The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order 303072042X, 9783030720421

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PSIR · PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order

Vittorio Emanuele Parsi Translated by Malvina Parsi

Palgrave Studies in International Relations

Series Editors Mai’a K. Davis Cross, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA Benjamin de Carvalho, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway Shahar Hameiri, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Knud Erik Jørgensen, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark Ole Jacob Sending, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway Ay¸se Zarakol, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Studies in International Relations (the EISA book series), published in association with European International Studies Association, provides scholars with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. The series includes cuttingedge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. EISA members can access a 50% discount to PSIR, the EISA book series, here http://www.eisa-net.org/sitecore/content/be-bruga/mci-registrat ions/eisa/login/landing.aspx. Mai’a K. Davis Cross is the Edward W. Brooke Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. Benjamin de Carvalho is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway. Shahar Hameiri is Associate Professor of International Politics and Associate Director of the Graduate Centre in Governance and International Affairs, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. Knud Erik Jørgensen is Professor of International Relations at Aarhus University, Denmark, and at Ya¸sar University, Izmir, Turkey. Ole Jacob Sending is the Research Director at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway. Ay¸se Zarakol is Reader in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College, UK.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14619

Vittorio Emanuele Parsi

The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order

Vittorio Emanuele Parsi ASERI—Graduate School of Economics and International Relations, International Relations Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Italy Translated by Malvina Parsi Milan, Italy

Palgrave Studies in International Relations ISBN 978-3-030-72042-1 ISBN 978-3-030-72043-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Tetra Images/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

to Tony (1927–1992) and Piter (1920–2015)

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book came from a lecture I gave for the Istituto di Studi Superiori Marittimi (Italian Navy advanced education school) of Venice in spring 2017, while a Reserve officer for the Italian Navy as well as professor of international relations. A second version was published in the Rivista Marittima (Maritime Magazine, in print since 1868). During the 2017 training campaign of the Italian Navy training ship Amerigo Vespucci—ninety-four unforgettable days of sailing from Montreal to Livorno, where I had the privilege and the honor to participate as commander and political advisor—I tended to its revision and expansion. This was my last shipboard, after the Italian Navy destroyer Caio Dulio (D 554) and frigate Carlo Bergamini(F 590), and my last assignment after two service rounds at Unifil in Lebanon and Operazione Mare Sicuro. I am finishing my naval career where that of my colleagueofficers begins. I am profoundly grateful to the Italian Navy for the opportunities they have offered me these past few years, and to the people I had the chance to meet and appreciate: officers, chiefs, NCOs, leading seamen, and seamen. This book is dedicated to all of them and to the cadets of the course Dunatos at the Naval Academy of Livorno; men and women who chose a difficult life, unique, but full of sacrifice. Among all of them, I acknowledge especially my colleagues of the Sixth course of the Selected Reserve of the Italian Navy. As always, this book was possible thanks to the intellectual and civil stimulus I get from my daily teaching activities. For this, I have to thank

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my students of UCSC,1 ASERI,2 and USI.3 Special thanks go to Damiano Palano, political philosopher of UCSC, Director of the Department of Political Science, but most of all a precious, acute, and sensible friend who nudged me out of my natural laziness and gave me the idea of making a book from the original article. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my dear friend and excellent colleague at the University of Milan, Nicola Pasini; my brilliant student and now colleague at Leiden University, Marina Calculli; and again, Damiano Palano, for sharing their suggestions, objections, and doubts on the first draft of the manuscript. The book’s theses were discussed during a seminar held at the Società per lo Studio della Democrazia (Society for the Study of Democracy), where they have benefitted from the suggestions, critiques, and requests for clarification raised during a debate made richer by the interdisciplinarity of the audience. I have tried to profit from the views and critiques of every reader and discussant, and to answer all their questions. I must also thank my young colleague Antonio Zotti for the enlightening confrontation on European matters. A special mention goes to my dear compare, Ambassador (retired) Paolo Janni, passed away in 2020, and to his wife Francesca, whose advice has guided me for the last fifteen years. And finally, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all the people who have supported me with their love for all these years—first and foremost Fiorenza, Teresita, Malvina, Lavinia, and Costanza—and who keep supporting me, wherever they are. What I have been able to give back is surely less than what I have received from them, and I can never forget their generosity. In the realization of this English edition, which is also a drastically updated and revised edition in many aspects, I was greatly helped by the support, encouragement, and advice of many fellow scholars who have offered me inspiration and friendship for so many years. John Ikenberry, Mick Cox, Matthew Evangelista, Joe Grieco, and Michael Mastanduno shared their precious insights, allowing me to resolve many doubts and ambiguities in the English manuscript. Without their encouragement and effort, this edition would have never come to life. I must also thank Mehram Kamrava for actively encouraging me to pursue an English

1 Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart). 2 Alta scuola di Economia e Relazioni Internazionali (Graduate School of Economics

and International Relations). 3 Università della Svizzera Italiana (University of Italian Switzerland).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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edition, as well as his staff, for their priceless editing work. Special thanks, from the bottom of my heart, goes to my Malvina Parsi, who patiently carried the burden of translating my anything but simple prose. And I also thank the anonymous referees of Palgrave-Macmillan for their useful critiques, which I hope I have fully addressed. A special mention goes to a couple of young colleagues and friends who have immensely helped me, and not only in a material way, in meeting the deadline. Antonio Zotti shared with me his precious time in ameliorating and updating the book, giving me fantastic support. Valerio Alfonso Bruno put his tireless and efficient enthusiasm in solving a multitude of problems. It is thanks to their critical contribution that this book, three years after its first Italian edition, has finally got its chance at a second life in English. However, all the mistakes and omissions the volume should contain are my sole responsibility. As for everything I have done, will do, or have failed to do, these pages have been written with a constant thought for my beloved daughters Malvina, Lavinia, and Costanza—the guiding stars of my roaming existence. I hope they will serve to remind them and cause them to believe, that a better world is always possible, and that a big part of our destiny— the only part we can influence—is in our hands. For in order to change the world, we must first acknowledge reality for what it is—and keep in mind that in life, as in rugby, every match, even the most unequal and complicated, has to be played to the end—and, most of all, know that there is no alternative in taking the field and trying our best to win, so that we can earn our own respect, even more than that of the opponent. Nave Amerigo Vespucci, aboard Northern Atlantic Ocean June 22/September 23, 2017 Nautical Miles traveled: 6.885 Hours of motion: 1.337

Praise for The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order

“In this tour de force, Vittorio Parsi offers a sweeping and penetrating account of the rise and fall of the modern liberal international order, emphasizing its unique and historical contingent emergence on the world stage and its complex and often conflicting internal principles and logics. Elegant, erudite, and insightful, Parsi chronicles the stormy voyage of the Western democracies as they search for calmer seas and gentler winds.” —G. John Ikenberry, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, USA “Vittorio Parsi, one of Italy’s leading scholars of international politics, has produced an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the postwar liberal order, what went wrong with it, and whether it might be restored. Parsi’s insights will be of great benefit to professional scholars, students, and policy officials on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Michael Mastanduno, Nelson A. Rockefeller Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, USA “One of Europe’s most original thinkers offers a penetrating assessment of the Liberal World Order and its prospects. Recognizing the challenges posed by Russia and China, by terrorism and migration, Vittorio Parsi nonetheless pinpoints the main source of decline in economic and political inequality at home and the pursuit of neoliberal policies of globalization abroad. A stable international order will only be possible, he xi

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argues, if governments attend to human needs, pursue economic justice, and reestablish a social compact to regain their citizens’ trust.” —Matthew Evangelista, President White Professor of History and Political Science, Cornell University, USA “Parsi has written a book of tremendous importance. In concise, persuasive arguments, he outlines the reasons for the steady but certain decline of the liberal world order, and what its next iteration is beginning to look like. For anyone interested in a serious examination of the emerging world order, post-Trump and post-COVID, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order is a must read.” —Mehran Kamrava, Author of A Concise History of Revolution, Professor of Government, Georgetown University Qatar “Vittorio Parsi’s The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order is exactly the right book for anyone—student, teacher, news reporter, or policymaker—who wants to understand how our domestic and global politics and economics came to such a sorry state, and what we can do to build a better future. Parsi combines political acuity with historical insight to show us how in recent decades the major liberal democratic countries lost their way, failing in particular to maintain a healthy balance between market capitalism and welfare-states policies aimed at ameliorating market-generated social inequality. Parsi is unflinching it laying out challenges to the restoration of a more humane liberal world order, including the rise of China, global terrorism, and Trump-style transactional populism. Yet, he also offers us a pragmatic program for political renewal, one that calls for a rebalancing of power between markets and welfare within and between countries, a reinvigorated common front among the democracies, and among those democracies a forthright acknowledgement not just of their common interests but their common values as well.” —Joseph M. Grieco, Professor of Political Science at Duke University, USA

Contents

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The Liberal Order and the Broken Pact Between Democracy and Market

1

Part I Out of Route 2 3

Titanic, or the Unsinkable Order: Origins, Expansion, and Betrayal of the Liberal World Order (1945–2000)

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The Broken Promises That Hijacked the Liberal World Order: A Safer, Fairer, and Richer World

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Part II The Four Sides of the Iceberg 4 5 6

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The Decline of American Leadership and the Rise of Chinese and Russian Authoritarian Powers

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The Molecularization of Threat: Jihadist Terrorism, Islamist Radicalization, and the Mediterranean Tragedy

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The Drift of Trump’s America in the Liberal World Order: From Reluctant Rule-Maker to Revisionist Power

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The Occultation of the People: How Sovereignist Populism, Stateless Actors, and Technocratic Oligarchies Have Taken on Boarding Democracies

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CONTENTS

Part III 8

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A Northwest Passage

Changes at the Helm After the Crash? Transitions Within the Liberal World Order and the Challenges for Europe

215

Conclusions. The Neoliberal Global Order and COVID-19: Which Way Ahead?

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Bibliography

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Index of Names

313

Index of Concepts

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About the Author

Vittorio Emanuele Parsi is Professor of International Relations at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan (Italy) and Director of the Graduate School of Economics and International Relations (ASERI), Milan (Italy). He is Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano. Parsi has also been Chair of the Italian Standing Group of International Relations since 2014 to 2020. He is a member of the LSE IDEAS Advisory Board (Center for Diplomacy and Strategy at the London School of Economics). His main research areas concern transatlantic relations, security policies in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and the relationship between politics and economics in the transformation of the global system. Parsi is currently a columnist for Rome’s Il Messaggero. Parsi is part of the Italian Navy Reserve with the rank of Commander and has joined several peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and search and rescue (SAR) missions in the Mediterranean. Among his numerous publications are La fine dell’uguaglianza: Come la crisi economica sta distruggendo il primo valore della nostra democrazia (Mondadori, 2012), The Inevitable Alliance. Europe and the United States Beyond Iraq (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Partners or Rivals? European–American Relations After Iraq (Vita e Pensiero, 2005), with Matthew Evangelista (Eds.).

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The Liberal Order and the Broken Pact Between Democracy and Market

A Diverted Order After decades of stormy conditions, increasingly evident structures failures, poor steering of the ship—and a good measure of sabotaging and attempted mutinies—the Liberal World Order seems to have gone off course for good. The ominous screeches coming from the vessel’ plating resonate with a sarcastic tone if one comes to think that, thirty-two years or so ago, liberal democracy had been declared the ‘common ideological heritage of mankind’ (Fukuyama 1989), the only viable political and economic model, legitimized by a sounding victory over every significant ideological alternative. Nowadays, contesting Francis Fukuyama’s argument about post-Cold War ‘end of history’ is pretty much like shooting a fish in a barrel. Since the famous article was published on The National Interest, at every bad turn of the liberal project, a number of observers and scholars have been ready to point out how diehard history was refuting the thesis—indeed, frequently using it as a mere straw man argument. Later in the chapter, we will see that Fukuyama’s line of reasoning may be still more relevant than its trivialized version suggests. Regardless, today’s Liberal World Order can hardly be regarded as the world’s unquestioned political and economic layout. Open trade is resisted not only by tariffs and new forms of protectionism and mercantilism, but © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_1

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also by the crisis of multilateralism in international trade governance (Helleiner 2019; Tao and Woo 2018; MacIsaac and Duclos 2020). Big business keeps benefiting from governments’ enduring reluctance to impinge on the exemptions and privileges accrued from thirty years of deregulation, generating unprecedented levels of wealth inequality within countries and oligopolistic trends, especially in the most advanced sectors of global economy (Bourguignon 2017; Holm 2019; Rupert 2012; Schmidt 1995; Wu 2017). International institutions and regimes are undermined and shunned, no longer by outcast governments only, but occasionally also by countries that had traditionally been regarded as pillars of the organizational structure underlying the international order (Ikenberry et al. 2018; Peters 2016; Smith 2019). Moreover, increasingly large sectors of Western countries’ population have been growing weary if not skeptical of liberal institutions and principles, impairing the legitimacy as well as the actual functioning of the delicate mechanism balancing out open markets and representative democracy. This mechanism might be about to receive its clipping blow by the progressive decline of that ‘middle class’ that had served as the social linchpin of liberally informed political and economic systems at both the domestic and international level (Colomer and Beale 2020; Eichengreen and Leblang 2008; Jahn 2018; Näsström 2003; Tormey 2014). We maintain that this array of challenges affecting contemporary democracies and the international order that has been underpinning them over the last seventy years come down to a twofold crisis. On the one hand, liberal democracies are confronted with the rise of neo-populist movements. On the other hand, they have been proving increasingly incapable of coordinating among themselves at the international level. These are two sides of the same coin, and indeed intimately interrelated. In fact, neo-populist actors are not only dismissive of the global values, norms, and practices that have been established after 1945, but they are actively engaged in breaking them down in the name of ‘sovereignty’ (Blühdorn and Butzlaff 2019). All this is accelerating the crisis of the ‘Liberal World Order’, which is the focus of this book. Shifting the blame onto patently illiberal forces might be a handy expedient. It would be far too convenient to underplay this crisis by portraying it as a manifestation of the repeatedly prophesized ‘decline of the West’ (Spengler 2007), in turn becoming a function of the geographical redistribution of political, economic, and technological power at the global level. If this were the case, it would be futile to fret over the search for

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an impossible remedy. We might as well refrain from playing a role in a world designed by others, around values that are distant from both ‘liberalism’ and ‘social democracy’—the two overarching political cultures that have concurred, not without friction and tension, to shape the world in the twentieth century. What is more, it would exempt us from the difficulty of understanding whether or not the causes of this crisis are to be found within liberal democracies themselves. In the former case, the possibility of reviving the Liberal World Order and recovering democracies would depend mostly on liberals themselves: not only on their ability to reform existing institutions, but also to revamp the very ideas which contributed to the triumph of both democracy at the internal level and cooperation and multilateralism at the global one. In the latter narrative, the transformation of the balance of power between old and new—or resurgent—forces, as well as the inevitable decline of Western hegemony, may be convenient discourses to preclude reactions and changes in direction. The decline of the Liberal World Order is indeed a more complex story. It is inherently dependent on the domestic transformation of liberaldemocratic states in one peculiar way. The argument that I advance in this book is that the crisis of the Liberal World Order results from the breakdown of the balance between democracy and market-based economy. This balance was indeed the premise over which liberal democracies and the Liberal World Order were built. The collapse of the ‘social pact’ and the balance between capital and labor, which the welfare state—both in its American liberal version and its European social-democratic version—was able to materialize the inner contradictions of capitalism. As a result—I claim—a novel illiberal political project is emerging and is accommodated within democratic institutions (Crouch 2020: 48).1 My thesis is that, since the 1980s, the Liberal World Order has been gradually replaced by the ‘Neoliberal Global Order’. The vessel on which the West had been travelling since the end of World War II has been diverted from its original route. On this new and more dangerous course, 1 In particular Crouch (2020: 48) states: ‘“Capitalists”’ preferred regime is postdemocracy, where all the forms of democracy continue, including importantly the rule of law’, in fact ‘Post-democratic capitalism does not require a formal renunciation of democracy, any more than corporate neoliberalism requires a renunciation of the market; indeed, democracy and the market continue to be used together as the primary legitimation of the evolving political system of dominant corporate power, because this latter lacks any legitimation of its own’.

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an iceberg stands out. Each of its four sides is capable, on its own, of sinking our ‘Titanic’. They are the crisis of the American leadership combined with the rise of authoritarian powers Russia and China; the molecularization of the threat linked to Jihadist terrorism; the revisionism of the United States; and the weariness of democracy, pressed between populism and technocracy. In the background lies the European crisis. Europe can still be saved, and it can provide a decisive contribution to the reestablishment of the original route, if it will be able to rebalance the distinct dimensions of growth and solidarity, making the surveillance and defense of its borders a shared responsibility and showing its own capacity on transforming the COVID-19 crisis in an opportunity to relaunch its role, as it is trying to do with the ‘Next Generation Future’ program, that—if successful—will be a practical example of what means harmonizing the sovereignty of the different member states within the common project of the Union.2 The ascendancy of the Neoliberal Global Order enabled and made increasingly popular the attacks on the firstborn Liberal World Order both within the academia and—with much more treacherous effects—in the realm of politics. Unquestionably, the distinction between the two spheres must always be kept in mind, yet the two have to be equally addressed, as the Liberal World Order has in fact always been twofold in nature: on the one hand, it was the particular international order configuration that resulted from the interactions of an array of structural factors and actor-level contingencies in a post-World War II context characterized by the US hegemony (Keohane 1984: 34);3 on the other hand, it was a distinct political project designed to keep together as harmoniously as possible state sovereignty—in its liberal-democratic version—and market economy—entailing free trade on the international level. Those just mentioned are specific understandings of three concepts—‘international order’, ‘sovereignty’, and ‘market economy’—that have characterized the zenith of political modernity.

2 Conclusions of the Special meeting of the European Council (17–21 July 2020). Available at https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2020/07/21/eur opean-council-conclusions-17-21-july-2020/. 3 According to Keohane’s definition (1984: 34), the concept of hegemony: ‘is defined as a situation in which one state is powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations and willing to do so’.

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Liberalism accepted the challenge of integrating them—i.e., making them not only compatible but also synergic. In the long-term period, though, liberalism has scaled down its goal—especially with regards to its political and institutional aspects—and settled for harmonizing them by couples only, rather than in one triad. The emergence of this sub-optimal arrangement can be effectively regarded as resulting from the resistance to change typical of the kind of international society outlined by Hedley Bull, one in which—at least in its original version—states highly protective of their sovereignty establish common practices and institutions in order to manage anarchy (Bull 1977).4 Only later the drive would incrementally emerge toward a reform of the states’ political and economic institutions aimed at achieving higher levels of inclusiveness—even at the cost of less control and greater international interdependence. This ambition resulted in clashes among sovereign countries that would eventually degenerate into World War I, which in turn led to the end of the European international society. Over two decades ago, Ian Clark observed that it was no accident that the first globalization—the one that drew to a close in 1914—came to a head due to the inconsistencies between the states’ internal and external needs and priorities. ‘The paradoxes of the age are thus to be accounted for by the complex interplay of the two dialectical process—between an open and close international system, on the one hand, and between the old and the new social orders, on the other. It was the attempt to solve the problems of the latter by the enhancement of state power, and through the modality of the new nationalism, that tipped the scales of the former away from open internationalism and toward destructive fragmentation. The very globalization that had hitherto represented the extension of state power had come to be regarded as a threat to its base of domestic control. It was through the medium of changing state practice that the new mood of international relations was to find its expression: the need for domestic accommodation reduced the scope for international concessions on the key issues affecting the external standing of the states’ (Clark 1997: 50– 51). An analogous outcome seems likely to occur in the present circumstances, as domestic pressures resulting from increasing inequalities generated by hyper-globalization and the acceleration of technological 4 Particularly, on the role between order and international society see (Bull 1977: 22– 50), and on how order is maintained in world politics see (Bull 1977: 62–73).

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advancements prompt states to raise barriers among them and take on aggressive foreign policy attitudes. This is a trend we can observe across the entire international community, and mainly in the behavior of major powers, which increasingly act as they no longer belonged to a common ‘World International Society’. In the United States, Donald Trump wreaked havoc on liberal internationalism, treating allies and partners almost like rivals, advancing the notion that the goal of making America ‘Great Again!’ could only be achieved at the expense of the rest of the world—not by assuming leadership responsibilities for it. In doing so, the Trump administration has exacerbated the ever-present tension between the United States as a liberal hegemon—responsible for preserving and providing for global governance—and the United States as a great power—whose priority is the pursuit of its own national interest (Ikenberry 2011: 298–299).5 Caught up in his own transactional mindset, Trump has seemingly forgotten that US power has largely depended on the country’s relations with its allies and its leadership skills; it comes therefore as no surprise that his approach to international affairs has actually made America ‘Alone Again’. Paradoxically enough, while the United States was abdicating to its traditional role of leader, President Xi of China became the champion of globalization limited to free trade and business, unencumbered by political liberalism (Arrighi 2009).6 In this sense, the material facilities provided by the Belt and Road Initiative—serving as a source of unparalleled structural power for the Chinese government—supplant to a great extent the Liberal World Order’s ideological infrastructure (Gabusi 2020). Drawing on its newly acquired status, China has been fanning the flames of nationalism with its bellicose recriminations against neighboring countries, tightening its grip

5 Ikenberry (2011: 298–299) notes: ‘The United States is unique in that it is simulta-

neously both a provider of global governance—through what has tended in the past to be the exercise of liberal hegemony—and it is a great power that pursues its own national interest’, and shortly after ‘When it acts as a liberal hegemon, it is seeking to lead or manage the global system of rules and institutions; when it acting as a nationalist great power, it is seeking to respond to domestic interests and its relative power position. The danger today is that these two roles—liberal hegemon and traditional great power—have been in increasing conflict. The grand bargain that sustained liberal hegemonic order is in danger of unraveling, exposing the old tensions and contradiction buried within’. 6 In the postscript to the 2nd edition of The Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi observed that, while the possibility of a universal empire ruled by the West still existed, it was much more likely the possibility of global market society based on Eastern Asia.

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on Hong Kong, determined to put a definitive end to the ‘one country, two systems’ principle, showing growing impatience with regards to the issue of Taiwan, and locking up as much as a million Uyghur citizens in reeducation camps. Russia also played the nationalistic card in the annexing of Crimea and has sought to compensate for its growing internal difficulties—connected with the plunging profits on its oil and gas exports and the repercussions of Western sanctions—with a more assertive foreign policy, especially in the Mediterranean region (Sakwa 2020). The nationalistic trend, however, has not been restricted to the illiberal world. Even the United Kingdom—at the heart of the Liberal World Order since its inception—has been affected by nostalgia for its glorious imperial past. Beyond evidencing a widespread callousness about the most problematic legacies of imperialism and colonialism, such nostalgia has bolstered the Brexiteers’ argument and Boris Johnson’s bid for the premiership (Campanella and Dassù 2019). Even though present-day globalization seems unlikely to implode in an open conflict among great powers, like in 1914, fears for future growing tensions between states and within them are hardly unreasonable (Macmillan 2013; 2020: 22).7 A major ‘constitutive war’ that gives rise to a new global hegemony—possibly a Chinese one—may well be improbable (Allison 2017), also because we still live in a nuclear age (Gilpin 1981; Modelski 1979, also Kugler and Organski 1980). Nevertheless, in the past, quite a few great wars—including the one referred to by Ian Clark—have been triggered by misperceptions, errors of judgment, undesired escalations (Jervis 1976; Clark 2013). The one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic should have taught us is that inconceivable events—the famed ‘black swans’—are just occurrences that have not been given enough thought. As brilliantly and subtilty argued by John Ikenberry in his last work—A World Safe for Democracy—it was liberal internationalism that took up the challenge I am dealing with in this book: harmonizing the international 7 About the prospects of the current international order, with reference to the Trump administration’s reckless conduct, Macmillan (2020: 22) points out that ‘Norms that once seemed inviolable, including those against aggression and conquest, have been breached. Russia sized Crimea by force in 2014, and the Trump administration last year gave the United States’ blessing to Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights and may well recognize the threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank that Israel conquered in 1967. Will others follow the example set by Russia and Israel, as happened in the 1910s and the 1930s?’.

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order with the viability of sovereignty and of market economy. Liberal internationalism did so by acting not only as ‘a set of ideas about how the world works’ but also ‘as a set of ideas and projects’ for managing the world of liberal democracies, seeking ‘to organize and reform the international order in ways that strengthen and facilitate liberal security, welfare, and progress’ (Ikenberry 2020: 7). Liberal internationalism was—and still is, according to Ikenberry—not only an analytical approach, but a political project, ‘deeply connected to progressive political movements. Its greatest moments have come when its international agenda was defined in ways that strengthened the ability of national governments to carry out progressive socioeconomic goals. In these instances, the building of international rules, institutions, and partnerships has been designed to strengthen—not undermine—the capacities of national governments’ (Ikenberry 2020: 9–10).8 In line with the theoretical premises of liberalism, this book puts emphasis on the actions of states, (trans)national collectivities and individuals, whose agendas are going to be regarded as essential to determine how, and to what extent, structural factors— operating at the inter- and trans-national level, as well as within each state—do shape and trigger change within the international order. Far from adhering to an idealistic approach, the investigation emphasizes the relations between interests and values informing the agendas of states and non-state actors—relations which are established in a deliberate yet structurally constrained manner. The preference for a Liberal World Order will not be grounded—at least not systematically—on moral considerations, but rather based on the hypothesis that liberalism still provides the most adequate analytical premises to account for the unprecedented international and domestic stability cum flexibility experienced since the end of War World II. It is such ‘liberal stability’ that has led to the establishment of authentic international leadership, while limiting the effects of uneven power distribution. But these very same premises, the book argues, have also enabled—yet not in an inescapable manner—forces which are bound to destruct the Liberal World Order itself.

8 The scholarly debate concerning the Liberal World Order, its critics and supporters,

is immense and cannot be effectively summarized here. The recent work by G. John. Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy (Ikenberry 2020) serves as an excellent source on the history and perspectives of the liberal internationalism. See also Kundnani (2017) and Smith (2019). For a realist assessment of the notion, see at least the recent works by Mearsheimer (2018, 2019) and Allison (2018).

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As a start, we need to acknowledge that a Neoliberal Global Order has been replacing the Liberal World Order, since the end of the Cold War, generating disrupting effects on the balance between values and interests, democracy and market. The main aim of the book is then to reveal and expose the nefarious mechanisms of such ‘replacement’, and set the intellectual premises to revive and restore the Liberal World Order. To achieve this goal, the book develops along three axes, each addressing a specific tension: between the domestic and the international dimensions; between the political and the economic realms; between values and interests. But this is also related to the variety of forces that have been undermining the Liberal Word Order since the final decades of the Cold War: the technocratic forces that push for homologized international responses to economic-financial crises, thus undermining the social role of the state in domestic politics; the sovereigntist–populist forces that weaponize sovereignty against international cooperation; the authoritarian powers, like China, that seek to create a new international order deprived of liberal norms. Oddly enough, all these forces take little account of the relation between interests and values, as if there was nothing to argue for or against it, as though the question could be reduced to a mere choice of what to stand for—or what to succumb to. Conversely, one of the main points underlying this book is that values—which can only become ‘common’ as a result of passionate argumentations, not just random, unreasoned picking—are a feasible point of reference around which the fragmented and dispersed interests of the many—which are weaker as long as they remain divided—can coalesce and possibly prevail over the concentrated, ‘inherently’ stronger interests of the few.9

9 A large number of scholars have been arguing how difficult is to ‘fix’ the Liberal World Order and its unmaking. See, for instance, the following contributes, appeared recently on Foreign Affairs: Colgan and Keohane (2017), Haass (2020) and Cooley and Nexon (2020). According to Porter (2020) the Liberal World Order has always been an idealized narrative based on coercion and illiberalism, rather than benign US leadership and institutionalized multilateralism. Economists such as Milanovic (2020) and Mazzucato (2020) have been focusing on necessity, and the capacity, to rewrite the rules of the game governing capitalism to reform the Liberal World Order.

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The Pillars of the Liberal World Order The Liberal World Order is the particular shape that US hegemony assumed after 1945, inside a political project which recalled the Wilsonian principles and the entire tradition of liberal thought (Hathaway and Shapiro 2017). While the immediate goal was to create an international arena ruled not only by force but rather by law, the final goal was to shape the international system as a domestic democratic system. In some way, this entailed protecting the domestic social orders from the disrupting influences coming from the international arena—with war being of course the most disrupting (Ikenberry 2001). The Liberal World Order was a simple and brilliant structure founded on an idea based on five pillars: 1. Building a free, open international market to contain the excesses of sovereignty and the logic of international anarchy; 2. Using states’ sovereignty to check and balance the excesses of the market; 3. Erecting a rich, solid architecture of international institutions to make the cooperation between states possible, reducing the security dilemma and channeling the force of market and force of states’ sovereignty, making their cooperation possible and profitable; 4. Including politically, economically, and culturally the lower classes— the masses—to make ‘popular’, and thus reinforce, the liberal institutions of market economy and representative democracy; 5. Creating a strong, sizeable middle class, premised to be the backbone of the domestic political and economic systems. The main characteristics of the Liberal World Order—already sketched by Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, but fully defined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II—constituted a compromise between political realism and the transformational aspirations of liberalism. On the one hand, this order was based on the acknowledgment of the necessity of sovereignty. On the other, it used the diffusion of free market not only as a way to achieve welfare and wealth in the economic realm, but also as a barrier to contain the logic of sovereignty and its consequences in developing international cooperation. The market was seen as an effective tool to control international anarchy

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and the frequent resort to war, that was always accessible to the sovereign states. The idea was ‘liberal’ in its most classical meaning. Expanding the international dimension of economic exchanges and economic interdependence could be achieved only by making their interruption extremely costly, if not unaffordable. This logic would have reduced the temptation of war while increasing the appeal of peace as a way of strengthening and expanding international commerce. In a world that, in the span of a quarter-century, had known the tragedy of two world wars, the idea of using the market, its logic, and its power, to tame the ‘wild’ dimension of state sovereignty seemed, and was, a strategy for success. The 1929 economic crisis, with its protracted, devastating consequences, and the strategies put in place to solve it, had clearly revealed that markets—and especially financial markets—are not capable of selfregulation. In other words, the crisis had revealed the illusion of the ‘invisible hand’ (Polanyi 2001). It clearly showed that market imbalances can have a disastrous effect, well beyond the mere economic realm. They can in fact invade every social field: this was the American lesson in the 1930s. In addition, a disrupted market can even deluge the institutions of democracy, as the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism in Germany well exposed (Fritzsche 2008: chapt. 1; Kerschaw 2015: chapt. 5). During the interwar period, a clear axiom emerged: only the creation of a solid middle class—through the improvement of the conditions and well-being of a great portion of the working class, their inclusion in the circuit of welfare, consumption, and affluence— can constitute ‘the people’, the ‘historical subject’ that liberals needed to establish democracy (Wiebe 1995: 275).10 Relatedly, the appeal of liberal political culture became the core element of the democratic system itself. Of course, the incubation of liberal democracy preceded the end of WWII. For instance, the expansion of the rights of citizenship—i.e., the universal manhood suffrage—had been an achievement of the early 1900s. Yet, political inclusion would have had no concrete meaning without social inclusion. Its symbolic value had been in fact vilified by the rampant economic and social inequality. Not surprisingly, the ‘new citizens’ became an easy prey of the demagogues who capitalized on

10 The people who according to Wiebe (1995) have been dissolved during the Gilded Age (in particular: chapter 7, Dissolving the People, pp. 162–180).

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the disturbing disconnect between the ‘promises’ and the ‘premises’ of democracy. It is beyond doubt that the Cold War, while limiting the universalistic ambitions of the liberal model founded on the alliance between democracy and market economy, caused structural pressure on it. The competing appeal of capitalism and socialism shaped the interpretation of how liberal democracies should function: a consensus emerged among liberals that the forces of the market had to be reconciled with the welfare state. To put it otherwise, liberal democracy in the West not only triumphed during the Cold War, but actually thanks to it. More specifically, socialism fundamentally contributed to shaping the normative interpretation of the liberal democratic state, although its contribution is often denied. It is then not surprising that the end of the Cold War marked a tremendous U-turn, favoring the triumph of a different interpretation of liberalism.

The Great Discontinuity: From the “Liberal Triangle” to Rodrik’s Trilemma The inversion began during the 1970s, even if, actually, things started to change between the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, due to some facts that produced the project of the Neoliberal Global Order and that allowed the new one to progressively replace the original Liberal World Order. The crucial turning point came in the few years between 1968 and 1973. In those years, Western democratic societies were put under significant pressure and the pillars of the Liberal World Order were shacked, among others, by student radicalism, a significant average increase in salaries, the first symptoms of a generalized downturn in production, the consolidation of the London City’s Eurodollars market, the explosion of the US commercial deficit and federal debt, America’s defeat in the Vietnam War and the fatigue of Keynesian policies in coping with the unprecedented joint occurrence of high inflation and high unemployment (Piketty 2020).11 Moreover, the end of Bretton

11 Curiously, when Piketty (2020) examines the transition from cultural and political

hegemony of liberals—the Social-Democratic Transformation 1945–1980—to the conservatives’ and neoliberals’—the New Age of Propertarianism 1980–Present—he does not seem to draw much attention to aspects such as stagflation, the animosity against ‘big government’, workers’ strikes, students revolts and civil rights protests, which can all be regarded as signs of the upcoming change.

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Woods and the oil shock also came about, with the dramatic increase in the amount of US dollars—i.e., the so-called Petrodollars—detained abroad, effectively out of the Federal Reserve and the US political authorities’ control. This decade witnessed the emergence of distinctive cultural trends, which later enabled the ideological contestation of the welfare state and embedded liberalism—the neoconservative revolution—and the economic crisis following the 1973 oil shock that was overcome by placing its burden mainly on the workforce (O’Connor 1973). The deconstruction of social need for the welfare state, and the very logic of consensus underlying it, began to gain cultural hegemony and to become increasingly embedded in economic and political relations, both nationally and internationally. The onset of globalization was symbolically accompanied by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which also brought down its alternative, expensive, and illiberal model of modernization. It was at this point that the ‘great discontinuity’ began, together with the shift from the Liberal World Order to the Neoliberal Global Order, marked by the torpedoing of the ‘great bargaining between capital and labor’ (Reich 2010) that had shaped post-WWII domestic and international orders, and it was at this same point that so-called ‘deregulation’ gained its momentum as a general approach to the relationships between democracy and market, and as a tool designed to create a transnational, self-regulated, unbridled financial market. And it was here that the inversion from the original logic of the Liberal World Order also began in favor of the opposing one underpinning the Neoliberal Global Order: no more protecting domestic societies from the threats coming from the international environment, but rather shielding global markets —especially financial ones—from any interference coming from domestic societies.12 People’s rights, trade unions activities, salaries, workers’ and middle classes’ living standards: they all started to be compressed. In order to enable this change to occur, a cultural–political shift was put in place in terms that can be understood through the notion of Gramscian hegemony, which altered an apparently simple political question: which—and 12 This is the opposite goal of the Bretton Woods System. See Ferrarese (2017: 177): ‘The internationalism introduced in 1944 was not without flaws and did not escape the ambiguities of previous international agreements which were often only the mask of national or imperial interests. However, the intent of that structure was to pursue an internationalization that could be defined as ‘moderate’, as it took place under the aegis of the States, so as to allow them to pursue their domestic social and economic objectives, using the controlled opening of markets to increase the prosperity of national companies’.

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whose—intererst and walues deserve priority protection by the political and governmental action? The reply to this question was formulated along three different but converging cultural–ideological lines: neoliberalism, neoconservativism, and ordo-liberalism. Neoliberalism blamed ‘big government’ for being responsible for resource squandering, impairing the market from producing wealth; it also stigmatized the working class for demanding too much in terms of rights and wages, as assessed in the famous Trilateral Commission Report of 1975 (Crozier et al. 1975). The opposition between market and state was to serve as the narrative of the neoliberal discourse (Harvey 2005). While neoliberalism was doing its part, neoconservatism ushered in a discourse that would produce the ‘revolt’ against the former ‘progressive era’ in the name of the restoration of law and order, the rights of the moral majority, the re-establishment of family and traditional values, the praise of meritocracy and the stigma toward equality (Wolin 2008). The third cultural line was that threaded by ordo-liberalism, based on the Austrian-German school of thought, which, while admitting the relevance of collaborative state-market relationships, was mainly used to justify harsh new state policies rewarding capital at the expanse of labor (Slobodian 2018).13 Neoliberalism and ordo-liberalism both under-evaluate the weight of the ‘incumbents’—i.e., how the stronger market actors can hijack the so-called ‘pro-market’ political decisions to their own exclusive favor. This is the problem of the regulator’s capture by the strongest, the biggest, the richest, which has been a main concern for classical liberals since the age of Tocqueville. In short, we progressively moved away from what I refer to as the Liberal World Order’s original triangle of the—made up of ‘open market’, ‘state sovereignty’, and ‘international institutions’—toward the Rodrik trilemma—including open market, state sovereignty, and democracy. While the ‘liberal triangle’ is assumed to be able to simultaneously manage the three corners and create and preserve peace, wealth and democracy, the ‘Rodrik trilemma’ maintains that democracy, sovereignty, and open market cannot all function at the same time (Rodrik 2011). As John Ikenberry points out: ‘Liberal internationalism also needs to reclaim its legacy as a set of ideas and programs for managing economic 13 Slobodian (2018: 259) analyzes the influence of Hayek thought though what he calls the ‘Geneva School’ able to combine the global scale with the German ordoliberal emphasis on institutions and the moment of the political decision.

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and security interdependence. Its aim should not be to open and integrate the world system but to cooperatively shape the terms of openness. This means embedding markets and exchange relations in rules and institutions that balance the trade-offs between efficiency and social protection. Achieving this balance may mean a reduction, at the margin, in trade openness and integration. The goal is less about building or eliminating borders than agreeing upon principles and institutions for the cooperative management of border’ (Ikenberry 2020: 308–309). During the Cold War, communist states were largely assumed to have ‘limited sovereignty’, yet since 1989 it is, liberal states that have seen their economic sovereignty diminished as a consequence of the ‘confiscation of sovereignty’, not by a foreign power—the Soviet Union, in the case of the Warsaw Pact—but by the market. Market logic predicates protection of free competition, but in practice, it shields concentrated wealth and power. The logic of sovereignty has succumbed to that of the market and the imperative of regulating the market has been replaced by that of ‘selfregulation’, which creates false myths and covers up the dysfunctional consequences of deregulation (Rodan 2006). What we have been facing in these years is a general weakness of the liberal narrative and practice in managing the natural tensions between market and democracy, freedom and equality: in a nutshell, ‘the unfairness of the system’ (Rajan 2010). It is no surprise that ‘ordinary people’ reacted by defecting the system. In terms of Hirschmann’s ‘exit/voice/loyalty’ scheme (Hirschman 1970), Western democracies and liberal political cultures have been losing ‘loyalty’, facing a radicalization of ‘voice’, and experiencing a worrying growth of right-wing political cultures and actors (i.e., an exit option) that pose an ‘existential threat’ to liberal democracy. This could also be a major problem for the survival of liberalism good achievements and values. Too often, thinking of how powerful concentrated interests are, we might be afraid of not being able to counteract the sinister antiliberal forces. We tend to forget that values are as powerful a lever as interests in modifying reality. Reassessing what is acceptable—and what is not—is the ethical and political battle we need to fight to have fairness regain the center of political life. This is indeed key for recovering popular trust in political and economic institutions, which is at a low point in the history of democracies. The rule of law and the separation of powers constitute the balance point between economic wealth, concentrated in the hands of

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few, and the interests of the rest. In addition to this, only liberal democracy can protect private property from the politics of predatory instincts. Yet, rule of law and separation of powers come at a price, as they can only exist as long as they are not reduced to a docile instrument to legitimize privilege. In our current global economy, ‘the happy few’ need democratic political institutions that can only be supported by the consensus of the majority. This abiding coincidence of interests is the pivot on which the lever of liberal and democratic values can work. The interaction between interests and values for every political decision reveals—and conceals at the same time—a specific balance point—one of many feasible—and in turn produces winners and losers, better-offs and worse-offs. Only by changing this balance point between interests and values, conducting a long-term cultural fight to defeat neoliberal and conservative hegemony, we can come up with a new Liberal World Order up to this century’s challenges and make democracies—rather than any given state—‘great again’.

The Structure of the Book Having set out the theoretical premises to analyze the mutation of the Liberal World Order into the Neoliberal Global Order and the breaking point that long-established West-centered international arrangements seem to have reached, the book proceeds as follows: Chapter 2 offers a closer look into the key elements of the value-based political agendas, as well as the international context in which the post-World War II order was founded. At the roots of the primogenital form of Liberal World Order was the assumption that the domestic and international realms, as political and economic affairs, are highly interdependent. The architects of the Liberal World Order were moved by a twofold concern: on the one hand, they wanted to set the conditions for an open and strongly institutionalized international system in which liberal and market democracies could be safe and prosperous; on the other hand, they wanted to strengthen the democratic domestic political and socioeconomic systems that were going to be the pillars of said international order. The political inclusion of the masses required greater attention to be paid both to democracy’s premises—i.e., acknowledging and making practicable the formal equality of all citizens—and its promises—so as to narrowing the historically widening gap between the two. This entailed, first and foremost, keeping the excesses of market-generated inequality under control.

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The chapter also examines the double effect trigged by the domestic and international threats posed by communist parties and movements, and the USSR, respectively. At the center of the system—the transatlantic West with its extensions, such as Japan—these threats served as a motivation to preserve the compromise between democracy and market economy, especially through the ‘embedding’ of the latter within a liberal political arrangement. In the periphery of the system, anti-communism became the main—possibly the only—requirement to fit into the international order, coupled with the opening of domestic markets. Without the external constraints and incentives deriving from the Cold War, the transition from an ‘embedded capitalism’ to an ‘embedded democracy’, already creeping in several corners of the world, went underway for good.14 Ever since, deregulation—or, more precisely, a neo-regulation of the market that has been disproportionally advancing the interests of its main operators—has served as the order’s guideline. Chapter 3 examines the failed distribution of the ‘dividends of peace’ at the end of the Cold War. Three main promises—i.e., of a safer, fairer, and richer world for everyone—were broken. From 1990 onwards, Western democracies have been militarily engaged in a growing number of conflicts, with generally poor results. Especially after 9/11, they were forced to acknowledge that military force—the field in which the West still retains a conspicuous advantage on those who threatened its security—has not been resolutive. The West has been forced to admit that it is neither ‘invulnerable’ nor ‘invincible’. The unwillingness to consider the profound roots of the dissatisfaction that is feeding radical Islamism was manifest in the reactions of the Western countries to the Arab Springs of 2010–2011. The Middle East was the place where the greatest gap emerged between the promise of a multilateralism-oriented international system, governed by law and institutions, and the reality of US dominance and its—sometimes reluctant—Western allies, often corresponding to the old colonial powers. What Washington meant by ‘regional stability’ was manifest in the centrality of the triangulation with Tel Aviv and Riyadh. In economic terms, we witnessed the transition from ‘market freedom’ to ‘market dictatorship’, where fair competition has been replaced by birth and wealth privileges. The alliance between democracy and market economy—the compromise between the reasons of politics and those of 14 I use this concept as a mirror of John Ruggie’s concept of ‘embedded liberalism’, and not in the sense in which it was employed by Merkel (2004).

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economics—blew up with the 2007–2008 crisis and the consequent Great Recession, which has shown how the market can be its own worst enemy and how ‘market success’ can have consequences as dire as its failure. I am evidently speaking of an ill-regulated market, and/or limitless market, one whose hegemonic logic overflows every realm, because no other logic counters its weight. Chapter 4 will show how, during the last decade, China and Russia have grown in power and influence. In comparison with the unipolar era, these two authoritarian powers are now able to strategically exploit the mistakes of the United States—and, more generally, its retrenchment. Putin’s Russia has considerably reorganized and modernized its military capacity, most evidently in the Arctic region. It has also been able to capitalize on Western indecisiveness and division in Syria (2013) and Crimea (2014). In the Middle East, Russia cleverly profited the most from the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program—Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action/JCPOA—and started its own triangulation—with Iran and Turkey, the latter a member of NATO—as a response to the one between the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia (Calculli 2019). China has also increased its soft power with the Belt and Road Initiative (BERI), an international economic and financial infrastructure that could potentially replace the current one. This decision is linked to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, which has changed the cost/benefit ratio of tailing the United States in the Chinese perception. The relationship between Beijing and Washington seems bound to remain a competitive one, both in security and economic-financial terms. In Chapter 5, we will see how the ‘molecularization of threat’ has been the main characteristic of the post-9/11 era. The War on Terror has also become the legitimization for the resort to force, both at the domestic and the international level. One needs only to think of Syria and the repression exerted by the Assad regime, which has led first to civil war and then to the internationalization of the conflict. Saudis, Turks, Russians, the Western powers, Iranians and Israelis, and even the Kurd militias and Hezbollah: everyone has used the War on Terror to justify their actions in Syria. But the same argument was used for the intervention in Yemen, the repression in Israel and Egypt, and the interventions in post-Gaddafi Libya. It was also used by China to justify its treatment of the Uyghurs. The War on Terror has also changed the Mediterranean Sea, initially turning it from the ‘American lake’ it had practically become

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during the final stage of the Cold War into the logistic rear of American power projection in the Middle East. But the Mediterranean has also become Europe’s weak link, the porous wall for the migration flows that the European countries have refused to manage in a humane, common, and organized way. We witnessed the securitization of the migration issue, which has been reduced to a ‘law and order’ problem only focused on contrasting migration itself. But we also witnessed the failure of this approach. In Chapter 6, I argument how Donald Trump’s appearance and his extraordinary and unexpected success in the 2016 elections stem from the feelings of alienation of tens of millions of voters who felt marginalized by the increasing financialization of the economy, the expansion of international trade and the delocalization of production, as well as by the impact of the new information revolution, centered around the Internet and artificial intelligence. These dynamics are still at play, even though Trump is no longer President of the United States. The contraction of wage shares and the development of the ‘1 percent economy’ represent a tendency that has grown along with the transformation of market economy, creating the condition in which private income and birth-related privileges play a much greater role than entrepreneurial skills. This situation explains the political decisions synthesized by the slogan ‘Make America Great Again!’ Protectionism, the denunciation of treaties, the questioning of the key institutions of the Liberal World Order, and the persistent challenge of partners and allies are a product of the idea that the interests of American citizens have been compressed and sacrificed by the excessive condescendence toward ‘foreigners’ of US governments. This attitude was reinforced by some more ideological convictions, in continuity with the neoconservative policy of George W. Bush, such as the blind adhesion to Israel’s positions in the Middle East and the ostentation of privileged relations with the conservative monarchies of the Gulf. The unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA is partly explained by this ideological orientation, as well as by the aim to cancel the political legacy of Trump’s predecessor—including ‘Obamacare’. Donald Trump’s international action has systematically discredited the institutions, cast shades on the relationships with the allied countries, and exacerbated tension with rivals. These are the gravest aspects of the administration’s legacy with regards to the international system and the Liberal World Order. In Chapter 7, I will illustrate how the malaise that led Trump to the White House in 2016 is not limited to the United States. All democracies

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are being increasingly sieged by populist and technocratic impulses—since only within democracy can these impulses be freely expressed. Populism tends to deny the composite nature of the people—which entails that nobody has a right to its exclusive and definitive representation—and to devalue the natural tension between the people and institutions (Posner 2017; Mounk 2018; Urbinati 2019). Technocratic impulses limit the preferability scope of choices by diminishing the relevance of values and of the dialectic among different interests in light of ‘necessary choices’ that are not up for debate, as they are claimed to be ‘politically neutral’ (Berman 2018). We have considered how the success of the technocratic era has laid the ground for the ‘revenge’ of populism, which can have both left-wing and right-wing connotations, with an ‘inclusive’ or ‘nativist’ concept of the people, respectively (Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2017; Caramani 2017). Finally, I consider how, in the last decades, the circulation and pluralistic nature of the elites have diminished as a consequence of the breakdown of the social elevator and the oligarchic transformation of the political, as well as of the economic, circuit. The weight of inequality has transformed our societies in a similar way as the ‘enclosures’ stiffened the relations between landowners and rural communities in eighteenth-century England. Chapter 8 looks into the opportunities and limitations of a reshuffle within the transatlantic community, in order to salvage the leadership of what is left of the Liberal World Order. In light of America’s decreasing willingness and capability to remain at the helm of the machinery that has given—with variyng results—a direction to world politics, Europe’s and the European Union’s potential for at least sharing the burden to guide it will be examined. In doing so, the Europe-specific manifestations of the New Global Order’s encroachment will be analyzed, especially those that erupted as a consequence of the global financial crisis which, trigged the notorious Eurozone public debt crisis, exposed the multifaceted and at traits tragic aberrations plaguing national socioeconomic systems and the EU’s institutional functioning. Nevertheless, the European integration process, for all its flaws and inconsistencies, offers a valuable opportunity to consider what an adequate and effective recombination of international order, sovereignty, and market openness should look like, provided that a new generation of liberal-minded architects actually emerge, one willing to pick up the baton of ‘world-engineering’, reaffirming—and when necessary reviewing—the principles and the practical institutional

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that hopefully will lead to a redefinition of the West’s identity and political structure—including the EU and the transatlantic relations—and the ever more necessary dialogue with the rest of the world. In the Conclusion, besides summarizing the responses that the book will provide to the question just presented, the point is made that, for the al Liberal World Order to get another chance to exist and function, a fairer and more inclusive domestic democratic system will need to be (re)established, together a renewed transatlantic cooperation. Moreover, an outlook will be provided about the possible effects of the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency, as well as the consequences of the COVID19 pandemic, especially in terms of the opportunities that it may present Europe to finally transform into ‘a deeper and closer Union’—absolutely needed for playing a major active international role.

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Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holm, Hans-Heinrich. 2019. Whose World Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War. London: Routledge. Ikenberry, G. John. 2001. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ikenberry, G. John. 2011. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ikenberry, G. John. 2020. A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ikenberry, G. John, I. Parmar, and D. Stokes. 2018. Introduction: Ordering the World? Liberal Internationalism in Theory and Practice. International Affairs 94 (1): 1–5. Jahn, Beate. 2018. Liberal Internationalism: Historical Trajectory and Current Prospects. International Affairs 94 (1): 43–61. Jervis, Robert O. 1976. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keohane, Robert O. 1984. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kershaw, Ian. 2015. To Hell and Back, Europe 1914–1949. London: Allen Lane. Kugler, Jacek, and A.F.K. Organski. 1980. The War Ledger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kundnani, Hans. 2017. What Is the Liberal International Order? Washington, DC: The German Marshall Fund of the United States. MacIsaac, Samuel, and Buck C. Duclos. 2020. Trade and Conflict: Trends in Economic Nationalism, Unilateralism and Protectionism. Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 26 (1): 1–7. Macmillan, Margaret. 2013. The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. London: Profile Books. Macmillan, Margaret. 2020. Which Past Is Prologue? Heeding the Right Warnings from History. Foreign Affairs 99 (5): 12–22. Mariana, Mazzucato. 2020. Capitalism After the Pandemic: Getting the Recovery Right. Foreign Affairs 99 (6): 50–61. Mearsheimer, John J. 2018. The Great Delusion. Liberal Dreams and International Realities. Yale: Yale University Press. Mearsheimer, John J. 2019. Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order. International Security 43 (4): 7–50. Merkel, Wolfgang. 2004. Embedded and Defective Democracies. Democratization 11 (5): 33–58.

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Milanovic, Branko. 2020. The Clashes of Capitalisms. The Real Fight for the Global Economy’s Future. Foreign Affairs 99 (1): 10–21. Modelski, George. 1979. The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the NationState. Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (2): 214–235. Mounk, Yascha. 2018. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Näsström, Sofia. 2003. What Globalization Overshadows. Political Theory 31 (6): 808–834. O’Connor, James. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Peters, Michael A. 2016. Challenges to the ‘World Order’ of Liberal Internationalism: What Can We Learn? Educational Philosophy and Theory 48 (9): 863–871. Piketty, Thomas. 2020. Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Originally published as Capital et idéologie [Paris: Seuil, 2020]). Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press [1st edition 1944]. Porter, Patrick. 2020. The False promise of Liberal Order. Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump. London: Polity Press. Posner, Eric. 2017. Liberal Internationalism and the Populist Backlash. University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Paper Series 606: 1–17. Rajan, Raghuram G. 2010. Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reich, Robert B. 2010. Aftershock: The Next Economy and the American Future. New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Rodan, Garry. 2006. Neo-Liberalism and Transparency: Political Versus Economic Liberalism. In The Neo Liberal Revolution: Forging the Market State, ed. Richard Robison, 197–215. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rodrik, Danny. 2011. The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States and Democracy Can’t Coexists?. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rupert, Mark. 2012. Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order. London: Routledge. Sakwa, Richard. 2020. The Putin’s Paradox. London: Tauris. Schmidt, Vivien A. 1995. The New World Order, Incorporated: The Rise of Business and the Decline of the Nation-State. Daedalus 124 (2): 75–106. Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Sheila A. 2019. Japan Rearmed. The Politics of Military Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spengler, Oswald. 2007. The Decline of the West. Translated by Charles F. Atkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published as Der

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PART I

Out of Route

CHAPTER 2

Titanic, or the Unsinkable Order: Origins, Expansion, and Betrayal of the Liberal World Order (1945–2000)

In this chapter, I examine a set of elements that are key to understand the rise and—possibly provisional—fall of the Liberal World Order. At the roots of this distinctive arrangement lay the assumption that the domestic and international realms, as well as, political and economic affairs, are highly interdependent—as argued in the previous chapter. The architects of the Liberal World Order were urged by a twofold concern. On the one hand, they wanted to rebuild an open and strongly institutionalized international system in which liberal—‘therefore’ market—democracies could be safe and prosperous. On the other hand, they aimed to strengthen the domestic political and socioeconomic systems that were to be the pillars of the new international order. The interwar years had taught them a clear—and tough—lesson: financial and economic shocks can cause dramatic social crises, as well as deep political and institutional predicaments. Hence it was vital to prevent protectionist policies from making costly and ineffective recovery-oriented national plans, which were also bound to steer up international hostility, xenophobia, and chauvinist nationalism—which, in turn, are likely to generate further market closure, isolationism, and unilateralism. The tensions between the democratic political dimension and the liberal economic one exploded as a consequence of the 1930s specific circumstances, but they also revealed a structural issue in the relationship between mass democracy and market © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_2

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economy (Halperin 2003). An ill-regulated market undermined the very foundations of democracy (Merkel 2014). The political inclusion of the masses required greater attention both to the ‘premises’ of democracy— enabling actual formal equality for all citizens—and its ‘promises’—i.e., keeping in check the excesses of market-generated inequality—so that the two converge, rather than diverge. The Cold War and the threat posed by communism and the USSR exerted a double influence. On the one hand, they allowed the core of the system—essentially ‘the West cum Japan’—to abide by the commitments to the balance between democracy and market economy— and its fundamental interest in embedding the market. On the other hand, moving toward the system’s periphery, anti-communism was the only requirement to fit in the liberal order, coupled with the international opening of domestic markets (Jahn 2013; Müller 2019). The end of the Cold War marked the definitive transition from an ‘embedded capitalism’ to an ‘embedded democracy’1 that bent backward to the needs of an ever less regulated market—more precisely, a market steered by the interests of its most important operators. But the attack on of progressivism’s cultural hegemony had already begun in the 1970s, the result of three combined dynamics: (1) the ascendancy of monetarism; (2) the distortion of Hayekian ordo-liberalism, with his emphasis on authoritarian elements and the need for governmental contribution to market protection, which would lead the ‘deregulation credo’; (3) the neoconservative mission aimed at replacing class interests with ‘non-negotiable values’—whose forebear had been the so-called ‘moral majority movement’—(Bebbington et al. 2013; Chodor 2015; Navarro 2020; Nedergaard 2020; Owen 2018; Wilkinson 2019). Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s concerns—‘The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little’2 —would return to be confined to the granite stone of his memorial. We would revert to a re-edition of the unbridled economic liberalism that devastated market societies

1 As already mentioned in Chapter 1, I use this concept as a mirror of John Ruggie’s concept of ‘embedded liberalism’, not in the modality employed by Wolfgang Merkel (2004). 2 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937”. Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. Four Freedoms Park Conservancy. Available at https://www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org/blog/2015/2/17/fdrs-second-inauguraladdress-january-20-1937.

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throughout the nineteenth century, which was denounced by Karl Polanyi during World War II (Desai and Polanyi Levitt 2020). A full-fledged betrayal of the Liberal World Order.

The Origins and Foundations of the Liberal World Order The Liberal World Order is the complex of principles and institutions that ruled the international system since the end of World War II. Based on the United States’ leadership, and fleshed out through five main institutions—the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)— it promoted economic development and granted political security in a large part of the world during the Cold War (Eichengreen and Vazquez 2000; Gaddis 2006). Its conception dates back to WWII, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill began to outline the features of the international order that was to replace the one that was being swept away by the ongoing conflict (Leffler and Westad 2010). The project of a new world order aimed to address two basic concerns. The first was to preserve peace through the building of a universal, generalist institution replacing the League of Nations. While recognizing the limits of the latter, the Atlantic leaders believed that the principle that had inspired its construction had to be safeguarded, while being aware of its flaws. The United Nations was founded on these premises (Cottrell 2017; Jackson and O’Malley 2018). With the soon-to-be winners of the war at its core, the UN would admit all the states that would embrace its principles, starting with the limitation of the use of force exclusively for self-defense purposes; the concerted effort of all members toward the goal of collective security; and the formal equality of all states and the respect for national sovereignty, complemented with the right of peoples to self-determination—even though a consistent part of humanity was still subject to colonial domination. At the same time, from a realistic standpoint, the UN would acknowledge the privileged status of winning great powers—United States, Soviet Union, China, and United Kingdom, as well as France, only included due to its large colonial possessions— granting them a permanent seat and veto power in the Security Council, so making them the de facto leaders of the organization (Schlesinger

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2003). At the time of the UN’s foundation, there was still hope that relations with the Soviet Union would stabilize on cooperative terms as they had during the war (Gaiduk 2013). It was also believed that the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek would prevail in postwar China (Shen 2011). The juridical fabric of the United Nations was of manifest American design. The coexistence of the equality principle, expressed by the General Assembly, with the reality principle, synthesized by the special status reserved to the ‘big five’ of the Security Council prevented the UN from ending like the League of Nations, even though its constitution was almost simultaneous with the onset of the Cold War (Hurd 2002; Peterson 2006). In spite of the stark opposition within the Security Council between Washington and Moscow, the United Nations played a crucial role during the US and USSR bipolar competition, offering a permanent forum with an institutionalized code of communication facilitating an as peaceful as possible cohabitation between enemies during the incoming nuclear era. However, it was only after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union that of the UN’s statutory goals first appeared achievable. During the brief season known as ‘the unipolar moment’ of the international system, the United States not only enjoyed the benefits resulting from a tremendous political, military, and economic gap with any other states but, most importantly, it also had no other power willing—or able for that matter—to challenge its global leadership. Hence, the prospect of a new world order finally fully consistent with the principles of the UN Charter seemed to be attainable (Brands 2016; Nye 1992, 2020). The failure to do so can be regarded as the greatest wasted opportunity in modern times (Brooks and Wohlforth 2008). As Tony Judt rightly observed, we ‘missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts’ (Judt 2010: 138). The second concern in the years following the end of World War II was to avoid falling in the same path that had led to the formation of closed economic blocks and the draconian commercial protectionism of the 1930s (Pani´c 2003). The latter was correctly believed to have been a composed cause of the expansion and deepening of the 1929 stock market crash, having amplified its effect in terms of resource destruction. It also

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served as an accomplice—through the diffusion of poverty and hostility toward the ‘unfair competition’ from foreign entities—of the success of fascist and ultranationalist movements across Europe and in Japan in the interwar period (Ikenberry 1993). These are all recurring concerns for advocates of freedom and democracy. At the same time, they are coarsely incorporated among the arguments of those who equate the protection of freedom with the advancement of total free circulation of factors of production, conveniently omitting that while capital can choose to move or not, labor is often forced to do so—and in exchange for different and unfairly lower remuneration rates. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, which fixed the exchange rate among the main currencies of the world, was designed to avert this danger. Anchored to the US dollar as the international reserve currency, due to its convertibility with gold, it was based on the newly instituted IMF and WB, whose purpose was to supervise the stability of exchange rates, counteract financial speculation and support economic development, and, later on, the GATT. However, due to the divisions between East and West, these measures were only applied in the ‘free world’—that is in non-communist countries. This is no small clarification, because an increasing number of hardly liberal political regimes were developing connections with the Liberal World Order—Francoist Spain, Antonio Salazar’s Portugal, the Central American Republics, apartheid-ruled South Africa, the Iranian monarchy, as well as the countless authoritarian regimes that emerged from the decolonization of Africa and Asia (Westad 2005). At best, these regimes could only be regarded as liberal insofar as they protected private property, albeit limitedly so, and only as long as it did not interfere with the power elites’ interests. However, they all allowed international access to their markets and resources. They were ‘client states’ rather than ‘allied’ of the Western democratic powers: the United States, of course, but also United Kingdom and France (Parsi 1998). I point this out not for the sake of controversy, but to mark the difference between the center’s and the periphery’s involvement in that order. This difference reveals a relevant aspect of the Liberal World Order immediately: while liberalism’s political and economic principles were presented as a perfectly consistent combination, there was in fact a sort of intrinsic tension between the two dimensions (Hardin 1993; Helleiner 2003). This friction was most clear in the international realm, and it was decidedly resolved in favor of the center over the periphery, and of the economic dimension over the political one (Goldgeier and McFaul 1992; Kwon 2010).

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This implies that the liberal cosmopolitan ideal of reducing the divisive power of state borders—that is, the aspiration to make the international arena, anarchic in nature and ruled by force, more similar to the domestic arena, typically hierarchical and ruled by law—would thus minimize the occurrence of war through the diffusion of democratic institutions and free trade (Kaldor 2003). This was actually subject from the start to a realist compromise in which all that was sacrificed was the support for democratization, while opening up to the economic penetration of every possible political space, even if ruled by authoritarian regimes—as long as they were not communist, nor allied with the USSR (Mandelbaum 1994; Mayall 1992). This compromise was the true non-negotiable aspect of the liberal order blueprint. While this aspect was obvious in the periphery, within the West it was only apparent since the 1980s—and increasingly so after the end of the Cold War—that the compromise between democracy and market was openly resolved in favor of the latter and to the detriment of the former. It became soon clear that a truly peaceful cohabitation with the Soviet Union was impossible, and that its international policy was aggressive and threatening in nature. This had been a decisive factor in the choice to sacrifice everything other than the anti-communist stance as a prerequisite for dealing with the United States. Thereafter, the goals of the Atlantic Charter were incorporated in the North Atlantic Treaty, which established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. The Atlantic Alliance still represents the main security warranty for European countries—including those that are formally neutral—the instrument of America’s leadership in Europe and the Mediterranean, and the permanent institutionalization of the privileged relationship shared by Western democracies. In fact, apart from its military dimension, NATO is the criterion upon which ‘the West’ emerged as a ‘political community’: home to democracy and market, the only place where war has become virtually impossible and normally able to come up with shared position about world affairs (Deutsch 1954; Mastanduno 2019; Wallander 2000). America’s extreme concern that Europe would not be able to resist the combined effect of external pressure from the Soviet Union and internal communist subversion if the Old Continent was to remain economically fragmented and politically divided is precisely what inspired Washington’s thrust—rather than mere support—toward European unification (Lundestad 1998; Milward 2003). This was resolved through the creation of the Marshall Plan, with its mechanism of reception and distribution

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of recovery assistance that imposed the necessity of a unified agency on Europe (Ellwood 1992). The Europeans were able to add to that thrust and give it autonomy, first founding the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom, 1957), then the European Economic Community (EEC, 1957), and finally the European Union (EU, 1993) (Urwin 2014). Of course, an analysis of the European integration process would deserve a separate, more thorough discussion. What needs to be stressed here, is how every single step ahead made in the process, raises the stake and changes the meaning of the very idea of Europe. The synergy between the European integration process—and project— and the complex of institutions underlying the Liberal World Order’s institutional settings (Szewczyk 2019)—which warranted and were warranted by the US leadership—was so apparent that all the communist parties in the Old Continent opposed it (Geoffrey 1994). They ended up sharing it only when they foresaw the possibility that a more politically cohesive Europe could lead to the loosening of the transatlantic relations, and even more so when they severed their ‘internationalist loyalty’ to the Soviet Union (1982). The so-called Eurocommunist experiment (1977–1989) was a relevant stage in that sense, though not at all free from contradictions (Zirakzadeh 2014). Successive development of the European integration project disproved at least in part both those who feared and those who hoped for the enlargement of a ‘transatlantic divide’. On the one hand, the denser European political identity developed through this process contributed to the extraordinary recovery of America’s leadership at the end of the Cold War. At that point, many of the geostrategic challenges that Europe as a whole and its single member states had to face—e.g., the 1990–1991 Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, the North Korean nuclear crisis— started to become too great for them to play a leading role. Moreover, even where Europe could have seized the opportunity of an external crisis to make a qualitative leap—as appeared to be the case with the civil war in former Yugoslavia, 1991–1995—it was not willing nor able to do so (Parsi 2006: 152). On the other hand, the United States actively neutralized the prospect of a Europe too independent of its political tutelage by binding it on the economic front. Obviously, not thorough large-scale merging and acquisition of European economic assets, but rather counting on Europe giving up pursuing the road of social market economy—the so-called ‘Rhine capitalism’—that in the 1970s and 1980s could still be regarded

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as a distinctive declination of the democracy–market nexus, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon model—in its neoliberal version. However, this became apparent only much later. The complex of institutions so far described provided with the United States what Susan Strange defined ‘structural power’ (Strange 1988), namely, the power to shape the structure of the global political economy through financial control, as well as control of security, production, and knowledge. In the relations between the United States and postwar Western Europe, the financial dimension of power was warranted by the dollar standard and the control on foreign exchange derived from it— framed within the Bretton Woods system;3 the security dimension, by the constitution of a protective umbrella for European countries, which enabled American deterrence to span up to West Germany’s borders; and that of production, as in the aftermath of the war, European markets mainly provided a commercial outlet for products manufactured in the United States, whose industry was at the cutting edge of technological progress—the fourth dimension of power. During the Cold War, the Liberal World Order coexisted with the American-Soviet bipolarism and ruled not only the Euro-American relations, but also that part of the world with a shared interest in containing communism. Hence, it was a global system, a precursor of globalization, which made it possible (Crockatt 1995).4 Expectedly it did not turn out to be the heaven on earth that its creators had envisioned in the 1940s. However, it was widely believed that another international crisis like the one that followed World War I would have marked the end of the system of values and ideas that had been established over time through conflicts and battles since the Age of Enlightenment. No one questioned that the economic and financial interdependence that had come into being before the war had shown its duplicitous nature. While it had given a tremendous boost to the growth of the international economic system, contributing to overhaul local social order still widely permeated by pre-modern features (Cox 2019),5 it had also underlined the growing contradiction between the ongoing phase of capitalism’s 3 Named after the place where the agreements were signed in 1944. 4 For an historical account of the coexistence of Soviet-American bipolarism with

substantial unipolarity based on US leadership during the Cold War, see Crockatt (1995). 5 See to this regard Michael Cox’s (2019) “Introduction” to John Maynard Keynes’s The economic consequences of the peace.

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development and the holding of a social structure that the late nineteenth century’s political and institutional system—an extremely elitist, exclusive, heavily hierarchical one—was unable to govern an adapt to. The success of inclusive and totalitarian authoritarian ideologies such as fascism—in all its different versions—and communism was the price that early 1900s liberalism had to pay for its inability to grant the political inclusion of the masses, despite them being necessary and irreplaceable to the functioning of the economic circuit and to its growth (Hollinger 1996). Hence, in the 1940s, there was a deep awareness about the order’s means and ends, and a strong hierarchy between them was established: it was paramount to ensure that economic instability would not once again jeopardize the conditions for individual freedom. At the same time, there was no intention of enabling the pursuit of economic growth to overstep fundamental political and social rights. The architects of this concept were in fact the same people who had quite literally pulled the United States out of the Great Depression with the ideation and realization of the New Deal (Gould 1989; Patel 2017). They were extremely confident in their own abilities, and in the general purpose of politics to solve problems, thanks to that extraordinary success. After all, America too had experienced a double crisis, comprising the more notable economic and financial predicament and the political crisis that had begun at the end of the nineteenth century. The latter was essentially a process of progressive and yet rapid expulsion of the people from the political circuit. These were ‘The People’ mentioned in the first paragraph of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, who had gradually disappeared from the American political horizon as the US economy was transformed with the rise of corporate trusts (Wiebe 1995), fostered by the expansion of railroads, and by the growing need for an imported workforce that consisted of ‘aliens’, for whom the separation between the political and economic functions was easier to maintain. Consequently, the political system had become increasingly elitist (Davies 2017). This circumstance favored the distortion of the economic circuit due to the impossibility of building the institutions and norms necessary to contain its oligarchic regression (Wolin 2008). In the United States, three presidents addressed this state of things: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who succeeded in implementing it owing to, among others, the joint catalyzing effect of the Great Depression and World War II (Smith 2019). Significantly, around that period, a robust populist movement was on

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the rise, attempting to address the common perception that the electoral market was devoid of its capacity to hold the rulers responsible before the ruled—because ‘voting power is a futile power anyway if vote is an isolated power’ (Urbinati 2014: 62). Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous Speech on the ‘four freedoms’ stands as a reminder of the necessity to keep the relationship between democracy and market continuously under check, in order to prevent either from overstepping the other, resulting in degenerated forms of demagogy and oligopoly. ‘Freedom from want, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear’: these are the four freedoms of the State of the Union Speech held by Franklin Delano Roosevelt before the Congress in January 1941, and delivered with a register that purposefully echoed Abraham Lincoln’s best prose in the Gettysburg Address. Meanwhile, the war in Europe was sweeping the Old World away. ‘Freedom from want’ became the American term for equality after the Great Depression and the enactment of the New Deal—after tens of millions of Americans had found themselves unable to have their basic needs met. To get out of a crisis that history might one day prove to be less structural than the one which Europe is currently going through—in light of today’s systematic expulsion of workforce, the youth unemployment rates, the rampant inequality—Roosevelt did not design a new social contract. He went back to the egalitarian spirit embedded in the origins of the Republic and updated it to face the new challenge, placing ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’ on a par of the other two—apparently more traditional—American liberties. The ‘four freedoms’ Speech resumes and expands in Roosevelt’s inaugural address in 1933, in which he stated, in front of an exhausted, disoriented, and hopeless country, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. Roosevelt showed no sign of fear; he initiated heavy reforms of the United States economic system, making way for its spectacular recovery. After the war, the economy started to expand again, just as it had before the Great Depression, even though the differences in salary among classes had been extraordinarily compressed. This demonstrated that the redistribution of income and patrimony, achieved through taxation in favor of the lower classes, had not interfered with the growth capacity of the system. In fact, it had contributed to its readjustment. In the light of these experiences, when it came to the relation between economics and politics, or between market and democracy, the designers of the Liberal World Order were not fanatical believers in the alleged selfregulation ability of the market—especially financial markets. In fact, they

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had endured the 1929 crisis exposing all its shortcomings, and most of all the damages caused by ill-regulated financial flows. As they envisaged an open economic and financial system based on the free circulation of goods and services, they were conscious that an integrated world market required a solid governance structure, and that only a well-reasoned set of rules could prevent such ‘global market’ from completely overriding ‘national democracies’. This is exactly what has been happening in recent decades with the systematic dismantling of public welfare. A number of rights have been declassified as mere services that can be provided by a number of actors— public or private— and vary in quality, not according to principles but to market inputs, or even cease to exist as rights if these services are regarded as economically redundant (Moore 1974). Which, again, is already happening as a consequence of the ‘plutocratization’ of the more advanced democracies (Robinson 2006). This demonstrates the supremacy of economic over political power; the devaluation of the government—the only possible implementer of rights that are conceived as universal—implies the devaluation of these rights and the reversal of the liberal order’s intrinsic logic, undermining its very viability. The Liberal World Order, built on the very same premises that today are being discussed and attacked, is responsible for offering the political and economic space in which the West flourished. It provided the social protection that, in turn, granted the development of that ‘embedded liberalism’ which, in the words of John Ruggie (1982), created ‘freemarket societies’ rather than just free markets: it fashioned social and institutional settings that promoted the welfare state through labor policies that valued people regardless of their productivity rates. This was all but a waste of resources. The Liberal World Order preserved a longterm balance between the necessities of economic competition and social order, enabling the latter to gradually adapt to the development of the former and, conversely, it ensured that the former did not destroy its own foundation. The result was the realization of a kind of capitalism that fulfilled the prophecy of a ‘creative destruction’ rather than mere destruction (Schumpeter 1954), preserving those ‘pre-market’ virtues—to quote Adam Smith’s, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and not Karl Marx—that only can allow the market’s birth, survival, and growth. In addition, the custom of moderation, temperance, and honesty that characterized the beginning of the market was not a prerogative of capitalism, descending instead from ‘long-lasting religious and communitarian practices. Sustained by traditional restraints and the continuing authority

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of secular and ecclesiastical elites’ that enabled the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism to benefit ‘from the flattering illusion that it unerringly corrected for the moral shortcomings of its practitioners’ (Judt 2010: 50). Leaving out the ongoing economic crisis and the theoretical and empirical debates on the paradigm underpinning the welfare systems of liberal-democratic countries, the variety of capitalism integrated with a social security system is profoundly different from free market free of social security buffers (Pasini 2015). Yet, the disciples of neoliberalism seem to have given up their faith in Adam Smith and embrace the idolatry of a dull re-edition of social Darwinism. At its launc, there were no expectations that the Titanic—our Liberal World Order—would be unsinkable; quite the opposite. Its promoters were fully aware that, like any other ship, it would require continuous maintenance. Its route would have to be constantly verified. Its load would have to be fastened and well balanced, so that a sudden lurch, or a gradual displacement of weight, would not make its operation impossible or even lead to its wreck. All these precautions seem to have been lost right at the moment of its triumph, on November 9, 1989, when, as loudly as unexpectedly, the Iron Curtain collapsed.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Expansion and Betrayal of the Liberal World Order (1945–2000) Over time, the general awareness shared by the first creators of the Liberal World Order has gradually waned as difficulties and periods of crisis in the economic cycle combined with the obliviousness of the game’s real purpose: maintaining a balance between democracy and market—two powerful forces not necessarily inclined to natural harmony, and whose priorities have tended to increasingly diverge the more they developed and strengthened (Burley Slaughter 1993). What has been lost is the notion that market economy is synthetic and instrumental in nature, and can only exist ‘embedded’ in a society and thus cannot afford to disengage from its destiny (Parsi 1995). The strengthening of the market and its expansion are positive circumstances only as long as they grant the greatest happiness to the greatest number, allowing for acceptable thresholds of inequality as a reward for individual merit, initiative, audacity, and innovation, but at the same time protecting the mediocre, the losers, the

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weak, or simply the less fortunate (Mazzucato 2018).6 Market protection is not an end goal, because the rules and procedures organizing the production and distribution of goods are not valuable in themselves. In fact, democracy is not judged predominantly based on its output, because it—also—embodies a value: the intrinsic equality of all persons, their natural equality of rights, acknowledged and guaranteed by law. Majority rule is relied upon not because it is expected to achieve correct outcomes, but because it reflects the belief of being the only political order that honors liberty of ‘all’, as opposed to ‘the few’ or ‘the best’, and not for some specific quality they might possess, but just as human being and member of a community (Urbinati 2014: 17). On the contrary, a system for organizing the production and distribution of goods or services cannot demand ‘to not be judged’ by the results it produces, particularly on people and society. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the possibility of realizing a true global market became a reality, and it was accomplished in a surprisingly short amount of time. Things had definitely changed since the 1940s. The advocates for the global market were the same people who had pushed for deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from the economic system a decade earlier—the policies promoted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in their respective countries, later spread throughout the West. Paradoxically, even as a powerful global market was coming into existence, the structure, rationale, and control purposes of the economic system were being undermined. This allowed for advantages legitimately obtained in the economic realm to be turned into unacceptable privileges in the political arena. This was a betrayal of what had been originally designed with much more wisdom; in the new plan for a global market the rules were abandoned, bypassed, and simplified (Steil 2013), and the market came to be interpreted not as a sophisticated artificial institution born out of the union between the law and the desire for wealth, but as a purported natural institution (Polanyi 2001: 257).

6 Mariana Mazzucato criticizes the ‘innovation’ myth as a new force of modern capitalism, built around the narrative of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs as the leading force behind the creation of wealth. She underlines how the vast majority of the digital economy’s innovations are supported by public funds. She also stresses the difference between who makes value—‘the maker’—and the one who simply extracts value—‘the taker’— ; the myth of the creation of value allowed to confuse rents—unearned income—with profits—earned income—fueling inequality (Mazzucato 2018).

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This is not to say that the market is the evil brainchild of some global organization à la ‘Spectre’—the evil organization in James Bond novels and movies. It was in fact the ultimate outcome of a combination of an array of experiences that had shaped the notions and the strategies of the New Deal’ architects, and those of the advocates of the new global economy. We have already spoken of the former, and their Keynesian economic views. The latter, which may be labelled ‘Friedmanian’— for the sake of symmetry, let us assign them too with a patron saint to: Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner and father of monetarism—had been faced with the progressive ossification of the developed economies—blamed on an array of government designed traps and snares and the pervasive presence of a smothering bureaucracy—that had to be ‘liberated’ from the excesses of a hypertrophic, therefore bad, regulation. Their polemic counterpart was the inner projection of the state, and not the absence of an international public dimension, which had been the case for the founding fathers of the Liberal World Order. Their arguments were picked up and used by political leaders as their strong suits in their domestic campaigns, as much as they were convinced, perhaps in good faith, of their correctness. If a link or an alliance is to be found between Thatcher and Reagan, it seems to lie in their reciprocal support in their domestic battles. They were both jealous guardians of their own state’s national sovereignties. In fact, this nationalistic dimension—and more generally, the questioning of liberal values that had characterized the previous decade—was an integral part of that ‘conservative revolution’ that would eventually lead to the fusion between economic neoliberalism and cultural and political neoconservatism (Bruff and Burak Tansel 2019; Burak Tansel 2017). This pact would prove crucial in obtaining the support of the middle and lower classes to economic policies that were going to favor the upper class—in terms of power and benefits—and damage everyone else, redefining the power relations between classes in a way that clashed with the long ‘liberal revolution’ that had characterized the second postwar period (Harvey 2005). To explain this turn of events, there is no need to evoke a scheme’ designed by the ‘great cosmopolitan capital’ with the aim of conquering ‘global power’, even though the consequence was undoubtedly the redefinition of the power balance between the holders and the intermediaries of great financial assets and those who enter the market carrying mostly, or exclusively, their capacity to work. The final outcome was the partial

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embezzlement of the state, or its transformation into an agent of dissemination of the neoliberal cultural hegemony and a rule-provider that further consolidated the new power relations (Dardot and Laval 2014). Government intervention in the economy has not been reduced over the last decades, ‘but its axis has shifted in favor of companies and the capital’ (Fana 2017: 128). Taking Italy as an example, one only has to look at how much the government spent to rescue failing banks—approximately 4 billion euro according to the European Central Bank. Between 2008 and 2014, bank aid in Europe amounted to 800 billion euro, equal to 8 percent of the GDP.7 As said, Thatcher and Reagan were fervent nationalists. Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate to wage war against General Leopoldo Galtieriruled Argentina just to reaffirm the Crown’s sovereignty over the remote Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas, and to get out of the popularity slump that followed the ‘social butchery’ measures taken during her first term as Prime Minister. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, reinflated America’s patriotism and national pride back after the disastrous epilogue of the Vietnam War, and enlisted the approval of the conservative middle class, which was gradually being captured by the moral majority and by the other movements of the evangelical right. However, their economic policies favored neither the members of the ‘silent majority’, nor those of the new ‘popular capitalism’ theorized in London. Thatcher and Reagan’s policies partially marked the beginning of the end of economic stagnation for their countries. By the turn of the millennium, and even more so today, wealth, income, and rights have been amassed, concentrated, and depleted to a measure never witnessed in the United States since the 1930s and in the United Kingdom since the 1940s.8 The substantial difference between the supporters of the market in the 1940s and in the 1980s is that the former were, first and foremost, ‘progressives’, who saw the propagation of market and free competition as an instrument to ensure that even ‘those who had always had too little could finally have enough’—to quote Roosevelt—; while the latter were ‘conservatives’, and primarily interested in restoring the ‘favorable conditions for 7 European Central Bank (ECB), Economic Bulletin no. 6 (Frankfurt: ECB, 2015), www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/ecbu/eb201506.en.pdf. 8 Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy (TFIAD), “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” American Political Science Association, 2004, www.aps anet.org/portals/54/Files/Task%20Force%20Reports/taskforcereport.pdf.

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capital accumulation’—to quote Marx. They pursued two opposite political projects: the first implying a substantial and ‘systematic expansion’ of liberal democracy, the second, its ‘oligarchic closure’ (Helleiner 1996). The deregulation recipe applied in the domestic sphere in the United Kingdom and in the United States—in different ways, but with the same decisiveness—had proven to be successful, forging the belief that the ‘small government’ formula indicated the right path to the relaunch of economies that had never recovered from the consequences of the recession that began in the 1970s and worsened with the 1973 oil crisis (Warzoulet 1973). The suture between the national and international dimensions of these policies happened under the pressure of the events, under the peculiar astral conjunction that caused the Soviet—‘Evil’—Empire to implode. At the same time, the West was dealing with its own inner crisis, being pushed to abandon its social-democratic path in which economic liberalism limited itself in its own interest (Stràth 2016). If a link exists between the liberal practices in the domestic and the international arenas, it must be sought precisely in the awareness of the necessity of selfregulation. In the 1980s, in domestic politics, neoliberalism set out to break a long tradition of ‘embedded capitalism’ that, while possibly compressing the profit margin, had also reinforced consensus. In the 1990s, the United States, having won the Cold War by forfeit, was starting to lose sight of the necessity to restrain its own ambition by investing the ‘dividends of victory’ in building a hegemony that could be ‘shared’ with its partners and allies—hence more legitimate and solid— opting instead, to a never higher rate, for openly dominant behavior (Gaidar 2007). With the end of the Cold War in November 1989, economic institutions, rules, and principles of the ‘reviewed’ (Western) Liberal World Order were effectively extended to the whole international system. This occurred based on the twofold presumptions that the order’s expansion was both inevitable and absolutely rational. The result was the creation of a global market which would soon be referred to as ‘globalization’. Meanwhile, on the political and strategic front, NATO and the European Union concurred in securing the huge territorial expanse of the outer former Soviet Empire—along with the three Baltic republics annexed by Stalin in 1939—leading it through the transition toward forms of political democracy and market economy. The EU’s constant ‘state of crisis’— e.g., financial, occupational, migratory, terroristic, social security—can be

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regarded as evidence of a hastily conducted enlargement. With hindsight, the old member states were de facto incapable of providing the future of twenty-eight members Union—now twenty-seven, after ‘Brexit’—with instruments needed to act equably and effectively, thus paving the way for the return of identitarian nationalisms. Yet, when chauvinistic revivals in Budapest or Warsaw or other capitals of the ‘new Europe’ are frowned upon—and rightly so—one ought to ask where they would be now, if their fragile democratic institutions had not been secured to the buoy of EU standards. Most of all, we should consider if that undeniably tremendous effort of collective reciprocal generosity—of relying on each other in the name of a common past and in the hope of a common future—was not betrayed primarily by the substitution of the principles of freedom and solidarity with the compliance to an omnivorous concept of market, quite alien to the European tradition (Nölke et al. 2013; Nölke 2017). The fact remains that this very complex of institutions and practices is what has granted America’s leadership in the international system over these decades: first with the significant exception of the Soviet and communist world, and later free of limitations. However, it was only possible for this to occur because of a substitution that altered the terms of the social pact that had been the keystone of the ‘liberal/capitalist’ order that won over its ‘communist/collectivist’ alternative. Consequently, an open economic system was successfully brought to life on a global scale, while the political and economic direction was conditioned by the neoliberal tenet against ‘big government’, expressed by the slogan ‘government is not the solution to our problems—government is the problem’. Thus, the construction of a global market happened simultaneously with the gradual dismantling of the system of rules that could effectively organize it. While the Western socioeconomic model was celebrating its success, the substitution was going on, accelerating the transformation that would make our societies increasingly unequal, with an unprecedented concentration of wealth, income, opportunities, that frustrated ordinary people’s hopes, especially the expanded middle class’, now hardly able to serve as society’s backbone. As it was already apparent in 1998, drawing on Peter Glotz’s famous image, ‘the danger is that the two-thirds society (that in which market economy, integrated by the social security system, seemed two work fairly well for two thirds of the population) may become a one-third society, or even less’ (Parsi 1998: 152). The promise made to the West of a society rich with opportunity for everyone was about to be betrayed to the benefit of ‘the few’ who

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would rapidly cash-in their surplus wealth, gaining cultural and political hegemony. Yet, before looking into that, and in relation to the rest of the world, another promise was about to be broken: the promise of peace and a safer world, ruled by universally shared principles of justice.

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CHAPTER 3

The Broken Promises That Hijacked the Liberal World Order: A Safer, Fairer, and Richer World

In this chapter, I look into how, at the end of the Cold War, the ‘dividends of peace’ failed to be distributed. The reason for this crucial malfunction was the breach of three main promises: the Liberal World Order’s commitment to a safer, fairer, and richer world for everyone. From 1990 onwards, Western democracies have been engaged in a growing number of military operations, with generally poor results. Especially after 9/11, they were forced to acknowledge that military force—the domain in which the West has so far retained a sharp advantage on those who threatened its safety (Schmitt 2020; Gilli and Gilli 2019)—is no longer the decisive factor in the successful conclusion of a conflict. The ongoing Afghanistan War, begun in Fall 2001, is probably the most emblematic case of this change. After the withdrawal of most of the American troops from Afghanistan, including the ISAF mission, the country is still beset by terrorist attacks and guerrilla warfare. The peace negotiations with the Talibans have failed to provide greater stabilization, while both AlQaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS/IS) have encroached on the area. On the whole, the predominantly ‘kinetic’ response with which the Western world has reacted to the challenges posed by Islamist terrorism, from Afghanistan to Iraq, has proven incapable of increasing its safety. Faced with such hard evidence, the West had to admit that it was neither invulnerable nor invincible. Moreover, the Arab Springs of 2010/2011 was to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_3

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lay bare the Western countries’ lack of awareness of—and sympathy for— the profound roots of the dissatisfaction that had been feeding radical Islamism throughout the Middle East and beyond (Ottaway and Ottaway 2019). Egypt is probably the most glaring example of the inadequacy of their response to the unexpected uprisings: deaf to the demands of large sectors of the population, the West ultimately supported president al-Sisi’s authoritarian turn, regarding it as the lesser evil compared to the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood’s a consolidation of power. The Middle East was the place with the greatest gap between, on the one hand, the promise of the establishment of a multilaterally oriented international system, governed by rules and institutions, and on the other the reality of the United States’ dominance backed by its sometimesreluctant Western allies—some of which also happened to be the region’s old colonial powers. On the other hand, the Palestinian–Israeli conflict has been largely kept at the margins of the Western agenda since the end of the Cold War, lending weight to the perception of a double standard in how Israeli’s demands for safety are addressed compared with the Arabs’. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 strengthened even more this perception, undermining the prospect of a fairer world. The specious arguments and the false evidence presented to start and justify the war, the way the protracted occupation was conducted and the resulting uprising undermined the credibility of the United States and the West in general as reliable stability brokers in the region. Moreover, the diplomatic coordination with Tel Aviv and Riyadh put on display what Washington really meant by ‘regional stability’. As for the promise of widespread prosperity, what actually happened was a transition from market freedom to market dictatorship, one in which fair competition is replaced by birth and wealth privileges. The alliance between democracy and market economy—i.e., the compromise between the reasons of politics and those of economics—effectively came to an end with the 2007–2008 crisis, which showed how the market can end up being its own worst enemy and that the ‘success of market’— that is, the ascendancy of an ill-regulated, unbound market—can bear as unpalatable fruits as its failure. This setup was first shaken by the 9/11 attacks and put to an even more severe test by the ensuing conflicts in Afghanistan (2001–) and Iraq (2003–). An even deeper crack in the Liberal World Order was caused by the financial crisis of 2007–2008, from which Europe in particular—and even more so Italy—has had a hard time recovering (Tooze 2018). This crisis, aside from reinforcing

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inequality on a domestic and a global scale—with the richest 1 percent of the world population obtaining 19 percent of the absolute increase in real per capita income produced between 1988 and 2008 (Lakner and Milanovic 2015)—has also exposed the ingrained unfairness of the globalization process, which led to increasing and robust criticism. When the current situation is contrasted with the expectations circulating at the end of the Cold War, and the declarations explicitly made about what the ‘new world order’ was going to look like, the mentioned ‘broken promises’— i.e., a safer world for everyone, ruled by principles of justice and fairness traditionally informing the liberal order, in which the ‘dividends of peace’ would be enjoyed first and foremost by those most in need—can hardly be missed.

‘A Safer World’: Neither Invulnerable Nor Invincible---9/11, the Afghanistan War, and the Inadequacy of the Military Tool In August 1990—less than nine months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and before anyone could predict that shortly thereafter the ‘Evil Empire’1 itself would implode—Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait (Rowland and Jones 2016). In order to dispel him, and to lay the foundation for a ‘new world order’—one that would finally fulfill the promises of peace, democracy, welfare, and progress encompassed in the Charter of the United Nations—the George H. Bush administration, with the assent of China and the Soviet Union, created the greatest military coalition in history, which, in January 1991, after a few days war, restored Kuwait’s sovereignty (Ashley Leeds and Mattes 2007). The extraordinary success of that conflict, and the universal consensus it rested on, marked what may be regarded as the highest point in the political and military hegemony of the United States. At that time, a new world truly seemed possible, and the West appeared to be left with no enemies (Fukuyama 1992). From an ideological standpoint, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and China apparently intent on finding its own place within a US-led order, America and the West had

1 ‘Evil Empire’ was the vivid attribution given to the Soviet Union by Ronald Reagan in a public speech at the beginning of his first mandate. It marked the entire final stage of the Cold War, and the end of the so-called ‘détente’ that had preceded it.

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all the reasons to believe that they were invincible and invulnerable. The psychological effects of the latter misapprehension were to prove even more dangerous than the former’s: in case the illusion of invincibility alone had faltered, it would have inspired more discretion, called for greater caution in the use of military force, and perhaps even a healthy quantum of ‘cowardice’—as it proved to be the case with wars in former Yugoslavia, and the failure of Somalia’s intervention (Bush 1997).2 Conversely, once tragically shattered by the 9/11 attacks, the illusion of invulnerability would result in the opposite, equally fallacious—and dangerous—perception of being helpless and exposed to every danger, which in turn would feed into that obsession for absolute security that has been affecting our life ever since. Politically speaking, an entire geological era has passed since the Kuwait invasion of August 1990. At that time, the Soviet Union was still standing and Mikhail Gorbachev was the general secretary of the Communist Party; Deng Xiaoping was China’s grey eminence; John Major resided at 10 Downing Street and George H.W. Bush in the White House;

2 With the end of the Cold War and the fall of Siad Barre’s dictatorship, Somalia descended into chaos. It was one of the first cases of ‘state failure’ to be brought to international attention, due to the presence of several American NGOs among the many that were trying to alleviate the suffering of the population. Their action was inhibited by the systematic assaults of the various local war lords militias. When the subject was discussed on CNN, the United States (then between the presidencies of Bush and Clinton) decided for a massive intervention. Operation Restore Hope, which started in December 1992 as part of the new UN mission UNITAF (which armed 25,000 men) was supposed to replace the ineffective UNOSOM. Its goal was not only to enable the distribution of humanitarian aid, but also to favor the pacification of the country through the disarmament of the fighting factions and the creation of State institutions. It was an ambitious operation of peace enforcement and state-building, which we would became accustomed to seeing (and to see fail) in the 2000s. Following the aggravation of the political situation in Somalia in March 1993, Washington decided to withdraw most of its troops and abandon the mission (which was replaced by the newly instituted UNOSOM II), leaving only a rapid intervention force to support the Blue Helmets. The rebels grew more and more audacious, luring the UN forces into a series of ambushes that turned into full-blown battles that also engaged Italian troops (Battle of the Radio, June 5, 1993; battle of Checkpoint Pasta, July 2, 1993), staged by ‘General’ Aidid. To put an end to this situation, on October 3, the American Special Forces that were still in Somalia organized an attempt to capture Aidid that ended in the disaster known as the Battle of Mogadishu, which resulted in nineteen deaths and eighty-four wounded, prompting President Clinton to withdraw all troops. UNOSOM II ended in March 1995 with the departure of all international contingents (Operation United Shield). About post-Cold War Somalia: Bush (1997).

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François Mitterrand was president of France, Helmut Kohl Bundeskanzler and Giulio Andreotti presided over his sixth cabinet. From that moment onwards, the Western countries’ involvement in wars, peacekeeping or peace-enforcing operations, humanitarian interventions, or ‘peace missions’, have been the norm rather than the exception. In the thirty years that followed the demise of its archenemy, NATO has redefined its strategic concept over and over, so as to readjust its core mission to every circumstance encountered, including the post 9/11 war on terror, and—again and with greater emphasis—after the wave of attacks that, over the last ten years or so, have been sweeping through European and North American cities (Edström and Gyllensporre 2012; Sayle 2019). At the beginning of the new millennium, fear became the dominant feeling in the West when the awareness started to spread that the fleeting period of post-Cold War invincibility and invulnerability, and absolute safety, was quickly drawing to an end, giving way to scenarios that live up to the ‘best’ of Hollywood’s catastrophism (Moïsi 2008). 9/11 and its aftermath confirmed time and again that what had been framed as tragic yet sporadic exceptions—i.e., the interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor—had become a dramatic constant. War had made its comeback into the ordinary lives of Western citizens. The 9/11 attacks also ratified, for the first time, the periphery’s capacity to hit the center, while also picking the time, place, and kind of conflict, and punishing the West for its listless leadership, exercised with arrogance and often in contradiction with its own principles. Sadly, the West has made little to no use of this cruel lesson in its political reflection, and even less so in its political action. Without trying to defend what can by no means be defended, or to find moral justifications for actions that cannot have any, it must be recognized that the hate directed toward the West had—and still has—political motives, in that hatred fuels its anti-West sanguinary prejudices with the very same prejudices that the West holds against the Arab and Muslim world (Mitts 2019). To be clear, this does not amount to an endorsement of any particular brand of ecumenism, nor to the ideal of peace among all religions, nor to a subscription to the popular mantras according to which all religions teach peace, or are all equally tolerant of the values that support the development of a free and secular society—which is the necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of democracy. For centuries if not millennia, most religions have fostered hate, fanaticism, and violence. The fact that religious leaders today acknowledge, for the most part, this

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irrefutable reality, and that their awareness of the explosive potential of the material they handle is orienting them toward irenic views, is certainly a positive circumstance that should be welcomed with relief. Yet, religious leaders’ consciousness has very little power in persuading the minds of those who arm homicidal hands in the name of some God, believing themselves to be the legitimate new prophet—or caliph. Like PhilippeJoseph Salazar (2017: 167–169) brilliantly pointe out, when al-Baghdadi claims an attack, ‘it is redundant to say that retroactive recognition is what allows the Caliphate to “project its power” as a modus operandi: In populist action, it is the base that acts, without needing to receive precise orders from above (…). That this “people” is normalized through religion does not change any facet of the process. It is time this was acknowledged, because what it points to is a movement whereby the world is undergoing a populist re-enchantment of the most radical kind—and not electoral ‘populism’ as it is tritely presented in the media’. We have to realize this, because what appears on the horizon is a return of the world to the ‘ecstasy of populism’: an ‘accumulation of spontaneous actions and group actions, gradually bringing about a movement of collective consciousness. And this movement, expanding, becomes a constitutive logic for “the true, the good people”, a brutal resurgence of “the people” that takes on an irresistible, political shape and that, where the enemy is concerned, translates into a radical hostility’ (Salazar 2017: 169). In terms of the consequences they are capable of generating among the lines of their most fanatic disciples, some religions today are more problematic than others, and the overflow of organizations or isolated terrorists that explicitly—and, in their own views, authentically—refer to Islam, constitutes an objective problem that also relates to the lesser degrees of social and political development of many of the countries where Islam is the most widely practiced religion. Yet, the West has its own share of responsibility for these countries’ and its own predicament, seeing how little and how bad it has done to influence those factors of— primarily political—underdevelopment that fuel radical Islamism. This became clear during the Arab Spring experienced in Tunisia in 2010, when the reaction of Western governments and public opinion was dismay at the possibility that the dictators targeted by the uprisings might fall (El Houssi 2019). Until the very end, figures like Ben Ali (Tunisia) (Masri 2017), or Mubarak (Egypt) were supported insofar as they were the ‘lesser evil’. The same attitude was held toward al-Assad in Syria (Lacroix and Filiu 2018).

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These satraps’ hold to power may be a lesser evil for us, perhaps—and only as long as we have been willing to play blind and deaf no matter what—but certainly not for the populations preyed upon and tortured for decades also thanks to our complicity. And yet we knew back then, as we know now, that the lack of alternative means to oppose the powers to be is precisely what fueled the success of religious fundamentalism and its terroristic spores. We know that the support the West offered to the dictators and to the oil monarchies of the Gulf increased the number of those who aim not only at the ‘near enemy’—the local tyrants—but also at the ‘far enemy’ backing them. In countries such as Egypt—in the days of Morsi’s presidency—and Syria, revolutions were hijacked by Islamist movements that in the beginning had been strangers to and very ineffective in channeling the spontaneous surge of freedom expressed by the young protesters (Kuru 2019). When not taken over by Islamic militancy, revolutions were repressed and sedated—as in al-Sisi’s Egypt and al-Assad’s Syria. Hence, not only the West had been shy and stingy in supporting those civil society groups that were trying—with courage, struggle, and sacrifice—to lead their countries toward political progress, but it also lost no time in running to the aid of the ‘normalizers’. No news here, if we do not overlook how long the Arab States ‘have sought to establish coercive and “ideological apparatuses” enabling them to rule over society’ (Kamrava 2018: 2). Think of Matteo Renzi’s trip to Egypt on August 2, 2014, during which he expressed the Italian government’s full and unconditional support of al-Sisi, a support that was renewed the following year with the words ‘Your war is our war’ (Rampoldi 2016). This position remained substantially unchanged even after the kidnapping and murder of Giulio Regeni—the Italian Cambridge University graduate student tortured to death by the regime’s thugs and whose body was found on February 12, 2016 in a ditch alongside the CairoAlexandria highway, in the periphery of the country’s capital city—even after Italian prosecutors presented compelling evidence of the Egyptian National Security Agency’s involvement in the kidnap and murder of the young man (Brighi and Musso 2017).3

3 The Italian student, who was pursuing his PhD from the University of Cambridge by researching the political role of Egyptian trade unions, was abducted on January 25, 2015, the day of the fifth anniversary of the Tahrir protests, near the very square that gave the Arab Spring movement in Egypt its name. Many analysts have looked at Regeni’s death as being indicative, rather than exceptional, and representative of the degree of political

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Let us take a moment to ask what kind of message we are conveying to the young Egyptians who are seeking to free themselves from al-Sisi’s dictatorship (Sayigh 2019)—without necessarily yearning for an Islamic State—when not even the murder of a fellow citizen is enough to reconsider our position toward a regime that systematically tortures its own citizens. Let us ask ourselves to what extent our cynicism is favoring our enemies’ propaganda. And yet we saw with our own eyes how terrorism had at first been cornered by the Arab Spring, how Al-Qaeda—ISIS/IS did not exist yet—had been left shocked and silent; because when people see for themselves that marching in the streets is a more effective way of fighting than blowing oneself up in a public place—one even capable of attaining the overthrow of a regime which no terroristic campaign has accomplished so far—they automatically know what side is in their best interest to choose (Gerges 2009). In spite of its enormous costs in terms of time, resources, money, and human lives, the intervention in Afghanistan was inconclusive despite being fully legitimate and legal—so much so that the UN Security Council established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to assist the new Afghan Interim Administration. Yet, this substantial failure also certified that, aside from not being invulnerable, the West was also not invincible (Shafer 2014). One only has to consider how a coalition including the richest, most powerful, and most advanced countries, confident in the legitimacy of their legitimate entitlement, with the support of the media and the public opinion, and equipped with the best warfare technology, could not prevail, over a period of almost twenty years, against tens of thousands of lightly armed insurgents not particularly loved by the local population and lacking any actual international support. As Marina Calculli argues, ‘non-state armed groups can exploit their multifarious roles in the wider society to circumvent, neutralize and counteract internal and external policies aimed at their destruction’ (Calculli 2020: 479; Cambanis et al. 2019). This crushing outcome certainly encouraged many to keep up their resistance against the West on the Afghani battlefield—mainly with the notorious Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)—and later to bring the battle on the invading countries’ streets with alternative means; think of the attacks of

repression unfolding in Egypt in the name of the strategic priorities of stability and the fight against terrorism.

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Paris, Berlin, Nice, and Barcelona, perpetrated even through truck hijackings, that can be regarded as conceptual offshoots of the IEDs. Even before that, however, the West had already cut off the tree branch on which its legitimacy once sat, namely when it decided to invade Iraq in 2003 as part of the War on Terror triggered by the terrorist attacks staged by Osama Bin Laden (Wilson 2007).

‘A Fairer World’: The Invasion of Iraq and the Consequences of George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s Unpunished Lies The only thing more devastating for the Liberal World Order’s—and the West’s– credibility than the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is the impunity enjoyed by its two main proponents, US President George W. Bush (2001 to 2009) and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997 to 2007) after the lies backing their decisions were revealed. It is easy to see why the Arab community has perceived as a major insult Blair’s appointment as the Special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East entrusted with the Arab–Israeli peace project (Shlaim 2014; Tocci 2011). As it may be remembered, the George W. Bush administration began the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime with a persistent persuasion campaign alleging proof of Iraq’s involvement in the terrorist attacks against the West, with accusations of the country’s development and possession of a huge concealed arsenal of unspecified ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (Phythian 2006). It was also suggested that Iraq might have been providing Al-Qaeda with materials that could be used for the fabrication of ‘portable’ nuclear or chemical/biological devices—the infamous ‘dirty bombs’. In fact, George W. Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussein was the result of a mix of political, ideological, economic, and personal factors. Among the political factors—which were by all means incredibly ambitious, and at the same time most likely influenced by a perception of absolute insecurity pervading the American establishment and public opinion after 9/11—was the project of putting the Middle East, particularly the Levant, under firm American control. This was a drastic change of pace and direction in the United States’ Middle East strategy, seeing how, until 1991, the country had been content with entertaining indirect

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tutelage relations with their allies and regional clients, with no military bases established in the wider Middle East region. All efforts had been focused on a classic ‘balancing by overseas’ strategy—that is, intervening by sea whenever American interests in the area were threatened. Although, as we will see, things had already changed after the 1990– 1991 Gulf War. George W. Bush took a radical turn, identifying ‘regime change’—i.e., the foreign-imposed replacement of the country’s regime— as the main axis of the new American approach to the Middle East (Schmidt and Williams 2008). For a long period, Israel had been America’s only true ally in the region. Over decades, the relationship has deepened to the point where Washington’s decisions often appeared to be heavily conditioned by Tel Aviv’s choices and faits accomplis, at the expense of America’s position in the eyes of the Arab world (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007). However, things changed after the liberation of Kuwait, which resulted in the stationing of American military forces in Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and the United States’ direct involvement in Middle Eastern politics. Expectedly, this involvement intensified after the invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), which also made America’s support of Israeli positions a much more taxing burden, as highlighted by General David Petraeus in 2010, during a hearing before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services as the commander of CENTCOM (the US Central Command, whose area of responsibility ranges from the Middle East to Afghanistan). The difficulties encountered in ‘conquering the hearts and minds’ of the Afghans with the famous ‘comprehensive approach’, and, in general, the limits of the American policy in the Middle East, were summarized as follows: ‘The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [Area of Operations]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support’ (Petraeus 2010; Egnell 2010). The United States’ reputation in the eyes of Arab and Muslim public opinions is regularly damaged when the American government threatens to veto United Nations resolutions condemning the latest settlement of

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illegitimate and illegal Jewish ‘colonies’ in occupied Palestine territories in East Jerusalem. It is noteworthy that Barack Obama was the only US president who tried to remedy this gross prejudice, not only for the sake of international legality, but also to protect the Unites States’ own strategic interests; moreover, Obama also put forth a great effort in the reduction of the US military presence in the region. At the end, though, Washington’s acquiescence to the Israeli illegal settlements in Palestine has been progressively embraced by most American politicians in the last decades (Elgindy 2019). According to the Pentagon’s strategic planning under the George W. Bush administration, the birth of the ‘new Iraq’ was meant to serve as a stepping stone for the consolidation of American hegemony in the Middle East, and a bridgehead for what was deemed to be an inevitable strike against Iran—the true obsession of neoconservatives and more generally the American right: an enduring illusion, considering that more than eighteen years later it is still unquestionable that the ‘Middle East is far beyond the ability of any outside power to control’ (Lynch 2021: 116).4 This agenda was strongly influenced by ideological arguments—mainly the belief that democracy could be exported by war—and its relatively moderate cost. One of the tragic paradoxes of the Iraq campaign is that it was planned and conducted by cutting corners, that is, by deploying the smallest possible number of troops, for the shortest amount of time, keeping expenses very low and expecting to cover them with the returns of the oil extractions from the occupied country. This parsimony was manifestly incongruous with the ambitiousness of the declared goal— designing the new democratic Middle East—but perfectly coherent with the administration’s ‘minimal State’ rhetoric and its aim to privatize its functions as much as possible. This rationale—pivotal in the neoconservative ideology—was also applied to armed forces logistics, and even the protection of sensitive targets, convoys, and fortified camps, was largely entrusted to military contractors, despite having already proved a failure in Afghanistan (Carmola 2010). The ultimate result of all these shortcomings combined was the risk for the ‘new Iraq’ to be overtaken by the ISIS/IS, which rose in a country that had never gotten over the civil war 4 It is no coincidence that high officers of the Pasdaran had been the object ‘targeted assasination’ during the 2020: from that of Qassam Suileimani, commander of Al Quds Brigate on the beginning of January just outside the Bagdad airport, to that of Muslim Shahdan, on the Iraqi–Syrian border on November 31.

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that had followed the invasion until 2017. Iraq is now inside the Iranian orbit, and its army—mainly equipped by the Americans, but also by Russia since 2017—has been salvaged and reorganized by the Pasdaran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iran and Iraq even signed a military cooperation agreement in July 2017, with the explicit intent of promoting cooperation and information sharing in the fight against terrorism and extremism, in border security, logistics, and technical and military support (Abedin 2019). The idea that democracy might thrive in a country after it has been militarily defeated and occupied by the prevailing power is not unreasonable or irrational per se. In his fundamental work on the diffusion of democracy, The Third Wave, Huntington (1991) lists military failure as one possible cause of a transition from an authoritarian or totalitarian regime to democracy (Fassi 2017: 88 and ff). This happened in Italy, Germany, and Japan after WWII—as there is no saying how long their authoritarian regimes would have survived otherwise. In those countries, the Allies’ occupation acted as the necessary midwife of democracy, keeping them from falling out of the fascist pan into the communist fire. However, it must be taken into account that in all these cases, regardless of the eventual collaboration with the surviving local authorities, the success of the operation depended primarily on one condition: the total surrender of the conquered populations on the spiritual as well as the physical level (Hendrickson and Tucker 2005). Also necessary was the absence of a ‘back-up’ ideology that could replace the one fallen with the regime, and inspire the resistance against the occupation. In Germany, razed to the ground by the Allies, and in Japan, devastated by the nuclear bombs, the capitulation of the regimes marked the end of the war (Panebianco 1997). No other subject could rise and claim the support of the population to a new form of resistance (Maull 1990: 91; 2018). Evidently, the latter condition was not in place in Iraq; in fact, the Islamist propaganda took root all the more easily in a country that had become the favorite battlefield of Islamist groups come from all over the world to fight their war against the Americans. The American presence ended up fomenting armed opposition—and leading to the unnatural alliance between former Ba’athists and Islamists—through the dissolution of the Iraqi armed and security forces in the name of a process of ‘deBaathification’ modelled after Germany’s denazification. The occupation also intensified the sectarianism of Shiites and Kurds, which inevitably

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troubled the Sunni minority, that had steadily held power until the toppling of Hussein’s regime. Moreover, the denazification of Germany is largely a myth.5 After the various appeals won in the courts of the German Federal Republic in the early 1950s, the number of former Nazi Party or SS members in positions of power and influence that were actually removed from office amounted to a little over 1000 people (Mueller 2017; Remy 2002). This small number is still significantly greater than the number of Italian and Japanese officers removed from their positions for similar reasons (Parsi 2006: 86–89). From an ideological standpoint, it was believed that Iraq could be made the second democracy of the region after Israel, considered the only democracy in the Middle East despite the country’s growing and increasingly obvious discrimination against the Arab population, which ought to disturb any sincere friend of the Jewish people (Carlstrom 2017).6 In fact, widespread and institutionalized intolerance risks turning Israel from the region’s democracy par excellence into a segregationist regime—an ‘apartheid regime’ to quote former US President Jimmy Carter (Said 1992; Bregman 2014) and Human Rights Watch World Report (2021). As for the economic motives of the war—the idea of paying off the military effort with the revenues of the oil exportations—it is worth pointing out that in 2011 the first big concessions on the new oil fields discovered in the area went to Malaysia (Petronas), Angola (Sonangol), China (CNPC), Russia (Lukoil and Gazprom), Netherlands (Shell), France (Total), Norway (Statoil), England (BP), and Italy (ENI) (Bonds 2013). The Americans had to make do with the crumbs, consisting in two contracts, only one of which was of some relevance. The situation might even worsen in the future, if the political and military bond between Iraq and Iran were to further consolidate—which appears far from unlikely. Lastly, George W. Bush’s personal motives also played a role in his determination to eliminate Saddam Hussein. By the then-president’s own admission, he intended to punish the rais for the attempted killing of his

5 On the deep support of German people to Hitler regime, till the very last days of World War II, and on the failure of postwar denazification see the following: Kershaw (2015), especially Chapter 10 (‘Out of the Ashes’), Stargardt (2015), particularly ‘Epilogue’, and Fritzsche (2008), particularly the second paragraph of Chapter 1 (‘How Far Did Germans Support the Nazis’) and Chapter 4 (‘Intimate Knowledge’). 6 Carlstrom (2017) describes Israel as a society where ‘incitement and racism’ are nowadays ‘a regular feature of political discourse’.

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father, President George H.W. Bush, planned by Saddam’s regime as a revenge for the devastating defeat endured by his country in 1991. Notoriously, the United States had a hard time convincing the other permanent members of the UN Security Council of the validity of these motives, even though the less-than-cooperative demeanor of Iraq toward the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) raised reasonable suspicions about whether Saddam Hussein actually possessed, or intended to acquire an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Russia and China vetoed the resolution designed to consent to the use of force; France and Germany (the latter at the time holding a seat as a temporary member of the Council), also refused to yield to Washington’s pressure. Conversely, the United Kingdom’s active support to the war compelled other countries to assume a more favorable attitude toward it. If the United Kingdom had opposed the war, the European Union would probably have had a uniform stance on the issue, possibly less polemic toward Washington, but certainly against the intervention. On the contrary, Europe and the Union were literally torn apart, with France and Germany opposing the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Poland— to cite only the most sizeable countries—and was unable to come up with a common position, thus missing yet another opportunity to enhance its identity as an international actor. As notorious today, but unknown in 2003, Tony Blair’s support of the war, and his unrelenting proselytism in trying to gather new allies, was carried out being perfectly aware of the falsehood of his arguments (Seaton 2016). We know today that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was already in possession, back then, of reserved information from the British intelligence that ruled out the possibility that Saddam Hussein was hiding a chemical-biological arsenal, much less a nuclear one. Blair not only chose to omit this information when relating his reasons for siding with America from the onset of the campaign, but he also failed to mention it in his communications with the allied leaders, as well as the British and the international public opinion. In short, he deliberately lied to his fellow citizens and to the rest of the world, and this deception was a decisive factor in influencing not so much the public opinions— which were almost ubiquitously against the war—as that of the allied governments. It must be stressed that Blair, unlike Bush Jr., was not the scion of a powerful family who became President almost by chance and through a

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dynastic scheme, nor a born-again Christian who converted to neoconservatism by a small circle of friends and advisors after a long phase of alcohol abuse, who lacked—until September 11, 2001—any coherent and articulate vision on foreign politics and the Liberal World Order’s leadership. In fact, Tony Blair was the leading exponent of the New Reformist Left—which also included Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, and Romano Prodi—which, throughout the 1990s, had succeeded in forcing conservatives out of power in numerous democracies on both sides of the Atlantic, making the New Labor the predominant party at Westminster after the long conservative hegemony inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher. Blair had been the main interpreter and mentor of the so-called ‘third way’ envisaged by Anthony Giddens as a synthesis between neoliberalism and social democracy (Giddens 1998). In light of this distinctive set of conditions, and for the level of ideological and political awareness it implied, Blair’s actions can be regarded as a full-fledged betrayal of the principles and promises of the Liberal World Order, impinging on the very foundation of its credibility. For those who had not opposed the war—and even more so for those who watched the West’s doing from the outside, be it with feelings of trust or suspicion—that act of treachery was a rude awakening. It was more proof that, behind the noble words coating the concept of a new world order informed by liberal principles and characterized by equality and the rule of law, nothing stood stronger than the usual old imperial arrogance. The fact that no penalty—not even a political one such as the banishment from public life—was faced by the authors of this war, which allowed the spores of terrorism to spread throughout the Middle East—among the Islamic communities of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and even in the outskirts of our cities; the war that led to the birth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq—under the command of Jordan native al-Zarqawi—and later of ISIS/IS—under al-Baghdadi)—this was the final straw that revealed the hypocrisies characterizing this phase of the Liberal World Order in the eyes of a huge segment of the world population, as Marina Calculli critically and brilliantly puts (Calculli 2019).7

7 For a critical, brilliant evaluation of the impact of Western intervention on Middle East security, see at least Calculli (2019).

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‘A Richer World for Everyone’: The Financial Crisis and the Substitution of Freedom and Equality with Arrogance and Privilege It is the socioeconomic sphere, the one in which the Liberal World Order suffered from the most devastating attacks frequently originating in its own core, raising the question whether the positions conquered at such a heavy price over the course of the twentieth century could actually be considered final and irreversible. With the end of the Cold War, the promise of the dividends of peace has in fact revealed itself to be a joke. After the enemy was defeated, and new capitals and workforces were integrated into the system, we have witnessed a deliberate reduction of that de fact tax for social cohesion represented by welfare mechanisms in their different forms and declinations. Freedom of trade soon became a dictatorship of the market, where the big financial operators—even more than goods and services producers—are the only ones experiencing increased liberty, from rules, from responsibility, and, ultimately, even from the proper functioning of the market economy (Appelbaum 2019; Lemann 2019). The consequence has been the slow, unrelenting polarization of wealth distribution, starting in the United States, the country where the global financial crisis originated in 2007. In the years preceding the explosion of the famous ‘real estate bubble’, a reaction to the contraction of incomes, Americans had increased the number of workers per family unit—more women entered the job market—increased the working hours, and added to the already high level of private debt (Reich 2010). Meanwhile, hourly wages had been progressively reduced, along with savings rates, and—an even greater structural phenomenon—‘bad jobs’ had been replacing ‘good’ ones (Bolx 2019). To put it simply, the increase in productivity gained with the use of new technologies has been remunerating the capital only. Income rates have not been rising accordingly. As attested by the Global Wage Report of the International Labor Organization (ILO 2015), ‘productivity growth has outstripped wage growth over recent decades’ (Fana 2017: 14)—in other words, even though workers are more productive on average, they are not benefitting from this increase in productivity, either in terms of income or in reduced working hours. As recalled by Raghuram Rajan, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, the ‘rising income inequality in the United

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States and the political pressure it has created for easy credit’ was one of the main ‘fault lines’ that caused the 2007 financial crisis (Rajan 2010: 8). Faced with the widespread perception of stagnant wages and growing job insecurity among the middle class, politicians set out to find a solution that would not imply an increased burden for the government. Their reasoning was based on a very dangerous, albeit effective, assumption: ‘income does not matter, consumption does’. Essentially, the argument goes as follows: if the middle class is able to sustain its consumption, maybe it will pay less attention to the rise of inequality. That real estate, a safe-haven asset and long-term investment, had been turned into a warranty for short-term debt, had already been denounced by Paul Volcker, former president of the Federal Reserve, more than a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers (Drawbaugh and Younglai 2020). Volcker had been one of the protagonists of the concrete actualization of neoliberalism. In fact, the roots of the 2007 crisis can also be found in the responses to the precedent economic bubble, the one related to the ‘new economy’, that at the start of the millennium had revealed the widely speculative, fragile, and iniquitous nature of the economic growth registered during Bill Clinton’s mandates: in the 1990s, the poverty rate in the United States rose to 11.3 percent (Shaxon 2019). During that decade, the debt rate of the middle class reared up significantly, proving decisive in both the 2001 and 2007 crises. The collapse of Enron—the seventh-largest American company by capitalization—in December 2001, was followed by the failure of the telecommunications giant WorldCom in June 2002, prompting a domino effect throughout the entire American economy and, obviously, affecting the unemployment rate as well. Both on that occasion and six years later, the consequences of these burst economic bubbles would have been less severe if they had not been preceded by legal proceedings aimed at facilitating speculation. Bill Clinton himself approved the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, removing the mandatory separation between commercial and investment banks (Luconi 2016: 231). As a result, bank deregulation widely surpassed the limits reached during the Reagan years. The legislation favored new concentrations of financial activity by subjects that were able to regain the ground they had lost during the 1980s, like Citicorp. It is clear that a further critical element had been added to the financial system. In 2000, as completion of Clinton’s neoliberal policies, the Commodity

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Futures Modernization Act was approved, which deregulated over-thecounter derivatives, further exposing the financial market to the risks of speculation. As has been clearly explained: ‘One problem was that derivatives and securitization were so complex that they introduced a brand-new risk into the system: ignorance. It was virtually impossible for investors to grasp the real risks of these products. […] To put it another way, as innovation took hold, finance stopped looking like a means to an end—as the word finer had once implied. Instead, Wall Street became a never-ending loop of financial flows and frantic activity in which financiers often acted as if their profession was an end in itself’ (Tett 2019: 37). It was the betrayal of that good society that had granted economic growth and social peace in the second postwar period and during the Cold War—albeit with some phases of stall and recession, as is physiological in the alternation of economic cycles (Galbraith 1996). The ‘equality society’ built in those years in the United States—defined by liberal standard, of course—was not one of total egalitarianism, but it was based on a shared agreement on what would constitute an indecent level of inequality (Alvaredo et al. 2018).8 This is what Robert Reich called the ‘Basic Bargain’, a ‘core social covenant’ according to which the greater part of what was produced by the economy was consumed by the working class (Reich 2010: 28), whose wages were raised at the same speed as productivity, and were sufficient to sustain high levels of consumption and to feed a flow of savings that could finance investments. Thus, the pact between capitalist economy and political democracy was altered— the pact that in the second half of the twentieth century had enabled both parties to be strengthened through reciprocal balancing, and most of all, to popularize a market economy in the two-fold meaning of the word. One of ‘the major failings of what passed for liberalism over the last 30 years’—has recently written Timothy Garton Ash—has been to advance ‘a one-dimensional economic liberalism, at worst a dogmatic market fundamentalism that had as little purchase on human reality as the dogmas of dialectical materialism or papal infallibility’, forgetting that 8 See on this issue the still crucial report by Alvaredo et al. (2018). The authors underlined that income inequality has increased in nearly all world regions in recent decades, but at different speeds. The fact that inequality levels are so different among countries, even when countries share similar levels of development, highlights the important roles that national policies and institutions play in shaping inequality’ and forecast that till 2050 ‘in a future in which ‘business as usual’ continues, global inequality will further increase’. In particular, The Executive Summary of the WIR: 5 and 12.

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‘extreme inequality at the top is in practice incompatible with equal life chances because, through educational and other forms of privilege, it perpetuates that hereditary meritocracy’ and that ‘distrust of any concentration of power is a quintessential ingredient of liberalism, which wants all kinds of power to be limited, accountable and dispersed. But in recent decades, Anglo-American liberalism, while continuing vigorously to question public power, has been far too indulgent of private power’ (Garton Ash 2020). We must remember that democracy and a market economy are not founded on the same principle: a free-market economy breeds inequality because it rewards the most efficient organization on the factors of production and individual merit and abilities. Democracy, on the other hand, is founded on the premise of equality, in spite of the obvious and irreducible differences that make each individual an unrepeatable instance. Democracy and a market economy have historically sustained and strengthened each other in the West, not because they posit the same principles or preach the same virtues, but because a market economy alleviates and corrects the defects and excesses of democracy, and democracy alleviates and corrects the defects and excesses of a market economy. The alliance between these two formidable institutions was established in the era of the great revolutions, American and French, when the power of a market economy was exploited to uproot the privileges of the Ancien Régime societies. Although those blood-and-birth-based privileges were challenged in the name of equality, they were eradicated thanks to the superior force exerted by market economy as a form of economic organization. Market economy was literally employed to break down inequalities characteristic of the Ancien Régime society and was not a product of the logic informing modern economics. However, this did not transform the market into a factor of equality, nor did it turn democracy and market economy into fellow travelers. If anything, it left the field open for the creation of novel and diverse forms of inequality, this time produced within the market itself by the economic action. The equality principle postulated in the premises of democracy, whose immediate economic implication was of delimiting a playing field free from artificial barriers that could get in the way of economic development, had become insufficient. Because of its association with market economy, democracy now had the responsibility of preserving the conditions in which equality would be something more than a long-lost original moment: the ‘premise of equality’ had to be completed with the ‘promise of equality’. That

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meant ensuring that the old privileges, torn down by the joint action of democracy and market economy, would not be replaced by new privileges generated by market economy itself, so that the ‘society of equality’ would never again give way to the return of the ‘society of privilege’ (Parsi 2012: 89–100). Yet this is exactly what happened, especially after 1989, when it went largely overlooked that when democracy and market economy are deprived of each other’s support they can be swamped by their own defects instead of being mitigated through their interactions. The decline in consumption, the erosion of the middle class, the polarization of wages, and the rise of inequality are unsettling first and foremost from a political perspective. The point is not whether economic inequality should be eliminated to make political equality possible, but we have to make sure that such differences are not too vast. In order to protect political equality from the effects of economic inequality, ‘what is crucial is that the people know and believe that their unequal economic power is not a reason for making their political voice unheard’ (Urbinati 2014: 52). Without the middle class, the society of equals is doomed to succumb to a new society of privilege. This is already happening, not because of the market per se—as is worth repeating—but because of its solitary and uncontrolled growth, and of the illiberal hegemony of its logic over all others (Dardot and Laval 2014). ‘The market, over time, is its own worst enemy’; and ‘although market failure may be catastrophic, market success is just as politically dangerous’ (Judt 2010: 195). As pointed out by Colin Crouch, ‘the problem with contemporary liberalism as a political movement rather than as a philosophy is that it depends on a certain balance of forces in society to provide it with the variety it needs’ (Crouch 2014: 141). Hence, ‘If the power balance shifts’—as it has in recent years—‘to a position of great inequality and the emergence of hegemonic elites, liberalism has difficulty mounting any social challenge to it’. (Ibidem). There is no ineluctable economic rationale behind the transformation that capitalism is undergoing and imposing on society as a whole, because, as noted by Thomas Piketty, ‘the history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality that took place in most economically developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due

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largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined’ (Piketty 2014: 20). Another author that has given much thought to the impact of inequality on the holding of the most evolved social systems, on the destiny of the middle class, and on the future of democracy, is the economist Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s greatest experts on inequality. He, too, observed that ‘the decline of the middle class and its diminished economic power trigger a number of social and political effects. One of these effects is that support for the public provision of social services, principally education and health, declines. The rich may prefer to opt out and move toward private funding and consumption of these services (as they often do in emerging market economies), guaranteeing them higher quality’ (Milanovic 2016: 197). The privatization of social risk—the transition from a situation in which the state acknowledges its own role and contributes to the insurance of individuals, to one where the state disengages from the matter, leaving the individuals to provide for themselves—is one of the distinctive traits of the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism. This has been remarked by a number of authors investigating the long-term relation between social risk and solidarity, analyzing its trajectory from its original form to the neoliberal configuration (Calhoun 2006; Di Palma 2011; Weber 2004). The idea that the decision on what constitutes a risk and whether or not to insure it—and at what conditions and costs—should be the exclusive responsibility of each individual, and that this should guarantee greater freedom, is naïve to say the least. The asymmetries in information, knowledge, and income disposable for the fulfillment of essential needs play a critical role in this decision. It is perhaps worth reminding that the first measures of statutory insurance in the workplace were introduced in Germany by Chancellor Bismarck, a conservative fiercely opposed to liberalism, and in Great Britain, in the immediately following years, by extremely moderate governments, in a political system where social elites had a substantially hegemonic role. To those who would argue that the privatization of insurance is more efficient because it is less expensive, we must object. The social fragmentation induced by the difference between those who can afford better and costlier services and those who

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cannot is a price that should be deemed unacceptable from a purely liberal perspective, because it alters the probability of success for different individuals and ends up marketing values that have nothing to do with the market (Colombo and Tapay 2004). Milanovic also warns us that ‘the great middle-class squeeze (…), driven by the forces of automation and globalization, is not at an end’, and in the society that is beginning to emerge, even ‘education may not have much influence’, while ‘chance and family background will play much more of a role than before’ (Milanovic 2016: 214–215). The data already show this, if we consider that in the richest 10 percent of the American population by income it is impossible to discern any differences in observable factors—such as education or experience—able to account for the wages of the richest 1 percent amounting to more than ten times from those of the remaining 99 percent (Piketty 2014: IX). In the near future, ‘family endowments in wealth and, perhaps more importantly, connections, will matter more’ (Milanovic 2016: 215). Consequently, the ‘new capitalism, where the contradiction between labor and capital will have been resolved at the top (in a peculiar way, since the richest people will be both the top labor earners and the top capitalists), will be more unequal. Success will depend on the chance of having been born well and having luck in life, more than it did in the past century (which was a century of major political and social upheavals). The new capitalism will resemble a big casino, with one important exception: those who have won a few rounds (often through being born into the right family) will be given much better odds to keep on winning. Those who have lost a few rounds will see the subsequent odds turn increasingly against them’ (Milanovic 2016: 216).

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PART II

The Four Sides of the Iceberg

CHAPTER 4

The Decline of American Leadership and the Rise of Chinese and Russian Authoritarian Powers

The Liberal World Order, like the Titanic, is not an unsinkable ship, and it has been diverted by the unskillfulness of its captain to fulfill the shipowner desires, who has proved himself unable to prevent the drift toward a course that is much more dangerous than the one originally planned. On this new course, the eerie profile of an iceberg stands against the dark sky. This iceberg has four faces, all of them menacing in different ways, none of which to be underestimated. (1) The first face consists of a normal and recurring phenomenon in international politics: a new distribution of power within the system connected to the actors’ divergent foreign policies, which has modified relations between the United States, Russia, and China, while the background is dominated by the fragility and weakness of Europe. (2) The second face accounts for a relatively new phenomenon, with which we have been dealing for about twenty years. This is the molecularization and privatization of the threat that enabled variously organized and ramified terroristic groups to deploy a considerable amount of highly destabilizing means of destruction. Its effects are chiefly evident and virulent in the countries overlooking the Mediterranean Basin and contribute to the gravity of the migratory emergency. (3) The third face is something altogether unprecedented: the contestation of the Liberal World Order itself, of its principles and legitimacy, coming from the superpower that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_4

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has been—and remains—its greatest beneficiary, the United States. As we will see, there are explanations for this phenomenon that run deeper than the immoderate personality of the 45th occupant of the White House. (4) The fourth face is constituted by the shrinking leeway available to Western democracies, seemingly unable to hold their course between the mentors of sovereignist and identitarian populisms, on the one hand, and the minstrels of stateless technocratic oligarchies on the other. These two opposing visions that idealize and deny, each in their own distinctive fashion, the role of the people, —who seem to have disappeared altogether from the political, economic, and cultural horizon (Marsili and Varoufakis 2017). In this chapter, I will argument how, during the last decade, China and Russia have grown in power and influence. In comparison with the unipolar era, these two authoritarian powers are now able to strategically exploit the mistakes of the United States—and, more generally, its retrenchment. Putin’s Russia has considerably reorganized and modernized its military capacity, most evidently in the Arctic region. It has also been able to capitalize on Western indecisiveness and division in Syria (2013) and Crimea (2014). In the Middle East, Russia cleverly profited the most from the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, and started its own triangulation with Iran and Turkey, the latter a member of NATO) as a response to the analogous conduct held by one between the United States with Israel and Saudi Arabia. China has enhanced the size and quality of its armed forces, especially with an intense naval rearmament program aimed at the creation of a ‘deep water fleet’. Beijing’s assertive policies in the Chinese Sea have marked the beginning of a grand strategy distinguished by forceful nationalism, which has been the cause for concern in several Asian countries. China has also built up its soft power assembling an international economic and financial infrastructure potentially capable of replacing the current one, as well as through the commitment to its flagship Belt and Road Initiative. The former enterprise is linked to the financial crisis of 2007– 2008, which has changed the cost/benefit ratio of tailing the United States in the Chinese perception. The relationship between Beijing and Washington seems bound to remain oppositional, both in the security and the economic-financial domain. At the security level, the North Korean nuclear question is still open, and tension may escalate at the expenses

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of Hong Kong and, more importantly, Taiwan, which should not be overlooked. At the economic level, the interrelation between two different types of capitalism—the ‘concession capitalism’ of China and the ‘market capitalism’ of the United States (and the West at large)—risks escalating the conflict between the fatigued superpower and the growing one to a global dimension. However, the intertwinement between their economic systems makes the Chinese-American rivalry incomparable to the Cold War-time Soviet-American conflict.

‘Anchors away’: the Russians are back and the Chinese are in Over the last few years, starting with the progressive disengagement of the United States from the Middle East, we have witnessed what appears to be a redistribution of power among the main actors of the international system (Acharya 2017, 2018; Buzan 2004; Flockhart 2016; Ikenberry 2020).1 In fact, there was no reduction in America’s power. While it is true that Russia and China have increased their military expenses compared to the past, the United States has not been sitting idly by. Indeed, the Kremlin has embarked on a massive program of modernization and military reform. Between 2007 and 2016, Russia’s annual military spending nearly doubled, adding up to little short of $70 billion, the third-highest level of defense spending in the world, following the United States and China. Military spending in 2016 amounted to 5.5 percent of Russia’s GDP the highest proportion since the country’s independence in 1990, and the highest percentage spent on defense by any major economy that year. Although Russian military spending decreased in 2017 and 2018, it rose again in 2019 to reach $65.1 billion, 3.9 percent of the country’s 2019 GDP (Wezeman 2020). For the most part, the Russians have filled the gap between them and the United States in the area of command and control of their armed 1 Flockhart (2016) arguments around a “multi-order” in which the State-center order and the individual-center order coexist. Acharya (2017, 2018) talks about a “multiplex” in which different political and economic modernities will coexist and will maintain a certain degree of interdependence. Buzan (2004) had introduced the concept of “1 (super/global power the U.S.) + 2 (great/regional power: China and Russia)” international order.Ikenberry (2020) is the more optimistic on the surviving of a Liberal International Order. For a critical approach, see Parmar (2018: 172): who notes: “A Gramscian-Kautskyian synthesis combines consideration of domestic and international class-based imperial hegemonies and offers a good explanation of the existing order”.

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forces, managing to reorganize them even more efficiently than in the years of the Soviet Union (Renz 2014; Sokolsky 2017). In the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Syria, the forces of the Red Army—the name is still in use— have progressively and deliberately demonstrated their increased ability to carry out complex and joint actions—land, sea, air—with the employment of tactical missiles and field artillery—showing to have caught up with the ground lost in the past and be now at the forefront in command and control capacity. The demonstration of power and coordination with which Russia initiated the exponential increase of its involvement in Syria was rather meaningful and spectacular (Charap et al. 2019). The Russian high command opted for bombing the rebel positions—an action that signaled the beginning of a turnaround in the dynamic of Russia’s support of the regime—carried out through the joint deployment of aerial, naval, and land means. The salvos of artillery and short-range missiles from the batteries lined up in the Syrian theater of operation were joined by the bombs and missiles launched by strategic bombers flying from the bases of the Baltic and the White Sea, which hit their targets after circumnavigating the European continent, performing numerous air refueling operations, and touching the NATO airspace. All of this was topped by the waves of cruise missiles launched by the Caspian Fleet (Kofman 2020). This was an operation of lethal synchronism whose purpose was not only to annihilate the enemy positions, but primarily to send NATO a clear signal that ‘Russia was back’, and with even greater military power than the former Soviet Union. The same aim inspired the big maneuver dubbed ‘Zapad (West) 2017’, which took place in September 14–20, on the borders with Ukraine and the Baltic republics, and involved 12,700 soldiers, 700 armored vehicles, and dozens of naval and aerial units. The intention to show its muscle— and the determination to use it—was also behind Russia’s decision to position short-range missiles equipped with nuclear warheads in the Kaliningrad Oblast—formerly Koenigsberg, hometown of Immanuel Kant—a portion of Russian territory located within the EU borders (Boulègue 2017; Giles 2018). Finally, we must not overlook the renewed activism of Russia in the Arctic area, which is all the more strategic nowadays because of global warming. In 2017, Russia reactivated the Alakurtti base on the Finnish border—Finland recently reintroduced conscription—which now hosts a wing of the Navy Aviation equipped with SU-24 aircrafts—known as

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Fencer in the NATO reporting system—and a wing of MI-24 helicopters (Hind), as well as a brigade specialized in Arctic operations. Generally speaking, since 2015, Russia has been strengthening its presence in the Arctic, which had faltered after 1990, and is planning the construction of two more bases in the area (Conley and Rohloff 2015; Melino and Conley 2020). Aside from the very realistic opportunity for opening new Arctic routes, thereby connecting Europe, Asia, and North America much more quickly via sea, the retreat of glaciers facilitates the exploitation of the region’s natural resources, making its protection ever more essential (Goodman and Sun 2020. For different opinions: Weidacher Hsiung 2020; Buchanan 2020). According to the US Geological Survey, 13 percent of the oil, and 30 percent of the natural gas present in the world have not yet been discovered, and a large part of these reserves is located in the Arctic (Bird et al. 2008). Russia has invested in the region more than any other country in the last five years, and has requested the United Nations to acknowledge its maritime sovereignty of an area spanning over 1.5 million square kilometers. In March 2017, President Vladimir Putin visited—with great media coverage—a new structure named ‘The Northern Clover’, Russia’s latest and northernmost military base in the Arctic Ocean, located on Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of 192 islands, only 800 kilometers away from the North Pole. It has the capacity to accommodate 150 aerial defense unit soldiers, and to operate for eighteen months without supplies. It is worth noting that Russia’s activism has compelled Canada to modernize its fleet, equipping it with armed icebreaker units, and restart a project that had been set aside a few years prior, arming a nuclear attack submarine with obvious goals of ‘anti-access’—preventing a counterpart’s access to an operative area—and ‘area denial’—inhibiting the counterpart’s scope in the eventuality—in order to catch up with Russia’s remarkable advancements in this military strategy (Jacob 2017; Jankowski 2018). The tragedy of Kursk, the Soviet nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, at the beginning of the Vladimir Putin era, occurred while the vessel was returning from a training mission conducted with the nuclear battlecruiser Peter the Great . Possibly torpedoed by a US unit or hit by friendly fire by Peter the Great , but most likely due to a reactor malfunction, the submarine was severely damaged by an explosion and sunk to the bottom of the sea. Some crew members—23 out of 118—survived for a few hours or maybe days, after the incident:

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a situation that was only known to the Command of the Northern Fleet, which denied the news for forty-eight hours. When the news spread, an international solidarity effort mobilized to try and save the lives of the Kursk crewmembers. Such an operation was technically possible, albeit not easy, with the technology of the time. On Putin’s precise order, all offers of help were rejected, while the Russian Navy—then in a state of neglect that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier—engaged in a series of inconclusive attempts that compounded the agony and the tragic fate of the survivors. When, after five days of failed attempts, Moscow finally accepted the aid of Norway and Great Britain, it was too late. The submarine fleet had always been the peak unit of the Russian Navy, the true crown jewel and the only division that could compete with the Western maritime forces, althought in those years, on the White Sea, where most of the submarines were stationed, the installations and the submarines themselves were a rusty and disheartening sight (Barany 2004). The Kursk disaster, with the poor management of its rescue, probably marked the lowest point in the deterioration of the military apparatus of what was still the second superpower on the planet (Barany 2007). It also represented a moment of burning humiliation for Russia as a whole. On August 25 of that year, during a meeting in Moscow with then deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, Nadezhda Tylik, mother of a young sailor who had lost his life in the tragedy, loudly inveighed against Klebanov for not having done everything possible to save the lives of the crew: as a consequence of her public protest, she was sedated by an agent of the FSB—the heir of the KGB, of which Putin had been a colonel under the Soviet rule. A video recording of the incident went viral, causing great perturbation. Putin distanced himself from the tragedy, even refusing to interrupt his holiday in Sochi to avoid associating his image with that of the manifest decay of the Russian Navy. The Chinese, on the other hand, are setting up a remarkable blue-water navy, doubling the number of aircraft carriers in their possession (McDevitt 2020). They inaugurated Shandong in 2018, entirely built in China, added to the smaller Liaoning —based on the Russian Kuznetsov-class ships—by late 2019. Additionally, they introduced new missile cruisers (type 055), and multiplied the number of submarines, frigates, and destroyers (type 052), as well as consistently increasing its amphibious expeditionary component. The Chinese have also set up a third, bigger aircraft carrier, equipped with catapults and arresting gears to carry aircraft

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requiring more space for approach and take-off, which should be operative around 2022–2023 (Joe 2020). There is an obvious correlation between the upgrade of the Chinese Navy, China’s new maritime power projection, and the country’s dependence on international trade—particularly sea trade, which is exposed to numerous risks, such as piracy, that have become a matter of national security (Cole 2012). As already theorized many decades ago by Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), a US rear admiral and founder of the concept of ‘sea power’, seas and oceans, as they cover a great share of the planet surface, are crucial for transportation and communication, hence their control is the ultimate goal in the competition between powers with hehemonic aspirations (Mahan 2015). China, in particular, has been enacting the so-called String of Pearls strategy (Lintner 2019), consisting of privileged diplomatic, commercial, and military relations with some of the countries overlooking the Indian Ocean, with the aim of controlling the sea lines of communication most strategic for oil supply (Ashraf 2017; Reardon-Anderson 2018). Today, China is the world’s top oil consumer and importer, having surpassed the United States, Japan, and Europe (British Petroleum 2020). Seventy percent of the global energy traffic, and half of global commerce—60,000 out of the 90,000 naval units comprising the global rear commercial fleet—transit along the maritime East–West route, across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the straits, with 15.2 million oil barrels crossing the Strait of Malacca every day, in comparison with the 17 million crossing the Strait of Hormuz, and the 3.8 million transiting the Bab el-Mandeb (UNCTAD 2019; see also Center for Strategic and International Studies 2020). The extraordinary increase in commercial exchange between China and foreign nations dates back to the early 1980s, when the Reforms and Openness program was approved as part of the great transformation launched by Deng Xiaoping (Bin 2015). This clearly did not—and still does not—imply devoting less attention to Beijing’s regional interests, especially if we consider that in that moment the regional framework was increasingly perceived to be on the verge of a disadvantageous alteration (Fravel 2008). East Asian waters were also appealing to other states in the area, and, as a consequence, Beijing sensed a direct challenge to Chinese authority over the Asian seas in the context of local resource competition. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was asked to protect ‘the rights and the maritime interests’ of China; that is, to grant it access to the resources contained in its surrounding waters, thus contributing to the

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country’s economic development. For this reason, the action perimeter of the PLA Navy was gradually widened to encompass the of East Asia entire maritime sphere (Dossi 2014). The perception of a great challenge is precisely what gave way to the Chinese claim over the surrounding islands and archipelagos. The most notorious cases are the controversy over the Senkaku Islands—contended with Japan—and the disputes over two archipelagos in the South China Sea: the Paracel Islands—also claimed by Vietnam—and the Spratly Islands—also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. These conflicts originated in the late 1980s and have made a comeback in the last few years (Kilcullen 2020). On March 14, 1988, China and Vietnam engaged in an open battle— won by the former—over the Johnson South Reef, part of the Spratly Islands. The sequence of events is a testament to China’s determination in asserting its ambitions. In the first half of the 1980s, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan occupied a great part of the Beijing-claimed archipelago. In 1988, the Chinese government decided to establish a permanent settlement in the island of Fiery Cross Reef. Hanoi retorted by taking possession of five islands in the proximity of Fiery Cross, with the intention of creating an anti-Chinese belt around it. These tensions exploded into an open altercation, and in under an hour, the Chinese ships, which were superior both in equipment and technical specifications, sank two of the Vietnamese ships and damaged a third. The battle was a concrete demonstration that the goal of Beijing’s naval doctrine was to preserve the Chinese authority over disputed sea space was to be taken extremely seriously. The Spratly archipelago was fully within the scope of action defined by the ‘defense of near seas’, and the skills employed in the battle were those that had been prioritized at the start of the naval modernization program.2 The motives behind these disputes relate to the vindication and defense of China’s sovereignty and rights of resource exploitation in contiguous waters—even when theese actions violate international law, as happened in the case of the verdict on the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea (July 12, 2016), with which the Permanent Court of Arbitration rejected the Chinese demands as inconsistent (Mazarr 2017).

2 See the Council on Foreign Relations’ “Territorial Disputes in the South China Sea”, Global Conflict Tracker. Available at https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/ territorial-disputes-south-china-sea. Accessed 13 December 2020.

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Beijing contested loudly and disdainfully the adjudication, alleging historical rationale. However, although the dispute has age-old roots, what compelled China to claim the islands with such imperiousness is the unequivocal increase of its military power, which allows it the country to support its claims even using force (Rapp-Hooper 2016). We must remember that the South China Sea is one of the most important international trade routes—with 30 percent of global maritime trade—the source of 10 percent of global fish production, and it stores significant reserves of oil and natural gas (UNCTAD 2019). Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese naval doctrine has been asserted based on a growing awareness of the strategic weight of sea lines of communication (Fravel 2019). To reduce the vulnerability of the routes connecting Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb to Shanghai through the Malacca and Sunda Straits, Beijing is planning on improving earth supply, as well as actualizing the project for a ‘canal on the Kra Isthmus, the narrowest point of the Malay Peninsula in Thai territory. The canal would reduce the track from the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand to the ports of China by 1500 nautical miles’. Its impact would be comparable to the one generated by transcontinental railroads and the Panama Canal on the commercial relevance of the Strait of Magellan over a century ago (Ferrante 2017: 23; Jenner 2019). Chinese documents have started to mention ‘maritime security protection’ in global waters—i.e., security of navigation along sea routes—with specific reference to nontraditional threats such as piracy, maritime terrorism, and transnational criminality. At the end of the 2000s, this interest in maritime security was again encapsulated in a new slogan—the ‘construction of harmonious oceans’ (Shixin 2009)—incorporated in the official ideology. The PLA Navy was assigned new tasks, belonging to the category of ‘military operations other than war’, that is, all operations entailing the possible use of armed force with a lesser degree of intensity than in actual war. Particular emphasis was placed on the participation of the Chinese Navy in terms of collaboration with other naval forces, with cooperation identified as the critical tool for the construction of ‘harmonious oceans’ (Dossi 2014). To this end, China has pursued a steady, yet swift, development of the logistical support system on which its navy may rely for naval operations outside of East Asia. The central aim of the system is to be able to refuel in friendly ports: Sittwe and Kyaukpyu in Burma; Chittagong in Bangladesh; Singapore; Hambantota in Sri Lanka; Marao in the Maldives; Gwadar and Pasni in Pakistan; Aden in Yemen; Port Salalah in Oman; and Obock

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in Djibouti. The good relations maintained by China with some of the states on the Indian Ocean ensure the necessary logistic support in the region without having to sign any military cooperation deals (Kostecka 2011; Marantidou 2014). This is what the United States’ naval doctrine defines as ‘military places’, as opposed to ‘military bases’—not permanent structures directly managed, but footholds utilized for basic refurnishing needs. The exception is to be found in Djibouti, where Obock represents indeed the first permanent Chinese naval base in a foreign country, and quite far from China’s territorial waters. Beijing can thus remain loyal to its principle of not establishing foreign bases, without having to give up the in loco logistic support that is vital for operating continuously far from the national territory. The growing military presence of Beijing in the South China Sea, and the numerous controversies related to the exclusive economic zone and the related exploitation of ichthyic and energy resources, have newly aggravated its relations with Hanoi, which were already complicated after the attempted invasion of Vietnam by China in 1979, in retaliation for the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The dispute over the Spratly and Paracel Islands—two archipelagos located approximately 400 nautical miles of the Vietnamese coast, consisting of a myriad of small islets and reefs, habitable only to a minimal extent, but claimed for various reasons by China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan—is at least partially within the range of the ‘traditional controversy’ between China and Vietnam, but is also a manifestation of China’s new naval strategy. In its defense white paper of 2015, China made an important turn, affirming the concept of open seas protection (Information Office of the State Council 2015). Beijing deems the reinforcement of its ‘antiaccess’ and ‘area denial’ capacity in the South China Sea a priority. The leadership of Xi Jinping has brought new life to the everlasting territorial claims on the South China Sea, in marking the area making it a primary interest for national security, along with Taiwan and Tibet (Sardellone 2017; Saunders et al. 2019). The flipside of this assertiveness has been compelling Vietnam to pursue military relations with Washington and strengthen its own navy, following Japan’s and South Korea’s suit. The latter is in the process of equipping a light aircraft carrier, also in response to North Korea’s growing belligerency. In itself, the review of the naval strategy and doctrine of employment of the Chinese Navy does not necessarily entail a hostile attitude

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toward the United States, as, for all its improvements, China is not— or at least not yet—a naval superpower capable of challenging American dominance on international seas (Gresh 2020). The PLA Navy does not have naval capacity comparable to the US’s, and not even the most optimistic observers can hope for a decisive turn when the unit that will join the Liaoning becomes fully operative. Washington plans to expand its already imposing fleet in coming years, equipping 12 aircraft carriers—it currently has 11—; 38 amphibian assault units for the Marine Expeditionary Corps—of which 10 are light aircraft carriers—along with 10 swift transportation units; 102 among various cruisers, destroyers, and frigates; 52 littoral combat ships; and 66 attack submarines, totaling— together with the other surface units, the logistic and support units, and the 12 ballistic missile submarines—355 ships (O’Rourke 2017).3 Clearly, the disparity of power on the open oceans is bound to persist, and China’s relation to the United States remains one of subordination in this regard. On a regional scale, however, the two states are moving according to a logic—if not yet a plan—of equality, as the US views China’s perceived threats to its freedom of access to the regional waters of East Asia as already concrete and imminent. The PLA program of naval modernization has strengthened the interdiction capacity of the navy in the Taiwan Strait and in the entire Eastern Sea space. China’s goal of inhibiting access to the area is tied to the development of ‘anti-access/area denial’ capacities, in which a key role is played by the submarine component. Should the Chinese Navy actually become capable of denying US forces access to the disputed zone—or to significantly raise the risks for the US Navy in trying to do so—Washington would face a credibility issue with its Asian allies (Twomey 2014). Leaving predictions aside, it appears clear that if the Chinese maritime rebalancing the American leadership, this challenge is limited to the regional horizon, and the country’s interdiction capacity inside the East Asian perimeter, without a significant global projection. This perspective, in light of the disconcerting developments of North Korea’s nuclear threat, nonetheless demonstrates the osmosis between regional and global crises. As much as Russia and China are modernizing their apparatuses, America still remains, by a long shot, the top military superpower on 3 The littoral ships program has been temporarily suspended. The US Navy has commisioned new frigates (FREMM type) from Italian company Leonardo SpA.

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the planet, with a firepower and a projection radius that are effectively global. Even before the conspicuous budget increase declared by Donald Trump in Spring 2017 ($54 billion), the United States’ military expenditure equaled that of the next eight ‘heavy spenders’ all together: in 2019, in USD billions spent: $732 US, $261 China, $71.1 India, $65.1 UK, $63.8 France, $61.9 Saudi Arabia, $50.1 Russia, $49.3 Germany, and $47.6 Japan (SIPRI 2020). Things are somewhat different—at least concerning the relations between the United States and China—if we move from the purely military dimension of power to its aggregated conception, which is comprised of military force, economic relevance, and demographic weight. Following the 2007 financial crisis, the relative economic positions of the two countries have come closer, and the Chinese growth trend, albeit downsized, is still imposing. This overview of capacity stocks, however, is not our main reason for speaking of a new world arrangement (RAND 2017). Far more influential have been the policies adopted by the governments of these three great powers. It is in this sphere that a change has occurred, one much more meaningful, and in some ways irreversible and dangerous, for the survival of the Liberal World Order. The will of the United States to project its power has gradually decreased, and is contrasted by an expansion of ambition and strategic action by Russia and China—with different modalities, as we will see, but to the same end: counteracting the unconditional freedom of action of the United States and challenging the Liberal World Order (Mastanduno 2019).

From Obama disengagement in the Mediterranean to the Moscow-Tehran-Ankara triangle The strategic withdrawal of the United States from the Liberal World Order began well before Donald Trump took his oath of office as the 45th president in front of the Capitol Building (Grieco 2021). The America of Barack Obama had already chosen a similar policy. Concepts such as selective engagement, retrenchment, offshore balancing, and leading from behind were common in strategy documents in the eight years of the Obama administration (Brooks et al. 2012), even before they were concretely—albeit tentatively—applied in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and even Europe—at least until the reappearance of the Russian menace (Quinn 2015). This jargon points out the redefinition of the strategic posture of the United States after the phase of hypertension and overexposure that had characterized the presidency of George W. Bush.

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This choice could be deemed an appropriate adjustment to the changed conditions of the political and economic/financial landscape, both domestically and internationally—especially as the conjuncture was more favorable to actors that had been on the rise for a long time (China), or were re-emerging after a long period (Russia) (Layne 2018). Besides, it specifically accounted for the fact that the response to the economic and financial crisis—far more than security issues—had been the leitmotiv that had brought Obama to the White House for two consecutive mandates. We must not forget that George W. Bush’s imperial overstretch can be regarded more as a reaction to the shock of September 11 than the outcome of a strategic plan (Snyder 2009). As the first ‘Pacific President’ of the United States, Obama shifted the focus away from the Atlantic Ocean—the move had been implied in the strategy of George W. Bush before 9/11 swept away all preconceived plans—as he deliberated the gradual reduction of US military presence and engagement in Europe and the Middle East (Weisbrode 2009). The latter received a different kind of attention—political rather than military—which was manifested in the extraordinary effort to achieve an inclusive and multilateral agreement for the internationally controlled dismissing of the Iranian nuclear program in July 2015. Theoretically, the decreased assertiveness of the United States should not have impaired the stability of the Liberal World Order. In fact, it should have made more room for multilateralism, the work method par excellence and a liberal asset of the international system (Gaietta and Zotti 2020; He 2019). But, in order to be considered suitable for the safeguard of the Liberal World Order—therefore of the American interests—multilateralism must be able to rely on the synergy between the politics of the United States, Russia, and China—we gloss over Europe for now, as the Old Continent’s political difficulties will deserve a specific chapter to be examined. In other words, a more multipolar arrangement of the international system, such as the one we are slowly moving toward, does not undermine the pursuit of ‘club goods’ useful for the safeguard and realization of collective interests—as long as these interests are shared. This is not dependent upon the multilateral method, despite it being theoretically preferable, as shared interests could also be pursued unilaterally, at the expense and care of the hegemon or leader of the system. But no multilateralism is possible when the actors have different and competing solutions to the main issues, and incompatible organizational principles for the international order (Mastanduno 1999).

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US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright effectively grasped the notion with her formula ‘multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must4 ’. The pursuit of ends deemed as nonnegotiable by those who—like the triumphant United States after the Cold War—find themselves at the vertex of a unipolar system, cannot be held hostage by a work method. But there is a difference between the situation of America in those years, as a solitary superpower, and its present condition, characterized by a sort of hesitation in the projection of its power. Back then, America might as well have walked alone—or so it was believed—hoping to gather friends, allies, and clients along the way by virtue of its excess power. Its main problem lay in curbing its own ambition, presenting its actions as conducive to the support and maintenance of the liberal order—as well as, obviously, economic success—rather than to the exclusive fulfillment of its national interests. Today, America needs more than the mere support—active and military, not only passive and political—of its allies, as we have seen in Afghanistan, where Europe and Canada have provided around 40 percent of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF Force) troops, paying a death tribute of nearly a quarter of the total (Breccia 2020). America also needs the other powers to consider themselves its partners, rather than its rivals, in the design and support of the international order. This is precisely what has changed in the last few years, with Russia and China admitting—first and foremost to themselves—to have not always shared the interests of the United States and, more generally, of the West (Gallis 2008; Kilcullen 2005). In fact, the international system can be assimilated to the ‘1+2’ scheme foreshadowed by Barry Buzan as a possible outcome of the ‘unipolar moment’ of the international system: one with a global superpower as its pivot sided by two great regional or multiregional powers (Buzan 2004: 35). In such a situation, it is crucial that the actors’ interests converge, because, even if the two lesser powers are not yet capable of imposing their own order, they can nonetheless obstruct the hegemon’s action by hindering the pursuit of its goals or by raising the stakes. They can also profit the global superpower’s mistakes and failures of the global superpower, which is precisely what happened in the Middle East. 4 Madeleine Albright first used this term publicly during testimony at Senate confirmation hearings that would ultimately approve her nomination to become US Ambassador to the UN in 1997.

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‘Varus! Varus! Give me back my legions!’ Tacitus wrote that Roman Emperor Augustus, after learning about the extermination of three legions by the Germans in the Teutoburg forest in 9 AD, would roam about the halls of the imperial palace calling the name of the consul who had led them into the deadly trap set by Arminius, the Romanized German officer who had betrayed his trust. But that defeat—aside from persuading the Romans that there was no use in trying to conquer cold lands that offered nothing but slaves to prey on—did not hinder the strength of the empire, which prevailed for more than four centuries. After Teutoburg, the Romans extended their dominion in Dacia and Britannia, and for some time in Mesopotamia and Armenia. The hard blow suffered in Teutoburg did not endanger the empire for the simple reason that the Germans were unable to capitalize on the tactical advantage they had gained. Since the times of the Scipios, in the heroic phase of the Res publica, Rome had no enemies that could pose an existential threat—like Carthage—or take full advantage of military defeats such as that suffered with the Germans. This was not the case for Constantinople, the ‘Oriental Rome’, where Bulgarians and Arabs alternatively exploited the defeats suffered by the Eastern Roman Empire against either of them (Breccia 2016). Before the return of Russia into the Middle East arena, and before China adopted a more confrontational policy, Washington enjoyed the liberty of making mistakes, even considerable ones like the invasion of Iraq in 2003 at virtually no cost. No one could profit from their mistakes, simply because no other great power could even conceive of being in that position. Yet this does not seem to be the case anymore: Chinese and Russians—as well as Iranians, on a regional scale—can, and do profit, from Washington’s mistakes, and consequently, as observed, the Liberal World Order end up in the current precarious situation: ‘The American foundations undergirding the liberal international order are in grave danger, and it is no longer possible to take the pillars of that order for granted… Like a Jenga tower, the order will continue to stand upright—right until the moment it collapses’ (Drezner 2019: 10). If we analyze the behavior of Putin’s Russia, especially in the last decade, we notice it has been acting unscrupulously to expand its sphere of influence—in Transcaucasia, for instance, with the military intervention against Georgia in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008—and even beyond its territorial borders, as was the case with the annexing of Crimea after the ‘dirty war’ against Ukraine in 2014, followed by

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the war in Donbass (Toal 2017: 30). As strongly stated by Ivo Daalder (2017: 30), ‘under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, Russia has embarked on a systematic challenge to the West. The goal is to weaken the bonds between Europe and the United States and among EU members, undermine NATO’s solidarity, and strengthen Russia’s strategic position in its immediate neighborhood and beyond. Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War’ (see also Taylor 2018; Walker 2018). While it is true that, after the Cold War, the resort to arms—even in the heart of Europe, in former Yugoslavia—was somewhat more than a tragic exception, no state had ever been so determined to forcibly redefine its borders, to the point of formally annexing swathes of territory ripped away from a neighbor, and in a matter of only a few weeks. Slobodan Miloševi´c’s Serbia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had tried that and we all remember how heavily sanctioned they were by the international community. Apart from comprehending its historical, psychological, or cultural motives (Gessen 2017; Plokhy 2017), it should be obvious that what Russia has done in Crimea is unacceptable and objectively undermines one of the cornerstone principles of the liberal order. In fact, a behavior like that would destabilize the fundamental rules of any order, not unlike when, in the eighteenth century, Frederick II of Prussia stole Silesia from Maria Theresa of Austria because ‘he needed the iron of its mines’. There is a pro-Russian ‘advocacy group’ in Italy, with a strong information media presence, that tends to justify everything Putin’s Russia does in the name of ‘necessity’ (Weiss 2020). We cannot fail to notice, here, the typical Italian fascination for the ‘alpha male’ type—a mere declination of the idolization many Italians all too often devote to powerful figures, which is rivaled only by their contempt for authority. This justification is an attempt at posing as realism, but it is nothing more than a display of cheap cynicism at the expense of others. It is peculiar that such inclination is usually accompanied by the most visionary normativism, often simplistically irenic: both attitudes are symptoms of a sort of immaturity if not sheer infantilism from which not even the political and executive classes are immune (Rooduijn 2017). In the Middle East, the first sign of Russia’s grandiose return was concomitant with the emphatic accusations made by the United States against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for having resorted to chemical agents during a bombing in the Ghouta area, an enclave of the Damascus

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region that had been conquered by the rebel forces (Trenin 2017). In that instance, in September 2013, Obama denounced Assad’s trespass of the figurative line that he publicly drawn during the weekly address to the nation on August 20, 2012, in which he called for painful punishment administered by the United States on behalf of the international community (Office of the Press Secretary 2012; see also Greenberg 2016). To convince Obama to recall the fleet that was preparing to bombard the bases from whence the incriminated action was supposedly launched, Putin only had to remind him that Syria was an ally of Russia. This event exposed the contradictions of the Obama administration, which was oriented more toward ‘the dissimulation of American ambitions in the area than a real disengagement’ (Calculli and Strazzari 2017: 279). A vast international peace front was mobilized, even supported by Pope Francis, which—rather than taking the victims’ defense—focused on preventing the ‘expansion of the conflict’. Eventually, even the House of Commons voted against a joint retaliation strike directed at the military posts deemed responsible for the chemical attack, and the remained American and French aircraft carriers had to reverse course and return to their moorings (Strong 2015). The reader hardly needs to be reminded that a conflict expansion of much greater proportions took place later in the hands of the Russians, who were able to profit from the hesitations of the West and the international community. The highest price for the inertia in reacting against the Syrian dictator—responsible, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, for 90 percent of the victims of the civil war—was paid by the civil population of Aleppo in the months that followed (Van Dam 2017). The tens of thousands who died in the siege of East Aleppo—which turned into its systematic destruction—can thank those who, by impeding the punishment of Assad, enabled the Russians to step into the conflict and overturn the inertness of the civil war, hitherto inexorably unfavorable to their protégé—despite the successes of the Hezbollah militia and the Iranian Pasdaran in their house-tohouse combat in the region contiguous to Arsal, on the Syrian-Lebanese border, and on the highway between Beirut and Damascus (Calculli 2018; Almousa 2018). This goes to show that the saying ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ applies even to the most inspired. From that point, Russia has intervened more and more forcefully in the Syrian civil war, dragging it out of the stagnation in which it versed. The country sealed an informal agreement with Iran—for a long time the only supporter of the regime, besides Hezbollah—and later expanded its

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political sphere by involving Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan’s Turkey. The political and strategic significance of this triangular agreement is huge. Aside from making Russia the possible—no matter how improbable—peacemaker of the Levant, and establishing it as the power without which no agreement will be feasible, it has also legitimated the regional aspirations of Iran— freshly readmitted into the international community after the ratification of the JCPOA—and to all effects moved Turkey—formally still a member of NATO—into the Russian sphere of influence, to the point of elevating it to the role of protector of the Sunnis in the Levant in lieu of the Saudi monarchy (Aghaie Joobani and Mousavipour 2015). It is a paradox that Moscow has been the first and most immediate beneficiary of the end of Iran’s long ostracism from the international community—a circumstance that had historically favored the Saudis, with all the harmful consequences we are still experiencing today—considering that the United States under Obama was the champion of the agreement that put a formal end to it (Paulraj 2016). The Americans were surely ‘burned’ by Russia’s rapidity in this instance. On the other hand, the Russians were in the best position to take advantage of the situation: they shared with Iran a total aversion toward Sunni radicalism—as they had personally paid a tragic price with the Islamist turn of Chechnyan separatism epitomized by the Beslan school siege in 2004, which resulted in 384 deaths, of which 188 were children. Another common point between Russia and Iran was an alliance with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria—as the country hosts Russia’s only Mediterranean base, in Tartus, near Latakia. Lastly, Russia could finally offer Iran the much soughtafter legitimization of the strategic preoccupations and ambitions the Islamic republic had been voicing, unheard, since 1979 (Katz 2012). Moreover, Obama had already overstepped the boundaries of his own autonomy regarding American policy toward Iran, by signing the JCPOA. Israel and Saudi Arabia had exerted a great deal of pressure against the agreement and the president himself. With an unprecedented move, well beyond the limits of acceptable diplomatic customs, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s made harsh declarations before the US Congress on March 3, 2015, while the powerful pro-Israel lobbies applied all their influence to the Congress and the Senate of the United States (Washington Post 2015, see also Mearsheimer and Walt 2007). To capitalize on his farsighted action, Obama would have needed time, which Putin denied him. Obama should also have avoided opening the door to Syria for Moscow. Nonetheless, the fact remains that JPOA—whatever its many

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partisan critics’ arguments—represents a huge success for the international community as a whole. Those who in good faith have any doubts, need only compare the internationally monitored reduction of the Iranian nuclear program with the nightmarish scenario looming over the Korean peninsula. In this case, the failure of negotiated strategies and international sanctions, combined with a far more dangerous and unpredictable regime than the Iranian one, has resulted in a situation virtually immune to any credible pressure tools. Trump’s refusal to release the recurring three-month certification that the agreement ‘still serves the security interests of the United States’ in October 2017—against the advice of his secretaries of state and defense— was a gravely irresponsible gesture, a sign of mistrust in the efficacy of diplomacy despite the achievement of its objective, and it certified that the United States considered itself free to violate any international agreement. The unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA, decided by the American president the following year, has proved even more disastrous, aggravated as it was by the imposition of extreme economic sanctions for economic and financial operators that refused to abide by Washington’s dictate (Fitzpatrick 2020). For a character like Kim Jong-un, it is proof that the worst choice he could make would be to sign a treaty that would deprive him of his nuclear capacity—as was done by the Iranians, who, in any case, had not yet developed a bomb—and implicitly incites him to continue challenging the international community. The president’s decisions exposed that ideological furor and the will to destroy any legacy from the precedent administration—from health care reform to the normalization of relations with Cuba to the improvement of relations with Iran—along with a stunning incapacity of discernment— are the driving forces behind the decisions of the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful country the warrantor of the international order and primary leader of the West. And, to top it all, it was announced a few months after the attestation of the International Atomic Energy Agency that the Islamic republic was complying, with loyalty and in the spirit of cooperation, with all the obligations it agreed to in July 2015 (Davenport 2019). This does not make the Iranian regime the best in the world—far from it (Saikal 2019). Nor does it place the country among the peace builders in Syria or the Levant, or prevent it from pursuing the development of its own missile program. But none of these elements were part of the treaty that Trump urged the US Congress to sabotage by inflicting new unilateral sanctions on Iran.

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There is no doubt that in these years Iran has acquired more power in the region, but this is primarily due to the wars that its rivals—the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—have carried on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and to the errors in the (non-)management of the Syrian crisis—and certainly not because of the nuclear agreement. The attempt to jeopardize this accord while the world holds its breath because of the nuclear crisis with North Korea—a regime far more dangerous for world peace than Iran—is an offense to common sense. Apparently, Trump had left a window of opportunity open by passing the decision to the Congress. But those who are familiar with American politics are well aware of the lobbies’ clout in the Legislative decision-making process, and considering the increasingly extremist element of the Republican Party, this window was not bound to remain open for much longer. And it did not. With this act, Trump demonstrated once again the low regard in which he holds his allies—Europe—and his interlocutors—Russia and China— which in turn proved to be quite disinclined to second his minacious intentions. If the Biden administration will go on to employ unilateral sanctions toward Iran, which would also affect any third parties unwilling to accommodate them, as happened for decades with the sanctions against Cuba, it will fatally compel Iran to reconsider the value of the agreement, making nuclear proliferation in the region a tragic, self-fulfilling prophecy. Trump’s ill-considered decision has heavily and possibly permanently affected the relations between the United States and Europe, which could end up damaging both in a deep and even permanent way (Tabatabai 2020). To complete the overview of this crucial juncture of Middle Eastern politics, the consequences of which are far from being exhausted, we must point out that, paradoxically, the very success of Iran’s foreign and military politics—in Syria; in Iraq, with the fight against ISIS/IS and in the continued discreet assistance to the Iraqi forces in the battles for the re-conquest of Mosul; and in Lebanon, through the new political centrality of the Shia movement Hezbollah, its ancient creature and solid ally, which had a role in determining in the election of Maronite Christian, Michel Aoun, as president of the republic after a two-year delay—might have unsettling consequences for its internal dynamics. These successes contributed to strengthening the more conservative wing of Iran’s regime, an emanation of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, centered around the Pasdaran (Kazemzadeh 2020). This

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is in contraposition not only with the moderate wing, as interpreted by President Hassan Rouhani, but also—and more dangerously—with the main trend of a consistent part of Iranian civil society that since the ‘Green Wave’—brutally repressed by the thugs of then-President Mahmud Ahmadinejad—has been manifesting increasing intolerance for the hierocratic, illiberal, sexophobic, corrupted regime of the ayatollahs. There is no doubt that, even if the sanctions were limited to compromise the interests of the Pasdaran—which is an extremely powerful central institution of the Iranian regime, and not a simple organization—President Rouhani would find himself politically and institutionally obliged to sympathize with them, as they are his fiercest political adversaries, and could not take any action aimed at reducing their power. Apart from the problematic repercussions to its internal political balance, it is fairly obvious that Iran would have an objective interest in stabilizing the region, considering that the situation is evolving according to its own strategic interests. The same is not true of Saudi Arabia, which has—and it is no coincidence—an equally objective destabilizing effect on the region: from Iraq to Syria, from Yemen to Qatar, and recently, Lebanon, where we risked being to witness a new season of terroristic attacks after Saudi authorities made a sinister call to its citizens to leave the country on November 9, 2017 (Al-Saud and Kéchichian 2020). This followed the unusual resignation of Sunni Lebanese Premier Saad Hariri, which was declared during a press conference in Riyadh, and was subsequently rescinded in Beirut that December after a ‘visit’ by Hariri to Paris. We will return to this topic later, in a discussion on the effects of Trump’s policy in the Middle East. As said, Turkey is—for now—the third pole in the tactical alignment realized by Moscow for the consolidation of a general truce in Syria, which is based on the survival of Assad’s regime and the protection of Russian strategic interests. Nevertheless, things are rather different here. The regime of Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan has been undergoing an authoritarian, confessional involution—a circumstance that inevitably stirs the preoccupations of Turkey’s NATO allies and the EU partners, and which is having a destabilizing influence on the regime itself (Günay 2017). It is also contributing to the polarization of the division and hatred between, on the one hand, the pious, conservative Turkey of the innermost Anatolia, which is tied with a double thread—also financially—to the entourage of the ‘new sultan’ and, on the other hand, the secular, Westernized Turkey of the big metropolises, increasingly intolerant of the

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anti-Western rule imposed on the country by Erdo˘gan (Ottaviani 2016). It is worth recalling that in the 2017 constitutional referendum that made Erdo˘gan the absolute ruler of Turkey, which he won by a stretch through systematic intimidation and rigging the election, the ‘nays’ prevailed in all the large cities. After over fifteen years of uninterrupted rule, Erdo˘gan’s foreign policy has proved a general failure, salvaged only by the opportunity offered by Putin to hop on the Russian bandwagon—albeit in a decidedly inferior position compared to Iran (Cagaptay 2017). Launched with the foreign policy slogan ‘zero problems with neighbors’ the campaign eventually became ‘zero neighbors we don’t have issues with’. After years of deteriorating relations with Russia, Israel, Syria, Iran, al-Sisi’s Egypt, post-revolutionary Tunisia, and even Saudi Arabia—suspicious of Ankara’s support to the Muslim Brothers—Turkey has switched again. It has re-approached Moscow and Tehran—as well as, for a while, Tel Aviv, at least until the explosion of the Jerusalem Question in December 2017—putting Europe and the United States in its line of fire. The Netherlands, Austria, Great Britain, and Germany especially have attracted the rais ’ outrage with their criticism of the regime, and also because they forbid him and his ministries from using their squares to publicize the constitutional plebiscite. This was the only way to avoid the risk of aggravating the problem posed to every European democracy by the dual citizenship—and a possible dual loyalty—of many naturalized Turks. The conflict implied in belonging to two distinct national communities was much more blurred and susceptible to be abridged when a Westernized political culture was prevalent in Turkey—that is, when the regime itself was busy filling the gap between Turkey and Europe in terms of political and civil rights, which is the very opposite of what has been happening in the past many years. The talkfests of Erdo˘gan’s party would have acted as a ‘call of the wild’ of identitarian pride mixed with a political culture that is worlds apart from that of European democracies, underlining the incompatibility of that kind of political particularism with the adoptive countries of Turkish-born European citizens. The Erdo˘gan phenomenon is for now simply a watered-down version of radical political Islamism, and we will see how much and for how long. It also poses the same problems to our societies: by driving Turkey away from Europe and its political culture, it lays the premises for a divarication over the principles and limits that must inspire and contain a democracy, which will

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complicate the orderly cohabitation of the European citizens of Turkish heritage with their indigenous co-citizens. On the security side, the ever more brutal repression of the Kurds has prompted the resurgence of PKK-based terrorism (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), while the Turkish army has intensified its action against the Kurdish Peshmerga in Syria (Kaya and Whiting 2017). The Peshmerga military forces have been engaged on two fronts—against Assad and ISIS/IS; thereby representing, along with their Iraqi equivalent, the most reliable forces of the frayed international coalition fighting against the ‘caliphate’. Under international pressure, Erdo˘gan was forced to give up the ambiguous attitude toward ISIS/IS that had made Turkey the main transit country for ‘foreign fighters’ headed to Raqqa and Mosul (Laub and Masters 2016). The consequences of the sudden and imposed change of heart quickly followed: a stream of terrorist attacks hit Turkey in the second half of 2016, often targeting the meetings of the Kurdish opposition groups and activists, but also Istanbul’s city center. Erdo˘gan’s interest in the agreement with Russia, which has being forcing him to accept and consolidate the permanence of Assad on at least a portion of Syria—the ‘useful Syria’, as the dictator cynically calls it—is explained by its dual value, internal and international (Calculli 2016). On the external front, the so-called sultan can hope to gain back at least, the vitally important opportunity to take action against the Kurds, who are equally disliked by Russians and Iranians due to thier close ties with the United States. A strengthened relationship could pose a problem for the stability of Iraq, whose Shia leadership is closely aligned with Iran. This is another variable in the already complicated Syrian equation, and a prospective headache for the regime of the ayatollahs, especially after the Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum held on September 24, 2017, which had a turnout of 78 percent with 91.8 percent of the votes cast in favor of independence. On the internal front, the agreement with Russia enabled Erdo˘gan to resell a foreign policy success to influence domestic public opinion, gain recognition as the protector of the Sunnis in Syria after the string of Saudi failures and Iranian triumphs, and keep the movements of the Turkish Kurds somewhat in check. From the Western point of view, however, Ankara’s entente with Moscow and Tehran represents the transition of a NATO member into the Russian sphere of influence—something that would have been unbelievable just a couple of years ago. The Turkish resolution to acquire some

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S-400 anti-aerial missile batteries from Moscow was another unprecedented event, incompatible with the security of the Western defense strategy. The relations between NATO and Ankara have progressively worsened since the incident of the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship rented by a cluster of NGOs (Bongiovanni 2018). In May 2010, under the name ‘Freedom Flotilla’, the Mavi Marmara joined with a flotilla of ships to break the illegal and unilateral blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed by the Israeli authorities. In that event, a brutal and botched attack by the Israeli Special Forces caused the death of nine occupants of the ship and led to the severing of diplomatic relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv. That was the phase in which Erdo˘gan, trying to take on the mantle of guide and mentor of the Arab Spring uprisings, was consciously aiming for a clamorous break with Israel—a country toward which Turkey had always had a friendly disposition (Almog and Sever 2019). In that instance, Turkey called for an emergency meeting of the consultation team provided by the North Atlantic Treaty, hoping to gain some partner’s sympathy and hinder the United States and the other pro-Israel countries. However, the opposite happened, and the Turkish government was told to cease any activity that could further escalate tensions. A few years later, while Ankara was reapproaching Moscow after a period of cold relations—following the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish fighter jet that had briefly trespassed into Turkish air space on November 24, 2015—Turkey mended the fractured ties with Israel. However, because of the opacity of Turkey’s behavior in the fight against ISIS/IS, for years NATO and many of its member States have not shared sensitive information regarding terrorism with the Turks—even though the parties involved deny it. As one example of Turkey’s ambiguousness, Erdo˘gan’s son is still being prosecuted in Italy for illegally trafficking Iraqi and Syrian oil exported by IS to finance its activity (Baev 2019).

The Chinese challenge and the North Korean nuclear pasticcio The current Middle East context can be interpreted in many different ways, but frankly, it is hard to fathom how it could be compatible with America’s interests, even in this phase of withdrawal. China, on the other hand, seems to have set aside its strategy based on the mere exploitation of the advantages of the liberal order, aiming now to turn the tables altogether (Weinhardt and ten Brink 2020). Beijing’s renewed aggressiveness in its island disputes is one sign that China is changing its strategy. This turn is probably motivated in part by the need to inspire nationalistic

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cohesion in public opinion at a time when the necessary development of the domestic market could stir tensions within the Chinese social structure (Ci 2019). For the Communist Party of China (CPC)—and for the People’s Liberation Army, which is a vital part of it—the challenge of switching from its ‘export-led’ economic model to one able to meet internal demand is not at all risk-free (Tang 2020). Holding the monopoly on political representation while accepting a greater articulation of the economic interests is anything but a safe operation. Increasing competition is the only way to expand the domestic market, yet more competition means there will be competing interests—even in the search for political representation and tutelage. The demand for prompt representation unavoidably is to exert increasing pressure on the party and its capacity to meet all demands, since in a truly competitive market ‘time is money’, and no operator can quietly wait for its turn without automatically giving an advantage, and perhaps a decisive one, to its competitors. Even though China is aiming to replace the United States as the leader of the globalized economy—think of Xi Jinping’s speech at the 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017 (CPC National Congress 2017)—it is yet to see if it will succeed and when this could possibly happen. Moreover, the delicate transition from an export-led economy to one based on domestic consumption is complicated by an excess of productive capacity and the large debt exposure of its main companies in relation to the inner financial system, which is anything but effective and transparent. The minute America would retired from its position as leader of the international economic system—possibly pushed by the protectionist winds that seem to be blowing over Washington—China would have to allow much greater access to its internal market, and to make its financial market much more transparent and internationalized. This is the exact opposite of the measures recently adopted by Chinese authorities, which multiplied controls over capital movements (Hu and Spence 2017: 60). Nevertheless, if Beijing were to succeed Washington in the leadership of the global order, the real question would be if, after the waning of the ‘American power, the international system it sponsored—the rules, the norms, and values—will survive’ or if America’s ‘empire of ideas’ will decline with it (Zakaria 2019: 16). For a country that, between the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the triumph of the communist revolution (1949), has known a ‘century of humiliation’, with the systematic spoliation of its resources and dignity at

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the hands of Westerners, the nationalistic mobilization of public opinion at every hint of an external threat—that is, other than consent to the hardening of repressive measures necessary for maintaining the internal order—constitutes a very effective message. This does not stop Beijing from hoping to succeed in implementing its design of a parastatal capitalism operating under the aegis of an informal but substantial ‘concession regime’ controlled by the government—i.e., the Communist Party—enabling some carefully selected big operators to act within the market, but always under the sword of Damocles of their permits’ revocability. Think of the numerous times great capitalists fell from political grace and were prosecuted for their embezzlements, which had been tolerated—when not downright encouraged—until that day. Considering the tight intertwinement between the banking and political sectors, and the more than incestuous relations between the political apparatus and the economic-financial one—of which the outrageous accumulation of wealth of the family of President Xi is only the most blatant and least denounced case—the plausibility of this scenario is not remote. During his much-awaited speech at the Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 18, 2017, Xi Jinping reiterated the narrative that has, so far, run China: promising more competition among private companies, but also the relaunch of government-owned companies; a greater opening of China to international operators combined with the conservation of the guiding role of the CPC; all topped by the determination to grant ‘a better life’ to the people and to make China a global superpower in the twenty-first century (Economy 2018). On closer inspection, what emerges it is a battle between two models of relation between economics and politics, or between the market and the political forms of societal governance—the consequences of which will surely not be limited to China (Pein 2016).5 The oligopolistic and oligarchic turn of both the market and democracy in the West—a consequence of the establishment of the ‘neoliberal theology’, and the ever more pervasive commixture and overlapping between those who rule a country and those who own its resources—as for instance in Russia,

5 On Chinese close relationship between the Communist party and the new Tycoons, see Pein (2016). It should be noted here the strong reaction on November 13, 2020 by Xi Jin Ping towards the allegedly excessive confidence of Jack Ma, Ali Baba CEO, accused of threatening the CCP’s monopoly in the Chinese banking system.

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but also the oil monarchies of the Gulf—objectively hamper the protection of the balanced relation between political democracy and market economy that had gradually become predominant in the West, in spite of the difficulties it encountered, and which has served as a ‘canon’ since World War II. The increasingly open annoyance with which the West looks at labor unions and the rules protecting workers regarded as hindrances to neoliberal political and economic processes, can be deemed a concerning sign of the success the Chinese way in market economy might achieve in our world as well. Nowadays it is becoming increasingly clear that ‘China’s experience in economic growth constitutes a “model” that could be transplanted, in whole or in part, to other developing states’ (Lanteigne 2019: 11). We should never forget that: ‘Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States). Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think’ (Judt 2010: 144). The devaluation of rights discussed in the previous chapter is also dangerous for its cultural consequences: the progressive affirmation of a culture that makes the rights of the weaker negotiable in theory, leaving them in practice at the mercy of the stronger. That weaker part of society is overflowing, expanding at the same pace as the growth of the stock and flux of the resources owned—in different modes, evidently—in China, the United States, Russia, Europe, the Gulf, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America, by the richest and most privileged 1 percent. In strategic terms, China’s irritation at the ineffective way in which the United States managed the 2007 financial crisis—that is, by deflecting outward as much as possible its costs—has surely reduced Beijing’s commitment to the Liberal World Order, which is incarnated by the primacy of Washington. The crisis ‘not only entailed the worse financial shock and recession in the United States since 1929; it also shook the country’s global reputation for financial competence’ (Tett 2019: 34). In the eyes of the political leaderships of the so-called BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa— which were only marginally touched by the crisis and thus entrusted with the support of the global economy in the first and hardest years of the crisis, the image of the United States, and of the West as a whole, drammatically shattered. In the words of the Chinese leaders, it was then that the necessity and the

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urgency of finding an alternative to the liberal order gained momentum (Womack 2017). As recalled by Henry Kissinger (2011: 448) in his volume on China, witnessing the chaos of the economic governance of the US political and juridical system erased the ingrained conviction of the CPC leadership that even though Washington had nothing to teach them on the political front, China should follow the American lead in economic-financial governance. In this sense, the constitution of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2014—a sort of regional alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that enjoyed financial contributions from the major Western nations is significant (Jacques 2009: 362).6 It is probably excessive, and certainly premature, to speak of an explicit strategy shared by Russia and China that would aim to undermine American supremacy (Smith 2012). However, we must realize how, in recent years, there have been recurring efforts by Moscow and Beijing to find a common platform that could limit American hegemony. From the Shanghai Initiative, which later became a formal organization, to the agreements on gas supplied by Russia—though this has being stalling due to the need to build a giant, and expensive, distribution network, which has also become unsustainable because of the reduced price of hydrocarbons resulting in no effective agreement as to the allocation of costs having been reached yet. (Dutkiewicz and Sarkwa 2014). There is also the matter of Russia acquiescing to the demands of the ‘Dragon’ in the China Seas. Furthermore, in July 2017, Russia and China conducted joint naval trainings in the Baltic Sea—after already conducting exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, and one year later in the Joint Sea 2016, conducted in Guandong province in September the previous year. The document on Russia’s strategy and foreign policy doctrines released in December 2015 and 2016 respectively clearly indicated the pursuit of a greater syntony with China as one of the axes of foreign politics in the next decade (Russian Federation 2015, 2016). It explicitly stated Russia’s will to use its global veto power in the international system again, as well as to champion of a kind of ‘neosovereignism’ that would make both the commitment to the ‘responsibility to protect’—perhaps 6 As it has been written, China has been operating “both within and outside the existing international system”, ready to switch to a new China-centric one. See on this Jacques (2009).

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the most meaningful conquest of the United Nations system at the turn of the millennium—and the human rights regime obsolete. Regardless, it is obvious that the United States’ ‘command of the global commons has weakened as China’s and Russia’s asymmetric capabilities have improved’ (Drezner 2019: 13). In the unfolding North Korean crisis, the actual collaboration between Beijing and Moscow has been evident. This crisis still risks dragging the region, and potentially the world, into a war that could even see the deployment of nuclear weapons. The facts are known. Since the end of the 1980s, Pyongyang’s regime has embarked on a nuclear race characterized by its proclaimed nature. Instead of trying to conceal evidence of his involvement, Kim Jong-un has taken pride in it, exploiting it for both internal and external propaganda. It has been observed astutely that the nuclear choice of North Korea can be traced back to two different causes (Fiori 2016). At the international level, the sudden changes on the geopolitical landscape at the end of the 1980s, characterized by Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the USSR, and the reconciliation of Deng’s China with Japan; and later, as a balancing act with South Korea. It was a nightmarish situation for the North Korean regime, lefting it deprived of its political landmarks and causing the perception of an escalating threat to its very existence. This perception was abundantly validated by the belief—shared by the European capitals, but also by Seoul, Beijing, and Moscow—that North Korea was a ‘failed state’ on the verge of collapse; so much so that South Korea and China had already devised plans to deal with a prospective humanitarian crisis stemming from the fall of the regime. It is perhaps unnecessary to remind the reader that in the following years, a catastrophe did ensue: a famine, self-induced by the regime itself, caused the death of tens of thousands of North Koreans, mainly in the countryside. The regime was able to profit from this state of deprivation, obtaining international aid and the suspension of economic sanctions in exchange for the promise to have their nuclear facilities monitored—which, ultimately, was not seen through (Daekwon 2019). At the same time, on the domestic level, North Korea was undergoing a power transition crisis, as the system was being transformed into a communist totalitarian monarchy—a singularity among political regimes. As the geopolitical map was changing so rapidly, and so detrimentally to

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the interests of the regime, the maneuvers by the first of the first Kim— the founder of North Korea—were on course to pass the power on to his son—Kim Jong-un’s father—whose success was all but guaranteed. This was due to the internal opposition of parts of the nomenklatura, including some of the close family members of the ‘great leader’—his second wife, for example, and possibly even his brother. They were both surpassed by the young rising star of Kim Jong-il, but at the time, the situation was still fluid and uncertain, also due to the fact that the communist leaderships in China and Russia were decisively distancing themselves from blatant forms of despotism and personality cults. It was in this context that North Korea’s decision to proceed with the development of its nuclear program—at first secretly, then overtly and flauntingly. The purpose of this strategy was to secure the survival of the regime by discouraging potential aggressors, protecting the country’s isolation, and employing its nuclear capacity as a blackmailing tool to obtain concessions from the international community. As a strategy, it was all but irrational, and so far, it has paid off. As a matter of fact, the isolation pursued by the Kims and the secession from the international community have been rather selective. Periods of total closure—often marked by full-fledged aggressive actions against military and civil targets in South Korea, aiming to further raise regional tension—alternated with periods when cooperation with a few countries—for instance China, and even South Korea—was actively pursued. The international community acted as the cushion the regime has used, so far successfully, to sink the ball. The ambiguous result in the management of the North Korean nuclear crisis clashes with the success achieved by the Liberal World Order in the management of the Iranian dossier. Beyond the clamor caused by the Trump administration and the monotonous warnings of Israel against the purported noncompliance of the regime, two years after the enactment of the JCPOA—expected to be completed in seven years—the IAEA publicly stated in August 2017 that Iran is abiding with loyalty and cooperative spirit all of the obligations of the agreement. This includes the handing over of fissile material, the dismantlement of thousands of nuclear centrifuges, and the closing of facilities and laboratories—all under the supervision of the appointed international commissions. We are then forced to consider why this success achieved in the Gulf has not been replicated in East Asia. The answer is disconsolately simple: a lack of sincere unity of purpose among the main actors of the international

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community. We might very well say that no crisis foreshadows the imminent end of the Liberal World Order like the North Korean crisis. If things have gone so differently with Pyongyang than with Teheran, it is because the three great powers involved in the matter—to different degrees and with various shares of responsibility—did not cooperate with one another. It is redundant to emphasize that since we are dealing with a case of proclaimed nuclear proliferation, this lack of cooperation bears enormous gravity. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which factually restricted the club of bomb owners to the ‘Big Five’, is one of the few agreements on which some convergence of interests remained even in the worst moments of the Cold War (Gaietta and Zotti 2020). Just consider that when the Chinese seat on the Security Council and in the General Assembly was occupied by Taiwan, it was Joseph Stalin’s refusal to provide Mao Zedong with the expertise and the fissile material necessary to build the Chinese atomic bomb which caused the first rupture between Russia and China. The treaty has been violated a few times since its institution, but these infringements were never endorsed by the two superpowers. Israel was the first country to infiltrate the exclusive military atom club—though it never explicitly admitted it—and realized its program with the decisive help of the French. India and Pakistan got there much later, and did it autonomously—as did North Korea. We should then question what brought about the division between the great powers in the face of Kim’s objectively dangerous efforts. In recent years, not only has Kim Jong-un continued perfecting the device by reducing its volume to make it truly utilizable—he has sensibly improved the capacity and precision of its vectors in a notable series of nuclear and ballistic tests (Albert 2020). Once again, the answer is simple, and it lies in the increasing divergence among the foreign policies of the ‘big three’— United States, Russia, and China—which became especially apparent in August, September, and November 2017, when the nuclear crisis underwent another hazardous strain. After a series of underground explosions of extraordinary magnitude, alternated with the launch of several missiles of increasing range, a firm reaction came from the United States—albeit manifested in Donald Trump’s expressive style, including his cringeworthy tweets, which even found their way into the communications of Italian politicians. China and Russia proposed a mediation based on ceasing provocations toward North Korea, and partly in exchange for the suspension of the joint South Korean and American military maneuvers.

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It became obvious in this circumstance just how much the Chinese and Russian interest in reducing American presence in East Asia—also shared by North Korea—prevails over the common interest of the ‘big three’ in preventing conflict in the region, especially nuclear conflict (Krickovic 2017). On this point, we must be crystal clear. As we said, no one— not even China—wanted to see North Korea become a nuclear power. Moreover, to a certain extent, the Chinese did try to keep their ally off that path. At the same time, however—and increasingly so in the last few years—Beijing feels the hindrance and the burden of America’s military presence in the region, and the US role in keeping China from achieving hegemony on the East Pacific and in the Chinese Seas. After all, Washington has been pursuing similar policies against Japan—leading to Tokyo’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor—and China throughout the last century (Mastanduno 2019; Stokes and Waterman 2017). As a long series of American administrations—with striking consistency from George W. Bush onward—have accentuated their confrontational policy with Beijing, China has manifested increasing intolerance toward this renewed American assertiveness. The two countries are playing a delicate chess match, and both are trying to use the North Korean piece to further their own ends. The United States wants to prove its capability of protecting its allies, thus reinforcing its role as ‘offshore balancer’ in East Asia. At the same time, a successful action of containment of the Korean threat carried out under American leadership—even if it were limited to the exacerbation of economic sanctions regime and their stricter application—would be a point of attraction toward the stars-and-striped orbit for the Asian countries—from Vietnam to Malaysia—preoccupied with the growth of China’s power and increased assertiveness. This is a scenario that Beijing cannot accept at this point. Chinese efforts in these years have been focused primarily on proving to its neighbors that they are a reliable power whose economic, political, and military growth poses no threat. ‘Harmony’ was the keyword in Chinese political communications with the outside world; the cornerstone on which to build its ‘soft power’—in contrast with American hard power—and a web of alliances (Hagström and Nordin 2020; see also Dian and Menegazzi 2018). For some time, the massive American presence in the region was functional to keep up this facade, and contributed to soothing the neighboring countries’ worries over China’s growth. However, the situation has changed. If China wants to reise in status and international ranking,

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it must progressively replace Washington in its function as regional leader (Smith 2012). The American failure on the North Korean dossier would represent an objective success for Beijing, especially if it were not followed by a conflict on the Korean peninsula, but by a good outcome of Chinese mediation, perhaps with the help of Russia (Lind 2018). The result would inevitably diminished the role of the United States in the area. It would also shatter the US credibility, which it would be proven inept at effectively protecting its allies, especially when faced with such a serious threat as the nuclear one. In the short term, such an outcome would convince the indecisive regional actor that—rather than taking useless risks in contributing to the balancing of China by associating with the Americans (Funabashi and Ikenberry 2020)—it would suit them better to jump on the Chinese bandwagon and negotiate the best possible conditions for their protection. In the long run, Japan and South Korea would also be pressured to join in. As it appears, not only are these power politics mutually incompatible—they are also extremely dangerous. Beijing has nothing to gain from a North Korean ‘victory’, but it has much to gain in letting Pyongyang light the match to burn the hands of the Americans, in hopes of keeping them distracted for as long as possible. However, if America were to react—if only by bringing its nuclear warheads below the 32nd parallel—the prospect of a checkmate on Washington would in turn constitute a checkmate on Beijing. Increasing economic sanctions is no easy task. Consider China’s hard reaction to their application by America on Chinese companies accused of engaging in ‘forbidden’ commercial relations with North Korea, even though it appears that at the end of September 2018, China had ordered its regional banks to cease all operations with Pyongyang. Washington is well aware that finding a balance between imposing severe restrictions and abstaining from undertaking an extremely uncertain and hazardous military operation is no easy task. Military tactics could well attract the anger of the international community at a time in which the US administration is already out of favor with the worldwide press and public opinion. Meanwhile, Russia is playing its own game. In a peculiar roles swapping, Russia is now interested in supporting China and is ready to step up as a mediator, certainly enticed by the prospect of striking another blow to American prestige and leadership. The convergence of Russian and Chinese interests in the North Korean crisis is strong, and it goes

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hand in hand with the shadow cast by the blatant insanity of Kim’s regime (Malle 2017). In recent years, we have often heard the expression ‘new Cold War’ in relation to the dire state of Russian–American relations—a concept that could also be used to describe the involution of Chinese–American relations. Apart from the fact that historical analogies are always deceptive, the current divarication between America’s foreign policy and those of Russia and China makes for a scenario than differs significantly from that of the Cold War (Breslin 2018). Until 1989, the confrontation between the United States and the USSR comprised both political-ideological and strategic-military dimensions. The understanding—or lack thereof— between Washington and Moscow determined the level of tension within the entire international system (Westad 2005). However, the economic dimension was mostly out of the equation, because capitalism and collectivism had few points of contact and interchange, except in the grain and energy sectors. Today, the game is engaged by three players, one of which—China—is considered and anticipated to be in steady growth (Orlik 2020). The other two are—in different ways—in decline, but still capable of causing significant shocks in the opposite direction. The United States is the strategically withdrawn hegemon, and the second nuclear superpower of the system—whereas Russia—seems to be singing its swan song—in spite of the undoubtable successes achieved on the political and military fronts over these years, all other indicators—economic, demographic, internal politics—describe a country on the verge of an inexorable decay (Nye 2019). Moreover, even if China is universally deemed the holder of the best credentials to challenge US hegemony (Xuetong 2019), we must not forget that, from an economic and financial standpoint, Beijing is still— and increasingly so—enmeshed with the international system, besides being the largest holder of US debt. It is yet to be seen how this will play out in defining the terms of contention—if it will aggravate it and bring an inevitable eruption, or if the opposite will happen. Either way, this is a point of absolute difference from the Cold War. Unlike the former Soviet Union, China certainly has a chance to propose a ‘new order’ that could accommodate the economic and financial structures of globalization. Such an international order would ‘simply’ shed its authentically, politically liberal features, while maintaining the neoliberal ones, ultimately leading to an involution into a markedly private form of capitalism in the West and a ‘concession capitalism’ in Russia and China, in which

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political and economic powers would be more intertwined and distinct at the same time (Naughton and Tsai 2015). So far, China has been extremely skillful in presenting itself and acting as a ‘status quo power’. However, this phase is over now, as was made clear by Xi during the 19th Congress of the CPC. While China is not pursuing global hegemony, it will also not let its interests be harmed. As has been observed, ‘finding a modus vivendi with China will be the biggest strategic challenge that Western liberal democracies will face in the coming century’ (Barrass and Inkster 2018: 63). The switch in the self-placement of China in relation to the Liberal World Order was not manifested abruptly, except in the South China Sea island disputes. Moreover, extreme caution and flexibility will be required—especially by the United States—every time China’s vital interests will be at stake, to avoid being caught in Thucydides’ Trap (Allison 2017). Even though China ‘can no longer be taken for granted as a status quo power, it nonetheless wants to continue benefiting from some aspect of the international liberal order, while at the same time seeking to set its own rules on issues it cares about’ (Barrass and Inkster 2018: 63). Whether Beijing will truly aspire to global leadership, and whether this aspiration will be successful, depends on a number of factors that are still difficult to evaluate in its entirety, starting with the reaction of the United States. Arguably, the ambiguity that has characterized China’s behaviour over the past fifteen years—the ambiguity of enjoying the rank of ‘status quo power’ while at the same time keeping acting as one of the biggest ‘free riders’ of the Liberal World Order, and not only in terms of international trade—will become more pronounced in the future. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is as close to a manifesto for the ‘Chinese century’ as has ever been launched so far (Hillman 2020). Beijing presented it as a ‘win–win’ enterprise: a great infrastructure system, comprising land and sea routes that will connect China to the rest of the world. Roads and tracks on which the goods will move both ways, as its supporters love to accentuate (Ly 2020). ‘All roads lead to Rome’, the ancient Romans used to say: building roads was a way to demarcate the centrality of the capital city in relation to its imperial provices. Those who live in Italy—where the state highways still follow the layout of the old Roman consular roads—cannot miss the historical precedent here. Moreover, the Chinese are presenting the BRI as a systemic project with the ability to integrate different strategies for national development and enable the full exploitation of the Eurasian

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market, which will promote consumption, investments, and jobs (Maçaes 2018). All this, obviously, was designed based on a philosophy founded on global free trade and in the name of an open global economy—a model that, as mentioned previously, encompasses two entirely different types of organization of capitalism: a market capitalism based on private property and a state capitalism based on political concession. Emphasizing the dimensions of a single open global economy, a single global free trade regime, implies leaving out political differences to maximize business opportunities, according to the maxim: ‘let’s not talk about politics, let’s do business together’. However, not talking about politics is a way of making politics: those who have tried to organize and shape the international system have always sought to make it as similar to themselves as possible. Making the world ‘safe for democracy’ was the expression used by President Woodrow Wilson in his speech to the US Congress on April 2, 1917, to declare war on Germany. The concept was reprised by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and was an element of the foundation of the Liberal World Order after War World II. Making the world safe for democracy also meant making the world safe for America. The hegemon—whether or not reluctant, whether or not benign—tends to transform the world according to its vision, to be able to better conceive its evolutions and make its leadership familiar. The more the world is organized according to one’s principles, and by rules and institutions that are similarly shared, the more those rules, principles, and institutions will be perceived as natural and inevitable and the less likely for opposition to this leadership. Why should China act any differently than the United States or Rome? (Nye 2020).7 With its narrative of harmony and inclusiveness, the Chinese leadership tends to replace the rhetoric of competition and balancing that—other 7 To this regard, see a recent interview of Joseph Nye. Asked on the decline of Soft Power of the US and the role of China, Nye stated “[…] the United States is still more attractive than China in soft power, measured by public opinion polls or rankings done by the Soft Power 30 Report, a British Index. This really has a lot to do with the nature of American society and Chinese civil society. China is spending a great deal of money to increase its soft power, but they are not willing to unleash their civil society. Through its policies, the Chinese government sometimes interferes with the ability of Chinese civil society to produce soft power. This occurs when people like Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, who might be seen as admirable and might attract others, are essentially undercut by the government’s policies. The United States government has also implemented ignorant policies, which leads people to lose attraction towards the United States. Fortunately, American civil society does not obey the government” (Nye 2020).

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than being typical of the Western political tradition—while being more likely to lead to conflict, certainly warns against the rising powers. The liberal interpretation of international relations has recently questioned the explanatory power of polarity. According to one of its greatest interpreters, John Ikenberry, framing the international system within a unipolar or multipolar logic—after the long stage of Soviet-American bipolarism—would be misleading. At least, the concept of ‘pole’ should be redefined, not in terms of a state that can amass material capacities, but of ‘organizational forces’. Ikenberry argued, ‘A state is a hub to the extent that it provides the organizing infrastructure of international relations within a geographical region, a functional sphere or, more generally, within the wider global system’ (Ikenberry 2011: 133). Indeed, the BRI network does resemble this idea of a web, in which the ability to attract resources is more decisive than the ability to project strength. But at the end of the day, at the center of this web we find Beijing, just as two thousand years ago we would have found Rome at the end of all its roads. By looking at the maritime dimension of the BRI, we really see the implicit challenge to American hegemony, ‘because the most pressing threat the People’s Republic presents is a maritime one’ (Mandelbaum 2019: 30). Unlike land space, sea space is contestable by definition. It falls under no one’s sovereignty; hence, it leaves open more opportunities for escalation, before possibly leading to direct conflict. Today, China is already the country to and from which the greatest number of merchant ships sail, and over 90 percent of world trade is carried by sea. The United States is still the warrantor of freedom of navigation, the true ‘highway patrol of the oceans’. Scholars universally deem control over transit routes a crucial instrument of hegemony. Significantly, China’s possible challenge to American hegemony would be carried out by sea. The impressive development of the Chinese Navy is well documented. The central question is for how long the Chinese will allow the Americans to sanction the protections of routes that are mostly crossed by Chinese ships traveling to and from China’s ports. There is, however, a different option from the Cold War analogy that may deserve some attention (Monaghan 2015; Zhao 2019). In the 1970s, the ability of Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger—the man behind the decision to bring China onto the US side, to profit from the tensions existing between the two communist powers—proved crucial in allowing a crisis-ridden America to catch its breath and regain lost ground from the Soviet Union. Today, we

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are witnessing the opposite process: the United States has been actively promoting the reconciliation between China and Russia for many years. It is a worrying situation, as without their cooperation the Liberal World Order stands hardly any chance of survival. However, as we will see, the threats from inside the Liberal World Order’s Western nucleus are far more likely to compromise the stability of a society where freedom is not the privilege of only a few. In any case, we should be aware that any shift in hegemonic power is quite hard to put in place, especially since the advent of the nuclear era, which made a major war between great powers unlikely. The structural power of the hegemon—which assures its pivotal role in the system—is very hard to fight against: ‘the central point of structural power is that unlike relational capabilities, its effects are pervasive and enduring. The biggest single obstacle to rising powers is the structure of the system within which they seek to rise: the technological conditions, historic patterns of behavior, norms of conduct, regimes and institutions that order international relations. […] International order, in short, has a huge amount of inertia built into it, which both mitigates against the reconfiguration of power hierarchies, and ensures that the settings within which the interaction occurs disproportionately advantage those states that were at the top of the hierarchy at the last comprehensive remaking of the system’ (Kitchen and Cox 2019: 747). In this context, the absence of Europe inevitably stands out and upsets us. Europe’s introversion is troubling not only for its future, but also for the solidity of the liberal order, because it unburdens an actor—or a number of actors—which is vital for the prevailing support and natural adhesion to that kind of order, thus depriving the United States of a political partner that had been growing ever more relevant after the Cold War. Although it must be remembered that the decline of America itself is the main obstacle to the conservation—or rather recovery—of the Liberal World Order, most of the remaining pages of this book will focus on Europe.

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CHAPTER 5

The Molecularization of Threat: Jihadist Terrorism, Islamist Radicalization, and the Mediterranean Tragedy

In this chapter, we will investigate the molecularization of threat, understood as the main feature of the post-9/11 era. To back up this assumption is the hard evidence that the two biggest and most devastating wars of the last twenty years—Afghanistan and Iraq—have stemmed from, and have been justified as a response to, the action of terrorist groups. Accordingly, the War on Terror has become the main legitimizing factor for the resort to force both in the domestic and the international domain. One only need think of Syria and the repression exerted by Assad’s regime, which has led first to civil war and then to the internationalization of the conflict. Saudis, Turks, Russians, the Western powers, Iranians and Israelis, and even the Kurd militias and the Hezbollah: everyone has used the War on Terror to justify their actions in Syria. But the same argument was used for the intervention in Yemen, the repression in Israel and Egypt, and the interventions in post-Gaddafi Libya. It was also used by China to justify its treatment of the Uyghurs. The War on Terror has also changed the Mediterranean Sea, initially turning it from the ‘American lake’ it had practically become during the final stage of the Cold War into the logistic rear of American power projection in the Middle East. Ironically, the failure of American interventionism in the area has ultimately made the Mediterranean Sea a contestable area, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_5

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rekindled Russia’s and Turkey’s status-seeking behavior. But the Mediterranean has also become Europe’s weak link, the porous wall crossed by the migration flows that the European countries have refused to manage in a humane, common, and organized way. We witnessed the securitization of the migration issue, which has been reduced to a police problem only concerned with containing and contrasting human flows. Yet this approach too has proved wanting, especially when faced with the conflation of the migration issue and the terrorist threat based on the mere fact that a majority of the migrants traveling through the Mediterranean Sea are of Islamic faith. The European policy toward Islamism and Islamist radicalization has been a colossal failure on the Union’s part. It has also made the Union more vulnerable to the attacks perpetrated by ‘lone wolves’ pledging allegiance to the terror franchising embodied by AlQaeda and ISIS/IS. Europe has also become the main furnace of Jihadist ‘foreign fighters’ engaged on the Syrian, Iraqi, and Libyan war fronts.

Non-State Actors’ Threats and the Return of Security as a Source of Legitimacy for State Action The molecularization and privatization of the security threat to the international order is a qualitatively new phenomenon in comparison to the one we previously discussed, but it is becoming customary very quickly. Appearing on a large scale in the first decade of the new century, on September 11, terrorists struck the first hard blow to the liberal order (Beres 1977: 131, Milte 1975).1 This can essentially be regarded as an attack to the Liberal World Order’s security dimension, whose devastating effects have been fully recognized only gradually. The terroristic nature of the attacks, which were multiple and of extreme severity, brought terrorism from the periphery to the center of the system, along with the

1 Admittedly, terrorism had been regarded as a threat to the Liberal World Order as such—and not just as a security issue—even prior to the Twenty-first century, yet it was typically conceived as a deviant offshoot either of the nuclear balance underlying the international order, posed by the radical groups using nuclear explosive or radioactive devices (see, among others: Beres 1977: 131) or as a comparatively unfamiliar and blurred instance of political violence aimed at a world environment constituted of, and supporting, not only individual nation states but also global integration and international cooperation (see Milte 1975).

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unanimous condemnation, and seemed at first to paradoxically enforce the legitimacy of American hegemony. We were still fully in the unipolar stage of the international system, when no other power presented itself as a rival of the United States. The previous decade—the ‘roaring Nineties’, to quote Joseph Stiglitz—had been marked by massive economic growth, enough to put an end to the fatigue that had characterized the Cold War aftermath (Stiglitz 2003). The slowdown of the American economy and the persistence of high unemployment rates had determined the unexpected defeat of George H. Bush in the 1992 presidential elections. The failed reelection of the president who had dealt with the end of the Cold War with prudence and audacity, and who led an international coalition through the victorious war against Iraq for the liberation of Kuwait (1990–1991) came as a surprise (Naftali 2007). The agenda of his successor, Bill Clinton, was dominated by the themes of economic recovery and the fight against unemployment. International politics would break into the agenda mainly when ‘imposed by the facts’—like a revived Lord Palmerston might have noted (Hamilton 2007). If the unsuccessful intervention into Somalia had further reinforced the anti-interventionist caution of the new Democratic president, Clinton may have avoided entering into the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. However, Europe’s apathy and the persistence, savagery, and magnitude of the violence pushed the United States to take the lead in the military operations in Bosnia until the Dayton Agreement was signed in 1995 (Dumbrell 2010; Lucarelli 2000). The Clinton years represented the apogee of American power, where nothing and no one seemed to be able to challenge the United States; but this absolute superiority was largely wasted. They were also ‘wasted years’ in terms of structuring the new global economic and financial order, as no one ‘thought they had to fix it’ again quoting Stiglitz, at the time a member of the Clinton administration. The September 11 attacks broke the prevailing invulnerability of the United States, and caused a genuine wave of solidarity—as it was called— that continued into the military campaign in Afghanistan in December 2001 (Gheciu 2008). The 2003 war against Saddam Hussein—almost unanimously deemed unrelated to its declared motive: the fight against terrorism—rapidly consumed the legitimacy surplus earned with 9/11. That intervention elicited harsh criticism even among the allies, especially France and Germany (Evangelista and Parsi 2005). Appearing as a manifestation of imperial hubris, and eroding the conviction that for a very

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long time, as maintained by John Lewis Gaddis, had brought an abundance of support in terms of public opinion and from political leaders worldwide, which considered the hegemony of the United States to be the ‘lesser evil’ in comparison to a victory of the USSR, or simply chaos (Gaddis 2005). This hubris also fostered terrorism (Colás and Saull 2007; Gardner 2017). We need only to remember that ISIS/IS was born as a spin-off of ‘Al-Qaeda in Greater Syria’, an evolution of the Iraqi section of Osama bin Laden’s organization, founded by Jordanian Abu Musab alZarqawi after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Clarke 2019). This protagonist of the temporary, but no less grave and disquieting, territorialization of Islamist terrorism with the institution of the new ‘Caliphate’, has inspired waves of attacks primarily in European and Arab countries, especially after 2015. The George W. Bush administration tried to make terrorism into the hostis publicus —i.e., the public enemy, the nemesis of civilization as such—and the War on Terror was framed accordingly, as countries were called to take sides—either with the United States or with the terrorists—but to little effect. The concept of terrorism was too vague for the war against it to grant tangible and lasting chances to hierarchize the new world order (Buzan 2006). However, the conceptual framework of the fight against terrorism, originated as a response to the unprecedented events of September 11, effectively replaced the one of a globalized world, characterized predominantly, if not exclusively, by ‘peaceful’ economic competition. With 9/11 and its consequences, the world transitioned away from the relative tranquility of Cold War terror—characterized by the practical impossibility of a war in which no one could win, deterred by the prospect of mutual destruction. The actual shock of the War on Terror brought the perhaps delusional belief that it could—or should—be fought and won (Clark 2003; Clarke 2004; Mead 2004). In other words, the same terror that was the base on which to build the only possible peace has become the target that legitimizes and justifies war (Flint and Ghazi-Walid 2004; Smith 2006).2 It provides the Westerners, Russians, Chinese, Turks, Saudis, and Israelis with a new distorted lens to interpret the portion of the world from which the terrorist attacks that characterize the new millennium originated (Acharya 2007).

2 On the transformation of war Rupert Smith (2006) while on the “justification” of the War on Terror, see Flint and Ghazi-Walid (2004).

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Although the terrorism/war on terror dyad does not have the same hierarchizing potential as the previous East/West one, the interpretative grid of the war on terror has remained central to every American administration after September 11, providing support to all the other actors of the international system. Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and even China have used the common fight against Islamist terrorism to further their own particular interests, which were often mutually incompatible: from the Levant to the Gulf, Central Asia to North Africa, the Horn of Africa to Nigeria, and from Chad to Niger (Buckley and Singh 2006). Moreover, the terroristic threat has postponed the crisis related to the obsolescence of the state, as had been prematurely announced by postmodern theories. The state ‘might have lost many of the roles it had progressively acquired during the modern era, but it has maintained its original raison d’être: the protection of its citizens from violent dangers coming from inside and outside its borders’ (Andreatta 2001: 150). Further, terrorism has contributed to re-legitimize the function of the state and its irreplaceability, especially in the field of security, ‘the specific field of political power’ (Ibidem). Today, the state is still the exclusive beneficiary of the ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of force’, for ‘international organizations are not equipped with their own military forces, counting on those of the member states, while the subnational groups who employ arms do so against the law (Ibidem)’. When under attack by terroristic organizations, societies cannot help but turn to the state for protection. The non-decisive nature demonstrated by the extraordinary military force of the United States in victoriously closing the long insurgent wars that ensued from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (Andres 2006); the necessity of relying on the active support of its allies—not only European—even on the military front; the indecisiveness manifested in finding a way out of the mayhem caused by the military interventions—beyond the doubtful lawfulness of at least one of them—; these are all factors that have eroded the legitimacy of the Liberal World Order, and called into question the benevolent nature of American hegemony. Here, especially, lies the deconstructive capacity expressed by Islamist terrorism against the liberal order (Beeson 2007; Valladão 2006: 243). The challenges constituted by the divergence of politics of the great powers, and by the persistence of asymmetrical threats due to the diffusion and molecularization of violence, are phenomena whose impact on the Mediterranean is particularly glaring (Jünemann 2003). Starting in

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the mid-1970s, the Mare Nostrum—‘Our Sea’—has progressively turned into a sort of American lake. In the years after 1989, it had been most significant as a strategic sideline for the various American—and Western— military operations in ‘the Greater Middle East’. With the growing entropy of the eastern and southern coastal states, the Mediterranean has gained new centrality in the Western security dynamic (Biscop 2002). Concurrently with American interests reorienting toward the Pacific and Indian Oceans, unprecedented levels of attention manifested for the political and social systems of the countries shaken by the Arab Spring uprisings, along with ineffective attempts to influence their developments (Martinez 2020). In other words, the Mediterranean has reacquired its crucial value as the focal point of the dynamics on its northern and southern coasts, involuntarily reconnected by the consequences of the phenomena that concern them—regardless of their origins and causes. This security interdependence was evidently intensified by the collapse of certain states like Libya (Lacher 2020) and, partially, Syria, by the diffuseness of the terroristic threat, and by the abnormal growth of uncontrolled migration, which we will return to later (Owen 2000; Panebianco 2012). This is the context of Russia’s return to these waters, in concomitance with the Ukrainian crisis and the intervention of Moscow in Syria (Siddi 2020). In a nutshell, the turbulence on the southern coast, terrorism, and the return of Russia demonstrate that the Mediterranean Sea is once again contestable. In other words, the resurgence of the geopolitical tension with Russia—which goes well beyond the possible mutual attraction between Putin and Trump, and has been attested and amplified by the decision to increase the American military budget by approximately $54 billion—reveals two fronts of contention. One is the Baltic Sea, where NATO and Russia are in substantial contact/friction, so much so that any action by either actor risks triggering an extremely dangerous escalation. This is the main reason behind the effectiveness of deterrence in that area: both NATO and Russia are aware that they must tread with extreme caution, because they are looking into each other’s eyes at a close distance (Veebel 2018). Things stand differently in the Mediterranean, where a number of other countries—bordering with neither dueler via land—offer a chance for indirect strategic action aimed at weakening the opponent in a game of bank shots. Clearly, the West is the one that has most to lose in this game, due to its semi-hegemonic position in relation to the states of the southern coast, and its (so far) dominant role in the Mediterranean. This

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affords an opportunity for Southern Europe NATO members—especially Italy—to convince the Alliance as a whole to revalue the area, not as a mere secondary front or a limes looking out on nothingness, but as the point on which Russian maneuvers to weaken the Atlantic Alliance, or indirectly threaten it, are most insistent (Brandsma 2019). Think of the attraction of Turkey to the Russian sphere of influence through triangulation in the Levant, or of the eventuality that Moscow might obtain a base for the rest or resupply of its ships in Cyrenaica, in exchange for its support to Libyan General Haftar’s forces, or perhaps, in the near future, in Egypt (Mercuri 2017; Öni¸s and Yılmaz 2016).

The Migration Issue in the Mediterranean: A European Fiasco and an Oportunity for the Italian Far-Right In the last few years, especially in the Italian public and political debate, the Mediterranean crisis has taken on the likeness of a ‘refugee emergency’, due to the delay in the employment of necessary measures to grant at least a legislative and legal framework to the stream of people who flooded the Central Mediterranean (Ceccorulli 2020b; Panebianco 2016). This is the last door into Europe left open by the sly selfishness of some and by the convenient ignorance of others, for those who wish to escape ethnic, political, or religious persecution, war and poverty, or simply search for a better future. This phenomenon has highlighted how too much of Europe’s rhetoric over the decades still disguises entirely particularistic logics (Ceccorulli and Lucarelli 2017). The fact is that European norms were devised in different times and in response to completely different problems. For instance, the Dublin Regulation established that the country through which the asylum seeker first enters the EU is responsible for their reception.3 Such laws have been cunningly utilized to avoid the joint confrontation of a crisis that concerns the borders of the Union—and their security—rather than those of any particular member states, leaving the burden to the less fortunate—Spain, Greece, Italy— which has been a huge blow to the credibility of European solidarity

3 Country responsible for asylum application (Dublin), https://ec.europa.eu/home-aff airs/what-we-do/policies/asylum/examination-of-applicants_en. Accessed 13 December 2020.

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(Bauböck 2018). Clearly, the revision of the Dublin Regulation, on which significant consensus among the major European countries is still really hard to be found, could be the only way to offset the policy orientation of the Visegrad Group—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, emulated by other countries of the Union—which rejected any viable proposal for the relocation of asylum-seeking migrants by ridiculing the very idea of solidarity of fate among the EU members. It should be enough to consider that by the end of 2016 ‘the relocation to other countries of the migrants that had arrived to Italy and Greece had only reached 9,000 units in comparison to the 160,000 planned’ (Cotta 2017: 70; Trauner 2020). Another option would be to propose a common European frontier, whose vigilance and security would be a shared responsibility of all member states. The states would be required to contribute not only on the security front but also on the humanitarian front, managing eventual flows of people regardless of where they came from and through which part of the European frontier they enter. This is a matter that Italy ought to have had the right and the opportunity to propose—instead of limiting itself to sterile and unproductive polemics alternatively directed at Germany, Austria, and France. French President Emmanuel Macron raised the issue between summer and fall of 2018, and I think it was the interest of Italy, as well as Europe in general, in supporting the initiative to be fairly obvious (Ceccorulli 2019a). Then again, even those who are actual victims of the lack of solidarity within the EU, like Italy, can compellingly be deemed guilty of having thought for too long that they could circumvent unsustainable agreements in the name of an emergency. The purported unpredictability of the crisis was magnified by delays in the preparation of adequate facilities—humanity and security-wise—for the reception, identification, and eventual repatriation of the migrants (Gatrell 2019). When, over the course of summer 2017, Italian Minister of the Interior Marco Minniti finally promoted a hasty legislative intervention aimed at filling the void in which private agencies were moving to assist the victims of the new human traffickers, he became the target of harsh attacks. As usual, this came from opposite directions, equally unorganized and irresponsible of the consequences and the values underlying their actions and externalizations—to reprise the classic Weberian distinction. As always, contrasting noble principles were invoked, which can be summarized as ‘cosmopolitan humanitarianism’ and ‘defense of national

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sovereignty’, glossing over the less presentable electoral and economic interests that are also subject to those noble principles (Eriksen 2016). The measure was stigmatized as either insufficient, to ‘send the migrants back to their countries’, or ‘inhumane and hostile toward the NGOs’. In fact, it was designed to accomplished as much as possible given the (very stringed) circumstances: providing norms of conduct for those who intended to use Italian ports to unload the migrants, avoiding the proliferation of instances of possible and even unintended exploitation of the NGOs’ ships by the smugglers, and reassuring an over worried domestic public opinion (Ceccorulli and Fassi forthcoming; Ceccorulli 2020b). Though obviously limited in its capacity to solve a gigantic and intricate issue such as the migration crisis, especially with an eye to its economic implications, the new laws championed by the minister of interior in the Gentiloni cabinet at least took into account that, because of the unwillingness of the other European countries to absorb a non-nominal share of the refugee flow, Italy risked becoming a sort of ‘bilge’ to the Union—a huge, anomic refugee camp, unmanageable and ungovernable, and bound to foster xenophobia and racism (Blangiardo e Ortensi 2020). Limiting the arrivals and identifying and checking newcomers while determining their requisites for the right to political asylum were the necessary steps to force the other EU countries to do their share while the Dublin Regulation is in force in the face of a challenge that primarily questions law and politics, since the ethical side of the problem—hopefully—is not in doubt. The efficacy of the strategy of control of the migration flows and identification of the migrants—including the assessment of their eligibility for asylum and verification of the security of the facilities where they are hosted—has clearly demonstrated that the idea that the migration phenomenon was completely unmanageable was a convenient fable. It was useful to those who had given up on exerting their political function, possibly in the delusion that they could dump the burden onto neighboring countries; and functional to the interests of the enormous number of economic actors that have charged millions of Euros in these years, with huge profits, in the business of temporary hospitality centers. After the agreements actively sought by the Gentiloni government with the Libyan authorities and with the transit countries of the migrants, the flow toward the Italian coasts has been sensibly reduced, although at the cost of cretaing the condition for gross violation of hunan rights, criminal

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conducts by Libyan officials and human traffickers, and the lost of too many lives at sea. (Panebianco 2019; Zotti and Fassi 2020). Four years later the Italian-Lybian agreement, the issue is still very far from finding a politically and ethically acceptable solution. However, it is also evidence that overcoming the ‘emergency mindset’ is possible and much in need. These results were achieved despite the ruckus caused by the many who were interested in sinking the attempts of the premier and the minister of the interior for electoral motives and contemptible personalisms. Additionally, it was accomplished through the funding of interventions that were aimed at identification of migrants and verification of their eligibility for asylum while in Libyan territory and even earlier. Moreover, it is clear that the worsening of the civil war in Libya and the inhuman state in which migrants are held in Libyan camps, requires other solutions, starting from those ‘humanitarian corridors’, envisaged by Minniti’s plan as well, still far from being massive operational. In terms of effective implementation of collaboration with Libyan authorities, this should have implied both an increase in the efficiency and humanity of the actions of the Libyan security forces and a radical improvement of the facilities in which the migrants are temporarily hosted—possibly put under international conduction and responsibility. Clearly, the pre-requisite for theese measures to be effectively taken is building political relationship with Lybia and help stabilize the country: a goal that neither Italy nor the EU has pursued with much commitment and success. All goals very far to be reached, if not unrealistic at all and showing a Pontius Pilate-like attitude toward the human tragedy of migrants being detained inside Libyan centers in appalling conditions. However, consistent financial efforts must also be directed at the countries crossed by the routes of the human traffickers on their way toward the Libyan coastline. Choosing to prioritize the transit countries, rather than the countries of origin, with the flow of immediate aid, is an act of common sense and respect for the resources of the Italian tax-payers. As much as we can provide support toward improving the conditions of the countries of origin of the economic migrants—who amount to 60–70 percent of the total—our efforts can never compensate for the value of the money they send back to their countries. Things stand differently for the transit countries: they are consistently damaged by the crossings, primarily due to the contamination between legal and illegal economic channels (Haferlach and Kurban 2017). What is happening today in Libya and in countries such as Chad or Niger is not much different from what happened in

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Somalia in the ‘golden age’ of piracy in the first decade of 2000s—namely, the creation of a growing segment of the population directly or indirectly living off the revenue of criminal activities. In the case of Somalia, this was one of the most difficult factors to confront in order to eradicate piracy. In conclusion, if the countries of origin of the economic migrants do not have a tangible and clear interest in contrasting irregular emigration, the same cannot be said of the transit countries, as the agreement—in fact a ‘declaration’—reached by Germany on behalf of the EU and Turkey in 2016—one outside the scrutiny of international law and well below the ethical standards that EU claims to promote and protect—clearly testifies. The electoral earthquake in Italy in March 2018 radically changed the scene, laying the responsibility of governing the country on a coalition realized ‘in cold blood’ after the voting process, by two political forces significantly different from one another and on opposing fronts during the election. The Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) garnered approximately one-third of the votes, and ‘Salvini’s Lega’ reached 17 percent. The former is a hard to define populist and sovereigntist movement animated by various impulses: against big business, financial capitalism, and the austerity policy promoted by Brussels; but in favor of protection of small private property, increased investment in the south of the country, intensification of direct democracy, and the introduction of basic income. The Movement has at least two souls: one tendentiously leftist, secular, and critical of globalization on the grounds of the inequality it fosters and expands. The other soul is more conservative, hostile to the policy of asylum and acceptance of the migrants—considered too lax— worried about the erosion of the traditional family, and against the indiscriminate opening of commercial activities (Albertazzi et al. 2018). The party’s electorate comes predominantly from the countryside, small towns, urban peripheries, and the south. It is relatively less educated, composed of people from the lower classes and various age groups (Carlotti and Gianfreda 2020). Lega—formerly Lega Nord or ‘Northern League’—has transformed, in the years of Matteo Salvini’s leadership, into a full-blown far-right party, and losing its local connotations. The party was conceived as an open, often vulgar, polemic against Southern Italians, the central state and the capital town—‘thieving Rome’—choosing the path of identitarian and sovereignist nationalism, and following in the steps of Marine Le Pen’s National Front party in France, where immigrants—‘illegal immigrants’ as Salvini underlines—and most of all Muslims, replace

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the Southern Italians as a polemical target (Bonikowski et al. 2019). However, although National Front has served as inspiration in turning Lega from a federalist/secessionist party to a nationalist/sovereigntist one, their relationships with radicalization are different; the National Front today has less radical positions compared with ten years ago, while the exact opposite is true of Lega. Salvini’s Lega has a revisionist position on the Fascist regime; it denigrates the value of antifascism and of the ‘Resistenza’ (1943–1945) that gave birth to the republic, flaunts positions in the name of ‘law and order’, favors the diffusion of weapons, and is acritical in support of police forces even in cases of power abuse. After being appointed minister of the interior, Salvini approved two ‘security decrees’ that disproportionately inflated the right to self-defense and the use of force by police, he criminalized hostile public manifestations, and established heavy fines for bringing migrants rescued from international waters into Italian ports, as well as imprisonment for the captain and seizure of the NGOs’ ships to prevent a repeat of the ‘crime’ (Dennison and Gedde 2018). In the successive campaign for the European elections, which Salvini clamorously won—doubling the Lega platform at the expense of its government partner—he has massively and profusely abused his prerogatives as minister of the interior. In this case as well, we can observe a more peripheral/rural rather than urban electorate, with low to average education rates. Lega’s base, however, is still concentrated in the northern part of the country— although it is rapidly expanding southward—and is more represented in the middle-age bracket. Economically speaking, it has garnered electors with very diverse income levels, but traditionally it especially represents autonomous workers—those from which, in Italy, it is extremely hard to collect taxes. Italy, together with Greece, holds the record for tax evasion on VAT, income taxes, and social security contributions. It is an unusual case of a ‘catch-all’ party—identitarian and extreme-right, comparable in this aspect only to the National Fascist Party (1922–1943). Not coincidentally, the legislative measures on which it has most insisted were a partial revision of the law on retirement, which was really a sort of ‘una tantum’ (lump sum) law that would enable certain age groups to retire earlier, and the umpteenth tax amnesty (Miller-Idriss 2019, 2020; Mudde 2019). Salvini, a political entrepreneur whose main personality traits are opportunism and tacticism (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018), definitely found his strong suit in the presumed insecurity of the country. Even though

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all indicators present the image of Italy as a secure country, where all crime categories have been in strong decline in recent years—in 2008– 2017 murder rates declined by 39.8 percent; robberies diminished by 33.3 percent; and in 2016–2017 home robberies declined by 8.5 percent (Gabanelli and Offeddu 2019). Lega’s leader artfully paints the picture of a crime-ridden Italy preyed upon by gangs and lowlife immigrants with the help of anomalous coverage of crime news by the national media—36.4 percent in Italy, in comparison with 26.3, 18.2, and 17.2 percent of British, German, and French television respectively (Gabanelli and Offeddu 2019; Biassoni and Pasini 2014). Interestingly, Salvini’s speeches—even less his actions—never target drug trafficking or the presence and spread—in the North and the financial world—of Mafia, Camorra, and Ndrangheta criminal organizations, which notoriously represent a centuries-old problem for legality. Salvini’s obsession lies with the immigrants, who are invariably depicted as potential criminals who steal, kill, rape, and rob Italians of their jobs. Against their presence, and the NGOs that tend to their reception, he has begun a war that has brought about the criminalization of both. At the same time, he has lashed out at the EU and the European partners, accusing them of wanting to leave the responsibility and costs of dealing with the migration flows on Italy’s shoulders. As previously noted, the Union’s faults—especially of some of the member states—are undeniable. Nevertheless, it is equally undeniable that consistent financial help was given to Italy, and that Salvini has systematically skipped all the meetings of the European Home Affairs Council that have been dedicated to the issue (Ceccorulli 2020a). Matteo Salvini’s unquestionable talent lies not so much in interpreting the needs or desires of the Italians, or of a considerable number of them, but in the ability to penetrate and magnify their fears—especially those less-rationally founded, unleashing attitudes and feelings that would have once been deemed unspeakable in the public debate, even by those who experienced them—and even giving them ethical respectability and political representation. It is hard to attribute ‘values’, even negative ones, to Salvini. What is noteworthy about him is his ability to seize and politically exploit the moment. The extraordinarily favorable results in the European Parliamentary elections in May 2019 were an indisputable personal success for Salvini himself. However, at the same time, he has contributed to the political isolation of Italy within European institutions (the Council

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of Ministers and the European Council), making Italian demands on the migration flows and financial flexibility even less likely to be heard.

Islamist Radicalization and Islamist Terror in Italy: Far from the Far-Right Tale To close the circle on the subject of extinguishing the threat of terrorism, and on the multiplicity of new challenges to the security of a political community, it is worthwhile to spend a few words on the implications of Islamist terrorism in the Italian context, and on the ‘radicalization’ that represents its incubation phase, which does not always lead to concrete terrorist action.4 First, it is appropriate to clarify the meaning of ‘radicalization’. We are referring to a gradual process in which an individual embraces a value system that is incompatible with the society in which he/she lives, thus inevitably leading him/her to pursue social change, possibly through violence (Allen 2007). In the radicalization process, an individual undergoes cognitive transformations that bring him/her to legitimize violence in itself and its use for political ends (Ashour 2009: 8). Therefore, radicalization produces an ideological cleavage and generates an extreme fringe of the social body, a deviation from it, in a given historical moment (Khosrokhavar 2017). While radicalization can be inspired, and guided, by any extremist ideology—as the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in summer 2017 have grievously reminded us—it is also true that public opinion in Italy and in the West currently views the main threat to security in Jihadist-inspired Islamist radicalization (Frampton 2018). It is perhaps useful to pin a few historical and terminological points. By ‘Islamism’, or ‘political Islam’, we mean an ideological and political project aimed at the construction of a political and juridical order based on shari’a, the Islamic law (Mandaville 2007: 15). Islamism as a phenomenon is traditionally placed in the twentieth century (Giunchi 2017). Adapted to the forms of modern politics, mainly political parties,

4 In making some brief considerations on this aspect, I am aided by the experience gained while participating to the “Study Commission on Radicalization and Jihadist Extremism”, presided by Lorenzo Vidino, instituted by the Italian government after the truck attack in Nice, France, on July 14, 2016, with the purpose of individuating a national approach to the radicalization phenomenon. Although they largely reflect the contents of the report presented to Prime Minister Gentiloni at the end of 2016, the opinions I will express in the following pages are my own.

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it was nonetheless nostalgic of the Ottoman Caliphate, and a response to its abolition, in 1924, by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of contemporary Turkey. The pioneer of 1900s-Islamism was an Egyptian: Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), ideologist and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that—although it contributed to the abolition of the monarchy and to the creation of modern republican Egypt—was harshly repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The ruthlessness of the repression propelled the hatred toward the established order inside the prisons where the Muslim Brothers were being tortured. It was in one of these Egyptian prisons that Sayyed Qutb (1906–1966), hanged by the Nasser regime, developed his ideas on social change. Faced with such a violent secular state, Qutb invoked the necessity for an Islamic revolution to overthrow the Arab governments supported by the West—in which he also included the Soviet Union. This was to be accomplished possibly by force and through the takfir practice—the accusation of apostasy against the Muslims whose conduct is deemed out of line with the precepts of Islam. For at least two reasons, it is important to emphasize that the transition of political Islamism in adopting forms of radical fighting and in contemplating the use of violence were successive to its repression by the power regimes. First, recall in these trying times, that the claims of ‘equivalence’ of Islamism and radicalism—glossing over the outright hysterical equivalency between Islam and terrorism—is inaccurate. Although any integralism can imply a certain amount of violence, a radical program per se, if pursued through licit means, cannot and should not be criminalized in a society that wishes to call itself liberal. Besides, the liberal program itself, and even more so the democratic program, was considered radical utopias at their rise. By this, I do not wish to express any sympathy for religiously inspired political programs, to whatever deity they refer—much less for the contents expressed by political Islamism. Secondly, we should never forget that radical Islamism is bred by the liberticidal, kleptocratic, and criminal nature of the regimes that rule the majority of the societies where Islam is predominant (Stepan 2018). Qutb’s thought, in its most subversive form, has had a most relevant impact on a considerable part of the Islamist movement. Its influence was strengthened by the defeat against Israel of 1967 and by the decline of Arab nationalism (Addi 2017). It must also be specified that a peculiar version of Islamism developed in Shia Iran, where Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic in 1979. The Iranian Revolution was also ideologically

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inspired, in its initial stages, by the views of Ali Shariati (1933–1997), author of an original synthesis of Islamism and Marxism. Shariati’s central idea was the reconstruction of true Islam, which he identified with the original Shia Islam of the Ali period, preserving its implications of social and political justice in the ideal of a classless society pervaded by a revolutionary ethic. Shariati’s influence is apparent in the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini, who reprised the concept of Islam as an instrument in the fight of the oppressed against the oppressors, and in the equalization of socioeconomic inequality. However, we need to stress that there is no real correspondence between the thought of Shariati and the theoretical base of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Constitution. It was mainly in the 1980s that the Qutbist faction ‘interbred’ with Salafism, a much older movement. To gauge the relevance of this event, we must first acknowledge that within Islam, as in many other religions, there is some tension between text and interpretation. We could suggest factitiously that Salafists recognize the absolute primacy of the text, and this fact constitutes the specificity of their ‘fundamentalism’ (Cook 2014: 374). Clearly, this does not automatically imply their adhesion to violence. What sets the Salafists apart from the other rigorist Sunni movements is the contention that access to the text should not be mediated by the filter of scholastic tradition. The revival of the Salafi movement in the modern era is related to the success of some movements that have been active since the late eighteenth century in various parts of the world. The strongest of which is the Wahhabi movement in Arabic Peninsula, due to the ties connecting it, since its rise, to the House of Saud. Notoriously, the extraordinary wealth that flowed to the Saudi clan after the discovery of oil and its exploitation in the Arabian Peninsula—formerly controlled by the Hussein family, sharifs of Mecca and descendants of the Prophet— has enabled Wahhabism to spread the Salafi verb in the greater part of the Islamic world, albeit with alternating fortune (Wald 2018). Salafism, like many other fundamentalist movements, would have a quietist attitude with a preference for religious predication rather than political action. However, after the encounter with Qutbism, a minority currently developed within it that built a platform and a political agenda focused on the violent deposition of the so-called ‘moderate’ or ‘republican’ regimes, especially after the fight of the mujahidin in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet invasion, between the late 1970 s and into the following decade. This was the precursor to what is now called

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Jihadist-Salafism, and groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS/IS refer to this sub-current (Meijer 2009; Wagemakers 2012). The Jihadist movement is multifaceted and is divided by internal fault lines—the rivalry between Al-Qaeda and ISIS/IS being the most tangible evidence of this fact. The movement resulted from a sort of revision of the tradition in a modern and pan-political key, partially accomplished through a hegemonic narration of the meaning of the word jihad. Among the many divisions that articulate it, we must mention the one between the supporters of the fight against the ‘close enemy’—the regimes of the Arab and generally Muslim world, and the one against the ‘far enemy’—the West. The debate then expanded to include the form that the Jihadist galaxy should assume, and the modalities of fight to employ, including the legitimacy of hitting targets traditionally considered inviolable, such as women and children, and the role of independent fighters within the movement (Guolo 2004). It must be mentioned that the near totality of terrorist groups belonging to the international Jihadist network are Sunnites. Western media, as well as the governing authorities of the United States, Israel, several Sunni autocracies, and in some other Western countries, often cite Hezbollah—the Lebanese Shia party and militia—among the terrorist organizations. This is inaccurate. Although Hezbollah may resort to terroristic action—usually against opposing military forces—it is first and foremost a resistance movement that emerged in reaction to the recurrent Israeli invasions in the ‘Land of the Cedars’, and to provide political and social representation to the Shia Muslims of Lebanon. In many respects, as Marina Calculli well arguments in her brilliant book, Hezbollah is “acting like a state” (Calculli 2018). Simply put, to include it in the gamut of global jihadism is both analytically and politically incorrect. The same goes for the Palestinian formations that have been fighting against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—going on for fifty years (Bregman 2014). This mix of different and contrasting positions and principles is the breeding ground of the model of global jihadism we are facing today— scattered, mutable, limited by blurred lines, of which the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been one of the most successful examples. Its ideology has gathered proselytes both in countries where Islam is the main religion and in the West, attracting the most diverse of profiles. Some of its ‘soldiers’ belong to structured groups, while others, especially in the Western countries, support it, or commit violent acts in its name, without undergoing a formal process of selection, and in almost total independence

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(Chan 2019). We need to stress that this spontaneous development has been long sought by various leaders of the global jihad who theorized the necessity for a worldwide movement composed by organized groups as well as small networks and independent ‘lone wolves’, the only unifying element being a common, or should we say similar, ideology. In Italy, the radicalization and appearance of the first alarms in relation to jihadism are actually quite early—dating back to the 1990s. During the Bosnian civil war, the imam of the mosque of Viale Jenner in Milan, Egyptian Anwar Shaaban, was also the emir of the ‘foreign fighters’ that engaged in the Balkan conflict (Kohlmann 2014). This precocious appearance has not yet been followed by the threat of external or local networks as happened in other European countries, especially after 2001. Certainly, the investigations and the repressive activity promptly conducted by the Italian authorities against the first organizations have been successful; there was also no increase in the growth of local groups. Toward the end of the last decade, however, the intelligence services had begun periodically signaling the possibility that second-generation immigrants could take the path of Jihadist violence. This was attributed to a higher degree of vulnerability related to poor socioeconomic conditions or possibly emotional fragility, and after a process of radicalization that is now conducted more and more through online propaganda and psychological conditioning by co-religionists already adhering to extremist positions. The same sources have pointed at the growth of a new generation of Islamic extremists that are less bounded by structured organizations, having taken a personal path before embracing the Jihadist creed (Vidino 2014). In the following years, cases of Italian Jihadists and foreign fighters have been fairly limited and very diverse, from that of Libyan Mohamed Game—who tried to explode a rudimental device in front of the Santa Barbara Army barracks in Milan on October 12, 2009, to Genoa-born Giuliano Delnevo, who converted to Islam and died in Syria, to Balkan workers Munifer Karamaleski and Ismar Mesinovic, to Moroccan-born rapper Anas el Abboubi. However, those that have most affected public opinion include Maria Giulia Sergio, the Campanian woman residing in Brianza, who converted to Islam along with her family after marrying an Albanian Jihadist, and fled to the ‘Caliphate’, where she continues to proselyte in favor of ISIS/IS. In addition, Abderrahim Moutaharrik, a Moroccan-born kickboxer residing in the province of Lecco, showed up

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in the ring carrying an ISIS/IS flag, and investigators believe he has been planning a terrorist attack on Italian soil. These, and many other profiles of Italian radicals, foreshadow highly differentiated personal stories, consistent with what has been registered in the European countries that experienced Jihadist terrorism earlier and more severely than Italy—e.g., United Kingdom, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany. Several theories have been devised to attempt an explanation of this phenomenon. Some focus on structural factors such as political tensions and cultural conflict at the internal and international levels. Others insist it is psychological and personal factors, highlighting the increasingly younger age—the teenage years—at which the radicalization process takes place. Some theories have been formulated to explain the radicalization of European Muslims, emphasizing elements such as the quest for identity, discrimination, and situations of relative economic discomfort (Dalgaard-Nielsen 2010; Kepel 2003). Olivier Roy has an evocative thesis about the ‘Islamization of radicalism’, that is, that violent Islamism today represents the primary option encountered in demands for radical protest generated by juvenile discomfort (Roy 2017). Second- and third-generation migrants, in particular, would experience a ‘double absence’, a situation in which they are neither foreigners nor citizens, as they belong neither to their inherited culture nor to the Western culture (Sayad 1999). In such conditions, a void in identity and meaning expands, which the Jihadist militancy is able to fill, thanks to its capacity to provide ‘some fixed points to the indetermination of their existences’ (Guolo 2005: 35). Radical Islam offers absolute certainties about life and death, good and evil, right and wrong. It allows for the synthesis and coexistence of the rejection of the Western society—which often rejects these youths—with the repudiation of the religious and cultural traditions of their families, thus providing a new identity as a substitute to the one that was shattered. If we look at the numbers of Italian foreign fighters’ arrests, or of the arrests taking place on Italy’s territory, we find evidence of the reduced scale of this phenomenon in the country. According to the Ministry of the Interior, between January 1 and October 25, 2016, there were 34 arrests and 57 expulsions, while the foreign fighters ‘connected’ to Italy numbered 110. This is a decidedly smaller number compared to those registered in France (1,500), Germany (1,000), Belgium (500), Austria (300), or the Scandinavian countries (several hundreds) (Van Ginkel and Entenmann 2016). To explain the Italian anomaly, various

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hypotheses have been made, and they can be divided into two groups: the demographic-sociological group, and the group that relates it to the response of our antiterrorism unit. With regard to the first group, the explanations begin by taking notice of the more recent history of immigration in Italy, the data for the second and third generations of immigrants—the most vulnerable to Jihadist propaganda—are scarce. Moreover, compared to those from Latin America, the Far East, or Eastern Europe, those coming from Muslim countries are not the most numerous, and they are much more heterogeneous in comparison to those we find in France—who are predominantly from the Maghreb—or Germany—largely Turkish (Grappi 2020; Zotti 2020). In addition, there are no Muslim neighborhoods in Italy: consider the multiethnic and multireligious composition of areas such as Viale Padova in Milan (Allievi 2010). Other interpretations emphasize the fact that Italy is characterized by a strong presence of national and governmental Muslim organizations—Moroccan, Egyptian, Tunisian—engaged in anti-radical mobilization, while the number of Salafi or Islamist militant organizations is comparatively very slim. Lastly, I believe it is worth mentioning that the confederal structure of Italian society, which is also a result of familism and of the country’s highly pluralist character, caused the piecemeal immigration of other groups in the past to be received with ‘benevolent laxity’. That feeling has certainly changed, partly due to the scale of the phenomenon and to the narrative of the impossibility to control it. Additionally, it is because certain groups—starting with Lega— have politicized the issue, and because of the specular, center-left positions that have long neglected to comprehend the social discomfort of the lower classes, while at the same time fighting tooth and nail to defend the inviolability of their privileged bourgeoise Shangri-las, as the notorious holiday destination of Capalbio or the uptown district of the great cities. The second group of explanations focuses on the efficiency of the intelligence services and the investigations carried out by the police and judiciary forces, advantaged by the extensive anti-terrorist experience gained during the long season of leftist and neofascist domestic terror known as the ‘anni di piombo’—‘years of lead’—and by the learned habit of fighting against organized crime. It should never be overlooked that the level of cooperation between different police forces—mainly State Police and Carabinieri—and between police forces and intelligence agencies, is extremely high in Italy (Zotti and Parsi 2020). This is reinforced

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by the fact that the men and women employed by the intelligence are in great part supplied by the police forces. Moreover, the Italian legislation—due to the traditional confrontation with domestic terrorist groups and with the many ‘mafias’ that, unfortunately, characterize the criminal profile in the country—provides more ductile instruments compared to those that can be applied in other states in similar circumstances. Lastly, the level of cooperation between investigators, inquirers, and judges is also higher than what is commonly understood, as judicial records testify. In particular, the instrument of expulsion of foreign subjects from the national territory for reasons of public order and state security has been utilized widely and effectively (Caponio and Cappiali 2018). However, it is clear that the relative advantage of having a smaller presence of generations at high risk for radicalization enjoyed by Italy, in comparison with other European countries, is quickly eroding and will be nullified in a few years. Furthermore, we must note that expulsion—while it was proven to be a precious and effective instrument for individuals whom the intelligence had identified as radicals about to take action, but had not yet committed a crime, or could not be incriminated due to the modalities of proof collection in their cases, if conducted by the intelligence services, for instance—would not be applicable to Italian citizens (Marone 2017). And, as we know, the vast majority of perpetrators of the attacks that have disquieted Europe in recent years were European citizens. This consideration has nothing to do with the debate that has been poisoning the media in Italy in the last few years, over the jus soli—as opposed to the jus sanguinis —as a factor of eligibility for citizenship. Both these can be argued without speciously involving the fight against terrorism (Ceccorulli 2019b). However, maintaining the obvious principle of juridical civility that citizenship can never—and must never—be revoked it is unquestionable that, when we consider extending the modalities of its conferment, we must establish evaluation criteria that also takes into account adhesion to the republican value system and the transit through the school system, especially for those children born in Italy. It is equally undeniable that the sic et simpliciter concession of citizenship, after a certain period of residence and once a few conditions have been verified, does not in itself solve the issue of identity and of its possible ‘double absence’, as has been demonstrated by the cases in France, Belgium, and Great Britain. When we consider why the first generations of immigrants from the Maghreb in the French suburbs did not fall prey to Islamist propaganda,

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we should perhaps remember that they were largely employed in the big metalworking, chemical, and steel factories, in the shipyards, in the mines: places of socialization where class identity ended up prevailing over religious or national identity. They were workers and miners, like their French, Spanish, and Italian colleagues who shared their same issues and fights. None of this exists anymore. Today, the children of the immigrants, as well as the new migrants, do not have such solid places of socialization and aggregation. The Italian framework that has been so reassuring for a long time could suddenly change, especially if extremist predicators were to choose the country as a target for their action, and even more so once the European foreign fighters return from the ‘Caliphate’. This scenario cannot but concern us, as hundreds of thousands of ‘second generations’ will soon enter adolescence, an age that is extremely vulnerable to radicalization. The domestic debate on citizenship in Italy should take this into account and question without prejudice if making citizenship an impossible conquest or a mirage is truly in the interest of republican security, besides the fact that it appears frankly iniquitous (Colombo et al. 2009). The international framework must also not be forgotten. On the one hand, the frequency of Western military interventions in the civil conflicts of Muslim-majority countries offers the best elements in the propaganda of hate predicators. This does not mean that we should abstain from intervening when it seems necessary. But, it does dictate that we should carefully evaluate when and how to do so. On the other hand, we need to reiterate that, as long as the Islamic world is characterized by autocratic governments and by the exclusion of most citizens from the political sphere, we can hardly hope that the message of political Islamism, even in its radical version, will not be alluring (Diwan et al. 2019).

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CHAPTER 6

The Drift of Trump’s America in the Liberal World Order: From Reluctant Rule-Maker to Revisionist Power

Donald Trump’s appearance on the main deck of the Liberal World Order, wearing the stripes earned with his largely unexpected victory of the 2016 presidential elections, may be regarded as the result of the rise among large sectors of the American society of a bitter sentiment of alienation, which ultimately found a suitable outlet in the figure of a blustering, over-the-top political outsider. By and large, the tens of millions of Trump voters were people who felt marginalized by the increasing financialization of the economy, the expansion of international trade, and the delocalization of production, as well as by the impact of the ICT revolution. Even though Trump is no longer the President of the United States, these sentiments—no matter how well-founded—and their political consequences are far from being extinct. The prolonged contraction of wages and the rise of the ‘1 percent economy’ are the most conspicuous symptoms of the transformation of free-market economy into a system in which inherited wealth and birth-related privileges have become much more relevant than entrepreneurial skills. Donald Trump appeared in the eyes of the ones who felt like exiled in their own country as an oportunity to finally gain a voice. He listened to them without denying the legitimacy of their fears and recriminations, and indeed embolded them with his rants and swagger; his answers, however, ultimately aggravated problems he had promised to address—although the evidence of his administration © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_6

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failures did not prevent tens of millions of citizens to vote again for him in 2020 (Posner 2017). No matter how simplistic, the slogan ‘Make America Great Again!’ does encapsulate Trump’s political platform and his supporters’ underlying concerns. The adoption of protectionist measures, the denunciation of a number of treaties entailing the removal of trade barriers and the approval of new regulations, the questioning of the key institutions of the Liberal World Order, and the transactional approach toward partners and allies were all based on the idea that the interests of American citizens had been undermined by the former administrations’ excessive acquiescence. This attitude was compounded and reinforced by some more ideologyladen principles, in line with the neoconservative policies ushered in by George W. Bush, such as the almost uncritical support of Israel in the Middle East and the country’s ostentatiously good relations with the conservative Gulf monarchies (Jones and Guzansky 2020).1 Donald Trump’s international conduct has systematically discredited international institutions, cast shades on America’s relationships with its traditional allies, and exacerbated the tension with rivals, with potentially disruptive and enduring repercussions on the international system and the Liberal World Order.

‘It’s the Economy, Stupid!’ In light of what has been discussed so far, it comes as little surprise that the first overt blows to the foundations of the Liberal World Order originated in the slippery domain of economics, in the form of a financial crisis that—while due to spread on a world-scale and unfold in a myriad of place-specific predicaments—was ultimately triggered right in the center of the global economic system (Carmassi et al. 2009; Dymski 2011; Shiller 2012). The crisis, erupting in the final two years of the presidency of George W. Bush, highlighted the hegemon’s inability to keep the order in the fragile relationship between the financialized economy, ‘turbocapitalism’, and the social-political equilibrium (Hennessey and Lazear 2013; Holtzman 2011). The crisis revealed an incredible incapacity to govern the capitalistic economy, even within the United States, which, less than 1 The unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA is partly explained by this ideological orientation, as well as by the intent to extinguish the political legacy of Obama—e.g., by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

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a century after the Great Crash of 1929, once again exported its own disorder to the whole system (Bernanke et al. 2019).2 The American crisis stemmed from the excess of private debt, and from the insolvency caused by the fact that credit had been granted too readily to people who clearly lacked the requisites. The European crisis that closely followed took the form of a public debt crisis—or ‘sovereign debt’, as it was renamed. In this case, the root cause was the excessively liberal concession of credit to insolvent countries by international banks that were sure that those governments would step in to back their moral hazard (Hodson and Quaglia 2009; Overbeek 2012; Zestos 2015). Common to both crises was the necessity to inflate consumption, which had decreased due to the diminished purchasing power of salaries and the abnormal concentration of income and wealth. This was accomplished by going into debt: private debt tied to mortgage loans in the American tradition; and public debt tied to public expense in the European custom (Blanchard and Summers 2019). The crisis has been devastating in the West, enough to unmask the fact that the golden years of globalization—the years of economic growth theorized as endless (Jackson 2016; Macekura 2020; Doll 2010; Victor and Jackson 2015)—have led to an unacceptable polarization in the distribution of wealth, an ovehaul restructuring of society at the expense of an increasingly impoverished middle class, and the substitution of labor with capital among the factors of production, de facto permanently altering the power relations between social classes. In this sense, the neoliberal model can be correctly interpreted as both (1) ‘a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism’ and (2) ‘a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’ (Harvey 2005: 19). The idea that ‘ever more fully guaranteed property rights, ever freer markets, and ever “purer and more perfect” competition are enough to ensure a just, prosperous, and harmonious society’ turned out to be a dangerous, simplistic illusion (Piketty 2014: 30), as vacuous today as it was at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first globalization started. To put it bluntly: ‘the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical (and often highly ideological) 2 For a qualified opinion on the possibility that U.S. economy is better positioned to avoid a financial crisis today than it was in 2007, see the three former Federal Reserve Governors’ book (Bernanke et al. 2019).

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speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves: this obsession with mathematics is an easy way of appearing “scientific” without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in’ (Ibid.: 32; Lawson 2012; Callegati 2021). I would add that the crisis we are still witnessing now appears to be a proper genetic mutation of capitalism that began in the 1990s, when, in the middle of an economic boom, the production system underwent a deep change characterized by technological innovation, specifically in the form of a second information revolution (Hanna 2010; Jorgenson and Vu 2016). This path entailed a growing need for capital to feed innovation—which has ended up destroying far more well-paid jobs than succeeding in creating new—and worse-paid—ones. In the absence of corrective political procedures—ever less conceivable due to the cultural hegemony acquired by neoliberalism—technological innovation, while positive in and of itself, has generated increasing profits that have been almost entirely utilized to remunerate the capital invested, rather than the work employed. In other words, the quota of capital for product unit has overrun the work quota, and the gap in terms of contractual power between capital and labor has widened, causing a distortion in the role of the state ‘that keeps intervening heavily in the economy, not to support the weaker party in the relations of production, but the stronger: companies’ (Fana 2017: 91). It is a sharp inversion of tendency, in particular, if compared with the previous decades, when the profits from increased productivity generated by technological innovation were distributed between labor and the capital (Harvey 2005: 25). What the long-term impact of automation and digitalization on the job market is going to look like is still far from clear. Expectedly, experts have fallen along the classical ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’ falter lines (Baldwin 2019). For the former, there will be a similar effect to that of the Industrial Revolution and of the mechanical revolutions of the past centuries, with a repositioning of labor to more productive sectors for—eventually— higher salaries. For the latter, we will retrace the path—so far less than virtuous in terms of quantity, quality, and remunerability of labor—of the last information revolution. According to Forrester Research, by 2025, digitalization in the United States will replace 16% of human workers with robots, automated procedures, and artificial intelligence, at the same time creating new workplaces for roughly 9% of them, with a net loss of

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7% of all current positions (Forrester 2016). According to Moshe Vardi, Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Texas, even those estimates are optimistic, as by year 2045, robots will replace humans in the majority of work activities, pushing unemployment rates to over 50% (Vardi 2016). The McKinsey Report has highlighted that for G-19 nations and Nigeria, a historical trend between 1964 and 2014 saw an average yearly increment in productivity of 1.8 percent (Manyika et al. 2017), almost equal to the average yearly increase in jobs, at 1.7 percent. The estimated trend for 2015–2065 is an increment in productivity between 0.9 and 1.5 percent depending on the rapidity of mass automation, and with a workplace increase of 0.1 percent. Considering that world population is not decreasing, and that even countries with low birth rates, such as Italy and the European countries in general, will be affected by significant migratory phenomena that will intensify the demographic pressures. The matter of a ‘jobless growth’—an economic expansion that, structurally, does not create workplaces—is dramatically real. We are facing the possibility of replacing up to 49 percent of remunerated work activities with already tested technologies, with the elimination of 1.1 billion workplaces amounting to $16 trillion in salaries (Dobbs et al. 2016). Considering that people cannot be scrapped, we need to address the question of how to grant sustenance and a full life to the growing portion of humanity that will not have jobs. The prospect of ‘working less, so that everyone gets to work’ would clearly be satisfying for some, and could even be considered the realization of Marx’s auspicious ‘liberation from labor’, but only as long as it does not doom the masses to social marginality and deprivation. Regardless, this does not seem to be the direction we are currently going in: the tendency in recent years has been the increment of productivity coupled with increased working hours, and the decrease in hourly wages, and the social protection historically associated with labor. As far as Italy is concerned, the political debate on basic income does not bode well for the urgent measures needed to address this historical change will be taken. As underlined by the McKinsey Report, one of the challenges of the new era will be to ensure that wages are high enough for the new types of employment that will be created, to prevent continuing erosion of the wage share of the GDP, which has been dropping sharply since the 1970s (Manyika et al. 2017: 18).

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The new financialized economy has therefore ended up being characterized by two syndromes: (1) ‘bulimia’ of capital—always insufficient, always scarce, to be ripped from the competitors with the highest possible remuneration rates—and (2) ‘anorexia’ of labor—always exuberant, always too expensive, to be expelled and replaced at decreasing costs (Atzeni 2013; Edwards 2017; Polanyi-Levitt 2007; Pretty 2013; Siddiqui 2018; Van Biesebroeck 2014). In such a situation, with real income in contraction, the only strategy we were able to devise to ensure social quietness was the preservation of consumption rates, achieved by lowering the prices of a number of goods and services—imported, or of delocalized production—and by supporting them through private or public indebtedness, with the devastating consequences highlighted in the current phase of the ongoing crisis. We could describe this phenomenon as a ‘rentierization of the capitalistic system’: financial investments are far more remunerated than productive investments (Bellofiore 2004; Christophers 2019; Seccareccia and Correa 2017). Reprising Piketty’s convincing and well-documented scheme, when the private revenue rate of the capital is significantly higher than the growth rate of income and production over a long time, the economic system becomes unstable. Inequality—also in terms of opportunities derived from the diffusion of knowledge and skills—rises, inevitably threatening democratic societies and the values on which they are built. The fact that the profit rate of the capital is higher than the growth rate of the economy implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction: the entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. As Piketty wrote, ‘The past devours the future’ (Piketty 2014: 571). The electoral triumph of Donald Trump’s proposal happened in this context. Trump won the presidency thanks to the promise, however confused, to deconstruct the Liberal World Order from within, starting with the commitment to bring back workplaces, production, and profit in the United States (Lucarelli 2020; Regilme 2019). It was undoubtedly an unrealistic proposal, ridden with contradictions; it is also hard to not recognize that billionaire Trump—heir to a fortune that he has multiplied, and flaunting a luxurious life—is a rather incredible champion for the revenge of the impoverished middle and lower classes (Ashbee 2020;

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Cozzolino 2018; Hallin 2019). Still, compared with his rival Hillary Clinton—in the eyes of those who voted for Trump—he at least had merit for not insisting on denying the imbalance that had been generated by an ill-governed economic and financial globalization, which left the masses at the mercy of the wealthiest. The refusal to recognize this phase of capitalistic economic development, characterized for over twenty years by the hyper-appreciation of financial resources—and due to their nomadic nature, and by the compression and devaluation of political and social rights due to their intrinsically sedentary nature—had privileged identifiable and narrow sectors of the population at the expense of the vast multitude composed by all the others (Cornia 2003; Rosière and Jones 2012;Stiglitz 2016). This explains how a certainly less ‘presentable’ candidate, with lesser funds, fewer influential friendships, and almost no support from the media, was able to beat a much more valued and expert rival who had the right friends, substantial financing, and was adored by the press and television networks—with the partial exception of Fox News. In evaluating the health of American democracy, the extremely grave accusations of Donna Brazile were particularly revealing (Brazile 2017a). The former president of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) accused Hillary Clinton of manipulating the democratic primary elections of 2016. In her book, of which Politico early published an excerpt, Brazile claims that Hillary rigged the primaries, adding: ‘I had promised Bernie [Sanders] … that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process … By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart’ (Brazile 2017b). The former ‘number one’ of the ‘party of the donkey’ found a fundraising agreement between the two pro-Clinton committees—Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund—and the DNC, signed by the former CEO of the latter and by Robby Mook, manager of the campaign of the former first lady. The document detailed how, in exchange for fundraising and investments in the DNC—that had been left with a $24 million debt by Barack Obama— ‘Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised.... When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party (...) This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination’ (Brazile 2017b).

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I am still convinced that without these maneuvers, Bernie Sanders could have won the democratic primaries, and at that point, with his ‘social-democratic’ platform, he could have also beaten Donald Trump by presenting himself as a candidate critical of globalization, and certainly with more credibly than the New York billionaire. It is indicative of the preoccupation shared by a great part of the more-educated America over the plutocratic and populistic drift of American democracy, that even a marketing guru of the 1970s, such as Philip Kotler, felt duty-bound during the primaries, to publish his reflections and his advice on how to halt it (Kotler 2016).

Alliances in Trump’s Eyes: There is no Such Thing as Partners, just Rivals It is primarily in this sense that Donald Trump’s America showed up as a revisionist power within the system: an unprecedented role, never before played by the United States (Chan et al. 2019; Friedman 2018; McKeown 2009). What was most problematic about his actions is the fact that, rather than tackling and reforming the system that produced the 2007 crisis, Trump seemed to be outsourcing the actual contradictions existing in the relations between democracy, politics, and financial capitalism without trying to defuse them. His threats and actions to impose tariffs or limitations on the goods imported from a list of countries—Mexico, China, Germany—could have triggered a series of dangerous retaliations that could potentially slow down the economic recovery, or even replace the current open economic blocks—EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, ASEAN—with closed economic blocks—the kind whose existence in the 1930s contributed to the outbreak of War World II (Nelson 2019; Rachman 2019; Salman and Bick 2017). The unilateral character of the United States’ actions and its strongly polemic and even aggressive tones made a coordinated strategy shared by friendly and allied countries, and aimed at the general reform of the system, unconceivable. Such a strategy could have achieved much better results, however. Breaking the dogma predicating maximum openness in goods and services markets and unconditional capital mobility are always beneficial for market economy would have been useful and possible, as long as it happened in a coordinated and multilateral manner. This is the opposite of what we have been doing in recent decades, senselessly loosening every set of reliable rules and actual controls that could prevent the wealth of

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the world from being taken hostage by the greedy, selfish, and shortsighted choices of a handful of financial speculators and their algorithms (Agné 2006; Mander 2014; Went 2000). Everybody can see that turbocapitalism and hyper-globalization have deliberately shattered the alliance between democracy and market economy—dismantling that ‘market society’ described by John Ruggie, which marked the history of economic growth and welfare diffusion of our postwar societies (Colgan and Keohane 2017). A reaction seriously committed to halting the oligarchic drift of capitalism should start from the center of the system, through an attentive, agreed-upon, and controlled revision—first between United States and EU—of the norms that regulate the globalized economy. It is not a matter of reinstating protectionism, nor of invoking an impossible return to ‘sovereignism’. Rather it entails walking together toward a less out-of-control economy, more cognizant of its instrumental role in relation to the welfare and in ‘pursuit of happiness’, serving humankind instead of enslaving it (Colgan and Keohane 2017: 36; Moghadam 2020). If we are so afraid that Trump’s wrong and unilateral measures could damage the globalized economy, let us consider what a positive effect the right multilateral measures could have if they were adopted by those countries—such as our Western countries—in which the dominant political culture still believes that democracy and market economy should seek a compromise, and that both are values in a game that can and must return to being a positive-sum game. It is time to recognize that the tension fueling contemporary ‘nationalism’ ‘is precisely the tension identified by Polany, which the embedded liberal order of the postwar years was designed to manage: the contradiction between free markets and national autonomy’ (Snyder 2019: 59). Our argument hinges on ‘globalization’s wrong turn’, repeatedly affirmed by Dani Rodrik, who underlined how the current ‘hyperglobalist path requiring domestic economies to be put in the service of the world economy instead of the other way around’. This approach has entailed sacrificing sovereignty and caused the ‘center-right and the center-left’ to disagree, in recent decades, ‘not over the rules of the new world economy but over how they should accommodate their national economies to them’ (Dani Rodrik 2019: 26–27). While Trump’s unilateralism is positively the wrong way to reform the global economy and its rules, it must be acknowledged that hyper-globalization, in its developments after the 1990s, has brought ‘much greater levels of international economic integration’, but has also ‘produced domestic disintegration’, causing, on the

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political plane, the ‘populist backlash’ we are now experiencing (Rodrik 2019: 33). The lack of awareness about the effects of globalization on the political front that we have been seeing for years now—and which is the deadliest threat to Western democracies—is typical of Western democracies, which are paradoxically the most prone to this steadly threat. The ‘plutocratization of democracy’ is especially obvious in the United States, and the diffusion of populist movements is often taking the form of ‘innatism’ in Europe as well (Vassilev 2004, also Pizzigati 2005). These are two different ways of coping with the problem of the exchange between globalization and democracy. In the United States, the plutocratization of the last decades—of which Hillary Clinton has been a classic exponent— represents ‘an attempt to continue with globalization while ignoring the opinions and wishes of the people on the bottom and even in the middle of the national income distribution, in many ways rendering democracy meaningless’. On the contrary, in the case of populism, ‘exposure to globalization is reduced both through obstacles to migration and through countries’ attempts to protect themselves against unfettered flows of capital and trade while redefining citizenship and citizenship rights. To put it in an extreme form, plutocracy tries to maintain globalization while sacrificing key elements of democracy; populism tries to preserve a simulacrum of democracy while reducing exposure to globalization’ (Milanovic 2016: 210). The contestation on the part of the Trump administration of the vitality, actuality, and relevance of institutions that are central to the defense of the liberal dimension of the global order—such as the UN or NATO—is in fact an aspect of a strategy of attack to globalization that instead of trying to remedy its breakdowns tries to externalize its costs (Ghemawat 2017). It is the product of that synthesis between plutocracy and populism that seems to be the most characteristic trait of this season of American politics. Mexico and China, but also Germany and the European Union in general, are also affected by similar problems (Gaudiosi 2018). In this sort of anti-historical and unattainable neo-isolationist dream, there are no allies or rivals: only ‘aliens’ and ‘unfair competitors’. Such a simplification leads, for instance, to evaluating alliances merely in terms of profit. It is true that all European countries should comply more seriously with their commitments to greater financial contributions to the costs of common defense—and this applies to Europe concerning its recurring project of a common defense. It is equally incontrovertible,

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though, that alliances are not for getting rich or saving money, but for strengthening a country thanks to a web of institutionalized political and military relations that become crucial in times of need. This was the case, after September 11, when the European countries offered their help to the United States, appealing to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty: an offer Washington refused, convinced that it could fare better without the hindrance of the allies, only to request their contribution when the invasion of Iraq was decided.3 In any case, the blood shed for common defense should be worth more than money (Benitez 2019; Kaufman 2017; Mandelbaum 2017). The over 1,000 deaths among the European and Canadian soldiers engaged in Afghanistan since 2001—a testament to the extent of the contribution of Europe and Canada to the collective effort—certainly deserve more respect. The extensive alliance network of America, of which NATO represents the most institutionalized and relevant portion, both politically and militarily, is the base on which the US hegemony, as well as the stability of the Liberal World Order, is founded. As Raymond Aron (1966) reminded us, and as demonstrated by the long Cold War season, peace by hegemony and peace by equilibrium can coexist. However, and this is an inversion compared with how it used to be before 1989, contemporary international stability has so far been based on the hegemony of the United States. Regional stability has been based on equilibrium, which can be defined as the capacity to contain the efforts of the revisionist powers to modify the system’s general equilibrium through an incremental strategy, consisting of challenges aimed at the periphery rather than the center of the American power, plucking the artichoke one leaf at a time. Grygel and Mitchell have argued that it is especially in the areas that Spykman would have defined as rimlands—the 3 “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” NATO, “The North Atlantic Treaty,” April 4, 1949, www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/official_texts_ 17120.htm?selectedLocale=en.

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Far East for China and Central and Western Europe; and, partially, the Levant for Russia—that the role of the allies of the United States would prove crucial in the eventuality of regional tensions (Grygiel and Mitchell 2016: 60; Spykman 1938: 50). Those allies would be the first to have a chance to oppose the challenging powers and maintain the equilibrium, and therefore the order of the system. If it wants to keep maximizing a hold on the status quo and minimizing costs, the United States must maintain the profile of what Snidal (Snidal 1985) defined as ‘benevolent leadership’: a leader able to represent a credible deterrence against threats and equally to distribute the dividends of power among the allies, eliciting their cooperation in the maintenance of the order. This is one of the main reasons why, every time the United States is perceived as exclusively motivated by the pursuit of its own gains the springs of its hegemony go dry (Nye 1990, 2004). And this is precisely the direction chosen, however consciously, by Trump’s foreign politics. In recent years, Russia and China have taken a path of military strengthening and foreign political hyperactivity through ‘probing’, the tactic of posing limited, peripheral challenges to the United States to test the likelihood and the credibility of its reaction, to insert wedges in its alliance structure, and to undermine its prestige (Grygiel and Mitchell 2016: 42). At the same time—since the presidency of George W. Bush, but especially with Obama—the United States has increasingly concentrated its resources toward the support of its wavering domestic economy, factually sacrificing the resources predetermined to international politics (Feng 2017; Graham 2016). This has contributed to the perception that its hegemony was undergoing a contraction phase. To counteract this perception, the United States has tried to integrate the authoritarian powers, giving them a role as responsible stakeholders in its international security system. These politics are giving signs of weariness, however, due to the decreased commitment of the Russian and Chinese authorities to the base goals of the Liberal World Order, which is connected to the structural problems that the order itself is manifesting—as we have been discussing. Consequently, while China and Russia have strengthened their ambitions, the trust in the United States of its allies has weakened, and the American promise of extended deterrence—capable of granting the stability of the peripheral areas, and different from traditional alliance structures—is at risk (Krepinevich 2019; Tsygankov 2020).

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If we take a look at the choices made by the Trump administration— which were not so distant from those made by Obama and even George W. Bush—although more exasperated—there seemed to be a temptation for an American grand strategy based on isolationism and—purposedly— Mahanian navalism (Hu and Meng 2020; Papadopoulos 2018). It was a dangerous delusion. The history of the great European powers clearly demonstrates that a strong fleet is not sufficient to control the international political system: land-sea collaboration proves decisive, and it is only attainable by alliance. We need only remember the seven antiFrench coalitions orchestrated by Great Britain between 1792 and 1815. A widespread network of strategic partners enables the projection of one’s power in every rimland with small cost and great benefit, and the ability to balance and contain the rivals, thus bringing the system to equilibrium (de Graaf 2019). After all, states, especially small, peripheral ones, cannot help but exclusively pursue their interests. Thus, they are ready to give up expensive and risky equilibrium politics aimed at the emerging powers if they find that the returns of loyalty to the existing order—the Liberal World Order, in our case—and to its warrantor—the United States—are inferior to those coming from a quick realignment with the challenging powers— China and Russia (Donaldson and Nadkarni 2018; Kausikan 2017; Zhao 2019). Reprising Schweller (Schweller 1994), we might say that the line between ‘lamb states’—the small and medium powers allied with the great powers who guard the order, the ‘lions’—and ‘jackal states’—the small and medium powers aligned with the revisionist great powers, the ‘wolves’—is blurred. If the United States were to loosen the bond with its allies further, especially the peripheral allies, the latter could feel more exposed to threats, and therefore find it more convenient to switch teams, turning from ‘lambs’ to ‘jackals’. The Trump administration appeared to have oscillated between two opposing temptations. The first was to seek big deals with rivals—‘great power bargaining’—even at the expense of the allies. This was a hazardous solution, especially when it involves opponents, such as Russia, who nurse historical resentment and desire to change the post-Cold War system. The worst combination this strategy could produce was pressure by US rivals on the American alliances, operating in conjunction with the thawing efforts of the United States. This would mostly have weighted on the allies’ sense of safety, doubtful of America’s willingness to protect them

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and leave them to their fate in case of threat—‘abandonment dilemma’ (Clarke and Ricketts 2017). On the other hand, the ‘biggest obstacles to a new policy of containment come, ironically, not from the powers being contained but from countries doing the containing’ (Mandelbaum 2019: 128). On Russia’s Western border, many countries of the Union are dealing with monetary tensions and intra-European politics, the presence of populist leaders who are often close to Putin—Hungary, Italy—and Brexit (Keating and Kaczmarska 2019; Klapsis 2015; Regan 2013; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2017). In Asia, the Philippines and South Korea have sometimes manifested ‘a more benign view of Chinese power’, while other actors on whom the US counts for containing Beijing—such as Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan—‘are an amorphous and heterogeneous group’ (Chu and Chang 2017; Chu et al. 2019). Lastly, in the Middle East, crucial American allies, such as Qatar (which hosts a US air base) and Saudi Arabia, are sharply at odds. The government of Turkey, a member of NATO, identifies with the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt and Saudi Arabia regard as a mortal enemy. Ironically, the one unproblematic member of the anti-Iran coalition is Israel, a country that for decades was anathematized as the root of all the problems in the Middle East but that is now recognized as a decisive counterweight to Persian power (Mandelbaum 2019: 129). The other possible option could have been and maybe still for the United States to retreat within the bounderies of North America and conduct an offshore balancing strategy, easing the geopolitical pressure and saving resources. As Grygiel and Mitchell put, this way the focus would shift from the allies—protection—to the rivals—confrontation— leaving the former with the burden of dealing with regional issues. The benefits of such a choice, however, would be temporary. First, because the value of deterrence for the defense of the allies, and the advantages of a joint balancing action by the United States and their allies in relation to their rivals, once lost, is not easily replaced. Secondly, because the economic gains from a neo-isolationist choice would be absorbed by the necessary strategic and technological requalification of the aeronaval defense apparatus, which would no longer be able to count on the allied bases—only on North American territories, and by the costs of deportation of the allies to their original bases (Grygiel and Mitchell 2016: 160).

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The rejection of multilateralism clearly expresses Trump’s idea of a ‘constraint-free’ America, and was transposed in the belief that agreements and alliances should be negotiated anew, this time following a ‘man to man’, business-style logic, in an effort to wrest the best agreement for the (immediate) American interests each time, as clarified by the slogan ‘America first!’ (Fassi 2017). The other slogan of Trump’s electoral campaign, ‘Make America Great Again!’, not only conveyed an obvious recall to national greatness, but also implicitly revealed the unavailability of Trump’s America to keep on bearing the maintenance costs of the Liberal World Order and of its multilateral institutions (Jervis et al. 2019). This confused neo-protectionist drive, harshly critical of globalization but scarcely propositional when it comes to possible alternatives, still testifies that—for the first time in the modern history of the United States—the White House was wary of the traditional open-door policy of international markets. While—as we have seen—the Liberal World Order has been profoundly weakened in recent years by external and internal dynamics—the rise of China and Russia, the economic crisis in the United States, Europe, and Japan, Brexit, the upsurge of populism, and the oligarchic degeneration of the market and of decisional procedures (Lafer 2017)—Trump’s ascension introduced uncertainty over the willingness, rather than the capacity, of the United States to continue bearing the responsibility of global leadership (Schake 2017; Stewart 2017). Since the 2016 electoral campaign, and even before the Republican primaries, Donald Trump was regarded as a controversial candidate and possible president; his declarations eliciting concerns of a dramatic break with tradition, to the point that, even in the United States, some spoke of the ‘Italianization’ of American politics, drawing a parallel between the Trump phenomenon and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (Clementi et al. 2017). However, some observers have deemed Trump’s foreign politics rather conventional and coherent with the Republican approach, at least in part (Abrams 2017). Within the National Security Council (NSC), which gathered the president’s closest advisors in the fields of foreign politics and security, the influence of the most ideologically right wing faded, as testified by the case of Steve Bannon, former executive director of Breitbart News —a far-right internet platform—and coordinator of Trump’s campaign. Bannon had been named White House strategist, and successively became a member of the NSC. In April 2017, he was removed from the council, and on August 18, 2017, his role as

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strategist to the President of the United States ended. Meanwhile, the role of the military was expanded. James Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general, was appointed secretary of defense; H. R. McMaster, a US Army general, then still in active service, was appointed as a national security advisor, replacing Michael Flynn, a retired US Army lieutenant general, after his resignation; while John Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was the White House chief of staff. The attention given to the Korean dossier was certainly a step in the right direction. The nuclear program of North Korea is undoubtedly a threat to world peace, and the president’s criticism of the unsuccessful and wearying season of inconclusive negotiations of the Obama era was fair. It becomes evident here that the diplomatic solution is not a panacea, and it only holds its ground because, while it is unacceptable that the Kim’s regime should go on unpunished with its systematic violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty—regardless of the fact that it never signed it—the other options are either unrealistic—the premises for a regime change are nowhere to be found, or extremely dangerous and uncertain—a unilateral military attack aimed at the destruction of the nuclear and missile facilities of Pyongyang (Cumings 2020; Easley 2017). Even if North Korea were to ‘only’ react in the conventional way, with a heavy bombing on the South Korean capital Seoul, located a few miles away from the 38th parallel border; keeping its options open as to the eventuality of a land attack, Washington would be left with a dilemma on how to respond to make sure that it is South Korean ally, and possibly Japan, do not suffer extreme damages. In this sense, and assuming no further escalations in Kim’s military provocations, there are no alternatives to finding a diplomatic solution. However, in order to engage Beijing especially, in the search for an acceptable compromise, it is fundamental to dismiss excessively intense and wavering tones (Panda 2020). There certainly is no use for muscle flexing of the kind indulged in by the American president during his first address to the UN General Assembly on September 19, 2017, when he warned the dictator— contemptuously dubbing him ‘Rocket Man’—that North Korea would be destroyed if he dared to attack the United States or its allies (Liptak and Diamond 2017). We are obviously not questioning a sovereign state’s right to self-defense—and to honor its alliance pacts—but we do question whether it is in the interest of the international community, and the United States itself, to contribute to overheating a controversy that is already at white heat (Rogers 2017).

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Over the course of the following year, rather surprisingly, Trump’s attitude toward Kim and the White House policy toward North Korea changed. In a little over twelve months, the President of the United States and the North Korean dictator met three times. The first time was in Singapore on June 12, 2018. It was the first meeting ever between an American president and a North Korean leader, an event destined to make history, regardless of the vague results. The international sanctions were not revoked, and North Korea did not commit to suspending its nuclear program. Nonetheless, the United States agreed to suspend the imminent military maneuvers in conjunction with South Korea. The meeting was dubbed ‘a success’ by the two delegations. Since then, the mood of the— also personal—relations between Kim and Trump changed, with growing declarations of mutual agreement, understanding, and sympathy (Fifield 2019). A second meeting happened in Hanoi on February 27 and 28, 2019. In this instance, the failed negotiations were apparent and probably tied to the diverging expectations of Washington and Pyongyang, as openly admitted by both parties. However, both Trump and Kim’s tones remained extremely mild. The final meeting, the most extemporary of the three—Trump called the meeting via Twitter on his way back from the G20 meeting in Osaka—took place on June 30, 2019 in the demilitarized zone near the 38th parallel. This time the American president crossed the armistice line and walked some twenty steps into North Korean territory alongside Kim. Trump’s promenade across the 38th parallel will probably remain the most famous walk in history next to Neil Armstrong’s walk in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, in July 1969 (Dian 2018; Wertz 2018). In a presidency that has been accused of not having a coherent foreign policy or grand strategy, the attention devoted to the Korean question and the sudden change of attitude toward North Korea were probably a move within the wider game against China, of which the economic sanctions were also a part. Another factor was perhaps the president’s character, his ‘narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea’ (Zakaria 2019: 16). What was most startling, before these recent events, was the difference in management style between North Korea, a country that refused to negotiate on the possibility of its nuclear disarmament, and even on the suspension of atomic and ballistic tests, and Iran, a country that had made an agreement with the international community for the verification of the strictly civil nature of its nuclear program (Cohen 2019). Iran handed over its enriched uranium,

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destroyed thousands of centrifuges, and closed the facilities suspected of ‘dual use’—civil and military. As we have seen before, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself has repeatedly certified the loyal and full cooperation of the Islamic Republic. The instrumental, factious criticism of the JCPOA, exclusively aimed at sinking it, was an act of pure oppression and arrogance, as well as complete foolishness, at a time in which everyone can see that that the agreement was able to defuse an explosive situation in an area characterized by chronic and unresolved tension (Cordesman 2018; Gaietta and Antonio Zotti 2020; Kroenig 2018).

Trump, Netanyahu, Mohamed Bin Salman: It Takes Three for a Dangerous Tango The anti-Iranian obsession is central in the archaic, simplistic, and superficial worldview of the neoconservatives, and goes hand in hand with the inconsistent patchwork of idolatry of the State of Israel, cynical friendship with Saudi Arabia, and contempt for a slacking Europe (Powaski 2019). Put it straight, Donald Trump failed to ‘treat Israel and Saudi Arabia as crucial regional partners but not as subcontractors free whatever they want’ (Indyk 2019: 20). The exportation of democracy—that in the time of George W. Bush at least tried to confer respectability and overall coherence to the neocon doctrine—was shelved. Associating the cases of North Korea and Iran simply conforms to the reflection of an ideology that was already condemned by history, not only because of its practical failures, but also for its intellectual lowliness. This last factor was the one President Trump appeared not to be even see. It was no coincidence that Trump’s speech was welcomed with great favor by then Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, who was probably the worst prime minister in the history of Israel, and one of the main culprits of the disconcerting decline of the Jewish state and of the outright betrayal of the original Zionist ideal (Benn 2016). As a reminder, it was the same Netanyahu who, from the balcony of the Likud headquarters in 1995, incited a mob to revolt against then-Premier Yitzhak Rabin, the Nobel Prize winner who signed the Oslo peace accords with Arafat, and laughed at a cardboard coffin with his name on. Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv on November 4 of that year by Yigal Amir, an Israeli ‘settler’ and militant fanatic of the religious right.

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Regardless of any ideological similarities between Trump and Netanyahu, their ruinous may have had much more prosaic motives (Kuttab 2019). Netanyahu’s wife Sara was indicted on fraud charges for ‘pocketing’ 400,000 shekels in state funds, and inflating the bills of the official lunches and dinners hosted at the prime minister’s residence.4 Benjamin himself was accused of accepting expensive gifts from wealthy businessmen in exchange for favors and also trying to reach agreements with Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s main daily newspaper, to receive more favorable coverage. But the worst suspicion hanging over Netanyahu’s head is that he supposedly engaged in bribery and fraud to purchase German submarines thanks to the mediation of one of his cousins (Zunini 2017). Trump has been hounded by Russiagate for around two years. Special Counsel Robert Müller’s final report of its investigation, delivered to Department of Justice in March 2019, found: ‘although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities’ (Müller 2019). However, the same report established—in a more cryptic way, compared with the obstruction of justice charge: ‘Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him’ (Müller 2019). Thus, the theoretical—and more unlikely—possibility that a Congress of a different composition could have forced Trump to resign and 4 On June 15, 2019, Sara Netanyahu was sentenced guilty of “improper use of public funds” by the Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court, for which she paid a fine, but was acquitted of the fraud and power abuse charges.

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leave the White House, was left open. A war, especially against a country accused—without proof or evidence—of threatening a nuclear Armageddon, could have solved many of their problems. The choice to target the Islamic Republic—an illiberal regime for sure: homophobic, sexophobic, misogynistic, and corrupt—would have enabled each country to pursue the objective of political survival, gathering their fellow citizens under their flags. Moreover, with the political cynicism they share, Iran— which does not have the bomb, or many protectors—was a much better scapegoat than North Korea, which has the bomb as well as a weighty protector (Ahmadian 2018; Simon 2018). To be clear, it would have been sheer insanity: a monstrous hazard, that would qualify as a political crime. History, however, has taught us that this would not get in the way of its perpetration. In the light of these positions, and the disquieting scenarios they present, we must stress that if there was a general problem in Trump’s foreign politics regarding the safeguarding of the Liberal World Order, it came from the same question that used to be asked to China: how much does the United States still deem itself a credible shareholder—besides being the main stakeholder—of the order that has served it well for so long, and which the United States itself founded? The administration’s revisionist attitude undermined the foundations of its own credibility, inducing partners and allies, as well as rivals and enemies, to believe that the pursuit of American national interests—which is legitimate in and of itself—could happen to the detriment of its security, welfare, and rights. The stubborn nonchalance with which the president and his men flaunted their lack of consideration for human rights, and showed that they held the ‘friendly tyrants’ to the same standard as the allied democracies, further reduced ability of the United States to exert its soft power. This behavior encouraged the many al-Sisis and Erdo˘gans to persevere with even greater strength in the direction of repression and abuse of power, certain of the impunity, not to mention the encouragement, on America’s part. Aside from being far from the ideals of a liberal order, such a scenario was not in the best interests of the United States. Consider how shortsighted Washington would have been if it had allow itself to be drawn further into the Yemeni nightmare—a conflict that has degenerated into a tremendous humanitarian tragedy—by its acritical support of the Saudi or Emirates’ regimes (Haass 2017). With Russia as well, things went not as had been anticipated during the electoral campaign; remember Trump’s appreciation of Putin and

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his expressed wish that relations between the United States and Russia would improve (Lynch 2018). Perhaps this was also due to the Russiagate scandal, with its allegations that Russia interfered in the presidential election, favoring Trump’s success; and that his staff, and possibly Trump himself, were aware of it; and that has damaged his entourage, including the president’s son-in-law (Cohen 2018). There was been no removal of the sanctions on Russia that had been imposed during the Obama administration for its annexation of Crimea, and for its alleged interference in the 2016 electoral campaign. Trump’s national security advisor Michael Flynn was forced to resign in part for concealing his communications with Russia, and he has since been collaborating with the FBI regarding Donald Trump’s role in the so-called Russiagate. Meanwhile, the US president ordered the bombing of the Syrian airbase from whence the April 2017 chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun was supposedly launched. These events have compromised the relationship between Putin and Trump, so much so that the US president later acknowledged that the relations between the two countries were ‘at the lowest point’ since the end of the Cold War (Evangelista and Shue 2014). It is important to recognize that the attack in Syria, especially, represents an anomaly in comparison to the usual skepticism of the president toward the role of the United States as leader of the free world, which would involve excessive commitments to abstractions such as ‘international community’ and ‘international law’. Before he was elected, Trump had often spoken in favor of the use of armed force, but only in cases in which the vital interests of the United States were threatened. While the attack in Syria was a response to a crime against humanity—the use of the Sarin gas by the dictator Bashar al-Assad—that was not, however, a direct threat to the security of the United States. To further complicate matters, after the intervention, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared it a necessity that the United States act on behalf of the international community to punish violations of the ban on chemical weapons—a principle ratified by international norms. Contrarily to what we might think, Trump’s neo-isolationism found little application in the Middle East, where the former American president was engaged to fight ISIS/IS more than Obama ever did (Abrams 2017; Black 2018; Lynch 2016). Trump invested more resources into supporting the Iraqi armed forces, which successfully reconquered Mosul in July 2017, and the Kurdish militia, who freed Raqqa, the ‘capital’ of

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the IS ‘Caliphate’ in Syria, in October the same year; and he sent more American soldiers into the Arab Levant. The Trump administration was also more actively involved in counteracting the Iranian expansion in the region, patrolling the accesses to the Suez Canal, and providing assistance to the coalition supported by Saudi Arabia in Yemen—with the potential risk for engulfment, as well as repudiating the JCPOA. Especially on the Arabian Peninsula, Trump’s politics contributed to overheating the already scorching hot climate (Ahmadian 2018). After the president’s visit to Saudi Arabia on May 20, 2017, which was interpreted as an endorsement and a green light to Saudi foreign policy, Riyadh felt authorized to take a lunge in Qatar, finding it ‘guilty’ of supporting—also financially—the Muslim Brotherhood and the connected constellation of parties, agencies, and charitable institutions, in addition to accusing it of having excessively friendly relations with Iran and Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic relations with Doha, joined by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt. The media ostracism of Al Jazeera— the Qatari broadcast company whose correspondent Mahmood Hussein remains detained in Cairo since December 2016, and who awaits trial but has not been formally charged—enacted by the aforementioned countries and the State of Israel, is also part of this picture. These developments in the intra-peninsular relations must not have been completely expected or appreciated by Washington, considering that Qatar hosts two American military installations: the Al-Udeid Air Base and Camp As Sayliyah, which, together with the naval bases located in Bahrain—headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet and NAVCENT—are one of the nodal points of CENTCOM, the US Central Command of the American armed forces, ranging from the Middle East to Afghanistan (Katzman 2016). Ten thousand soldiers are hosted at the installations in Qatar, though their capacity can be easily extended to 30,000 in case of need to quarter a heavy mechanized infantry brigade and several aerial flocks. Even before Donald Trump’s Saudi visit, US Secretary of Defense John Mattis had flown to Doha on April 22, 2017 to meet Emir Tamim bin Hamad al Thani and his Qatari homologous, Khalid bin Mohammad al Attiyah, with the goal of obtaining a change in the foreign politics of the small and active emirate. Mattis achieved less than brilliant results, considering that—as Mehran Kamrava observes—the country’s policy of support to the Brotherhood and its good relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran is part of a wider strategy performed by Qatar to gain influence over

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friendly governments, including in Europe, and to break free from the overbearing Saudi presence and pressure (Kamrava 2013). On Saudi Arabia’s part, however, Qatar’s manifestations of independence were barely tolerated, and in Riyadh, Doha was seen as a rebel and an unfaithful vassal—to use an improper but effective term—. At the same time, the Saudis were and still are dealing with internal issues of no small significance. For the first time, there is news of an organized opposition movement calling itself the ‘April 21 Movement’. Their demands include the institution of a constitutional monarchy in which the decision-making power of the sovereign would be balanced by a parliament elected democratically and in full gender parity. This is something new, adding to the tensions caused by the traditional political and religious protests of the discriminated and persistent Shia minority residing in the Eastern part of the country—the oil center of the kingdom. Increasing economic contestation were generated by the restrictive measures enacted since 2016 to cope with the vertical plunge in revenues following the price collapse in the hydrocarbon market—a trend caused by the Saudis themselves, to damage Iran and take the North American shale oil off the market. This technology made the United States the world’s largest oil producer in 2014, at fourteen million barrels per day, and made Canada one of the best-equipped countries in terms of hydrocarbon reserves. The Saudi monarchy appears to be more internally divided each day, also due to King Salman’s declining health. But it has perceived the gravity of the danger of a diffused revolt, in deciding to immediately reintroduce all the financial and fringe benefits enjoyed by the Saudi citizens—who are almost entirely employed by the government or by government agencies such as airlines and oil companies—that had been cut due to the potential bankruptcy of the state. The public debt was declassed almost to the level of junk bonds by the main international rating agencies over the course of 2016. The sale of Aramco (the national oil company) quotas on the international financial market—became necessary to fill the alarming holes in the public budget. The situation was caused in part by the incredible cost of the senseless and inconclusive military venture in Yemen, which has been going on since 2015. These matters have been the subject of strong internal contestation against the Saud, who was accused of selling off the national wealth. To gauge the gravity of the situation, consider that the enormous military expense has not been spared by the austerity policy. Saudi Arabia, which had the thirdlargest military budget in the world in 2015 (after United States and

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Russia), had to reduce it by 30 percent ($26 billion) in 2016, dropping its position to fourth-largest, which is still equal to 3.8 percent of global military expense, and 9.9 percent of the Saudi GDP. In 2018, Saudi military expenditure jumped to $67.6 billion, ranking the kingdom as the highest spender worldwide as percentage of its GDP (8.8 percent) (SIPRI 2019). In order to raise the price of crude oil by limiting the extraction quotas, and to evaluate the stipulation of possible agreements on arms supplies and discuss the respective interests in the Levant, King Salman visited Russia on October 5, 2017—the first in his dynasty to do so—for a meeting with Vladimir Putin, the new fundamental player in the region (Guetta 2017). But Saudi Arabia has been especially shaken by the political earthquake generated by the rise of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman—known by the acronym MbS (Hubbard 2020). At the beginning of November 2017, MbS ordered the arrest of eleven princes and thirty-eight former ministers of the kingdom. For the most part, they were ‘detained’ at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, as part of a purported anti-corruption operation. Among the most notable arrests were Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, whose patrimony is estimated around $20 billion; the minister of economy, Adel Fakeih; and the commander of the National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, who is considered close to the former hereditary prince, Muhammad bin Nayef. The latter had been ousted by King Salman in June to make space for his son, MbS, who took over the role. It appears that what had been presented as an anti-corruption blitz was actually a ‘white coup’ realized to pave the way to the throne for the young offspring by eliminating all those who could hinder him (Al-Rasheed 2020). To construct a political legitimization on his way to the throne, MbS invested everything in the so-called ‘Saudi Vision 2030’, a very ambitious plan sponsored by him. It involves the disengagement of the country from energy resources by that date with a definite economic diversification plan, including conspicuous financial investments and the selling of Aramco quotas through its stock listing (Al-Rasheed 2018). Among those arrested also included Ibrahim al-Assaf, a member of the Aramco board of directors, and Adel Fakieh, who was also a member of the supreme council, both were apparently against the plan. At the same time, MbS seems set on reducing the intrusiveness of the Wahhabi hierarchy that has always been enmeshed with the monarchy. Wahhabi hierarchy influence seems

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to have grown progressively since 1979, the year of the sacrilegious occupation of the al-Ahram mosque by the ultra-radical group Sahwa, which accused the monarchy of apostasy and of allowing non-Muslim foreigners to step on the soil of the peninsula. The year 1979 was also when the Khomeinist Revolution took place in Iran, which reveals an even more delicate plot in the strategy game played by MbS (Siepelunga 2017). Going back to 1979 means reconstructing the narrative of Saudi Arabia as a moderate Islamic country—rather than the driver behind the main Islamist terroristic organizations and, more generally, of the most obscurantist radicalism. It is a fundamental step to give credibility to the new profile MbS desires to give to the kingdom in preparation of the merciless battle he intends to conduct against Iran—which is also accused of being an international sponsor for terrorism (Hiro 2018). The escalation in the violence of Saudi attacks against Iran and Hezbollah, which for now have been nothing more than verbal, is impressive. It seems that Riyadh is routinely evaluating the possibility of opening a new front with Tehran in Lebanon, after the substantial defeat in Syria and considering the never-ending Yemen war. The resignation of Sunni Lebanese Premier Saad Hariri—who also has Saudi citizenship—was announced on November 4, 2017, while he was in Riyadh, which was a bad sign for the fortune of the ‘Cedar Republic’. Hariri explained his decision in blaming the suffocating intrusiveness of Iran in Lebanon, of which Hezbollah is allegedly the instrument. In the escalation of bombastic declarations that followed from both parties— including the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah—Saudi authorities invited their citizens to leave Lebanon, who were soon followed by the Bahrainis and Kuwaitis. On December 5, in a private meeting—and apparently thanks to the mediation of French President Emmanuel Macron, who met Hariri at the Elysée on November 18—Hariri rescinded his resignation, aided with pressure and reassurances by Lebanese President Michel Aoun. This created an opening for the Lebanese front, which explained actions could be taken ‘covertly’, in addressing the matter of financing terrorist attacks, considering several groups affiliated with AlQaeda and ISIS/IS are present in Beirut, in the Sidon area and in Tripoli, as well as in the numerous Palestinian refugee camps. Another possibility is a military operation, entrusted to Israel, where part of the political and military class would be in favor of a ‘preventive war’ against Hezbollah after the practical failure of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Especially significant were the statements released

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by the Israeli Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot to the Saudi newspaper Elaph on November 15, 2017. Eizenkot spoke of ‘total agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia when it comes to the Iranian axis’, and of the ‘two Shia crescents’ that threaten regional peace—one through Syria and Lebanon, the other Bahrain and Yemen. The general excluded the possibility that Tel Aviv intended to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon in the immediate future. However, we ought not to be confident about it, considering that a—victorious—war against Hezbollah could revive the precarious fortune of Netanyahu (Cucciatti 2017). In the meantime, however, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel—a position simultaneously held by Prime Minister Netanyahu—had instructed his diplomatic representatives abroad to lobby in favor of the Saudi policy toward Iran, and even more so toward Lebanon. Israeli diplomats were instructed to ‘stress that the Hariri resignation shows how dangerous Iran and Hezbollah are for Lebanon’s security’, and to ‘appeal to the “highest officials” in their host countries to press for Hezbollah’s expulsion from the Lebanese government’—as the fulcrum—and to ‘back Saudi Arabia in its war [or rather massacre] in Yemen’ (Cook 2017). Iran and Hezbollah certainly represented the biggest regional threat for the United States as well, to the point that Washington decided to scrap international agreements that were reached with difficulty—like the JCPOA—to contrast them. This was an extremely dangerous strategy that could paradoxically drag the United States into a conflict for the interests of its regional allies rather than its own (Parsi 2017). Lastly, at the end of August 2017, Trump announced his strategy for Afghanistan, confirming that the US commitment was in support of the Kabul government in the fight against the Taliban. According to leaked information from the Pentagon, the current employment of 13,000 men and women would be raised again to 30,000, possibly with the help of the ISAF allies. This seems to be anything but easy, not only because of the complicated relationship between the president and his administration and many leaders of NATO countries, but also because public opinion is not in favor of sending troops into a war theater that risks remaining indefinitely open like an infected wound. Nor is it clear which end goals would be accomplished with another (and limited) surge, considering that a far more numerous expedition corps engaged for years in combat operations throughout the country, only to achieve results that were easily reversible. The current state of the Afghan armed forces—and the state of the entire country—cannot inspire excessive optimism around the success

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of Trump’s maneuver.5 With yet another U-turn—on February 29, 2020 in Doha—Trump’s administration practically ‘imposed’ an agreement to a reluctant Afghanistan government for the complete withdrawal of American troops from the country within 14 months, in the framework of peace talks involving the United States, the Kabul authorities and the Taliban. The risk that a president who intended to reduce the level and the cost of the US foreign military engagement—and more generally the weight of the American commitment to the liberal world order—might have found himself embroiled in a series of wars of various significance— in Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Korea—should not be overlooked (Gordon 2017). Even with China, with which Donald Trump had been until that moment particularly resolute and even aggressive—promising that he would instruct the US treasury secretary to classify China as a currency manipulator, and threatening to not confirm the adhesion to the One China Policy—the facts were rather different from what might have been expected from the declarations. The One China Policy was reaffirmed in February 2017, and the allegations of currency manipulation for the purpose of international dumping were dropped, in the name of cooperation between the two countries to solve the North Korean question. However, some of the promises made during the electoral campaign were kept: one of Trump’s first official acts as president was the issuing of an executive order to withdraw the United States’ signature from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a commercial-free trade agreement that was going to unite countries on both sides of the Pacific. A further, grave step back was taken on the climate change front. On June 1, 2017, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, claiming that he wanted to renegotiate it because it imposed ‘extremely unfair environmental standards for American companies and workers’ (ISPI 2017). In the meantime, after the announcement in April 2018, Trump’s first tariffs on imports became effective on July 6 that year, primarily—but not exclusively—affecting Chinese imports, starting with steel and aluminum, and later extended to other goods. The tariffs imposed on China—10 5 The last issue of Foreign Affairs from 2017 was dedicated to the forgotten wars of the United States, to an attempt to explain what has not worked out and what could still be done about them. See “America’s Forgotten Wars,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 6.

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and 25 percent—were partly neutralized by the devaluation of the yuan against the dollar—9 percent. At the end of April 2019, it was estimated that the trade war had cost the United States $63 billion, while China had only lost $12 billion (Lops 2019). In the Osaka G20 meeting on June 28, 2019, Trump and Xi Jinping reached yet another truce in order to prevent a new and more intense stage of the trade war from having a devastating impact on markets worldwide. Hundreds of pages have been written on the social dangerousness of the then American president. An article by Stephen Walt—published in Foreign Policy in October 2017 (Walt 2017)—featured an unsettling parallel between Donald Trump and the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. The two shared a number of personality traits: superficiality, constant and inconclusive hyperactivity, poor knowledge of the dossiers, a fixation with certain prejudices mistaken for evaluations, a devotion for the armed forces and the use of force in general, a proclivity for releasing embarrassing statements, and an uncontrolled need to be in the spotlight at all costs. To make the picture bleaker, Walt reminds us that the decision-making power of an American president is decidedly greater than what the Kaiser could have even dreamed possible. Lastly, Walt points out the similarities between the challenges faced by imperial Germany at the beginning of the last century and those of the contemporary United States, where ‘threat-inflation is endemic, the utility of force is exaggerated, and the role of diplomacy is neglected or denigrated’ (Walt 2017). This would be the origin of the perceptual distortion that makes the United States routinely view third-rate powers like Serbia, Iraq, Iran, and others as though they were mortal dangers, and treats problems like the Islamic State as if they were existential threats, and tends to assume that these difficulties can be solved by blowing up more stuff, or sending in another team of special forces (Walt 2017). And, we might add, both Wilhelm’s Germany and Trump’s America have contested and tried to revise the international order in which they found themselves immersed. The ‘social dangerousness’ of Donald Trump was also marked by a reproachable cynicism and an embarrassing lack of scruples. We saw this at the beginning of December 2017, when, claiming that he wanted to honor a promise made during the electoral campaign, he announced the decision to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The announcement predictably stirred the rage of Muslims around the world, causing serious disorder in Jerusalem and Gaza and a split with the European allies at the United Nations(Eriksson 2018). It was a true gift to

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Putin, Iran, and even Erdo˘gan, who got to rise once more as the champion of Islam. Made just a few days after the news of Flynn’s collaboration with the FBI, this decision was yet another bomb dropped to drive the public opinion’s attention away from the mounting Russiagate scandal— in utter lack of consideration for American national interests, and in full awareness of its danger in the interests and the lives of American citizens worldwide (Pisany-Ferry 2020).

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CHAPTER 7

The Occultation of the People: How Sovereignist Populism, Stateless Actors, and Technocratic Oligarchies Have Taken on Boarding Democracies

In this chapter, I will illustrate how the malaise that led Trump to the White House in 2016 is not limited to the United States. All democracies are being increasingly sieged by populist and technocratic impulses—since only within democracy can these impulses be freely expressed. Populism tends to deny the composite nature of the people—the fact that nobody has a right to its exclusive and definitive representation—and to devalue the natural tension between the people and the institutions. Technocratic impulses limit the scope of choices by diminishing the relevance of values and of the dialectic among different interests in light of ‘necessary choices’ that are not up for debate, as they are claimed to be politically neutral. We have considered how the success of the technocratic era has laid the ground for the ‘revenge’ of populism, which can have both Left-wing and Right-wing connotations, with an ‘inclusive’ or ‘nativist’ concept of the people, respectively. Finally, I consider how, in the last decades, the circulation and pluralistic nature of the elites have diminished as a consequence of the breakdown of the social elevator and the oligarchic transformation of the political, as well as of the economic circuit. The weight of inequality has transformed our societies in a similar

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way as the ‘enclosures’ stiffened the relations between landowners and rural communities in eighteenth-century England.

Dancing on the Titanic and Emptying Democracy Virtually all Western societies are internally affected by the contraposition between forms of identitarian and sovereignist populism and oligarchictechnocratic tendencies, which are each characterized to varying degrees by the devaluation of citizenship (Basile and Mazzoleni 2020; Bruno 2020; Habermas 2015). This is not (only) a consequence of the economic crisis, but the direction the market economy has taken in the last thirty years, which seems increasingly incompatible with political democracy. Citizenship is a hindrance, with the heavy load of duties that is necessary in order to protect and enjoy the rights it implies. No one seems willing to take care anymore of its first essential component: the duties deriving from being a citizen. Those who want to reduce it to a strictly hereditary compartment—what citizenship has never been, it being hardly compatible with the universalistic nature of its rights— do so to avoid sharing these rights with newcomers, whether they be economic migrants, refugees, or displaced people. Those who postulate its extension to anyone who happens to live in or arrives at a certain territory, primarily associates citizenship with the possibility of enjoying a set of civil and social rights, and only secondarily with political rights. The paradox is that both old, new, and aspiring citizens often seem unable to escape a mentality that reduces the greatest conquest of liberal democracy—citizenship as a means to overcome the division of society in orders, each with its peculiar privileges and private laws—to little more than a mere social card allowing its possessors to access a world of social and political services, regardless of their genuine adhesion to the original political pact—with its necessary historical and constant amendments. Additionally, citizenship permits inclusion into a civic and republican identity, which only in this sense is ‘also’ national, and with all the duties that come with it, starting from the indispensable duty of defending such identity against internal and external attacks. Thus, far too often, the debate on the redefinition of citizenship and the modalities of its acquisition—a stage of necessary update of the variable parts of its content—dissipates into magniloquent perorations of abstract principles by those who seem to be in a rush to get rid of tradition—along with the indisputable synergy between citizenship and

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nation (Mavelli 2018). Furthermore, those who, like Italian far-right leader and former minister of the interiors Matteo Salvini—after having tried everything to divide the country into meager neo-states and derided the original republican pact—have suddenly become the guardians of a rather illiberal nineteenth-century-like nationalism, with the expected accompanying postures as staunch defenders of their country’s interests in an international environment construed as the locus of zero-sumgame relations, as well as whiners-in-chief against more or less plausible injustices and threats (Boyle 2016; Makarychev 2019). Other times, the debate focuses on the economic convenience of the neo-citizens for the retirement system, the job market, the demographic equilibrium, and so on. One cannot overlook that the Italian debate on the new rules that should define the acquisition of national citizenship—in the proper republican sense of the word, civic and conscious—and thus decide who is in and who is out of the demos , is tied to an effective devaluation of citizenship itself, to the disappearance of the people at the center of the political horizon, both concretely and theoretically (D’Ignoti 2019). Observing that the lack of legitimate alternatives—‘planetary solitude’—does not make democracy ‘invulnerable’, Nadia Urbinati introduces the effective image of ‘democracy disfigured’, debating the issue of the quality of democracy—politologically discussed by Leonardo Morlino (Morlino 2011)—from a philosophical perspective, views representative democracy as threatened by three deformations that make it unrecognizable, as they alter the ‘diarchy between public opinion and political decision’ that is essential to it. The first deformation is an ‘epistemic interpretation’ of democracy, a sort of democratic Platonism that tries to turn into an object of knowledge—‘true/false’—into what is really an object of evaluation—‘preferable/not preferable’. As correctly noted by the author, it is an attempt to depoliticize democracy, widening the scope and relevance of the purported ‘impartial decisions’—‘technical judgments’—to the detriment of properly political evaluations. Among the followers of this mystification are the majority of economists and a good number of political scientists. The second deformation, ‘populism’, is a conception by which ‘opinion’ should be simply and systematically transformed into ‘decision’. Populism depicts peoples as unitary ensembles of values, identity, and history, disregarding the complex and ongoing relationship between public debate and institutions. The third deformation, the ‘plebiscitary rendering of democracy’, acknowledges the distinction

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between opinion and deliberation, but seeks to keep the two artificially separated and exclusively connected through ‘the electoral moment’, filling the media debate with the identification with the ‘leader’ and the contemplation of his character, performances and outpourings (Urbinati 2014: 4–7). Looking into the United States’ situation, where financial support from rich companies and individuals is indispensable for political success, Branko Milanovic (2016: 199) emphasizes, ‘the political importance of the middle class continues to dwindle...While the political system remains democratic in form because the freedom of speech and the right of association have been preserved and elections are free, the system is increasingly coming to resemble a plutocracy. In Marxist terms, it is a “dictatorship of the propertied class” even if it seems, formally, to be a democracy. The government becomes nothing else but, in Marx’s words from the Communist Manifesto, “the committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”’. This is simply one of the consequences of the drift from democracy to ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004). Post-democracy can be defined and idealized in many different ways, but concretely, it has coincided with the estrangement of the masses from politics and the rise of increasingly cohesive oligarchies that have superseded the reassuring discourses of Robert Dahl (1961) and on ‘polyarchys’ and the pluralism of elites. Differently from what the great theorist of postwar American democracy had described, beyond their possible differences in social provenance— an ever more rebuttable datum nowadays—once they reach the peak of the sub-system they inhabit, elites tend to fuse together and convert their interests into the general goal of preserving their position—as Charles Wright Mills (1956) had correctly sensed—establishing new enclosures to prevent other people from sharing their power and privileges. This passage is easier if the economic elite has successfully imposed its logic, values, and interests as ‘hegemonic’—to use Antonio Gramsci’s words—making its agenda-setting power indisputable. One hardly needs to point out that this process has advanced at the same pace as the devaluation of egalitarianism, and politics itself—which, in turn, is an expression of that ‘realist model of democracy’ that has made ordinary people fall out of love with politics—through the state’s progressive withdrawal from concretely intervening in the lives of its citizens. The political decisions made since the second half of the 1980s have altered the balance between the economic and political realms. This is always a

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precarious balance, and enables the winners of the economic competition to shift the full weight of their success to the political arena. This is the neoliberal distortion of liberalism that has brought legitimization to the ever more rich, powerful, arrogant, and privileged elites, betraying the chief presupposition of classical democratic theory—the liberalism of the Founding Fathers: trust, not to say faith, in the capability and virtue of the people (Palano 2015; see also Cozzolino and Giannone 2019). The deterioration of democracy is what fostered the populism that has taken over Europe and the United States in these years. Besides generating or empowering parties and movements advancing populist agendas, it has also intoxicated the public debate and the political culture of ‘mainstream’ parties, which are left with two alternatives: either presenting themselves as a defensive wall against this ‘nasty mob’ or trying to pattern part of their political platform after them (Roberts 2017; Rooduijn et al. 2014; Schwörer and Fernández-García 2020). Alas, a long series of disappointing electoral results are testimony to the limitations of traditional parties to present themselves as an appealing alternative, in either sense (Norris and Inglehart 2019, see also Caiani 2019). Overseas, Trump’s election has been regarded as a success of the populist platform that still raises concerns over the very survival of American democracy. According to some observers, American democracy is turning into a ‘mild form of... “competitive authoritarianism”—a system in which meaningful democratic institutions exist yet the government abuses state power to disadvantage its opponents.’. This forecast may seem excessively bleak, but according to Mickey, Levitsky and Way (Mickey et al. 2017: 20), we need to account for at least two factors. The first is the flexible nature of the American Constitution, whose prescriptions are in fact easy to bypass. As a macroscopic example, consider how the segregationist regime was active until the 1960s—almost a century after the American Civil War that had ended slavery. In order for the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution to be concretely actualized, a harsh intervention of the Supreme Court was necessary, along with the firm political will of the Johnson administration, that had to resort to extraordinary measures such as the ‘federalization’ of the National Guard in several states. Additionally, in some cases, federal troops were sent to ensure the court’s sentences were respected. The Trump administration did not conceal its consideration of openly racist positions held by the white supremacist right wing in nominating conservative judges to the Supreme Court. Rather, they viewed it as a

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legitimate component of the American political and cultural spectrum, something to be tolerated in observance of the First Amendment, but politically fought. Appointing such candidates to the Court, who hold positions close to those of the Tea Party Movement: pro-life, creationist, anti-gender and so on, is clearly a major concern for the protection of the civil freedoms of the minorities, women, the LGBT community, and all those whose rights have been only recently been safeguarded at federal level (Kumar 2020, see also Libby 2013). As Margaret Canovan put it fifteen years ago, in Western societies, it is quite difficult to distinguish populism from the phenomenon of the politicization of the ‘silent’ or ‘moral majority’ (2005: 87). After all, well before Trump—and through two presidencies so different from each other, and from the current one: those of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—the field of civil rights and the concrete possibility of their tutelage were effectively reduced by the introduction of the Patriot Act—and its reiterated renewals. The Act had been approved in record time, on October 26, 2001, following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The debate over the efficacy and constitutionality of the Patriot Act is very intense. The prevalent opinion is that it represents a serious blow to constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, due to the shift of power in favor of the federal intelligence and investigative agencies, the reduction of the rights of investigated persons, and the disproportion in capability between the prosecution and the defense in sensitive areas such as the use of interception and filing (Luconi 2016: 223; see also Etzioni 2005, Gorham-Oscilowski and Jaeger 2008). In the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act may have seemed an adequate instrument to protect the country. The emergency-state atmosphere generated by the attacks contributed to the approval of special measures and laws that later became permanent. However, the Patriot Act is only the best-known and most organically structured example. Because for years the Department of Justice had been requesting an extension of its power, and the Patriot Act, rather than a courageous project of a powerful law against terrorism, ended up being ‘the comeback of a wish list of powers and competences the executive branch had been accumulating for years’ (Foerstel 2008: 30). This wish list had previously been rejected by the Congress, as it was deemed scarcely relevant in the fight against terrorism and a violation of civil liberties. These changes were made possible by the shift in the dominant political culture, being increasingly pushed toward radical, mainly right wing,

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positions with the introduction of measures such as the Patriot Act. In a provocative but convincing way, the advocates of the fragility of the democratic fabric of the United States emphasize how the polarization of the American party system—which, paradoxically, began after the success of the civil rights movement at the beginning of the 1960s—has progressively transformed Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party into an essentially ‘white’ party (Kabaservice 2012). This party has increasingly become hostage to minority groups, organized around a few very specific and powerfully supported issues, such as the right to acquire almost any kind of weapon with virtually no controls, or, conversely, the negation of the right to conscious maternity, or the issue of tax reduction (Ware 2016, see also Lacatus and Meibauer 2020). At the same time, polarization has made the Democratic Party—the party that once defended racial segregation in the South—the patchwork party of minorities of every sort and kind (Frymer 2007). The result is a political culture that struggles to recognize different positions as legitimate and where political positions are increasingly distant, extreme, and irreconcilable (Holland and Fermor 2020). This phenomenon became more accentuated during the presidency of Barack Obama, who was considered a ‘usurper’ by the segment of public opinion closer to the white supremacist right whose theses Donald Trump provided a formidable sounding board and a sort of legitimization, making them—at least in part—his own. Recall the accusations he made against President Obama during the Republican primaries, of not being born in the United States and, therefore, having been elected by deception (Hughey and Parks 2014). A polarized political culture is the worst support structure for the construction of bipartisan policies—a tradition that has gone practically extinct in American politics, and for the very existence of a common interpretation of the constitutional principles (Groenendyk et al 2020). The stall it produces within the Congress, through the reciprocal vetoes of parliamentary blocks perched on irreconcilable and intractable positions, ‘encourages presidents to pursue unilateral action on the edges of constitutional limits’ (Mickey et al. 2017: 27).

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The Dead-End Street of Sovereignist Populism The racial/racist element is perhaps the most distinctive trait of Trump’s populism, which falls under one of the two currents of traditional American populism, and explains the difficulty with which the president distances himself from episodes of racial violence involving exponents of white supremacism (Abramowitz and McCoy 2019; De Genova 2020). Of the two branches of overseas populism, the first targets economic and financial elites and the ‘plots’ that enable them to condition the federal government and approve policies that betray the interests of American workers. This current interprets the notion of ‘people’ as a substitute for the idea of ‘class’, thus avoiding characterization as being either for or against any particular ethnic or religious group. It belongs to the liberal world within the American political life, the one that believes in the fundamental equality of humans, in the inalienable right of every individual to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and to a democratic government that draws its legitimacy from the consent of the people (Fitzi et al. 2018: 27, Franzese 2019). The second current of American populism—the one to which Donald Trump belongs—also accuses the big business elites and the government of having undermined the economic interests and the political liberties of common people. However, its definition of ‘people’ is narrower and more ethnically-based, comprising exclusively the citizens of European heritage, the ‘true Americans’, whose racial identity would enable them to request the preservation of the rights of the ‘true America’. It is a racial nationalism: an ethnically expressed concept of America, of a people held together by a common blood and skin color who supposedly inherited a special aptitude to self-government from its founders (Henley and Warren 2020; Jenne 2018; Schertzer & Woods 2020). What these two different kinds of populism have in common is that they thrive amid, and are an expression of, well-founded discontent: an economic system that favors the rich, the fear of losing jobs to new immigrants, and politicians who are more concerned about their careers than the welfare of the majority of the citizens (Kazin 2016). As Michael Cox vigorously argues, on the role of ‘liberals’, especially of liberal intellectuals, facing Donald Trump elctions, Brexit, and generally speaking, the success of populist and sovereignist movements around the West: ‘We do not have to like or agree with populism. And we should not forget our role as critic. But we should at least try and distance

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ourselves from our own political or ideological preference, and try and move beyond moral outrage at something so many of us might not like and instead seek to understand what is happening here. Because something clearly is. And what is that something? We should not exaggerate. Not should we conclude that the world we have known is about to collapse. It is not. But the tectonic plates are shifting. The mood across the West is turning sour. Many millions of people are obviously very unhappy with the old order and have expressed their alienation by voting against the establishment in very large numbers. This has expressed itself through different political parties. It has taken different forms in different countries. Each nation has its own peculiarities. But the new populism is more than just a reflection of national exceptionalism’ (Cox 2019: 242). I believe this distinction may also be applied to the concepts of people held by the two main populist formations in Italy—which for a year, since spring 2018, were partners in a coalition government. Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) has a similar position to the ‘leftist populism’ of American tradition recalled by Kazin (2016): an ideal of the voiceless, of the last, of the betrayed by the promises of the democratic and republican state. Lega has built its national dimension on the vindication of an ethnonationalism that parades the values of ‘authentic Italianness’, completely hostile to any form of melting pot and aggressive toward the ‘foreign’ category, especially Muslims (Caiani 2019). During his year of government, by exploiting the weakness of the opposition and the confusion and inexperience of its government partner, Lega leader Matteo Salvini has cunningly managed to present himself as an interpreter for both these concepts of people. He has continued representing the interests of the northern middle class—a generally richer ‘people’, albeit politically frustrated—but has also obtained growing consensus in the center and south of the country and from the middle and lower classes that had previously voted for Movimento 5 Stelle. In doing that, Lega’s success perfectly testifies what Albertazzi and McDonnell (2015) have argued: that populist parties can be built to last, can achieve key policy victories, and can survive the experience of government, without losing the support of either the voters or those within their parties. In many ways, including the fiscal policy centered around the idea of a ‘flat tax’, Matteo Salvini has learned Trump’s lesson and made it the framework of his political proposal, even in the slogan ‘prima gli italiani!’ (Italians first!). On the concept of people as a sort of property and on the relation between the leader and the representation of people that characterize the modern populist

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movement, Nadia Urbinati (2019) observes that the populist leaders are convinced that ‘finally the people have arrived here’, as if before, with other majorities, it was not true. This means that populism presents its majority as the only legitimate possibility, and believes that the others are manipulated by the parties, by the elites, by the minorities. As if there were only one legitimate majority, that democracy reveals but does not create. In reality, however, democracy means creating majorities through elections. What has been happening in the West in these recent decades has resulted in the substitution of democracy and market economy with two simulacra, thanks to which populism and technocracy have spread. I think it is evident that a bad democracy cannot regulate the market, as it cannot alleviate its shortcomings—just as a faulty market economy cannot correct democracy’s flaws. Institutions only have regulating power as long as a reasonable balance is maintained in the relations among the powers of the state, between these powers and the parties, and between both of these subjects and public opinion. Today’s profound inequality, resulting from deliberate iniquitous decisions, is precisely what fed political proposals that transcend the limits of any institution, and is the phenomenon we call populism. Maybe, as Charles Kupchan wrote, ‘Rather than continuing to cede ground to extremist voices, centrists must encourage a brand of populism that support a pragmatic, progressive agenda’ (Kupchan 2012: 173). In many ways, contemporary democracies are forced to coexist with populism (Galston 2018; Pappas 2019). Populism is a form of mediation between the popular and the liberal elements of democracy, as well as a vector of popular aspirations. Its appearance is a signal of discontentment, and at the same time, it is a call to order that emerges when the balance between the elites and the people is perceived to be in favor of the former. Therefore, populism is more likely to emerge in periods of tension and crisis—and can even be considered an indicator of discomfort of the social and political body. This typically happens when a way out from the troubles of democracy is found in through the technocratic option, forgetting that the ultimate value of democracy—its moral superiority—lies in the process through which decisions are made and evaluated, and not in the ‘goodness’ of those decisions (Eatwell and Godwin 2018). Public debate is the appropriate place to support those values—different from individual freedom and political and juridical equality—that the democratic process, fed by public opinion, can implement more easily compared with other

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systems thanks to the role played by freedom and equality. It is the circular relationship between the conferment of authority to those who serve the institutions and the control exerted over them that makes public opinion, paraphrasing David Hume, ‘a force that makes the many easily governed by the few and the few unable to escape the control of the many’ (Hume 1994:16, see also Urbinati 2014: 35). When it grows past a certain limit, and when the mechanisms that should absorb it are perceived as inefficient or even shady, inequality has a devastating impact on society and undermines both democracy and market economy, making the former a distant memory and the latter a system for the legitimization of privilege. Particularly, when the corrective tools produced by democracy are absent—as in the case of China—or scarce—as in a growing number of Western countries—market economy becomes a multiplicator of inequality, because, without the correction provided by democracy, the inequality produced by the market accumulates within the system, making the strong stronger and the weak weaker. Accumulating and finding growing legislative protection, the differences created by the market—which are useful and positive in and of themselves—turn into privileges, and our society becomes once again one founded on privileges and on their tutelage, exactly like the Ancien Régime society that was taken down by freedom and equality at the end of the eighteenth century (Parsi 2012: 13–19). Even those who— like Angelo Panebianco—are convinced that the ‘failures of the state’ are more dangerous than the ‘failures of the market’ for individual liberties, do not fail to recognize that ‘since the market also generates... strong concentrations of social power, we are faced with the problem of the relationship between the state and the social powers generated by the market’ (Panebianco 2004: 92–93). In these conditions, the belief of not being able to exert any influence over the decision-making process feeds abstentionism: ‘today, the number of people who are ‘necessarily mute’ because they are “socially excluded” and politically irrelevant is large enough to make citizens worry about the future of democracy’ (Urbinati 2014: 55), and it should worry any democratic political class worthy of its name, if they were not so intent on the systematic occupation of power positions. As American political scientist and historian Charles Tilly observed in his last work, ‘the democratic accomplishment consists of insulating public politics from whatever material inequalities exist. Democracy can form and survive so long as public politics itself does not divide sharply at the boundaries of unequal

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categories. Conversely, political rights, obligations, and involvements that divide precisely at categorical boundaries threaten democracy and inhibit democratization. Democracy thrives on a lack of correspondence between the inequalities of everyday life and those of state-citizen relations’ (Tilly 2007: 117–118). In other words, even if economic and social inequality is accepted as a natural consequence of the difference in individual abilities and resources—and, according to some, as an impulse for the mechanism of creation of wealth—it must not be translated into political inequality. Here we can see the Rawlsian concept of justice, by which a society is just when the fundamental freedoms are equally distributed—‘principle of equal liberty’—when the various functions and positions are accessible to all—‘principle of equal opportunity’—and when the distribution of the other primary goods—especially those connected with income, wealth, and social status—maximizes the share of the less fortunate—‘principle of difference’ (Rawls 1971). In this perspective, accepting the transformation of democracy into the mere political registration of the social hierarchies built upon the different economic opportunities would mean not recognizing that ‘in the modern era the central issue [of democracy] is the role of the economy and economic power’ (Fisichella 1990: 95). But this centrality of the relationship between politics and economics and of their respective autonomy does not only concern democracy: it is typical of any regime. ‘Even when the economy becomes an end as an ideal of welfare and advancement to be pursued (the “wealth of the nations” of Adam Smith), it is only one of the ends, and politics has the responsibility to coordinate, grade and term the multiplicity of ends’ (Ibid., 113).

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PART III

A Northwest Passage

CHAPTER 8

Changes at the Helm After the Crash? Transitions Within the Liberal World Order and the Challenges for Europe

This chapter investigates the opportunities and limitations of a reshuffle within the transatlantic community, in order to salvage and relaunch the leadership of what is left of the Liberal World Order. In light of America’s decreasing willingness and capability to remain at the helm of the machinery that has given—with variable results—a direction to world politics, Europe’s and the European Union’s potential for at least relaunching an up-to-date Liberal World Order project and sharing the burden to guide will be examined. In doing so, the Europe-specific manifestations of the New Global Order’s encroachment will be analyzed, especially those that erupted as a consequence of the global financial crisis which, in triggering the notorious Eurozone public debt crisis, exposed the multifaceted and at traits tragic aberrations plaguing national socioeconomic systems and the EU’s institutional functioning. Nevertheless, the European integration process, for all its flaws and inconsistencies, offers a valuable opportunity to consider what an adequate and effective ‘re-combination of international order’, sovereignty and market openness should look like, provided that a new generation of liberal-minded architects actually emerge, one willing to pick up the baton of ‘worldengineering’, reaffirming—and when necessary reviewing—the principles and the practical institutional that hopefully will lead to a redefinition of the West’s identity and political structure—including the EU and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8_8

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transatlantic relations—and the ever more necessary dialogue with the rest of the world.

Europe’s Multiple Challenges As a matter of fact, a wreckage is a lengthy, complex process—as depicted in famous dramatizations of the Titanic’s incident. Reportedly, after the lookouts first spotted the iceberg on the liner’s path and relayed the message to the officers in charge of that fatal night, there were delays in the executions of the orders aimed at avoiding the collision. Eventually, the engines took quite some time after setting into reverse to produce consequences, and the position of the rudder relative to the propeller impaired the turning ability of the ship. Moreover, later inspections of the relic have pointed out a number of design flaws in the structural integrity and failure of the ship which worsened the effects of the damage caused by the collision. It should therefore be clear that, no matter how devastating the smash is, a vessel does not simply ‘go down’, it will be remembered that it took as long as two and a half hours of flooding, listing, and cracking for the Titanic to actually sink into the depths of the ocean. Every wreckage is in fact the eventual result of a myriad of interacting factors over an extended length of time. Hardly any contingency or action can be regarded as the ultimate cause per se of a disaster at sea. Accordingly, in any accident, there are a multitude of points in time where the actors can intervene, deploying contingency plans, opting for different courses of action, pinpointing the craft’s actual shortcomings in order to contain the damage procured by unforeseeable external factors. It might seem that we are grasping at straws here, idling in the domain of the ‘what if’—which, outside of the boundaries of academic investigation, appears quite inadequate to find a way to remedy a disaster. Yet, one might also consider that—besides having the luxury of some hindsight—the Liberal World Order, given the array of variably interconnected components it is made up of, is a very flexible vessel, equipped with a number of backup and fail-safes that, at on the long period and on a large scale, can increase its reliability and even enhance its performance. Indeed, as discussed in the first chapter, the order turned out to be so pliability that it came to distorting its very purpose and identity, mutating into the wreckage-prone, self-doomed Neoliberal Global Order. The challenge, therefore, is to strike a reasonable balance between adaptability and

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consistency. As long as that goal is kept firmly in mind, it makes sense to delve into the resources that our good-old keel has still in storage, before looking out for lifeboats and nearby rescue vessels willing to take onboard poor shipwrecked liberals—or having a vested interest into doing so. One of these resources is the ‘pluralistic nature’ of the Liberal World Order. This does not negate the hierarchical character intrinsic into the latter: the presence of the United States’s leadership was in-built in this kind of order, as its ultimate political sponsor, provider of international public goods and guarantee of a fair share of the order’s returns with lower-ranking countries—enticed into the uneven association by the prospect of higher and longer-lasting paybacks compared to alternative orders. Moreover, the order—i.e., its leader—while admitting a good measure of contestation in accordance with liberal principles, has not admitted the constant, extensive contestation of its sources of authority, including the American primacy. Yet, as previous chapters indicate, the United States’s preeminence has become increasingly problematic—for the international order and the country itself. The time might therefore have come for the order’s stakeholders—and observers—to consider the possibility of operationalizing plurality in the Liberal World Order, which, provided it actually survives the disaster, is going to need much fixing. This scenario does not necessarily imply a full overhaul, but a more or less permanent re-allotment of roles within the liberal family, with possible implications about how leadership may work in the future (Kupchan 2012). As observed by Charles Kupchan in 2012, the ‘principles for the next world’ have to be returned in terms of shaping legitimacy. This means not just reserving it to liberal democratic regimes, but also defining sovereignty ‘dialing back more ambitious proposals to attenuate it’. In doing so, it will be possible to pursue a number of crucial goals: facilitating regional devolution, taming globalization ‘guarding against protectionism, fashioning new financial rules, mitigating wealth inequality’ with ‘significant adjustments to the liberal economic order erected by the West’, managing the rise of China with ‘a nuanced mix of engagement and containment’, and restoring US leadership (Kupchan 2012: 186–204). Admittedly, until not long ago, the order’s self-balancing systems had proved good enough to maintain it in working conditions, albeit in a decreasingly effective and consistent manner. However, now that the Liberal World Order finds itself in a situation potentially even more destructive than the one faced during the Cold War—which also acted

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as an ‘external underpinning’—extraordinary measures might need to be taken into consideration—including a review of the order’s traditional leading function. In fact, it can by no means taken for granted that the assessment may actually result in a successful leadership transition. Bold predictions have to pass muster with a fifty-year-long debate about America’s decline, wrought with frustrated contestants in their—implied or more rarely direct—bids to the leadership. On the other hand, a nondeclining power does not entail that leadership cannot change hands. One only has to consider the idea—undiplomatically intimated by President Trump—that the United States was losing to another country because of the self-restraint with which it had operated, within a rule-based international order. This might turn out to be more than a fringe undercurrent that Trump has cunningly tapped into. Rather, it may be a rampant opinion, one that president Biden might be able to rein in and dull, but that still risk to eventually change the direction of the US foreign policy and amount to a relinquishment of the Liberal World Order’s leadership. According to some of its critics, the nature of the Liberal World Order is based more on coercion than benign US leadership and institutionalized multilateralism (Porter 2020). One may even wonder, whether the next—liberal—international order might not depend on leadership at all; in a post-hegemonic world, liberal rules may be assumed to have become so deeply incorporated in the actors’ behavior that they only need international institutions—i.e., the support of same-status countries—to sustain themselves (Vezirgiannidou 2013). Turning the analytical audacity dial a few tads back, the issue this chapter addresses is not whether a full-fledged new leader is going to get hold of the baton passed/dropped by the United States—let alone press for it. Rather, we are going to investigate what role the EU—regarded as next-in-line as far as supporting the Liberal World Order is concerned—is likely to play in a context marked by the still open-ended transition of the American leadership. It would have been remarkable if the EU—a constitutive element of the Liberal World Order—had remained unaffected by the latter’s decline. In recent years, the tensions between the Union’s supranational institutions—the Commission and the Parliament—and the intergovernmental ones (the European Council and the Council of Ministers) have frequently resulted in the latter prevailing over the former (Bickerton 2015; Maricut 2016). On the other hand, the unique governance of the EU provides for numerous opportunities of mutual influence throughout

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the policymaking cycle which make the supranational-intergovernmental divide only relatively accurate (Finke and Herbel 2015, Chou and Riddervold 2015, Tömmel 2016). Nevertheless, even within the Council of Ministers, the institution’s ‘culture of consensus’ that ensured a high level of support and few negative votes does not seem to inform decisions as it used to do, because ministers expressing explicit disagreement during the negotiations preceding the final vote are now increasingly willing to issue veto threats and appear prepared to carry through with their threats if their demands are not met. Sometimes the Member States use their veto power, especially on those issues where they are under domestic level scrutiny (Finke 2017). This recalcitrance is also evidenced by the Member States’ substantial disregard for the Commission’s scheme—put forward after extenuating negotiations—designed to ‘relocate’ a quota of the migrants who had reached Italy and Greece in the last six years to other countries of the Union (Geddes and Scholte 2017). The opposition to the plan was even more remarkable considering the relative political weight of the noncompliant Member States—e.g., Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia—and how their conduct failed to generate effective negative consequences (Nugent and Rhinard 2019). A significant shift of decisional power from the communitarian to the intergovernmental level had already happened at the time of the Barroso Commission, even though the latter was markedly less ‘combative’ than the one presided by Jean-Claude Juncker and now by Ursula von der Leyen (Peterson 2017). The European debt crisis was the event that favored and justified the intergovernmental solutions inflating the relative power of the Council of Ministers and the European Council (Schwarzer 2012). The most glaring manifestation of this development consisted in the design and implementation of the so-called bailouts, whose terms and conditions were set out entirely at the intergovernmental level—although the Commission had put forward its proposals to create a more integrated system (Overbeek 2012; Zahariadis 2012). The result was that the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), created to contrast the bank crises of Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus—the ‘state-saver fund’— were financed by the single member states through intergovernmentally agreed-upon payments—and not through the emission of European obligations—the much-discussed ‘Eurobonds’. Once again, in times of crisis, the balance of power within the Union has tilted in favor of national governments.

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How could all this be possible? How could the member states disobey with impunity to specific demands from the European institutions? Why were the ‘strong political and programmatic responses’ that would have been necessary to face a series of crises of unprecedented gravity— the Ukrainian crisis, the financial crisis, the migrant crisis, the Jihadist terrorism crisis—not even ‘in the mental and institutional horizon’ of the Union? And, most of all, why were the central institutions of the EU ‘only partially able to react effectively and reform their political role’ in front of these challenges? (Cotta 2017: 75; Rhinard 2019).1 We need to remember that the European Union is the product of numerous compromises among the three perspectives that brought it to life: the economic community, the intergovernmental union, and the parliamentary union. It is a ‘compound democracy’—a democracy ‘organized in a system of separate institutions sharing decision-making power’, still incomplete due to the ‘paralyzing coexistence of multiple perspectives within the same legal and institutional framework’ (Fabbrini 2014: XVIII). After 2008, to complicate the picture, the friction between the European Council and the Commission, that is, within the executive function of the Union, and between the executive organs of the EU and the European Parliament, added to the friction between supranational and intergovernmental institutions. According to Fabbrini: ‘Exploding shortly before the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the euro crisis not only halted the supranationalists’ expectation of the gradual convergence of the intergovernmental union into the supranational union, but it also complicated the coexistence of the two unions’. Indeed, the new intergovernmental treaties introduced a legal divide between them, with the stronger and larger member states—Germany in particular—‘relying more and more on intergovernmental institutions and practices set up outside of the legal order of the EU to organize crucial programs’— such as fiscal consolidations or resolutions of bank failures. At the same time, that crisis has also deepened the institutional distinction between the two unions, forcing the intergovernmental union to increase its institutional complexity and integration along a path that overlaps only partially with the supranational union. ‘The euro crisis ended the Maastricht Compromise between the two unions, putting a tremendous strain 1 Mark Rhinard recently proposed an interesting thesis on the policy-making machinery shaping European integration, that could be best described as crisis-oriented methods for arriving at collective decisions Rhinard 2019).

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on the coexistence of a supranational union unable to become a parliamentary federation and the intergovernmental union that has become a post-democratic federation of governments ’ (Fabbrini 2014: 268). We must also not overlook one of the most perverse effects of the classic problem of the so-called ‘democratic deficit’: the competition, within the Union’s legislative function, between the European Parliament and the national Parliaments. Yet, ‘the 2008 economic crisis has also been, and perhaps predominantly, a European crisis […], for it has been significantly conditioned by Europe and its consequences have specifically reverberated on the European Union as such’ (Cotta 2017: 34). It was a European-conditioned crisis because, due to the progresses in the construction of the Single Market, the Member States have faced the impact of the crisis in a situation of much greater economic integration compared with the past. At the same time, however, while the European architecture forced them to ‘renounce using national tools to deal with the effects of the crisis (or at least strongly reduced their scope), the Union’s tools to actively intervene at European level were still very limited and slow to implement’ (Cotta 2017: 38). There is no need to be experts on the functioning of European institutions—having being (alert) citizens of this Union for the past decade suffices—to realize how, among the three perspectives mentioned by Fabbrini, the economic one is by far the most compelling. With regard to the Stability Pact—setting the upper limits of ratios of public debts and deficits to national GDPs —at least in recent times, the Commission and the European Council have virtually stuck to a no-tolerance policy. To the extent any flexibility is actually allowed, this only occurs with the assent of the major Member States’ governments, and never without the German placet. Germany’s de facto veto power was also exerted in the case of the European Stability Mechanism, which was set to come into force in July 2012, but was postponed until September, once the German Constitutional Court had decreed its compatibility with Germany’s domestic fundamental law (Bulmer 2014). Whether we like it or not, Germany has the role of a veto player in the Eurozone, whose assent is necessary for any major decisions (Paterson 2011). The same happened during the first phase of the ongoing pandemic emergency in the process to create the ‘Next Generation Europe Program’. As a matter of fact, Berlin has managed this objective responsibility with great moderation (Bruno and Finzi 2018)— with the serious exception of the Greek crisis. With regard to the

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migratory crisis, for example, Angela Merkel’s moves appeared as less opportunistic, and certainly more farsighted, than those of other countries. However, Germany’s actions were not exempt from criticism or neglect of the country’s national interest; take, for example, the legally ambiguous agreement with Erdo˘gan’s Turkey to seal the Balkan track (Fernandez Arribas 2016; Smeets and Beach 2020). As for the Ukraine crisis (Orenstein and Kelemen 2017), as another example, the severity of the international community toward Russia, with the adoption and reiterated confirmation of heavy sanctions, was supported by Germany despite the important trade flow between the two countries (Kundnani 2015). It must be acknowledged that Chancellor Merkel made a difficult turnabout in relation to the centuries-old German policy—which goes back to Bismarck and before to Prussian monarchy—of always seeking optimal relations with Russia. Surprisingly to many observers, ‘the girl who came from the East’ proved much more inflexible than many other European leaders in defending the inadmissibility of changing national borders by force, which is what Russia did with Ukraine by annexing Crimea (Aggestam and Hyde-Price 2020). As far as the economy is concerned, though, Germany keeps turning a deaf ear, sticking decidedly on an austerity policy that has damaged Europe’s lukewarm, sparse economic recovery (Habermas 2020). On this matter, the neoliberal obsession with inflation and the aversion toward expansive maneuvers in times of deficit go hand in hand with Germany’s traumatic memories of the hyperinflation of the 1920s and its ordoliberalist tradition. The country has also been maintaining its trade imbalance, with an account surplus well above the established 6 percent of its GDP, according to the EU Treaties: 8.6 percent in 2015 (288.62 billion US dollar); 8.5 percent in 2016 (295.08); 7.7 percent in 2017 (287.21); 7.3 percent in 2018 (293.18); and 7 percent in 2019 (270.13) qualifying as ‘a sort of China’ within the Union, with a distorting effect on the whole economy of the Eurozone (World Bank 2020).2 Euroscepticism is not prevalent in the EU’s multilevel political system (Leruth et al. 2017); in fact, since the outbreak of the pandemic,

2 World Bank, Current account balance (% of GDP) – Germany, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.GD.ZS?locations=DE&most_r ecent_value_desc=true; World Bank, Current account balance (Bop, current US dollar) – Germany, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BN.CAB.XOKA.CD?locati ons=DE.

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the populist wave that had ridden and fuel resentment against the Union seems to have lost some of its momentum, although many warn of its possible resurgence (de Nardis 2020; Lichfield 2020; Rapley 2020; Wondreys and Mudde 2020). However, the public opinions of many member states continue to harbor a strong disaffection with how the European project has actually panned out, although these adverse feelings coexist with an enduring positive attitude toward the Europeanist ideal (Pew Research Center 2019). This disenchantment is fed by the Union’s poor performances over the last few decades, as well as by the general hostility toward economic and political elites—however marked out—and everything perceived as ‘establishment’. The widespread feeling seems to be that the Union has substantially broken many of its promises, especially those solemnly made every time the EU has tried to raise the bid—narratively if not concretely—and draw new lymph from its original premises, so as to face emerging challenges possibly with the renewed support of its citizens (Morlino 2020).3 That being so, the social butchery that the so-called Troika—twothirds of which was made up of EU officials—inflicted on Greeks in order to ‘save’ them from bankruptcy during the Euro crisis has certainly not benefitted the credibility of the Union. In that instance—among others— the EU appeared much more concerned with the health of the—primarily German and French—credit banks, preventing the much-invoked market forces from punishing the moral hazards that bank managers were guilty of, while letting them play havoc with regular citizens, and taking no significant measure to at least alleviate the debtors’ desperate conditions (Matthijs 2016; Pagoulatos 2020). European institutions acted irrationally and deplorably, setting a precedent that clashes with the very rules of market economy: speculation was protected despite being found guilty of willing and reckless wrongdoings, perpetrated, thanks to patent information asymmetries. Bankers and financial speculators can now act with a reasonable expectation that the Union will not let them pay the price of their poor choices, and, on the contrary, will eventually bail them out. This is likely to encourage them to blithely lend money to insolvent creditors, setting the conditions for the next ‘unforeseeable’ crisis, whose

3 On the key transformations in terms of equality and freedom in the six largest European democracies since 1990, the effects of the ‘Great Recession” and the impact of the EU, see Morlino 2020.

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cost will probably be to dumped once again on helpless regular people (Taylor-Gooby et al. 2017). Those who maintain that the Greeks were punished for providing the Union with false information and fabricating government budget figures should note that, if anything, it was a handful of Greek politicians who actually lied to the Union and—more importantly—to ‘their own people’, condemning them to pay the price for their incompetence and dishonesty. The Greek people could not be aware of what was happening, and nonetheless, it was deemed liable for it, and, to add insult to injury, doomed to be criminalized and ridiculed for ‘living beyond its means’ (Matthijs and McNamara 2015). On the contrary, the several bank and financial managers—who with their sophisticated tools and powerful connections could have detect on time the malfunctions of Greece’s ‘fundamental macroeconomics’—suffered no significant consequence. It is no wonder that this Union is neither loved nor esteemed by a growing number of its citizens (Morlino and Raniolo 2017). The repeated occurrence of such serious episodes has amplified the feeling that since the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993— ushering in what is still the basic political and institutional setting of the EU—the integration process has resulted much more in the ‘Europe of the banks’ than the ‘Europe of the citizens’ (della Porta 2020). Before Maastricht, the EU was not a primary issue in the hearts and minds of its citizens—definitely not consciously so—and it was only after the major changes brought in by the new treaty that the awareness of ‘being European’ first matured to a significant degree. On the one hand, this may seem unsurprising, as the treaty not only created the EU citizenship legal status, affording rights, freedoms and legal protections available under EU law, but also granted practical advantages to the European population, such as those coming to the freedom of movement within the Schengen Area, as well as a fuller realization of the Single Market. On the other hand, though, in advancing market integration, which benefitted primarily the ‘European consumer’, it also ended up interfering heavily with the development of the ‘European citizen’ regarded as a member of an open, plural political body. The tension between the economic and social dimensions of the European integration process built up until it erupted into a highly divisive ideological and political issue when the Greek crisis broke out and escalated into the notorious Eurozone crisis. As acutely observed by Maurizio Ferrera—who cannot be suspected of Euroscepticism—‘What many question today is the Union’s capability to

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coherently pursue the objectives of the Treaty of Lisbon: promotion of widespread welfare for the citizens, balanced and sustainable growth, a competitive social market economy that ensures full occupation, territorial cohesion and social justice. Since 2008, poverty, inequality and unemployment have grown, as well as the gaps between generations, occupational profiles, and insiders and outsiders within each country. Additionally, the process of rapprochement between Western and Eastern Europe has stalled, and a marked polarization between the countries of Northern and Southern Europe has emerged, reversing a historical trend of upward convergence’ (Ferrera 2016: IX). The repercussions of the financial crisis, that have been afflicting Europe over the last twelve years or so, have exposed the contrast between the citizens’ needs and expectations in terms of social protection and the austerity imposed by the monetary union (Cozzolino 2019, 2020). This contradiction was in many ways inevitable, considering that the relevance of welfare systems within national citizenship pacts and the European integration process, with all its elements of liberalization of exchanges, are coeval. Arguably, in the century-long evolution of the modern state, the expansion of the welfare state was neither a mere stage of the process, nor an accident, but rather the response of liberal political elites to the structural crisis suffered by capitalism in the 1920s (Di Palma 2015). More precisely, the establishment of the welfare state can be regarded as the reaction to the political consequences of an economic crisis triggered by the malfunctioning of the capitalist machine. After thirty years in which the construction of the global market has caused the progressive dismantlement of the social protection systems that used to grant the diffusion of welfare and social order, the financial crisis has revived the citizens’ demand for the state to step in and counterbalance the worse effects of the market’s negative relapses on society—a demand so far largely frustrated (Saraceno 2020). Since its onset, globalization has undermined ‘the social and material basis for greater political equality—central to the very idea of democracy’ (Gill 1996: 214). Public policy choices constrained by the need to create more favorable conditions for the attraction of global capital have progressively generated high levels of unemployment and job insecurity, decreasing salaries, the erosion of social services, the termination of redistributive politics, and increased wealth inequality in rich countries(Saraceno 2019). As a result, while small fractions of the poor

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countries’ populations were integrated into the world economy, rich countries ended up with ‘their own Third Worlds’ (Cox 1996: 26). The dismantlement—often disguised as reform—of welfare systems in Europe is especially fraught with political consequences as in the post-WWII period—the same that saw the inception of the European Communities—the politically and militarily fully sovereign ‘Westphalian state’ was replaced by the ‘welfarist state’. In other words, the objective limitation of sovereignty imposed on states by the Cold War caused the ‘exchange of political loyalty for social protection instead of security’— which is a constitutive element of any citizenship pact. Political allegiance itself progressively moved from the security domain—i.e., the protection against external threats, now mostly provided by the hegemonic superpower—to the economic-social field (Parsi 1998: 170–190). With the state’s retreat from the realm of economic-social protection— occurred in the last decade—the very notion of citizenship that developed in Europe after WWII has been inexorably undermined. The European Union was built based on a clear awareness of the inherent connection between state sovereignty, citizenship, and practices of solidarity and redistribution. It for this reason that national systems of social protection were kept relatively isolated from the dynamic of economic integration. The opening of the markets was delegated to the European Community, while the ‘sphere of solidarity and social protection’ remained a member states’ prerogative (Ferrera 2016: XI). However, starting in the 1980s, the progress made in the field of economic integration introduced direct and indirect obligations that affected to an increasing degree the member states’ social solidarity mechanisms. Yet, no political citizenship can exist without solidarity. In these years, the Union’s conduct has in a sense set a bad example for its members: too unbalanced toward rigor and efficiency, and unconcerned with the cohesion of its different social and national components. Member states were indeed all too eager to heed the suggestion that it is acceptable to disregard others’ interests while tending to one’s own, to the point of ‘seceding’. On the other hand, it cannot be concealed that values ‘such as solidarity or common European citizenship have only rarely found concrete application, except when they were instrumental to the solution of general problems such as the free movement of persons (especially workers) or the cohesion policy’ (Di Quirico 2016: 153). But the member states were not the only ones ready to learn the neoliberal lesson.

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The unconstitutional independence referendum passed by the Regional Parliament—in a session in which only nationalist parliamentarians participated—and held on 1 October 2017 in the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia despite the Spanish government’s clumsily opposition, can be regarded as evidence of the devaluation of territorial solidarity caused by a severe economic crisis, aggravated by the fiscal rigor imposed by the EU, which had been managing with cold detachment the hardships suffered by countries devastated by the social consequences of globalization. At the same time, the persistence of national sovereignties and the related prevalence of state-level political and electoral cycles has thwarted the attempts to redistribute resources among areas with different levels of well-being in order to promote their convergence. Unexpectedly European citizenship wound up relativizing national citizenship, while also denying the notion that belonging to the same political body implies effective—i.e., active and concrete—solidarity among its different social and territorial components. The failure to permeate the legal status established with the EU citizenship with sufficiently ‘warm’ contents—i.e., a sense of political togetherness—indirectly, and certainly unintentional, de-legitimized the idea that national citizenship, and the political pact underlying it, implies solidarity among the different regions of a country as well. As a result, ‘rich regions’ have given rise to a new wave of devolution and independence requests, seeking to separate their destinies from the nations that they have long been part of. In doing so, regional territories have acted as the staunchest harbinger of the communitarian selfishness that has been pervading the national and inter-/super-national levels of European politics. After the referendum, a significant number of Catalan companies moved their fiscal residences to Madrid, and many observers argued that banks and companies voted ‘with their feet’, opting not so much for Spain citizenship, as for Europe—a new application of the exit/voice/loyalty choice. This line of reasoning is consistent with a sense of belonging to the EU hinging on economic interests rather than political allegiance. While such a conception may be appropriate for a company’s legal head office, it had serious consequences for the actual European citizens living in the Union insofar as it exposed the fragility of notions of sovereignty and citizenship based on mere profit rather than a deeper—even emotional—participation in a political community. Moreover, overlooking these ideas—as well as the norms and practices related to them—is what allowed populist leaders including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, France’s Marine Le Pen, Austria’s

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Sebastian Kurz to Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni to lay claim on them and twist them into fundamental elements of identitarian ideology to turn against the Union itself.

Out of Collision Course: Restoring the Balance Between the Social and Economic Europe According to Ferrera, this tension between national solidarity and economic integration at the European level generates four specific ‘subtensions’. The first is between the social and economic dimension of the integration process, with a ‘governance programmatically unbalanced in favor of pro-market measures at the expense of pro-welfare measures’. The second has an opposing North and South, ‘core (economically powerful) and peripheral countries, “creditors” and “debtors”’. The third tension revolves around the free movement of the factors of production within the internal market, and primarily exists in the polemic between ‘countries with a consolidated (generous and expensive) welfare system and countries with relatively limited welfare systems, low-cost labor and low regulation’. And the fourth ‘is vertical in nature: Brussels, that is the supranational institutions, versus the member states—the national governments and their sovereignties in fields deemed crucial, such as the pension system and the job market’ (Ferrera 2016: 5). It should be noted that Europe itself has presided over and developed the grounds on which neoliberalism and the conservative revolution that began in the 1980s have globally reformulated not only the relationship between economics and politics, but the very attributes and priorities of politics. The national state was left with a rapidly shrinking space, its prerogative being questioned more each day, and deprived of the resources it needed to fulfill its remaining duties. The ancillary function of ‘social Europe’ in comparison with ‘economic Europe’—which is inscribed in the distribution of responsibilities between the Union and the Member States, and in the subsequent distribution of work between Brussels and the national capitals—was bound to become an increasingly manifest problem, regardless of the financial crisis (Crouch 2020). The crisis simply unveiled the ‘social unsustainability of the neoliberal model of capitalism, which is based on a reductive vision of the individual as homo economicus ’—economic man—that ‘legitimized the emergence of a revenue economy, massive waste and uncontrolled financial speculation’

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and ended up creating a ‘doctrine as dangerous, for its oversimplifications, as Marxism-Leninism’ (Corm 2013: 27). Today, the question for Europe—and not only Europe—is not about the so-called sovereignism, which is a mere symptom of the problem, or a bad solution to it. It is about the transformations that sovereignty must undergo—not to ‘graciously disappear’, but to be reaffirmed in a way that enables it to be an effective shield for the political, civil, and social rights that give meaning to the notion of citizenship. If one thing emerged clearly since 1989, it is that the reduction of sovereignty—the ‘retreat of the state’ as Susan Strange (Strange 1996) defined it many years ago—its delegitimization as an affordable third-party regulator of the competition between different interests and guardian of the general interest have not been neutral processes. They have privileged the strongest and most concentrated interests—i.e., the interests of a minority—over the weaker, diffuse interests of the majority. If we cannot retrieve the positive value of political sovereignty—articulated at both the national and European level, effectively represented by institutions and responsible toward the citizens-electors—we will never be able to undertake the challenge of its reconstruction and remedy to the erosion it has suffered over almost three decades. This is not about indulging in the nostalgia for a long-lost past, but being conscious that the world we live in is the product of humankind’s artificial action, and as such, it can be deconstructed and reorganized in a different and better way. One of the biggest mistakes implied by the great substitution of the late 1980s—the collocation of a Neoliberal Global Order in place of the original Liberal World Order—was the belief that any order could exist independently of its parts. Moreover, that an order with no sovereign states—or, more precisely, an order based on states whose sovereignty was ‘programmatically evanescent’—could be called ‘liberal’. The positive acquisitions of the EU, in terms of economic growth and partial creation of a European citizenship and political identity, as well as its contribution to peace and the spread of democracy in the Old Continent, cannot be denied. Its future, however, largely depends on the spirit with which the Union will be able and willing to accept the challenge of a restructuring of its relations with the member states in a way that does not mortify their necessary sovereignties and aims to harmonize the plurality of their goals. Most importantly, it is done in a way that seeks to balance the social dimension with the economic and financial dimension of the Union. As difficult as this task may appear to be, there are no shortcuts

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or alternatives, since, as it is fruitful to restate, only by agreeing to start again at sovereignty will we be able to grant a future to both political democracy and market economy. One way to affirm a European sovereignty that is able to ‘contain, harmonize, and complete’ the single sovereignties of the Member States is to address the issue of the common European frontier, which could potentially enable the process of European unification to make a significant step forward. The positive effects it would bear are easy to see. Establishing an actual European border, which would be jointly guarded by the military and police forces of the Member States, would enable the Union to newly go ahead in abolishing internal frontiers after their dangerous, albeit necessary, resurrection due to the porosity of the Union’s non-(common)border. At the same time, this shared responsibility toward collective security would strengthen the sense of belonging to the European community with all the symbols that have so far been a prerogative of states. The idea is not to give the Union the permanent command of military and police forces, or to form a ‘European Army’— an overambitious idea, unless the utopias of European federalization were to be realized—the Union would simply have a coordinating function limited to the vigilance of Europe’s external borders. To be clear, more guarded and better-defended frontiers do not equate with hermetically closed borders to migrants and potential beneficiaries of international protection. However, control over the migration flows would be made easier, and the procedures of hospitality and replacement—or rejection and repatriation—would become a part of the general issue of European sovereignty and its common frontiers. Borders have been the subject of much speculation and conversation in these years. We need to stress that relativizing the value of borders means importing characteristics, influences, and variables peculiar to the international system to single states—which might find themselves unable to react, or in serious trouble. The permeability of borders is a two-way street: the international system, too, receives characteristics, influences, and variables from the single-state systems that contribute to its modifications. However, with the exception of the most powerful actors—or the most cohesive and homogeneous groups of actors—the influence of single-state units on the international system is small. A reciprocal flow between states and the international system has always existed. It could be even argued that, despite appearances, the international system has always drawn substantial order and stability

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resources from the states. Regardless of the high number of wars that has characterized their history, the presence of states—ever since they were little more than clumps of rules and stability—has progressively shaped the international system. This is not only as an anarchic arena, but also, and equally as much, as a web of treaties, laws, institutions, and regimes. At the same time, states were the main resistance to the international system’s attempts to unload its own instability, disorder, and anarchy on the single states. This is why, today, the importation of disorder from the international system to the states increases to the extent that the states lose their power—intended as the capability of national and/or macroregional political authorities to break the seismic waves with which the international system periodically lays its instability excesses on the states. The relation between states and the international system is still characterized by an export of order and an import of disorder from the former to the latter. However, while, pre-globalization, the first flow used to override the second, now the second is currently prevailing. To complicate matters further, a growing portion of the states of the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and the Greater Middle East, not only does not contribute to the stability of the international system, but exports its internal disorder to it (Kamel 2017). As such, this disorder ends up being channeled toward the Northern states. Clearly, their political and economic interdependence—as well as the interferences, also military, of the stronger, more solid states in the political and economic lives of more fragile states—adds to their domestic chaos, which then reverberates on the international system. For all these reasons, redefining the relation between national sovereignties—that must be supported and sustained—and the European Union’s action—that must be able to coordinate them, harmonize them, and complete them—is the only solution—neither ‘neo-platonic’ nor ‘populistic’—to the drift and possible wreck of the Liberal World Order. That is, as long as the Union and its Member States are willing and able to re-equilibrate the reasons of solidarity and those of productivity to save at once democracy and the market. This is the common ground on which Europe and the West at large can and must rebuild their strength and attraction capacity, not for the restoration of the ‘postwar Liberal World Order’, but for the foundation of a ‘new Liberal World Order’. The starting point must be reiterated: to be sustainable, globalization needs to yield benefits for the many rather than for the few. This implies that states must promote new rules in

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the international financial sphere that enable them to regain control over the capital flows. More generally, ‘global governance should be light and flexible, allowing governments to choose their own methods of regulation. Countries trade not to confer benefits on others but because trade creates gains at home. When those gains are distributed fairly throughout the domestic economy, countries don’t need external rules to enforce openness; they’ll chose it of their own accord’ (Rodrik 2019: 33). Today’s hyperglobalization has actually betrayed its progenitor: the one based on the rules laid in Bretton Woods in 1944 and stabilized by institutions such as IMF, WB, and GATT. As has been repeatedly stated in these pages, it was a globalization founded on the ‘sovereignty of states’, embodied by ‘liberal, democratic, and representative institutions’, based upon the ‘rule of law’ principle rather than the ‘rule by law’ practice. Paraphrasing John Ruggie, it was a globalization ‘embedded’ by the preoccupation with the necessity of strengthening the resurging or new political and social structures of liberal democracies and of the mass market. Its architects, its builders, and all those who inhabited and nurtured it were well aware of the fact that no globalization could last without a stable and inclusive order whose solidity derives from its extension. To keep up those bridges on which goods were traveling in increasing quantities and with increasing speed, the pillars represented by national states, markets, and companies had to not merely be maintained, but strengthened by the fruits of global trade. The ‘good society’ envisioned by John Kenneth Galbraith had to be built at home first, and not sacrificed for the construction of a globalized world. As I have tried to argue in this book, the Liberal World Order was founded on a simple formula: employing the market to control the excesses of state sovereignty, and state sovereignty to control the excesses of the market, channeling the energy surpluses generated by both into international institutions. The current phase of globalization has repudiated its liberal origins. It has progressively dismantled the ties that ensured the safe navigation of the international order by enabling it to take advantage of the feeblest winds as well as hold the course during the inevitable storms. The mentors of hyperglobalism, the sirens who have charmed the ship’s captain, lookouts, and helmsmen, have sung of an ‘unembedded’ globalization capable of making everyone wealthier and freer. Under the illusion of becoming richer, we found ourselves working more and more in exchange for decreasing wages, conditions, and guarantees. The new globalization is

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much more akin to the one denounced by Marx, described by Polanyi and referenced by Piketty and Rodrik: the ‘gold-standard’ globalization that began in the middle of the nineteenth century and collapsed into World War I. We risk repeating the same mistake, magnified for worse by the fact that, in the meantime, we have experienced and wasted the remedies of mass liberal democracy and the welfare state, of social inclusion and the construction of the middle class—all of this in a situation that, differently from the one of the mid-1800s, is not characterized by the hegemonic rise of the West and its cultural and political standards on the rest of the world, but by its relative decline, and by the resurgence of non-Western authoritarian powers such as China and Russia. ‘No order can be unembedded’. It is a matter of choosing, while we can, to what kind of political order and economic growth we want to secure. The Liberal World Order established after the World War II was built on the premise that countries must be free to choose the terms of their participation in the world economy, because it had chosen to bind those values to the values of democracy and equality to affirm an inclusive and effective rule of law. In addition, these ‘ties’ surely did not prevent the international commerce from growing enormously between the end of the war and the beginning of the 1980s. On the contrary, they ensured its orderly, inclusive, and more equal development. The order that collapsed with the first global conflict was embedded in the gold standard, and the absolute right of capital lenders to see their investments guaranteed against any other, however legitimate, interest— from the remuneration of workers to their social security and living conditions. The choice of a globalization embedded in the gold standard determined the acceptance of the ‘working poors’ described by Marx and Engels, of the enormous transcontinental migration flows, of the race for the colonies. The order realized from the 1980s on, in which we live today, is also embedded. In the complete freedom of capital flows, in the absolute protection of capital rights—of which the overstretch of intellectual property and patent protection laws is a blatant example—that turns into the prevarication of any other kind of right, including political sovereignty rights. We should thoroughly question which ties are the best to offer the prospect of a better life to the greater number of humans, and whether it is legitimate that, in order to allow for the scandalous enrichment of so few, so many have to be kept in poverty and precarity, or on their

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borderlines. We should question—first, in the West and in Europe— the two political concepts that have profoundly transformed, since the end of World War II, linking their fortunes and strength on the political and institutional forms of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. If we do not, other actors, more dangerous at the domestic and international levels, will take control over this third phase of globalization, freeing it, also formally, from the residual hindrances of democracy. At the same time, the opposition to globalization and its breakdowns will be agitated by those who want its plain demolition—whatever it takes, in the name of an impossible return to a mythicized past made of identitarian certainties, oppressive communitarianism, and regression in the political and civil rights of anybody who does not conform to the ‘general will’ of an imaginary, but no less tyrannical people (Bauman 2019). The success of populist and sovereignist positions in the 2019 European elections is a further wake-up call, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, on what can happen when the instrumental utility of an open international economy is allowed to become an idol, a totem. Progressively, and with increasing speed and intensity, a contraposition grew between the fortune of the free international market and the tutelage of the effectiveness of democracy. An ideological opposition formed between economic freedom and political sovereignty. It has been claimed that international institutions holding technical and almost initiatory knowledge were more equipped to understand what was best for the people, with no regard for the costs of their decisions for societies to which they were presented as the only option and bypassing the dimensions of consent and legitimization, forgetting that, even though governments might well be wrong, ‘international institutions aren’t likely to be better judges of the tradeoffs—and even when they’re right, their decisions will lack democratic legitimacy’ (Rodrik 2019: 33). Regardless, are the privileged citizens of the West—the place where freedom and pluralism are ultimately still better guaranteed than elsewhere in the world—who have the responsibility to reaffirm that the idea we stand for is open and inclusive, inseparable from the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and truly grounded on the right to the pursuit of happiness for everyone, in accordance with the respect of the same right for everyone. If falls therefore on our shoulders to give compelling testimony that ‘our West’ is still the West imagined actively promoted by the like of Wilson Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, defined by its Atlantic and European matrix—despite and thanks to

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the diversity this cultural, social, and political environment includes—a carefully—and laboriously—created region of the world where security and freedom reinforce one another, and the excesses of sovereignty are mitigated by international institutions and coordinated domestic laws and practices. This notion of West must prevail on the alternative that have been advanced by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini, one that conceive itself as an ‘original community’, defined by simplistic notions of identity and constantly exposed to a ruthless siege by the ‘barbarians’ coming from the ‘outside world’—as well as unpatriotic and ‘self-serving liberals’. One that the sovereignist propaganda—pandering to and fueling the fears of common people bewildered by unfamiliar social phenomena—wants to turn into a tightly knitted brotherhood sealed within unbreakable walls, where freedom can always be sacrificed in the name of security—guiltily overlooking how much this prospect resembles the West that tragically imploded into two World Wars.

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Zahariadis, Nikolaos. 2012. Complexity, Coupling and Policy Effectiveness: The European Response to the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis. Journal of Public Policy 32 (2): 99–116.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusions. The Neoliberal Global Order and COVID-19: Which Way Ahead?

In the conclusion, besides summarizing the responses that the book will provide to the question just presented, the point is made that, for the Liberal World Order to get another chance to exist and function, a fairer and more inclusive domestic democratic system will need to be (re)established, as well as a renewed transatlantic cooperation. Moreover, an outlook will be provided about the possible effects of the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency, as well as the consequences of the COVID19 pandemic, especially in terms of the opportunities that it may present Europe to finally transform into ‘a deeper and closer Union’—absolutely needed for playing a major active international role—that so far it has been incapable of doing. Thankfully, this book cannot tell the story of the end of the Liberal Word Order’s journey. The collision with the iceberg was not averted, and much damage was done. But the ship still holds water—and, more importantly, none of the other watercrafts in sight promise particularly appealing traveling conditions compared to our vessel. Nothing can be taken for granted as our journey continues—not with a ship in such poor shape, and not as we enter even less predictable waters than the troubling ones we have just reported on. Thus, we need to assess the results of our investigation, as well as the route changes and the wreck—admittedly, not

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a fatal one, but by a whisker—of the Liberal World Order before we turn to scanning the horizon to know what lies ahead of us. The Liberal World Order is rooted in the—largely unsuccessful— attempts of the interwar period to ground international politics, as much as possible, on rules and cooperation rather than on power relations among states holding on to an aggressive concept of national sovereignty. Yet, it was only in the wake of World War II that this order emerged in its first complete and effective version, thanks to the interaction between two sets of apparently divergent factors. The first dynamic involved the two main political cultures of the West in the twentieth century—liberalism and social democracy. The Liberal World Order was a unique creation in that it was able to devise a set of goals, institutions, and practices that legitimated the institutions of market economy and representative democracy in the eyes of the lower classes—not only in principle, but also in light of the fact that it provided actual inclusion. Secondly, the order was a product of the interaction between the realization—however, limited—of a ‘blueprint’ and the resultant of systemic forces operating at both a domestic and an international level. The Liberal World Order was designed by statesmen and officials who were committed to restoring international relations based on different premises than the ones that had led to the political, material, and moral destruction of the war. Their project for a rule-based order was grounded on principles—including the aforementioned compromise between liberalism and social democracy— as well as a realistic assessment of international circumstances, including the distribution of power among states. At the same time, the Liberal World Order was a product of the Cold War—namely, the competition between the liberal and socialist ideologies and the corresponding political and social models underlying the bipolar conflict—to the extent in which the competition against socialism underpinned the persuasion that the only way to make liberal democracy viable for ‘the masses’ was to incorporate welfare principles, policies, and institutions into the political and economic framework of liberalism. In hindsight, then, it is unsurprising that the end of the ideological conflict of the Cold War threw a monkey wrench in the works of this delicate arrangement. In fact, the first signs of the rise of the Neoliberal Global Order can be traced back to the late 1960s. Fueled by the political, economic, and theoretical unrest of the 1970s, the delegitimization and practical de-establishment of the welfare state increasingly characterized economic and social power relations both nationally and

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internationally. With the defeat of the socialist alternative, the Neoliberal Global Order became the supreme order, and the global market acquired the authority to demand governments and international institutions to be sheltered from the common people’s requests for a fairer distribution of the resources of the globalized economy. At the same time, the unbalance between democracy and market economy had been building up. The progressive delegitimization of sovereignty—so far, the only viable basis of democracy—and the assumed wastefulness of governments and intermediate bodies compared to the unfettered free markets made the globalized international order more and more frail. The symptoms of this in-built weakness were soon manifest. Years of neglected mutual prejudice in the relations with the Islamic world, of hypocritical support of tractable authoritarian regimes, of spiritless and self-absorbed unresponsiveness to the injustice regularly perpetrated even in allied countries had left the West exposed to desperate acts of violent retaliation. A string of terrorist attacks stripped the Liberal World Order of its famed invulnerability. The overwhelming cost in terms of casualties and resources invested in the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq did the rest, dispelling the Western illusion of invincibility. But another empty promise was to be exposed by a military campaign started by the West. In the heat of the War on Terror, the George W. Bush administration, with the connivance of the British government led by Tony Blair, not only betrayed the international community, but also the general expectation that an order resting on liberal principles would be the best warrant of a fairer world. The selfprofessed standard-bearers of the liberal order deliberately resorted to carefully crafted lies to pursue their ideological and interest-driven foreign policy goals. The intervention in Iraq was tainted not only by the forged evidence presented to justify the conflict, but also by the troops’ criminal and inhumane treatment of prisoners and by an unacceptable number of collateral civilian victims. The final blow to the legitimacy of the order and of its leading countries came from a financial crisis generated by the American and European banks’ reckless credit management policies, which quickly escalated into a full-blown economic meltdown. At that point, the core promise of a richer world for everyone—which had already been largely broken by the advent of neoliberal policies— was exposed as empty. On top of that, it also became apparent that the hyper-globalized (neo)liberal world order, now adrift, was about to crash against a metaphorical iceberg composed of several different factors.

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One of these factors was the increasingly obvious decline of American leadership under the threat that authoritarian powers such as China and Russia pose not only to the primacy of the United States, but to the very foundation of the order the United States still formally guides. But state-generated threats are not the only kind of menace troubling the order, which is faced by the far more evasive danger of terrorism—no less destructive, but much harder to comprehend and prevent. The last two sides of the iceberg, while posing a less immediate existential threat, are in a way even more disturbing, as they come from within the liberal order itself. The election of Donald Trump exacerbated America’s increasing unwillingness to carry the burden of leadership, turning the country that was supposed to be the pillar of the international order into one of its most vociferous critics. Finally, coming full circle, there is the ultimate result of the unbalance between democracy and the market. Left unchecked, the two units of this crucial dyad have increasingly degenerated into sovereigntist populism and technocratic oligarchies, abandoning the people—with all its diversity of circumstances, values, interests, and ideas, and therefore not to be confused with the hypostasized homogeneous entity that populists love referring to—to a no man’s land where it is so neglected by the powers it almost disappears completely.

Plague on the High Seas, but not All is Lost… Plagues have been spreading both ‘trough’ and ‘on’ ships ever since the beginning of navigation. The ‘Titanic’—the Liberal World Order whose perilous course this book has been tracking so far—has proved to be no exception in this regard. Since the diffusion of disease has regularly occurred along commercial routes throughout history, it now seems obvious that an international order based on the principles of openness and free trade would have been destined to suffer a scourge such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It finally came, and with a vengeance. The virus has laid waste on our economies, our political processes, even our daily habits. On a deeper level, the virus has reminded us how vulnerable we are. It faced us with an apparent contradiction, and a real paradox: humanity is the most infesting species on our planet, the most threatening for its survival, and at the same time the most vulnerable part of the world it has built around itself in the last decades. We are extremely dangerous for the ecosystem, mostly because of the artificial reality we have built in the hopes of enhancing—at least apparently—our capacities,

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often pushing this ‘demiurgic drive’ beyond the limit of reason. Emboldened by our thirst for power, we have found ourselves enormously frail in our natural dimension, because of the risks to which we are exposed by the very structure we have woven ourselves in (Parsi 2021). Perhaps, this is what we ought to remind ourselves going forward— the duplicity of the challenges that await us ‘after’ the pandemic, as much as they were there before it—so that we do not miss the opportunity to learn from this ordeal, from this present—already twisted by the complex notions and practical experiences of post-modern temporality (Jameson 2013). The risk does exist of only remembering it as a dreadful interlude between the past and the future, since as humans, we mostly live in the present and for the present, continuously re-elaborating our past history—individually and collectively—to reconcile it with the flow of time. With the same tirelessness, we try to imagine the future—and to shape it, when we feel confident about our means and ideas. If we were on a vessel, I would say most of the time, instead of looking at the horizon to estimate where we are, we are trying to determine our position just looking at the water we have sailed. But we are, in fact, on a vessel. The complex system of interdependencies we have built—particularly over the course of the last century, with an extraordinary acceleration starting from the end of the Cold War, in the 1990s—can truly be represented as a ship in which every part is designed and built in relation to every other part. When building a ship, the leading principle of its design, realization, and operation is effectiveness: a ship must be able to function—and fight if needed—even when damaged, even if enemy attacks have caused fires and leaks. Its communication systems are duplicated, or even triplicated. This ‘redundancy’, while limiting the ship’s efficiency in the short run, amplifies its resilience. Although the concept of resilience is ubiquitous in today’s public and political discourse and policymaking parlance, there is little agreement on its meaning in the literature and among practitioners. In this context, I understand it not only as the ability to cope with a world of fluidity and uncertainty—the classical notion of resilience, meaning one’s individual ability to deal with external shocks and setbacks—but also as an interactive process of relational adaptation in which the individual does not survive solely because of its own ‘inner’ resources, but also thanks to his or her ability to adapt, or dynamically relate to its ‘socio-ecological environment’ (Chandler 2014). The ship on which we—as individuals, families, societies, states, regions, and ultimately as a species—are traveling through

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the oceans of life must always be governed, as long as it stays afloat. No designer, engineer, or commander would ever think these basic principles of caution and safety can be ignored or ‘tweaked’ to chase a speed record or cut the costs of one of the ship’s components, functions, or subsystems. Nor would they ever forget that the most vital and vulnerable part of a ship is its crew. ‘A ship is its crew’. Without its crew, a ship is just an empty shell, a useless ghost vessel. And because the human component of a ship is its most vulnerable part, every other part is designed, built, and operated around this awareness: thus, the reduction of its efficiency is compensated by the increase in effectiveness: no one would consider the cost of protecting the crew—and thus enabling it to best perform its duties—a nonessential one (Parsi 2021).

The Past In the world before the pandemic—the world we came from, which keeps pushing to impose its old ‘normality’—this elementary caution principle had been increasingly neglected. The reason for this is simple, as the pandemic should have clearly shown: we are all vulnerable to the virus, but not equally so. Its impact has been heavily asymmetrical, partly due to ‘natural’ reasons, but also due to economic ones. The elderly have paid the highest price, and the same people who were unwilling to challenge the underlying logic of our system have hypocritically harped on their fate. But the disproportionate death rate that hit the ‘lost’ generation has also been caused by previous political decisions which, in turn, were often motivated by economic considerations. ‘Poor’, ‘old’, ‘Black’, ‘Hispanic’: the label has varied across countries and societies, but the concept remains the same: the outcasts—the economically marginalized—have faced a much higher probability of contagion and death compared to the rest of society. In the Bronx, death rates have been twice as high as those recorded in Manhattan (Secon et al. 2020). These people were ‘expendable’—and they have been sacrificed. Clearly, I am not alluding to some eugenic plot devised by psychopathic political leaders, or to a global conspiracy of the richest 0.1 percent. What I am saying is that the webs of global interdependency we have woven in the last thirty years were conceived without taking into account the protection of the human element—the most essential and vulnerable part of the system. Humanity—an ever more problematic category to understand ‘solely’ through the lens of classical liberalism, as the subject of

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modernity, or through scientific reductionism, as a distinct being with a unique biological code, but is emerging, especially at this time, as a nodal intersection of shifting cultural discourses (Clayton 2002)—has been asked to adapt to the rhythm, speed, and mobility of the other factors of wealth production: goods, money, and information. The value of each of these assets has been amplified by their nomadism and decreased by their permanence (Parsi 1998: 178–180). The logic underlying these changes, which keeps producing ever newer estimates of risk aimed at making risk ‘acceptable’, is the one of profit and capitalism, which is neither good nor bad in itself, but is not inherently aimed at social wellbeing, or even at the protection of the very social networks it is grounded upon. This had already been noted by Adam Smith, the prophet of market economy, and was apparent to the architects of the Liberal World Order in the postwar era as they designed a system of checks and balances between economics and politics to harness the market, tame its ‘animal spirits’, and bind the states’ sovereignty through interdependency. The two world wars and the Great Depression had almost caused the destruction of the most economically and politically ‘advanced’ societies in the world. This was still an open wound and a vivid memory for the West. The takeaway was simple and unequivocal: the ‘excesses of the market’ could prove as destructive as the ‘excesses of state sovereignty’ for societies and for the wellbeing, safety, and freedom of their members. This is why talking about the unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic is both a display of social disloyalty and intellectual dishonesty (MacPhail 2020). As argued by the theorists of the so-called ‘complexity turn’ in natural and social sciences, the physical and social realms are equally unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, and influenced by small fluctuations (Urry 2005). If this is true, any decision-making process during a highly complex crisis such as the current one would be congenitally inaccurate and shortsighted. But this does not imply policy paralysis should be an unescapable fate. Embedding complexity thinking in policymaking based on a flexible, adaptive approach is possible, as evidenced by the different degrees of success achieved by different governments in taming the pandemic, even without forced interruptions of citizens’ daily lives (Capano 2020; Lee et al. 2020). Yet, in order to do so, we must reassess the neoliberal values of competition and individual self-reliance that have dominated in the last four decades, and see if cooperation and collaboration had not better be re-ranked as the guiding principles of social and political action (Kenny 2020). We were unable

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to anticipate this storm because we were looking elsewhere, governed by the inordinate and bulimic push of the market. We were overcome by the tides and swept away by the winds because we gradually reduced the redundancy of our systems, and therefore their capacity to offer resistance. We prioritized efficiency over effectiveness. Just as in Italy, the regional public health system—costly and unprofitable, while private hospitals are much more expensive for the National Health Service, but also much more lucrative to shareholders—had been dismantled, the ideologization and mystification of the market, deprived of its counterweights, has expanded as much as possible, along with the mutations originated throughout the decades from its hybridation with politics. I am not saying the market is inherently evil. Market economy is still a better alternative than feudal economy. But the market economy is also vulnerable to the progressive formation of power positions that tend to protect themselves—when they are allowed to do so—and to turn those positions into actual power, seeking—and finding—political collusion (on the US case in particular see: Philippon 2019). The transformation of economic advantage into political privilege is as old as mankind. Humans simply tend to appropriate the gains associated with a function while also separating them, as much as possible, from the performance of that function. This is the rationale behind the hereditary transmission of titles of nobility, which were originally a benefit tied to the fulfillment of a role. The feudal system was not designed as a means to protect privileges. But that is what it turned into, and the market economy is following suit.1 Only an ideological—and indeed, almost theological—vision of the

1 In his extensive and well-documented work Piketty (2020) has evidenced the fact that we are living within an ideological milieu designed to justify the growing inequality produced by ‘propertarianism”. According to Piketty, the ‘Age of Propertarianism’—which began with the French Revolution, the creation of the modern nation-state and the industrial revolution—had three stages. The first stage, which lasted until 1914, was characterized by unprecedented levels of wealth and wage concentration, even higher than those of the previous Ternary Age—from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution—that were only equaled by the ancient ‘slavish societies’. The first stage of the Propertarian Age ended with the ‘Years of Crisis’—1914–1945—characterized by extensive capital destruction, the introduction of systems of property taxation, and high progressive fiscality to finance the war and counter the Great Depression. These measures were then incremented and made permanent, leading to the ‘Social Democratic Transformation’—1945–1980— an age of exceptional reduction of inequality. This was the result of Keynesian economic theory, public intervention in the economy, full employment policies, the cultural hegemony of progressive parties and ideologies and the perceived necessity to fight against the

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market could have led us to believe that it would be able to escape its own progressive oligarchization thanks to the ‘antibodies’ supplied by its ‘animal spirits’ (in particular on financial oligharchies: Chesney 2018). The latest variation of this legendary vision of the market economy is the one according to which the acceleration of technological innovation should continuously ‘burn away’ any positions of privilege in less cutting-edge, or more technologically mature economic sectors. As if the financialization of the economy did not allow the swiftest shifts of capital across different sectors, leaving the social, occupational, industrial, and ecological disasters on the shoulders of societies and regions for governments and international organizations—including post-national polities such as the EU—to solve (Dembinski 2009; Nölke et al. 2013; Nölke 2017). As if the hi-tech entrepreneurs were not themselves searching for niches of political protection as much as the operators of recessing sectors—one need only look at what Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and even Mark Zuckerberg, despite the Facebook ban, have accomplished in China (Jiang 2015; Liao 2018)—at the same time, though, the Chinese government has reportedly ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell, and Microsoft to boost the domestic supply chain (Yuan and Liu 2019). In the ‘pre-COVID-19’ world, the manifest convergence of the interests of political and economic elites clashed with the increasingly less believable, and all the more obsessively reiterated narrative of the inherent opposition between politics and market economy, or between economic contracts and political obligation2 —to the point of proposing different anthropological ‘types’

Soviet Union. Since 1980, we have entered a ‘New Age of Propertarianism’ in which the ideological justification of inequality has brought it back to similar levels to those of the early 1900s. 2 See Slobodian on the opposition between imperium and dominium in the works of Carl Schmitt and Schmitt’s influence on Austrian and German ordoliberalism. Schmitt postulated the existence of two distinct worlds. One was the world partitioned into bounded territorial states, where governments ruled over people. This he called the world of imperium, using the Roman legal term. The other world was the world of property, where people owned things, money, and land. This was the world of dominium. The doubled world of modern capitalism coalesced in the nineteenth century. The ubiquity of foreign investment had made it common for people to own enterprises in countries of which they were not citizens and in which they had never even set foot (Slobodian 2018: 10).

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drawing on cultural prejudices: the greedy Dutch, the lazy Italians, the snobby French, the selfish Germans… (Sierp and Karner 2017). Only as long as we believe politics to be able to set not merely higher or different, but altogether ‘separate’ values from those of economics, can politics fulfill that completing—rather than complementing—role toward the realization of society’s ultimate purpose: the distribution of the highest possible level of wellbeing, and not only at the material level. Without this awareness, the market ends up becoming a ‘totalitarian institution’, devoured by the same animal spirits who feed it.3

The Future What the future will bring depends largely on us and on the extent to which we will refuse to surrender to a cynical and unjust fate, to the inexorable mechanical and dialectic forces of history, and to the hypocritical narratives that will even attempt to hijack our nautical metaphor to say that ‘we are all on the same ship’, as if we all had suffered equally. This is simply not true. The owners of the ship called ‘hyper-globalization’ were not on board with us (Grimalda et al. 2020). Not only during the pandemic, but in these last forty years they have forced us to sail through stormy seas, at an ever more convulsive pace, with decreasing safety, all for their personal gain. After all, when a ship sinks, the shipowners only lose an asset, while the crew, the officers, and the captain sink with the ship, losing their lives.4

3 Fabio Armao is decidedly pessimistic on this matter, noting that ‘neoliberal totalitarianism—as we may call it—comes from the bottom, from the regional level, generated by the demands of market economy—by a now uncontrolled demand for money. It then evolves through the construction of transnational networks of clans who are able to reconcile regional interests with the dynamics imposed by globalization. It no longer needs complex institutional propaganda machines or sophisticated ideologies centered around the supremacy of one nation, race, or political doctrine. It can simply exploit modern social media, which allow everyone—be it a populist leader or an international drug lord – to easily reach and mobilize “portions of masses”. Hence, even the total wars among nations can be fruitfully replaced by the conservation of a condition that will be defined as “permanent global civil war”’ (Armao 2020: 14–15). 4 In many ways, this is a new form of class conflict. The paradox lies in the fact that only the members of the ‘1 percent’ seem to possess any form of ‘class consciousness’—of their own class, that is, operating with perfect Marxian awareness of their own interests. See Klein and Pettis (2020: 221): ‘Trade war is often presented as a conflict between countries. It is not: it is a conflict mainly between bankers and owners of financial assets

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The profound inequity, the unacceptable asymmetry in the costs and risks of hyper-globalization lie precisely in the fact that the decisions concerning its political and economic set-up have been made by the few in spite of the interests of the many. The few who possess the power and resources that enable them to bend the states’ laws to their will, distorting the very notion and role of the market and conquering cultural hegemony—the monopoly of narratives, as it is now called (Urbinati 2020). This is not new. It happened, at a slow and inexorable pace, in the United States, starting from the end of the Civil War, when railroads unified the country and divided the fates of the social classes, and ‘the People’ whose centrality had been set in stone by the Declaration of Independence one century earlier was ‘dissolved’.5 The result of the progressive oligarchization of American politics and economics further accentuated and accelerated the concentration of income, wealth, opportunities, and power, polarizing society. The 1929 crisis detonated the unsustainable contradictions of that system, collapsing the United States and the world into the Great Depression. The instrument devised to pull them out from the devastating black hole John Steinbeck masterfully depicted in Grapes of Wrath—the functional equivalent of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, which is set almost a century earlier—was Roosevelt’s New Deal. Another president, elected without that agenda—one of the radical reforms of the economic and social system—would not have had the strength to impose it if the depression had not been so devastating.6 Roosevelt’s ‘new social pact’, however, was not limited to remedying to the consequences of the Great Depression. It addressed the general issue of the long-standing inequality characterizing American society: it did not bring the United States back to its pre-1929 condition, it radically transformed it. Postwar America was different and much more solid than it was in 1929: it was a system that saw the pursuit of its citizens’ wellbeing as a duty, rather than an option. Granted, World War II had

on one side and ordinary households on the other—between the very rich and everyone else. Rising inequality has produced gluts of manufactured goods, job loss and rising indebtedness. It is an economic and financial perversion of what global integration was supposed to achieve”. 5 With hyper-globalization, however, the people disappeared worldwide, as Slobodian (2018) has shown. 6 On the analogy between the ‘Gilded Age’ and the actual time for the role of big monopolies in corrupting democracy insists Teachout (2020).

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happened in the meantime. But the defeated countries that returned, or were made to return, to democracy after the devastation of the war— Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France—had chosen the same path as the United States: the fight against privileges, the taxation of war profits, the creation of more equal and inclusive societies and political and economic systems.7 The war had happened. But our struggle against the pandemic and its brutal economic consequences is also a war, as we have been told over and over. Building a better world after the pandemic is all we can and must do. It is also the best memorial we can build to honor the victims, as well as those who gave their lives to keep the front line and give us a chance to regroup. The ‘New York Times’ showed awareness of this fact with a front page entirely made up of COVID-19 victims’ names last May—a clear reference to the way the White House has dealt with both the Vietnam War and the pandemic: with lies, incompetence, and cynicism. The defeat in Vietnam acted as a catalyst in a society that was only held together by the opposition to the war and internally divided on virtually every other matter and was going through unprecedented economic, political, and social crisis. That was the environment in which the neoconservative revolution and the neoliberal model gradually took hold, destroying the very ideas of ‘welfare state’—disdainfully called ‘assistance state—‘great society’ and ‘good society’ in less than twenty years under the guise of meritocracy. It was the revival of the ‘unfair game’ presented as a return to the ‘free market’.8 Will the pandemic alone be enough to change this and make the West once again believe the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity that baptized the political and economic form of its modernity? Will it be enough to restore the push toward political and social inclusion, the protection of society from the shocks of war and financial crisis, from the consequences of the excessive concentration of power and wealth that defined the peace among democracies in the postwar period? The obvious answer is ‘no’. Not unless we remember the hard lesson we have been taught by the pandemic: that we can only overcome it together. If we 7 On the ‘Great Compression” as consequences of the two World Wars and on the role of the violent shocks in producing equalizer reforms, see Scheidel (2017), particularly chapter 5. 8 On those years, as an example of the narrative of state overload and its fiscal crisis, see O’Connor (1973).

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remain divided, we will be overcome. In order to stop the spread of the virus, we had to adopt behaviors that would primarily protect others— social distancing, facemasks, self-confinement. We had to do all we could, based on the little knowledge we had. We did that, and in return, we received millions of single gestures of protection. We were reminded that selflessness is not a luxury. Protecting each other was the only way to protect ourselves, and the sum of our individual actions produced that collective action that, alone, could make a difference. Selflessness became the most effective survival strategy. For many, it was a revolution: putting other people front and center—rather than ourselves—understanding that private interests are not always incompatible with collective interests, and that collective interests are not always a zero-sum game. If we manage to transform a bidimensional, ‘flat’ reality into a ‘solid’ tridimensional figure, we will all gain something from it. In fact, it is a form of collective investment. It is our responsibility, now, to remember these teachings and let politics be the midwife of change, rather than merely settling for the restoration of an unsatisfying past. The world will not change overnight, and it certainly will not change unless we believe change is possible, and fight for it. The signs are there. The European Union’s Recovery Fund (‘Next Generation Europe’) started to materialize when—Angela Merkel—a European leader that had been tragically unable, until that moment, to conceive and express the interests of Germany within the European unification project, finally came out from her slumber, remembering the teachings of her political mentor, Helmut Kohl, who was able to reconcile the German reunification with the European unification path. If the EU will succeed at ‘making a difference’ in the fight against the economic and social consequences of the pandemic, it will be through a decisive step toward a greater, more responsible, and less reversible European unity. Thanks to the insistence of Italy, Spain, and France, Merkel understood that a massive country like Germany, with the greatest manufacturing sector and population in Europe, could not become the hostage of a handful of small opportunistic countries. She understood that the crisis would not only swamp the countries with the highest public debt, unemployment, and social laceration rates—such as, respectively, Italy, Spain, and France—but also the world’s biggest exporter after China—that is, Germany. Let us return to our nautical metaphor for a moment. What we need from politics, is for it to continue doing what it has already partially done

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with the Recovery Fund: set a rendezvous point, as is done in aeronaval landing operations. The success of the operation will depend on our coordination and on the fact that we all get there at the same time. The ‘Recovery Fund Operation’ will only succeed if everyone involved understands that they will not be giving anything for free or yielding to anyone else’s positions and interests—rather, they will be converging on a new shared interest, a point that will only exist if we are able to imagine a solid, tridimensional reality rather than a flat, bidimensional one. This is a historical opportunity for Europe and its inhabitants. If they miss it, the necessary consequence will be the enslavement of every single European country—and all of us—to third-party interests. Without Europe’s ability to transform the Union and renew its foundations, the old continent will be doomed to irrelevance, and perhaps to political and institutional disappearance. The deciding challenge for our immediate future—and not for a distant and vague future—does not only concern the Chinese-American leadership of the international system. It primarily involves the ‘principles’ on which we will rebuild the world’s interdependence—or at least the part of it that we can control, since interdependence is partially systemic, expressing itself in pandemics, environmental damage, and migration flows. These challenges, too, we must face together if we are to stand the slightest chance to win. The challenge lies in reforming Western capitalism, which is apparently founded on merit, but is in fact increasingly based on birth privileges, and make it evolving in a different direction from the Chinese concession capitalism, toward a new ‘people capitalism’, as Branko Milanovic defined it, ‘in which income from both factors of production, capital and labor, would be more equally distributed’. That is, a capitalism ‘similar to social democratic capitalism in its concern with inequality’, but aspiring ‘to a different kind of equality; instead of focusing on redistributing income, this model would seek greater equality in assets, both financial and in terms of skills’ (Milanovic 2020: 21).9 Because the pandemic, even more so than the financial crises that have unfolded since 2007, has only intensified the inherent discomfort in the tension between democracy and market economy, it is no coincidence that many observers have signaled the necessity of seizing this formidable 9 Milanovic adds: ‘Unlike social democratic capitalism, it would require only modest redistributive policies (such as food stamps and housing benefits) because it would have already achieved a greater baseline of equality’ (Milanovic 2020: 21).

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opportunity to restore equity, and not only equality. As Mariana Mazzucato writes, ‘if governments instead focus only on ending the immediate pain, without rewriting the rules of the game, then the economic growth that follows the crises will be neither inclusive nor sustainable’ (Mazzucato 2020: 51).10 This is a massive problem for democracy, after the last forty years of the hegemony of conservative and neoliberal thinking that has programmatically attempted to destroy the dialectic between ‘the party for substantial equality and the party for political equality’ that had characterized the history of modern democracy, establishing a balance grounded on accepting political conflict in order to prevent social conflict to erupt into civil conflict. As Nadia Urbinati brilliantly points out in one of her recent works, the disruption of that dynamic is what produced the new, devastating contraposition of the ‘few’ and the ‘many’. This contraposition is exploding now because society no longer enjoys widespread wealth and is increasingly marked by inequality at various levels (Urbinati 2020).11 We need solid liberal democracies to adapt the Liberal World Order to the challenges of the twenty-first century. As John Ikenberry writes, ‘It will have to return to its roots – as a project to create a container within which liberal democracies can safely exist. The liberal international project needs to be reimagined. […] Liberal internationalism has been most successful when it has supported liberal democracy at home. It has to find new ways to do this again’ (Ikenberry 2020: 11). Thus, the three lines of reasoning of this book are coming together: (1) the necessity to revitalize democratic regimes by regaining control of market dynamics in order to rebuild an up-to-date Liberal World Order; (2) the fact that this project must be based on a privileged relationship among transatlantic democracies; (3) and the importance of values, as well as interests, to allow those whose only strength lies in their number to redefine the rules of the game. The election of Joe Biden as 46th President of the United States offers a chance to this perspective. In his speech as president-elect on his Economic Recovery Plan of November 16, Biden 10 Mazzucato adds: ‘Nor will it serve business interested in long-term growth opportunities. The intervention will have been a waste, and the missed opportunity will merely fuel a new crisis’ (Mazzucato 2020: 51). 11 This is why, right now, it is crucial to ‘take care of the social conditions of freedom and politicst—that is, to overcome the opposition between formal and substantial democracy’ lest democracy ‘is reduced to an empty word, a façade, or a scam’. Urbinati (2020) rightly recalls the works of Theda Skocpol (Skocpol 2004), particularly on the effects of the growth of economic inequality on democracy.

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has addressed the necessity to prioritize job protection and remuneration over wealth and birth privileges.12 The challenges awaiting him are so huge that only a daring and resolute leadership style can reunite the torn American nation. These challenges are the detoxification of society from the explosive mixture of over-excitement and lies that have characterized the last political season; the responsible management of the pandemic; the rebalancing of the 1 percent economy; and the relaunch of American leadership worldwide. This is what Biden laid out when he was still a democratic candidate, and what he deemed fundamental to reinvigorate American leadership: ‘The next US President will have to address the world as it is in January 2021, and picking up the pieces will be an enormous task. He or she will have to salvage our reputation, rebuild confidence in our leadership, and mobilize our country and our allies to rapidly meet new challenges. There will be no time to lose. As president, I will take immediate steps to renew US democracy and alliances, protect the United States’ economic future, and once more have America lead the world’ (Biden 2020: 65). The suit for a new Liberal World Order can only be tailored by liberal makers, and from liberal fabric. The most devastating effect of four years of Trump’s presidency has been the legitimization and amplification of a climate of permanent clash and truth mockery (Palazzo 2020; Romeo and Palazzo 2018). This is the worst toxin that could be injected in the body of a democracy. It is enough to rip the flesh of society from the skeleton of its institutions, like a form of political botulism.13 Trump has massively and consistently resorted to this strategy, with the amateurism and incompetence of his action being amplified by the magnitude of the problems he proved unable to face. For several weeks after the elections, the

12 https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-speech-on-economic-recovery-

plan-transcript-november-16. 13 This also explains Trump’s repeated choice of a communication obsessively addressing the ‘bubble’ of his supporters, which has contributed to the erosion of tolerance and to the polarization of American public opinion. ‘A rather serious inconvenience – one which many critics have pointed out in the last few years—is the reduction of the window from which we observe the world, and the resulting modification of the very premises of pluralism and public discussion, as well as of individual freedom itself’. Thus, the risk is that a ‘world of “bubbles” with no shared experience whatsoever will lose its ability to adequately feed democratic institutions, and that segmentation in ever smaller niches will be the starting point of a polarization that will eventually erode the rules of tolerance’ (Palano 2020: 20–21).

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former—and defeated—president stubbornly contested the legitimacy of the—victorious—president-elect’s mandate. It was the glaring last act of a man who had systematically put his personal interests before those of the institutions, of the community, and of the Constitution, he had solemnly sworn to protect. Joe Biden will have to prove that he can purify the poisoned wells of democracy. He will need to re-establish the prestige of truth and the authority of facts against the fog of slander, insinuation, and discord fostered by his predecessor. Richard Haass rightfully noted that ‘Most of the problems that Trump inherited have gotten worse; to the extent that he has simply ignored many of them, neglect has not been benign. And the standing of the United States in the world has fallen, thanks to the inept handling of COVID-19, its denial of climate change and rejection of refugees and immigrants, and the continued scourges of mass shooting and endemic racism. The country is seen not just as less attractive and capable but also as less reliable, as it withdraws from multilateral agreements and distances itself from allies’ (Haas 2020: 32– 33). The damage may well be permanent, since alliances ‘are predicated on reliability, and no ally is likely to view the United States as it did before. Seeds of doubt have been sown: if it could happen once, it could happen again’ (Haas 2020: 33). However, I believe—as does John Ikenberry who offered many arguments to support this hope in his formidable last book—a new and different leadership can not only remake the old Liberal World Order, but reengage the world in a new rule-based order (Lissner and Rapp-Hooper 2020). Trump’s culpable negligence in managing COVID-19 has almost certainly cost him the election.14 Taking this threat more seriously will be enough to make a difference, although it will not be enough to defeat the pandemic. The asymmetrical impact of the virus, which has affected black people more than white people, and the poor more than the rich, has exacerbated the rising inequality of American society, which has been repeating the mistakes that led to the Great Depression for at least forty years. Decades of ‘conservative revolution’ have culturally polarized America, across coasts and central planes, metropolitan and rural areas, along a fracture fed by the creationist superstitions and diffidence toward science typical of the ultra-religious Right. This is the ‘politicization of nostalgic pessimism’ Colin Crouch has written about in his latest essay. 14 On the impact of COVID-19 on Trump and, more generally, on the Populist Radical Right, see Bar-On and Molas (2020).

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This dynamic will not disappear with Trump, and will be reinforced by the hardships of our time: the deficits of the democratic institutions revealed by the rise of populism are still there.15 Biden will have to prove that the tragic magnitude of a challenge can exalt the qualities of those who are called to face it, as did Roosevelt and Johnson, who were able to harness the gravity of their times to change America, not merely contemplating the reasons for past discord, but offering a vision for the future—with the New Deal and the Great Society. They both took on a divided and struggling country and led it out of the storm. They did it because it was the only thing they could do—for sure, but also because they were able and willing to do it. They were practical men, who understood that practicality called for strong, ‘radical’ choices, because a strong swerve is the only way to come out of a dead angle and return to the wind. We should never forget that ‘policies aimed at addressing economic inequality can be polarizing or depolarizing, depending on how they are organized’ (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018: 228). Biden has announced an even more extensive program of public interventions and new economic regulation than the one devised by the Obama administration.16 This is the only viable route for the United States to return to being the leading nation among democracies. The anguish that fostered populism and sovereignism is still present, and it must be faced without the illusion that returning to the past can be a solution. A less savage globalization, a more inclusive and equal market, a more environment-conscious development, a society that does not mortify the aspirations of its female half—these goals are all more feasible ‘with’ than ‘without’ America, or even ‘despite’ America. This is

15 According to Crouch (2020a, 2020b) is essential that the calls to mobilization against

populism are not limited to post-democratic self-complacency, the protection of corruption, the plutocratic hijacking of the government or the survival of a party system that is no longer an adequate representation of the main divisions within society. A similar concept of ‘escape into the past’ can be found in Bauman (2019), and Campanella and Dassù (2019), the latter in specific reference to Brexit. 16 ‘The Biden administration should propose spending more than $1 trillion on tradi-

tional projects such as roads and bridges and on a green strategy to increase energy efficiency; expand clean energy, including both nuclear energy and renewables; and harden the economy against natural disasters. Such spending was warranted even before the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic has made it even more important” (Furman 2021: 33).

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why Biden’s victory has been met so positively by all European leaders. It cannot, on its own, put multilateralism and liberal internationalism back on track, nor will it magically fix the climate problem. It will also not change the reality of the growing importance of China in relation to the world economy, and the explosive tension in the Middle East. But it will buy us time, giving us reassurance on the method and responsibilities with which Washington will proceed in the next years. In short, it will increase our collective chances of success. The relaunch of democracy at home is also vital to the member countries of the EU. To fulfill its role of transatlantic pillar and promote a new inclusive balance between democracy and market economy, the European Union will need to overcome its internal sovereignisms—which will not magically disappear as a result of Donald Trump’s defeat—as well as the technocratic, globalist worldview that characterized it since the adoption of the Euro and, more radically, with the crisis of sovereign debt (Saraceno 2019).17 Two ‘Europes’, two sides of the Atlantic, and still one China; this could be the formula encapsulating the open questions the pandemic rises and intertwines. On the same day in which the French President Emmanuel Macron released an important interview that revamped his idea of Europe—a strong, elevated, ambitious vision—the reactionary governments of Poland and Hungary opposed the EU budget approval, claiming their right to the benefits of European membership despite their incomplete adhesion to the rule of law.18 This reminds us of how hard is the battle awaiting us. The promptness with which the funds of ‘Next Generation Europe’ will be available to the member states depends on the approval of that budget. Ironically, if Hungary and Poland were to request admission to the Union today, they would not be accepted, as they do not fulfill the acquis communautaire. This paradox must be solved, first and foremost, politically, but will also need to be addressed at the institutional level. The bluff of Warsaw and Budapest must be seen through. Otherwise, the European Union that Macron spoke of is extremely unlikely to

17 For a critical perspective on the disaggregating effects of the introduction of the Euro, see Di Quirico (2020). For an even more pessimistic—and equally well-documented—take, see Mody (2018) 18 https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/news/article/presidentmacron-interviewed-by-le-grand-continent-12-nov-2020. Accessed 13 December 2020.

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ever see the light. It is no longer possible to go forward with two ideas of Europe so different and incompatible with each other. In that interview, Macron spoke to Europeans, encouraging them to be braver and more responsible in matters of collective security. But he also addressed America and its president-elect. He talked about the shared values of the democratic and liberal West and the necessary reform of capitalism and global economy. It is a certificate of the intelligence of a man who comes from one of the financial temples of that global economy, and yet understands that the new and difficult times we live in call for new and courageous ideas and policies. Reforming global capitalism is especially crucial for the citizens of Europe and the United States, the ones who have been impacted the most by the unforeseen or underestimated consequences of the rules that have increasingly complicated the coexistence of democracy and capitalism. The renunciation of an effective control over hyper-globalization and technological revolution has resulted in the progressive and ever more rapid impoverishment of the middle and lower classes in the Western world, a process that risks being further exacerbated by the pandemic. Only democracies have this problem, the insoluble Rodrik’s trilemma—globalization, democracy, sovereignty (Rodrik 2011)—and only democracies—on both sides of the Atlantic— can initiate the common effort toward that massive reform operation that can no longer be postponed. This does not mean returning to Donald Trump’s aggressive and inconclusive protectionism, or to Orban and Kaczynski’s authoritarian sovereignism. It means trusting governments with the vigilance and leadership of the global economy. And governments will either succeed through cooperation, through international institutions and according to democratic principles, or fail through conflict, sabotaging the institutions and trying to lay their own burdens on each other’s shoulders. The alternative is a Chinese-style relaunch of technologic globalism: through alluring invites to a new era of shared prosperity in which everyone—shielded by the principle of mutual noninterference and their ‘national traditions’—can continue to expel any political figures that are unwelcome to the Parliaments—as in Hong Kong—and trade with the others, exploiting national and foreign labor—for instance, African—as

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they see fit.19 So long as no one raises the uncomfortable question— so long as no one rocks the boat. Is it a paradox that China today is the champion of global free market? Not really. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, launched in the same days as Biden and Macron’s speeches, simply reminds us who is reaping the rewards of the bad decisions, the West has made in the last decade, when it was deluded enough to think it was politically and militarily stronger than China and that its unshakeable technological supremacy would ensure its upper hand in their transactions. China is obviously pleased with ‘our’ globalization, as long as it can lead it (Orlik 2020). But what about us? We do not only have a role dilemma—leaders or followers?—but one much more crucial for our future—the reconciliation of democracy and market economy in the twenty-first century—which can only be attained through a renewed transatlantic partnership.20 As I wrote in the first pages of this book, it is time to remind us, in order to recast it, that the Liberal World Order project aimed at keeping together, as harmoniously as possible, state sovereignty—in its liberal-democratic version—with market economy—entailing, on free trade at the international level. The challenge that Liberalism accepted was merging together, in all their specificity and complexity, these three concepts—international order, sovereignty, and market economy—that have characterized the zenith of political modernity, by making them not only compatible but even synergic. As Jack Snyder synthetically and effectively put, the contradiction between free markets and national autonomy, historically, has been faced and resolved ‘only through an order of democratic welfare states supported by international institutions, which grant them the policy flexibility to adjust to market fluctuations without inflicting undue pain 19 As Timothy Garton Ash puts it: ‘China’s unprecedented Leninist-capitalist version of developmental authoritarianism is now a systemic rival to liberal democracy, just as fascist and communist regimes were for much of the twentieth century. It offers developing societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America an alternative path to modernity. The single most important thing the liberal world did to prevail in the Cold War was to make our own societies prosperous, dynamic and attractive. We must try to do the same again, hold true to the cause of persuading others that liberal societies offer a better way to live, and, importantly, keep faith with those in unfree societies who share our values. But realistically we must also recognise that we are in for a long haul of competitive coexistence with authoritarian regimes’ (Garton Ash 2020). 20 As Stephen Kocs (2019) argues in his book, liberal order combines multilateral institutions and the promotion of human rights with forceful diplomacy and military interventionism. It is not just a matter of free trade and international business.

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to their citizens’ and even today, to be newly resolved, ‘will require abandoning laissez-faire economics and unaccountable supranationalism and returning to the principles of embedded liberalism, updated for the present day’, in a call for a revival ‘of the basic practices of postwar liberalism: national-level democratic accountability, economic coordination through international institution, and compromise on competing priorities’ (Snyder 2019: 59). The contribution intellectuals and social scientists can offer to this project is both simple and decisive (Saraceno 2020). We need to provide new perspectives, new ideas for causal links, new concepts, new theoretical foundations to enable us to frame the challenges we are faced with as solvable (de Sousa Santos 1995). This is what I have attempted to do with this book. My personal belief is that the gravity of the pandemic is facing us with a discontinuity of epochal proportions. If we can take advantage of it, transformations that would have been unthinkable until very recently will become possible for us. If we continue with the attitude, mentality, and behaviors that we considered ‘normal’ before the pandemic, we will be overcome by it. In regard to international politics, political theory, and the relation between politics and economics, I am convinced that it is time to rethink categories and dynamics that call for more critical reflection, such as the irreducible opposition between the areas of exchange contract and political obligation, democracy and market, sovereignty and interdependence.21 It will be a gigantic task, one that none of us can perform on our own and will require unprecedented intellectual freedom and strong nonconformism, as well as a much-needed reinterpretation of many ‘classics’. But it will also be the main beacon of hope in the unfolding of a Renaissance not limited to the mere exit from the pandemic.

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Index of Names

A Adel Fakieh, 182 Ahmadinejad, Mahmud, 103 al-Assad, Bashar, 58, 59, 98, 100, 179 al-Baghdadi, 58, 67 al-Banna, Sheikh Hassan, 145 Albright, Madeleine Korbel, 96 Ali Khamenei, 102 al Sisi, Abd al-Fatt¯ah., 54 Al-Waleed bin Talal, 182 al-Zarqawi, Abu Mus‘ab, 67, 134 Amir, Yigal, 176 Andreatta, Filippo, 135 Andreotti, Giulio, 57 Aoun, Michel, 102, 183 Arafat, Yasser, 176 Arminius, 97 Armstrong, Neil A., 175 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 145 Augustus, 97 B Babiš, Andrej, 228

Bannon, Steve, 173 Ben Ali, 58 Berlusconi, Silvio, 173 Biden, Joseph R. Jr, 21, 241, 255–259, 261 Bin Laden, Os¯ama, 61, 134 Bismarck, Otto von, 73, 222 Blair, Tony, 61, 66, 67, 243 Brazile, Donna L., 165 Bull, Hedley, 5 Bush, George H.W., 56, 66, 133, 176 Bush, George W., 19, 55, 61–63, 65, 94, 95, 114, 134, 160, 170, 171, 202, 243

C Calculli, Marina, 18, 60, 67, 99, 105, 147 Carter, Jimmy, 65 Chiang Kai-Shek, 32 Churchill, Sir Winston, 10, 31 Clark, Ian, 5, 7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8

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314

INDEX OF NAMES

Clinton, Bill, 67, 69, 133 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 165, 168 Cook, Tim, 249 Crouch, Colin, 3, 72, 200, 228, 257, 258

D Dahl, Robert A., 200 Delnevo, Giuliano, 148 Deng Xiaoping, 56, 89 di Palma, Giuseppe, 73, 225

E Eizenkot, Gadi, 184 el Abboubi, Anas, 148 Erdo˘gan, Recep Tayyip, 100, 103–106, 178, 187, 222

F Fabbrini, Sergio, 220, 221 Ferrera, Maurizio, 224–226, 228 Flynn, Michael T., 174, 179, 187 Francis, Pope (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), 99 Frederick II of Prussia, 98 Friedman, Milton, 42

G Gaddafi, Muammar, 18, 131 Gaddis, John L., 31, 134 Galbraith, John K., 70, 232 Galtieri, Leopoldo, 43 Game, Mohamed, 148 Gates, Bill, 249 Gentiloni, Paolo, 139, 144 Giddens, Anthony, 67 Glotz, Peter, 45 Gorbachev, Michail, 56, 111 Gramsci, Antonio, 200

Grygiel, Jakub J., 170, 172 H Haass, Richard N., 178, 257 Haftar, Khalifa, 137 Hariri, Saad, 103, 183, 184 Hayek, Friedrich August von, 14 Hirschman, Albert Otto, 15 Hugo, Victor-Marie, 251 Hume, David, 207 Huntington, Samuel Phillips, 64 Hussein, Mahmood, 180 I Ibrahim al-Assaf, 182 Ikenberry, G. John, 2, 6–8, 10, 14, 15, 33, 85, 94, 115, 119, 255, 257 J Johnson, Boris, 7 Judt, Tony R., 32, 40, 72, 109 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 219 K Kaczynski, Jarosław, 260 Karamaleski, Munifer, 148 Kelly, John F., 174 Khalid bin Mohammad al Attiyah, 180 Kim Jong-un, 101, 111–113 Kissinger, Henry, 110, 119 Klebanov, Ilya, 88 Kotler, Philip, 166 Kurz, Sebastian, 228 L Le Pen, Marine, 141, 227, 235 Levitisky, Steven, 201, 203 Lincoln, Abraham, 38, 203

INDEX OF NAMES

M Macron, Emmanuel, 138, 183, 259–261 Mahan, Alfred T., 89 Major, Sir John (Roy), 56 Mao Zedong, 113 Maria Theresa of Austria, 98 Marx, Karl, 39, 44, 163, 200, 233 Mattis, James Norman, 174, 180 Mazzucato, Mariana, 9, 41, 255, 262 McMaster, Herbert R., 174 Merkel, Angela Dorothea, 222, 253 Mesinovic, Ismar, 148 Mickey, Robert, 201, 203 Milanovic, Branko, 9, 55, 73, 74, 168, 200, 254 Miloševi´c, Slobodan, 98 Minniti, Marco, 138 Mitchell, Aaron Wess, 169, 170, 172 Mitterrand, François, 57 Mohammad bin Salman, 182 Mook, Robby E., 165 Morlino, Leonardo, 199, 223, 224 Morsi, Muh.ammad, 59 Moutaharrik, Abderrahim, 148 Mubarak, Hosni, 58 Muhammad bin Nayef, 182 Mutaib bin Abdullah, 182 N Nasrallah, Hassan, 183 Nasser, Gamal, 145 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 100, 176, 177, 184 Nixon, Richard M., 119 O Obama, Barack, 63, 94, 95, 99, 100, 160, 165, 170, 171, 174, 179, 202, 203, 258 Orbán, Viktor, 227

315

P Palmerston, Henry John, 133 Panebianco, Angelo, 64, 207 Petraeus, David H., 62 Piketty, Thomas, 12, 72–74, 161, 164, 233 Pinochet, Augusto, 109 Polanyi, Karl P., 31, 41 Pol Pot, 92 Prodi, Romano, 67 Putin, Vladimir, 18, 84, 87, 88, 97, 98, 100, 104, 136, 172, 178, 179, 182, 187, 235

Q Qutb, Sayyid Ibrahim, 145

R Rabin, Yitzhak, 176 Rajan, Raghuram G., 15, 68, 69 Reagan, Ronald, 41–43, 55, 69 Regeni, Giulio, 59 Reich, Robert B., 13, 68, 70 Renzi, Matteo, 59 Rodrik, Dani, 14, 167, 168, 232–234, 260 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 10, 30, 31, 37, 38, 118, 234 Rouhani, Hassan, 103 Roy, Olivier, 149 Ruggie, John G., 17, 30, 39, 167, 232

S Saddam Hussein, 55, 61, 65, 66, 98, 133 Salazar, António, 33 Salazar, Philippe-Joseph, 58 Salvini, Matteo, 141–143, 199, 205, 228, 235

316

INDEX OF NAMES

Sanders, Bernie, 165, 166 Schröder, Gerhard, 67 Schweller, Randall L., 171 Sergio, Maria Giulia, 148 Shaaban, Anwar, 148 Shariati, Ali Mazinani, 146 Smith, Adam, 39, 40, 208, 247 Snidal, Duncan, 170 Spykman, Nicholas J., 169, 170 Steinbeck, John E., 251 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 133, 165 Strange, Susan, 36, 229 T Thatcher, Margaret, 41–43, 67 Tillerson, Rex W., 179 Tilly, Charles, 207, 208 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14 Trump, Donald J., 6, 7, 19, 94, 101–103, 112, 113, 136, 159, 160, 164–168, 170, 171, 173, 175–180, 184–186, 197, 201–205, 218, 234, 235, 244, 256–260 Tylik, Nadezhda, 88

U Urbinati, Nadia, 20, 38, 41, 72, 199, 200, 206, 207, 251, 255

V Vardi, Moshe Y., 163 Volcker, Paul A., 69

W Walt, Stephen M., 62, 100, 186 Way, Lucan Ahmad, 201 Wilhelm II, 186 Wilson, Woodrow T., 10, 37, 118 Wright Mills, Charles, 200

X Xi Jinping, 92, 107, 108, 186

Z Zuckerberg, Mark, 249

Index of Concepts

A Abandonment ailemma, 172 Afghanistan, 63, 94, 102, 131, 133, 135, 146, 169, 180, 184, 185, 243 Afghani War (2001-), 53, 54, 62 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 60, 96 ISAF mission, 53 Africa, 33, 109, 261 Maghreb, 150, 151 Sub-Saharan Africa, 67, 231 Al Jazeera, 180 Angola, 65 Animal Spirits, 247, 249, 250 Arab Springs, 17, 53, 58–60, 106, 136 Argentina Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas, 43 ASEAN, 166 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 110 Austria, 104, 138, 149

Authoritarian powers, 4, 9, 18, 83, 244

B Bahrain, 62, 180, 184 Balancing by overseas, 62 Bangladesh, 91 Belgium, 149, 151 Benevolent Leadership, 170 Beslan, 100 Big-power bargaining, 171 Bosnia, 133 Bosnian civil war, 148 Bosnian (war), 57 BP, 65 Brazil, 109 Bretton Woods (Agreements), 13, 33, 36, 232 BRICS (Countries), 109 Burma, 91

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. E. Parsi, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72043-8

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318

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

C Cambodia, 92 Canada, 87, 96, 169, 181 Carthage (Historical), 97 CENTCOM, 62, 180 China Belt And Road Initiative (BRI), 6, 18, 84, 117, 119 China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), 65 Chinese-American relations, 116 Chinese Navy, 89, 91–93, 119 communist revolution (China), 107 First Opium War (1839–1842), 107 Hong Kong, 7, 85, 260 Johnson South Reef (Battle), 90 Liaoning (Chinese aircraft carrier), 88, 93 new order, 116 Obock (first permanent Chinese naval base in a foreign country), 92 One China Policy, 185 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 89, 91, 93, 107 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (2020), 261 Senkaku Islands, 90 Shandong (Chinese aircraft carrier), 88 Shanghai Initiative, 110 South China Sea, 89–92, 117 Spratly Islands, 90 The Paracel Islands, 90 Tibet, 92 Uyghurs, 18, 131 Citicorp, 69 Classical democratic theory, 201 Constantinople (capital of Eastern Roman Empire), 97 COVID-19, 4, 7, 21, 241, 244, 247, 252, 257, 258

Cuba, 101, 102 Cyprus, 219

D Decline Of The West, 2 Dell, 249 Democracy and capitalism (debates on) Ancien Régime, 71, 207 complexity turn, 247 compound democracy, 220 concession capitalism, 85, 116, 254 democratic deficit, 221 economic inequality, 72, 255, 258 economic integration, 167, 221, 226, 228 exportation of democracy, 176 globalization, 5–7, 13, 36, 44, 55, 74, 116, 141, 161, 165–168, 173, 217, 225, 227, 231–234, 250, 251, 258, 260, 261 global trade, 232 Gramscian hegemony, 13 homo economicus , 228 invisible hand, 11, 40 Marxism, 146 people capitalism, 254 Rodrik’s trilemma, 14, 260 Scandinavian countries (model), 149 social pact, 3, 45 Democracy and capitalism (debates on) Rodrik’s trilemma, 12 Demos , 199 Denazification, 64, 65 Dirty bombs, 61 Dividends of peace, 17, 53, 55, 68 Djibouti, 92

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

E East Asia, 90, 91, 93, 109, 112, 114 Eastern Europe, 150, 225 Eastern Roman Empire, 97 East Timor Crisis (1999-2002), 57 Economically marginalized, 246 Egypt, 18, 54, 58, 59, 104, 131, 137, 145, 172, 180 Muslim Brotherhood, 54, 145, 172, 180 Embedded liberalism, 13, 17, 30, 39, 262 England, 20, 65, 198 ENI, 65 Enron, 69 European Commission Barroso Commission (2004-2014), 219 European Council, 4, 144, 218–221 European Union acquis communautaire, 259 Dublin Regulation, 137–139 EU Law, 224 Eurobonds, 219 Eurocommunist Experiment (1977–1989), 35 European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), 35 European Central Bank (ECB), 43 European Coal And Steel Community (ECSC), 35 European community (EC), 226, 230 European Economic Community (EEC), 35 European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), 219 European Parliamentary Elections (May 2019), 143 European Stability Mechanism (ESM), 219, 221 Euroscepticism, 222, 224

319

Eurozone, 20, 215, 221, 222, 224 Maastricht Treaty, 224 Mare Nostrum, 136 Next Generation Europe, 253, 259 Recovery Fund, 253, 254 Schengen Area, 224 Single Market, 221, 224 social Europe, 228 Treaty Of Lisbon, 225 Expendable, 246 External underpinning, 218

F Facebook, 249 Finance and financial crises 1929 Economic Crisis, 11 1 percent economy, 19, 256 four freedoms (Franklin Roosevelt speech), 38 Glass-Steagall Act (1933, abolished in 1999), 69 Global Financial And Economic Crisis (2007/2008), 20, 68, 215, 254 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999), 69 Great Depression, 37, 38, 247, 248, 251, 257 Lehman Brothers’ crack (2008), 69 New Deal, 37, 38, 42, 251, 258 plutocratization (of democracy), 39, 168 Financialization, 19, 159, 249 Finland, 86 Former Yugoslavia, 35, 56, 98, 133 Dayton Agreement (1995), 133 France, 31, 33, 57, 65, 66, 94, 133, 138, 149–151, 252, 253 National Front Party, 141 Total (French multinational oil and gas company), 65 Friendly tyrants, 178

320

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

G G-19, 163 G-20, 175, 186 General Agreement On Tariffs And Trade (GATT), 31, 33, 232 Georgia Abkhazia, 97 South Ossetia, 97 Germany Austrian-German school, 14 Berlin Wall, Fall Of The, 40, 41 German Constitutional Court, 221 ordo-liberalism, 14, 30 Prussia (Historical) and Silesia, 98 Republic of, 11 social market economy (Rhine Capitalism), 35 Weimar, 11 West Germany, 36 Greece Greek crisis (2009-2018), 221, 224 Troika, 223 Guerrilla warfare, 53 H Hard power, 114 HP, 249 Hungary, 138, 172, 219, 259 Hyperglobalization, 232 I Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), 60 India, 94, 109, 113, 172 Interdependence/interdependencies, 5, 11, 15, 36, 85, 136, 231, 245, 254, 262 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 66, 101, 112, 176 International Labor Organization (ILO), 68

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 31, 33, 68, 110, 232 Iran (Islamic Republic of) Green Wave (Iran), 103 Iranian Nuclear Program (JCPOA), 18, 84, 95, 101 Pasdaran, The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), 64 Iraq, 53, 57, 61–65, 67, 94, 98, 102, 103, 105, 131, 133, 135, 169, 186, 243 Ba’athists (ideology), 64 Iraq Invasion, 2003 (War), 54, 61, 97, 134 Israel Freedom Flotilla (incident) Mavi Marmara (Incident), 106 Israeli Special Forces, 106 Likud (political party), 176 Yedioth Ahronoth (Israeli newspaper), 177 Italy Anni Di Piombo, 150 Camorra (criminal organization), 143 Lega (political party), 141–143, 150, 205 Mafia (criminal organization), 143 Movimento 5 Stelle (political party), 141, 205 National Fascist Party (1922-1943), 142 Ndrangheta (criminal organization), 143 J Japan, 17, 33, 64, 89, 90, 92, 94, 111, 114, 115, 172–174, 252 Jihadist terrorism Caliphate, 58, 105, 134, 145, 148, 152, 180 Islamic State, 53, 60, 147, 186

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Jihadist Foreign Fighters, 105, 132, 148, 149, 152 Jordan, 67 K Kazakhstan, 135 Keynesian/Keynesianism, 12, 42, 248 Kosovo, 57 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), 105 Kurds, 64, 105 Kurdish Peshmerga, 105. See also Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Kuwait, 55, 56, 62, 133 L Latin America, 109, 150, 261 MERCOSUR, 166 Mexico, 166, 168 Lebanon, 102, 103, 147, 183, 184 Hezbollah, 18, 99, 102, 131, 147, 180, 183, 184 Left-wing, 20, 109, 197 LGBT community, 202 Liberal Hegemony (IR theory), 6 Liberalism, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 30, 33, 37, 44, 70–73, 201, 242, 246, 261, 262 Liberal World Order liberal democracies, 2, 3, 8, 12, 117, 232, 255 liberal lnternationalism (IR theory), 6–8, 14, 97, 255, 259 Marshall Plan, 34. See also Bretton Woods (Agreements); Embedded liberalism; General Agreement On Tariffs And Trade (GATT); International Monetary Fund (IMF); Keynesian/Keynesianism; Liberalism; Liberal World

321

Order’s institutions; Marketbased economy; Neoliberal Global Order (NGO); North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Welfarist state; World Bank (WB); World Trade Organization (WTO) Liberal World Order’s institutions, 35 Libya, 18, 94, 131, 136, 139, 140 Cyrenaica (region), 137 M Malaysia, 65, 90, 92, 114 Maldives, 91 Market-based economy, 3 Market dictatorship, 17, 54 Microsoft, 249 Middle East Greater Middle East, 136, 231 Gulf War (1990–1991), 35, 62 Mesopotamia, 97 monarchies of the Gulf, 19, 59, 109 oil shock (1973), 13 Military bases, 62, 92 Military places (doctrine), 92 N NAFTA, 166 Neo-isolationism, 179 Neoliberal Global Order (NGO), 4, 9, 12, 13, 16, 139, 143, 216, 229, 242, 243. See also Hyperglobalization; Liberal World Order; Market dictatorship; New Labor; Social Darwinism; Social inequality; Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); Trilateral Commission; Working poors; WorldCom (scandal) Netherlands, 65, 104 New Labor, 67

322

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

New Reformist Left, 67 New world order, 31, 32, 55, 67, 134 Nigeria, 135, 163 Nobel Prize, 42, 175, 176 Non-Proliferation Treaty, 113, 174 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 18, 31, 34, 44, 57, 84, 86, 87, 98, 100, 103, 105, 106, 136, 137, 168, 169, 172, 184 North Korea, 35, 84, 92, 93, 102, 111–115, 174–176, 178, 185 Norway, 65, 88

O Oligarchization, 249, 251 Oman, 91

P Pakistan, 91, 113 Palestine, 63 Palestinian question, 62 Petronas (Malaysian multinational oil and gas company), 65 Philippines, 90, 92, 172 Poland, 66, 138, 219, 259 Portugal, 33, 219 Post-democracy, 200 Protectionism, 1, 19, 32, 167, 217, 260

Q Qatar, 62, 103, 172, 180, 181

R Radical Islamism fundamentalism, 59, 70, 146 Islamist movements, 59, 145 Islamist radicalization, 132, 144 Sahwa, 183

Salafism, 146 Realism (IR & Political Science) doctrine. See Classical democratic theory; Military bases; Military places (doctrine) realist model qf democracy, 200 Regime change, 62, 174 Regional stability, 17, 54, 169 Renaissance, 262 Rentierization (of the capitalistic system), 164 Rome/Romans/Roman Empire, 97, 117–119, 141 Russia Chechnyan separatism, 100 Donbass (Ukraine region), 98 Gazprom (Russian gas company), 65 Kursk (Russian submarine), 87, 88 Kuznetsov (Russian class ship), 88 Lukoil (Russian oil company), 65 MI-24 helicopters -Hind (Russian Helicopter), 87 new Cold War, 116 Peter The Great (Russian Nuclear Battlecruiser), 87 Russian-American Relations, 83, 116, 178, 179 Russian Navy, 88 SU-24 aircrafts, 86 Tartus (Russia Mediterranean base), 100 S Saudi Arabia April 21 Movement, 181 Aramco (Saudi Arabian multinational petroleum and natural gas company), 181, 182 House Of Saud, 146 Saudi monarchy, 100, 181 Saudi Vision 2030, 182

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Wahhab Movement/Wahhabism, 146, 182 Shari’a (Islamic law), 144 Shia, 102, 105, 146, 147, 181 Sunni, 65, 100, 146, 147 Shell (British–Dutch multinational oil and gas company), 65 Singapore, 91, 175 Slovakia, 138, 219 Social Darwinism, 40 Social democracy (political party family), 3, 67, 242 Social inequality, 11, 208 Society of equality, 72 Society of privilege, 72 Soft power, 18, 84, 114, 178 Somalia, 56, 57, 133, 141 US-led intervention in Somalia (1992-1993), 55 Sonangol (Angola oil and gas company), 65 South Africa, 33, 109 South Korea, 92, 111–113, 115, 172, 174, 175 Sovereignist And Identitary Populisms asylum seekers/asylum-seeking migrants, 137 Breitbart News , 173 Fox News. See United States Of America (USA) identitarian nationalisms, 45 identity-politics, 35 Nativism, 20 neosovereignism, 110 populism, 4, 20, 58, 84, 168, 173, 197–199, 201, 202, 204–206, 244, 258 populist leaders, 172, 206, 227 racism, 139, 257 right-wing, 15, 20, 109, 197 rule Of law, 15, 16, 67, 232–234, 259

323

xenophobia, 29, 139 Sovereignty, 2, 4, 5, 8–11, 14, 15, 20, 31, 43, 55, 87, 90, 119, 139, 167, 215, 217, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232–235, 242, 243, 247, 260–262 delegitimization of, 243 Spain, 66, 137, 149, 219, 227, 253 Catalonia, 227 Sri Lanka, 91 Statoil (Norwegian state-owned multinational energy company), 65 Syria, 18, 58, 59, 84, 86, 94, 99–105, 131, 135, 136, 148, 179, 180, 183–185 Arsal (region), 99 Ba’athists (ideology), 64 Conflict: 2011-, 63, 86, 99, 101, 132, 179 de-Baathification, 64 Ghouta area bombing, 98 Syrian Observatory For Human Rights, 99 T Taiwan, 7, 85, 90, 92, 93, 113 Technocracy, 4, 206 elites/elitism, 197, 206 supranationalists/supranationalism, 220, 262 Technologic globalism, 260 Teutoburg forest (battle of), 97 Thailand, 91 The Third Wave, 64 Thucydides’ Trap, 117 Transcaucasia, 97 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 185 Trilateral Commission, 14 Tunisia, 58, 104, 150 Turkey, 18, 84, 100, 103–106, 135, 137, 141, 145, 172, 222

324

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Freedom Flotilla (incident)/Mavi Marmara (Incident), 106 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), 105 U Ukrainian crisis (2013-2014), 136, 220 Crimea (Ukrainian crisis 20132014), 7, 18, 84, 97, 98, 179, 222 Donbass (Ukraine region), 98 United Kingdom (UK), 7, 31, 33, 43, 44, 66, 149, 252 third way, 67 United Nations (UN), 31, 32, 55, 60, 62, 66, 87, 111, 169, 174, 186 Security Council, 31, 32, 60, 66, 113. See also Liberal World Order United States Of America (USA) American Civil War, 201 American interventionism, 131 American leadership, 4, 93, 218, 244, 254, 256 Bronx, 246 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 165 Federal Reserve, 13, 69 First Amendment, 202 Gettysburg Address, 38 Johnson administration (USA), 201 Make America Great Again (MAGA), 19, 160, 173 Manhattan, 246 National Guard (USA), 182, 201 NAVCENT (United States Naval Forces Central Command), 180 Obamacare, 19 Patriot Act (USA), 202, 203 Pearl Harbor, 114

Pentagon, 63, 184 Republican Party (USA), 102, 203 Russiagate, 177, 179, 187 Supreme Court (USA), 201 Tea Party Movement, 202 unipolar moment, 32, 96 US-China Relation, 18, 83, 84, 93 US debt, 116 US Fifth Fleet, 180 US foreign policy, 218 US hegemony, 4, 10, 116, 169 US-led order, 55 Vietnam War, 12, 43, 252. See also Vietnam. See also Thucydides’ Trap URRS/Soviet Union Cold War, 111, 116, 245 Kuznetsov (Class Ship), 88 Warsaw Pact, 15. See also United States Of America (USA) Uzbekistan, 135 V Varus, 97 Vietnam, 90, 92, 114, 252 Vietnam War (1955-1975), 12, 43, 252 Visegrad Group, 138 Vision, 67, 118, 228, 248, 249, 258, 259 W War On Terror 9/11 (terrorist attack), 17, 35, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 95, 131, 133, 134, 202 Afghani War (2001-), 53, 54, 62 Al-Qaeda, 53, 60–62, 67, 132, 134, 147, 183 Taliban, 184, 185 Weapons of mass destruction, 61, 66

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Welfarist state, 226 Western Europe, 36, 170 Working poors, 233 World Bank (WB), 31, 33, 110, 222, 232 WorldCom (scandal), 69 World War I/First World War, 5, 10

325

World War II/Second World War, 3, 10, 16, 31, 32, 242, 251

Y Yemen, 18, 91, 102, 103, 131, 180, 181, 183, 184