How my thinking on the world crisis has changed

Since 2015 I have written on the Burning Archive to make sense of a changing world with history. I have been haunted by Xi Jinping’s thought that we are witnessing changes not seen for one hundred years. But my thinking on this polycrisis continues to change.

For example, in early 2021, I wrote ten theses on the world crisis.

Here I reproduce these theses with no attempt to conceal my errors and exaggerations. They reflect a world still wrestling with a pandemic and not yet at war.

1. The resurgence of infectious disease has threatened our belief in invulnerability and the authority of medicine.

2. The American Empire is collapsing through cultural, political and social decay, and will suffer a century of humiliation instigated by China.

3. The multi-polar world is emerging but is breaking cultural and technological interoperability: we need to relearn how to talk to strangers.

4. A millennium-long trend of cultural convergence is reversing.

5. Our institutions in politics, media, education, government, commerce, arts, health and social services are corrupted and have lost the mandate of heaven.

6. The evolution of family systems and associated values in the Anglo-American world has generated a crisis of cultural fragmentation.

7. Education has prostituted itself to social stratification, and betrayed its authentic purpose of the getting of wisdom.

8. A mercenary caste system of political government in the West is collapsing.

9. The loss of meaning, or the poverty of collective belief among human groups, has produced a catastrophe of selfishness that confuses political protest with stealing a pair of high status sneakers.

10. The habits and institutions of civil society have been replaced by the illusions and mistakes of social media.

—The Burning Archive, 2021

My ten theses were inspired by the famous poem of W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919). In today’s world, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. In the widening gyre of overlapping world crises, our minds have lost contact with our culture. We are hunters alone and adrift in terrain we have not mapped, and where we can not find our way back home. Every day we witness this recurring truth.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

These ten theses were sharply drawn. They read to me now as a touch melodramatic. They got things wrong. They worried too much about politics and thought too little about war. But they were a starting point for thinking about the question: what is going on right now? Why do we feel that something is wrong with the world?

Will there be revelation for us in this moment of crisis? Have events stirred some pitiless stone monster in the sands to take rough form, and then stagger from our neglected Spiritus Mundi in the desert to terrorise the feral cities of our decaying culture?

I do not know. I lack all conviction that some ‘new normal’ or some vision splendid of progressive control or conservative restored greatness awaits us on the other side of tomorrow. I see many shysters putting forward shallow prophecies. Very few reconnect the falcon and the falconer.

Over the last three years, I have tried in my writing on world history and current events to interpret this meaningful crisis with several conceptual frameworks.

In 2021-2022 I used four themes: imperial rivalry, political disorder, social fragmentation, and cultural decay. It was a portrait of doom.

In 2023 and 2024 I reframed these themes as seven dimensions of change: politics, economy, society, culture, great state rivalry, environment, and war. I scored pluses and minuses against each dimension. It reflected more nuance and less catastrophic thinking. For example, I initially described political disorder as political decay. But over time I observed a transition in our mental models of modern political systems. We live within mixed political systems, with a fluctuating balance of pre-democratic, democratic, and post-democratic processes. Or again, I first saw culture as decaying or even collapsing; but then saw signs of cultural renewal, or green shoots among the ruins.

But the big change in my thinking, was to add vectors of the world crisis. I had thought social fragmentation could contain economics, but the changes in the world of money, trade and resources are too great, and need a separate category. I had hoped imperial rivalry could contain war and be limited to diplomacy, but the dogs of war and military change have been loosed upon the world again. And I neglected the environment, in part because I just did not know enough about the science. So today my summary of the world crisis includes these three extra vectors of economics, environment and war.

After the events of 2024, how has my thinking changed again?

My central underpinning thought is that the tides of globalisation have changed. The flow and appeal of ideas, resources and people around the world have shifted. They have jumped across borders. Globalisation is no longer Westernisation, nor Americanisation.

The changing of the tide cannot be precisely dated, but is noticeable since 2008. New resources came into play. New trade flows surged. New ideas and cultures escaped the conformity of Hollywood pulp fiction. New agreements and geopolitical institutions formed or strengthened: Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS. New cores and new peripheries formed. Bonds and networks between non-Western states and cultures strengthened, and were enabled as the new information technologies broke apart the world of mass communications on which the American century was built. Everyone could find their own world on the internet. Noone had to watch American anchors on the nightly news anymore. New processes of globalization got under way. And for the first time since 1830 the Atlantic world was no longer in command of this new phase of globalization. A new phase of non-Western globalization began.

The events of the world crisis since 2022, or arguably since 2014, have revealed the tremors breaking the world that American globalization built. In this world American Primacy is no longer sustainable, as I will discuss in later posts. But the new tides of globalization are bringing changes - good and bad - over many domains of life. It is not all about geostrategy. It is about culture, and the opportunities created by the braided cultures of the BRICS. It is about the life of the mind in a world no longer presided over by Anglo-American culture and its forms of liberal democracy. I will write increasingly about those other dimensions of life in later posts.

But if we are to develop a new model of this changing world we need to step outside the mental prisons of “geopolitics” and inherited concepts of the post-1945 world.

‘Geopolitics’ does not comprehend the changing world

If Adam Tooze is right that part of the polycrisis is the failure of a mental model of the world, then we cannot understand today’s ‘geopolitical’ crisis without reflecting on our mental model of the international system or of ‘geopolitics’ itself.

Will this be another American century? Will America continue to govern the world the American way through its preferred liberal rules-based international order? Will the world bifurcate into the NATO world and the DragonBear? Or will we enter a more complex multipolar world, or even enjoy a new era of peace and development?These questions are often addressed through models of geopolitics, international relations theory, and histories of empire.

Geopolitics has a tainted tradition, with influences of Mahan, Mackinder and Haufhosen. Mahan expressed the strategy to command the seas, and for the American Empire to take over British rule of the blue oceans. Mackinder defined the world competition as the struggle of the peripheral empires of Anglo-America to control the World Island of Eurasia. Haufhosen conceived the idea of the Indo-Pacific, and sought to use it to flip the table on the Anglo-Americans in an alliance between Germany, Japan and the other colonised nations of the two great oceans of the world. From the 1950s, Zbigniew Brzezinski reinterpreted these traditions as the Grand Chessboard on which the Democratic Grandmasters of Geopolitics would outplay the Authoritarian Dictators of Eurasia. His undertones of contempt for the Asiatic Mongol Horde were never far from the surface, and have broken out in the more fervid passions of American geostrategists and their clients in Ukraine. Some Russian Eurasianist theories challenge these ideas by using a black mirror of the same concepts. Geopolitics has a tragic flaw to conceive grandiose strategies to dominate the world, rather than to live with the world as it is.

International relations theory is the product primarily of the vast Anglo-American intelligence, university, think-tank complex. It follows economics models to conceive world systems through game theory. Rivalry between great states is conceived as the competition of great powers acting as rational actors in their realist or idealist national interest. This theory often refers to revisionist or revolutionary powers. Will China, the rising great state, accept the international order as the current hegemon bequeathed it to them, or do they need to be brought to heel? There are also world systems theorists like Wallerstein who articulate the system as core, semi-peripheral and peripheral powers. International relations theory has a tragic flaw to rationalise the world as the Anglo-American establishment wants it to be, rather than to see the world as it is.

The history of empires and civilizations has a deep, long tradition. Some long neglected writers, like Spengler and Toynbee, are being resurrected today. Felipe Fernández-Armesto provided a brilliant up-to-date rethinking of the civilization tradition in Civilizations. The Oxford History of Empires provides the most comprehensive and current overview of both the experience of empire, and the individual stories of empire all over the world, and outside the traditional Western fixation on Rome. As the historian, John Darwin, has written, empire is the default mode of political order for most of the last three millennia of human history. His After Tamerlane is the single best book to understand the story of geopolitics and empires over the last five hundred years, all the way to the misunderstood ‘unipolar moment’. We would be fools to imagine empire disappeared in 1919. It lives on today, if dressed in more modest clothes and drawing on new strengths.

Often geopolitics and international relations theories draw out slithers of this history to produce their universal rules. History has the advantage of facts, over the theory of international relations and mapped dramas of geopolitics. So of these three models I do prefer the history of empires and civilizations to make sense of the unique moment of polycrisis that we are in today. But this tradition too has its taints. Toynbee sought to secure Anglo-American dominion. There have been too many stories of the rise and fall of American Empire, premised on Thucidydes or the glory that was Rome. Priya Satia, Time’s Monster shows that historians were not bystanders, but participants in empire’s crimes. Even so Felipe Fernández-Armesto and the Oxford History of Empire has done a lot to rehabilitate an understanding of civilization as process and empire as international political order.

While talk of Western civilization seems newly fashionable today, talk of empire always encounters a little difficulty agreeing on terms. No contemporary great power readily calls itself an empire. American generals insist they are not an empire, but a republic. And then some American citizens trip the wire by saying they are not a democracy, but a republic. There are valid arguments to say there are differences between the American Empire and our most recently known empires, such as Britain, even though that once great power still retains extra-territorial possessions in Europe (Gibraltar) and the world’s oceans (Falklands Islands). There is also reason to doubt claims of pro-Western historians, such as Serhii Ploikhy, that the Soviet Union was the last empire, and that Russia still dreams of its lost empire. Empire is a system of rules. It is rarely, in our time, a preferred term of self-description.

Empire is not a perfect term. But nor is nation or sovereign state. World War One can be seen as the outbreak of the self-determined nation over the old empire. Since then, some writers would claim, we live in a world of nations, equal and sovereign nations, which freed themselves from the chains of empire in the West after 1919, and for the Rest since 1991. But this nation state was imagined in a liberal progressive order, dominated by Western civilization and an American super-state. The West can no longer claim to be the only territorial civilizational influence in the world today. China, India, Russia and other states are reasserting their long-standing influence beyond the borders of their nation states.

There is clearly a need for some kind of ‘interpolity’ (a political institution housing relations between sovereign states, such as the United Nations). Some kind of dominion is exercised by a few nation-states over many others. The World Crisis today is a set of conflicts and negotiations that will bring into being new forms of dominion of the more powerful over the less powerful states of the world. But is empire the best word to denote this kind of ‘interpolity’ and this kind of dominion or influence?

In my next post, I will discuss an alternative to the vexed word, ‘empires, to help us live in tune with this changing world of nations, which is no longer presided over by American Primacy.