Is there a new world order? Perhaps it is not yet institutionally constituted, but at least the old order, the “international liberal order”, is over. We will most likely be facing an interregnum, on the threshold of something more definitive.
The liberal international order lasted three decades, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in 2022. This is so we have round dates, certified by visible and notable events.
In the 20th century, the inaugural event of modernity was the great war of 1914-1918, not least because it was the cause of a time of radical ideological conflicts, starting with the Russian revolution of 1917.
It was the Russian revolution that generated this time of confrontation: the fear of communism, following the Bolshevik revolution and the awareness of the cosmocratic ambitions of that revolution, led to a kind of state of exception to resist it. It began with fascism in Italy, an alliance of para-totalitarian populism with the conservative forces of the monarchy, the industrial bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church; and, in the European twenties, in the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe, authoritarian and dictatorial nationalisms emerged, in the form of military interventions. Finally, and also with the support of the communist danger, Hitler triumphed through elections
the first economic and social power on the European continent. With known consequences.
The Second War had traditional geopolitical roots – Germany’s territorial claims, mistreated at Versailles – but also, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, radical ideological reasons, which gave it the character of a “religious war”. And against the Axis powers – Hitler Germany, fascist Italy, imperial Japan – there was a coalition of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies with communist Russia.
The victors then divided Europe, divided by an “Iron Curtain”, to the East, nations invaded and “liberated” by the Soviet armies; here, the multi-party democracies protected by Washington. And in the Iberian Peninsula, the authoritarianism of Franco and Salazar, tolerated by their anti-communism, which predominated over their non-democratism.
The Cold War ended with a convergence of Reaganite rearmament and Gorbachev’s suicidal liberalization in the USSR. And it was the end of bipolarism, which was followed by the attempt, inspired by North American neoconservatives, to export America’s political and economic model throughout the world, under the auspices of the international liberal order. A time of unilateralism.
From this came a globalist ideology, served by military adventures, such as the second Iraq war and the lost wars in Afghanistan. Above all, the relocation of industry from Euro-America
and the closure of tens of thousands of industrial units in the United States and Europe had economic and social consequences for the working classes and middle classes that explain the rise of national-conservative and populist parties in the West.
The new geopolitical order cannot yet be described, but everything indicates that it will be an order of great powers, realistically managing their national interests and seeking a balance between these national interests and areas of influence. Apparently without concerns about ideological export.
Which is perhaps the best recipe for peace.
Political scientist and writer
The author writes according to the old spelling