The Implausible is now the Possible

This week I attended a European workshop on reactionary theory and practice. I talked about two things: 1) the implications of the “deinstitutionalization” of U.S. foreign policy for international order and 2) what I see as unsustainable tensions in contemporary reactionary ideas about international affairs.

I suspect I was more than a little tiresome. My shtik has increasingly become that:

• We are living through a “context shift” akin to, say, the collapse of the Soviet Union or liberal revolutions that swept through the United States, Haiti, and France in the last decades of the 18th century; thus,
• Academics need to start imagining — and preparing for — developments that only a few years ago would have struck most of us as implausible.

Contemporary global order — especially in domains like finance and security — is underpinned, or at least profoundly shaped by, the “infrastructure” of U.S. hegemony. It’s precisely that infrastructure that the Trump administration is either deliberately destroying or inadvertently breaking.

What do we need to start taking seriously? The list is long, and extends beyond my academic competency. The example that I floated at the workshop: a return of irredentist nationalism to the European mainstream.

Do you know which countries in Europe have historical claims to territory now controlled by one or more neighbors? Pretty much all of them. Multiple governments face active or recently-active secessionist movement, and a few have large co-ethnic groups living just outside of their borders (there are over a million ethnic Hungarians in Romania, for example).

(Indeed, contemporary debates about NATO expansion are so focused on the “Russia question” that they obscure an important reason why policymakers backed the Partnership for Peace program in the first place. They feared a “power vacuum” in Central and Eastern Europe, one that could pave the way for nationalist conflicts between former members of the Warsaw Pact.)

What if we do, in fact, get a future in which Germany has the largest military in Europe? That might seem like a boon to European security right now. It strikes me as a lot less “stabilizing” in a world with a dysfunctional NATO, a decoupled or far-right (and authoritarian) United States, or with a party like the AfD in charge. And while the disaster of Brexit may currently serve to depress support for leaving the EU in continental Europe, I think it would be foolish to assume that sentiment will last forever.

The point isn’t that these outcomes are likely. The point is that “politics as usual” isn’t merely dangerous — it is potentially catastrophic. Perhaps the remaining liberal democracies can learn from the Biden administration’s failure to adapt to the moment. So far, it would seem that they have not.