cast members of both responded by encouraging audiences to watch the films on the same day. Celebrity participants included actor Tom Cruise, who purchased tickets to watch both while his latest film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, was still playing in theaters.
In the event, both Barbie and Oppenheimer received critical acclaim and exceeded box-office expectations. Their joint opening weekend was the fourth-largest at the American box office, and both rank among the highest-grossing films of 2023. The phenomenon also extended to the year’s awards season, in which both films emerged as leading contenders, earning a combined 21 nominations at the 96th Academy Awards. Both films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, which Oppenheimer won.
“Nothing is lost. . . Everything is transformed.”*…
In yesterday’s post, Álvaro García Linera wrote of the liminal time in which we live. Today, Parag Khanna starts from a similar place, but equally provocatively concentrates on what he sees coming next…
… the grander the vision, the further it likely lies from reality. Theories that inaccurately observe the present will inevitably fall short in predicting the future. This goes both for proponents of American hegemony as well as those aping the “return of great power rivalry” meme. Even as mainstream Western scholars belatedly accept the emergence of a multipolar world, it would be a mistake to allow their parsimonious frameworks such as neorealism to guide our thinking.
These top-down approaches neither capture the shifting global and regional dynamics among more than a dozen primary and secondary powers, nor the deeper systemic change by which a wide range of actors contest authority and shape global society in an irrevocably decentralized direction.
Indeed, the most accurate description of today’s world is high entropy, in which energy is dissipating rapidly and even chaotically through the global system. In physics, entropy is embodied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pithily summed up in a Woody Allen film as: “Sooner or later, everything turns to shit”). Entropy denotes disorder and a lack of coherence.
Robert Kaplan’s famous thesis of “The Coming Anarchy” three decades ago strongly aligns with the entropy mega-trend. Indeed, Kaplan memorably captured the decay underway, particularly in the “global south,” and the failed attempts by the post-Cold War West to sustain order in those regions.
Covid, supply chain shocks, inflation, corruption and climate volatility have all conspired to uphold his thesis alarmingly well: Swathes of Latin America, Africa and the Near East exhibit neither functional domestic authority nor regional coherence. The current faddish term “poly-crisis” applies in spades to this large post-colonial domain.
But entropy is not anarchy. It is a systemic property that manifests itself as a growing number of states and other actors seize the tools of power, whether military, financial or technological, and exercise agency within the system. There is still no consensus as to what to name the post-Cold War era, but its defining characteristic is clear: radical entropy at every level and in every domain of global life. How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasingly planetary reality?…
[Khanna characterizes the decline of U.S. exceptionalism (centrality/hegemony), the rapid diffusion of systemic power, …
… the structure of power is no longer a pyramid but a web with multiple spiders forging networks of varying strength. Today we live in a truly multipolar, multicivilizational and multiregional system in which no power can dominate over others — while all can freely associate with others according to their own interests.
This structural entropy is embodied in what I call the geopolitical marketplace, a distributed landscape far more complex than the conventional wisdom of a bipolar U.S.-China “new Cold War.” Many countries in the world are post-colonial nations innately suspicious of overtures that would render them subservient pawns of either the U.S. or China.
This is why the notion of alliances is a hollow one for much of the world. Alliances are more like multi-alignments in which swing states, regional anchors and almost every other country actively play all sides in pursuit of their own best deal. This is not about deference to hierarchy but active positionalism: each country, large or small, places itself at the center of its own calculations…
This is the reality of regional systems, overlapping spheres of influence, and ascending powers willing to say yes or no as it suits them. Exploring dynamics within this geopolitical marketplace are far more revealing than today’s anodyne tropes such as the “return of great power rivalry” that posit a neat division of the world into red and blue. And yet the rapidly changing structure of global order is only half the story of the entropy engulfing our world…
[Kahnna describes the “Global Middles Ages,” in which the world has moved from a presumed monopoly to an active marketplace in which anyone with the capacity can offer their supply to meet another’s demand, and the world devolves into a networked archipelago of functional hubs…..
… Every geography in the world thus features a complex milieu of overlapping and contested authority among some combination of the five Cs: countries, cities, commonwealths, companies, and communities. The answer to the question “who’s in charge?” is far from uniform. In contrast to an era where the government was the sole sovereign, authority in today’s polities is an ever more unique combination that depends on the locale.
A similar devolution is underway in the financial domain. The Eurozone is moving toward a capital markets union to deepen its own liquidity, while countries within regional trade blocs such as Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are harmonizing interest rate policies to minimize exchange rate fluctuations. The BRICS nations also want tighter exchange rate bands and trade denominated in their own currencies.
The U.S. dollar still comprises the largest share of global reserves, but nations have amassed dollar savings not to underwrite America’s low borrowing costs but to invest in their own economic security — including offloading U.S. Treasuries to hoard gold. Trillions of dollars of accumulated savings have been channeled into Western corporate war chests and Asian and Arab sovereign wealth funds whose capital flows and recirculates in all directions.
Most global trade is also still denominated in dollars, but new agreements are undercutting Washington’s blocking power. China is the largest trading partner of most countries in the world, and incrementally converting its trade with them into RMB currency, meaning they will increase their RMB share of reserves in order to finance imports. Russia is not only accumulating RMB reserves but has started lending RMB to its own banks. Expect a petro-yuan soon — but also a petro-euro and petro-rupee as well. But remember, countries don’t want to unshackle themselves from the dollar only to become subservient to another self-interested superpower.
Indeed, the more the U.S. weaponizes the dollar through sanctions, the more countries flock to alternatives such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that enable instantaneous and secure transactions while circumventing the U.S. financial system…
The diffusion of power in the technological domain accelerates all this simply by way of states enabling other states — whether by launching their satellites, installing their 5G networks, selling them surveillance technology, training their scientists or engaging in other modes of technology transfer. Now thanks to Starlink, there is WiFi almost everywhere.
And anywhere there is WiFi there can be DeFi — decentralized finance — a peer-to-peer marketplace of exchanges and crypto-currencies. We have entered a supply-demand world in which any two nodes in the global network can transact with a third by whichever means they choose…
The dollar, the internet and the modern-era primacy of the English language are symbols of American strength but also default utilities now slipping out of their master’s control. Americans have the loudest English language megaphones on global social media platforms such as X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese and Russian state-affiliated groups from bombarding Americans with mind-warping propaganda on TikTok. Regardless of whoever professes to own the global town square, the truth is that nobody controls it.
America is clearly not immune from social and political entropy. In theory, political devolution is a hedge against federal dysfunction. More than a dozen American states have a GDP size that would earn them membership in the global G20; each could be self-governed politically and serve as a laboratory of policy innovation while making America much more than the sum of its parts economically and demographically. But in practice, the federal system all but encourages the Balkanization visible today: An antiquated electoral process has convinced each side that the other is illegitimate, the Second Amendment has become so contorted as to justify red state militias, and a 2024 election may hinge on a heartbeat (or courtroom conviction).
Indeed, of the thousand cuts lacerating America today, most are self-inflicted. Gun violence is escalating, hordes of undocumented migrants are flooding in and being weaponized by red states against blue while drug abuse and fentanyl overdoses surge to record levels. Meanwhile, corporate America has been gorging on inflation while small businesses are forced to swallow rising interest rates and over-regulation. Make no mistake that a restoration of national unity in the model of Johnson’s Great Society is not the most likely scenario for America’s future…
[Khanna contrasts the U.S. condition with that in China, India, and others…]
… Planetary thinking embraces the liminal phenomena and complex butterfly effects that tie us together, but it must also contend with the diffuse patterns of terrestrial agency that will shape our response to the planetary condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our efforts to adapt to climate change, which will further create the future’s winners and losers.
Some geographies will suffer such intense drought that they may be fully vacated, while others such as Canada and Kazakhstan will gain millions of grateful climate migrants and be able to harness their human capital to become new power centers. The world will no longer be bureaucratically divided into investment grade categories set by ratings agencies that label them as a “developed market” (DM) or “emerging market” (EM), but between climate resilient and non-climate resilient zones.
If institutionalized orders such as the late 20th-century multilateral system tended to be established only after major wars, would an entropic drift into regional spheres of influence be preferable to a World War III among dueling hegemons? In this scenario, conflicts may flare from Ukraine to Taiwan, but they would be ring-fenced within their respective regions rather than becoming tripwires for global conflict. Regions that strive for greater self-sufficiency, such as North America and Europe today, could reduce the carbon intensity of their economies and trade, but potentially at the cost of undermining their interdependence with and leverage over other regions. Such is the double-edged nature of an entropic world.
With no major power able to impose itself on the global system or able to reign in those transnational actors domiciled abroad or in the cloud, the future looks less like a collective of sovereign nations than a scattered tableau of regional fortresses, city-states and an archipelago of islands of stability connected through networks of mobile capital, technology and talent. To argue that there is some bedrock Western-led order underpinning the global system rather than crumbling inertia is tantamount to infinite regress.
Global entropy doesn’t solely imply fragmentation. To the contrary, the system exhibits characteristics of self-organization, even aggregation, into new patterns and formations. Highways, railways, electricity grids and airlines link cities in ways that form neo-Hanseatic networks and alliances, and the internet transcends borders to link self-governing social communities. The universal reach and penetration of connectivity enables authorities of all kinds to forge bonds effectively more real than the many states that exist more on maps than in their peoples’ reality. The world comes together — even as it falls apart…
Reconciling an increasingly fractured order with planetary reality: “The Coming Entropy of Our World Order,” from @paragkhanna in @NoemaMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
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As we reconsider reorganization, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011, per Harold Camping, that the world would end. A Christian radio broadcaster and evangelist, Camping first predicted that the Judgment Day would occur on or about September 6, 1994. When it failed to occur, he revised the date to September 29 and then to October 2. In 2005, Camping predicted the Second Coming of Christ on May 21, 2011, whereupon the saved would be taken up to heaven in the rapture, and that “there would follow five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21, 2011, with the final destruction of the world.”
For several years after Camping’s death in 2013, Family Radio, the netwok of Christian stations that he co-founded and fronted, continued to air some of his past broadcasts and distribute his literature. But in October 2018, it discontinued using any of Camping’s commentary and content; Tom Evans, president and general manager of Family Radio, explained that “Family Radio has come out of self-imposed isolation and we’ve repented from many of our former positions, date-setting the end of the world and all that.”
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