If there was still any doubt about our coordinates after a decade of shocks to the normal order of things, the disorientating opening of this year has confirmed that we are not in Kansas anymore. A new geopolitics is taking form, particularly evident in the ongoing US-Israeli bombardment of Iran, in the US abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, and in the positioning of European troops in Greenland following Donald Trump’s claims on the island.
Since the financial crisis of 2007–8, incipient challenges to the primacy of US power, as well as political turbulence within Western capitalist democracies, have provoked the production of a considerable body of angsty writing about the end of things. Much of this writing, as it pertains to the imperial situation now commonly referred to as “international order,” expresses the desire for a “return” to stability.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that so many commentators on international affairs, of different political allegiance, have repeated the famous statement on “interregnum” authored by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci: a period in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”
Today such anticipation of “the new” in the international system tends to betray a pursuit of partial restoration of “the old,” premised on the idea that order can be a product of the will, of the kind of moral entrepreneurship exercised in previous decades by the cadres of global civil service and the executives of aid agencies and financial institutions. But there is no guarantee that a new order will be established.
The concept of international order, as it is generally understood today, describing a global arrangement of governing norms and institutions, is a bequest of the twentieth century, and more specifically of the period of US hegemony. In fact, while usage of this concept increased steadily in the second half of the twentieth century, it spiked dramatically over the last decade and a…
Auteur: Juliano Fiori
