Referendum time! (Laski Diffusion/Liaison)

As far as “world order” is concerned, the future may resemble the pre-modern past. The characteristic political institution of modernity is the nation-state. But before the era of European nation-states was inaugurated in Westphalia in 1648, Europe and much of the rest of the world was feudal. Today, the nation-state appears to be disintegrating. As it does, we should expect relationships of power around the world to again take on a feudal character, similar in form to pre-modern feudalism but operating on very different foundations.
I’m not referring to the so-called “neo-feudalism” described by Joel Kotkin — a socially ruinous and politically dangerous polarisation of wealth within nations where the middle class is rapidly vanishing. This primarily economic phenomenon is more accurately described as an extreme form of oligarchy. It is a product of liberal globalisation.
What I see developing is an alternative system of relationships among armed world powers, one which we might call “feudal globalisation.” Liberal globalisation seeks to universalise a “rules-based” order of nation-states cooperating to facilitate economic prosperity and to elevate mutual consent as much as possible over physical violence, which serves as a last resort when negotiation fails. Feudal globalisation embraces intimidation and violent domination of people and resources — embraces it forthrightly, except when trying to play the rhetorical game of liberal norms for diplomatic purposes, as Vladimir Putin occasionally does in his territorial claims.
Putin is one of the great lords in this alternative system. His vassals include the presidents of Syria, Belarus, and (to a lesser degree) Turkey. When Viktor Yanukovich was president of Ukraine, his was shaping up to be such a vassal regime, and there are rumours that when Putin began his invasion he had hopes of reinstalling him. Iran, Xi’s China, and Maduro’s Venezuela are also players in this alternative system. A year ago, Anne Applebaum dubbed this cadre of heads of state “Autocracy Inc.”.
Meanwhile, in the US, Shivshankar Menon, a former National Security Adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, recently observed that large a part of the “foreign policy establishment… has embarked on an ideological quest to divide the world between democracies and autocracies”. This is certainly how the Biden administration frames the stakes of its opposition to Russia in Ukraine.
This belief rests on the assumption that we are engaged in a struggle over what kind of nation states will shape world politics. But if this 400-year-old premise is really what is at issue, then something structurally deeper than democracy is at stake — namely, the question of whether world politics will operate according to nation-state logic or feudal logic.
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