No international system or geopolitical order is cast in stone. The liberal international order is on its way out. No tears need be shed over its likely demise. It isn’t worth defending. The global economic order is also in flux.

Gramscian Twilight And Monsters

The bewildering state of the world fits in Antonio Gramsci’s description. The Italian Communist Party leader wrote in 1929 that “the old order is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. Are we now in another Gramscian interregnum? French economist Gustave Messiah, too, warned us in 2003 when he wrote, “In this twilight monsters arise.”

The fall of the Roman Empire made way for the Dark Age. We again see the barbarians at the gate. The New Dark Age has its own barbarians—big tech plutocrats and the new robber barons.

Fiction Of Liberal World Order

Historian Niall Ferguson maintains that the liberal world order was, in any case, largely a fiction disguising the raw power of the American empire. Trump has “only shed the garments that dressed it up and taken the gloves off”.

The institutions that govern the present world order are anchored in yesterday’s distribution of power. These are unable to wrestle with the current challenges, like polycrisis, digital fragmentation, supply chain insecurity, debt distress, and geopolitical rivalry.

Un-Order And Global Dynamics

Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, calls the world order “un-order”. This is “not the same as disorder, where rules exist but are broken.........

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