From Unipolar Globalization to Polycrisis
By Jeremy Brecher, Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder
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How, in a few short years, did we get from a world order dominated by the United States and characterized by economic globalization to one of great power rivalry and global economic fragmentation? This commentary, the fourth in a series on “The Polycrisis and the Global Green New Deal,” sketches that transformation.
At the end of the Introduction to Globalization from Below (2000) my colleagues and I wrote,
Globalization is both irreversible, and, in its present form, unsustainable. What will come after it is far from determined. It could be a war of all against all, world domination by a single superpower, a tyrannical alliance of global elites, global ecological catastrophe, or some combination thereof.[1]
This commentary attempts to characterize what has come after unipolar globalization – namely, polycrisis.
Unipolarity — its rise and decline
Medieval Europe was governed by a multi-level political system in which monarchs shared law-making power and legitimate allegiance with feudal lords below them and the Holy Roman Emperor and the Roman Catholic Church above. A “patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights of government” were “inextricably superimposed and tangled.”[2]
Within this system, monarchs began to assert a monopoly of power within their realms. The budding capitalists found a territorially centralized organization increasingly useful for protecting property rights at home and abroad, while monarchs found growing capitalist wealth an important source of revenue for their emerging states. By the 17th century, the medieval multi-layered patchwork of political power had been replaced by a system of territorial states exercising a monopoly of power against church and feudal authorities within their territories and sovereignty against emperor and Pope. This system is sometimes referred to as the “Westphalian Model” after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 which incorporated some of its principles. This system of territorial states whose rulers assert absolute sovereignty and independence has dominated international relations ever since.
From its origins at the end of World War II, The Cold War embodied economic, political, military, and ideological conflict between two international blocs superimposed on the nation state system. The Cold War reflected a world system of nation states and blocs based on clearly defined national territories. Each state controlled its own territory, and one could only increase its rule by infringing on that of another. Notwithstanding international trade, national economies were bounded units whose internal development and relations with the outside world were largely regulated by the state. Rivalry between the “Western” and “Soviet” blocs was pervasive, but their economies were more isolated than interactive, and the established territories of the rival blocs were in practice largely accepted by each other.[3]
With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the US was left as the sole global superpower. The post-Cold War period was marked by a reduction of direct conflict among major states over territory, economy, and ideology.
At the same time, corporations were promoting an agenda of economic globalization that would allow them to move their operations to any place in the world where labor, environmental, and subsidy conditions were most favorable for profit-making. The US used its dominant position to promote such globalization and to create or use international institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization to institutionalize globalization and US hegemony. With barriers to transnational economic activities diminishing, corporations turned to globalizing networks of finance, manufacturing, technology, and information.[4] As Bennett Harrison wrote in 1994, the “signal economic experience of our era” was “the creation by managers of boundary-spanning networks of firms, linking together big and small companies operating in different industries, regions, and even countries.”[5] “Global supply chain” and “global assembly line” became buzzwords of the era.
Into the vortex
The Great Recession that started in 2007 marked the beginning of the end for this “new new world order.” The hegemony of unipolar globalization began to meet resistance and by 2014 Russia and China were openly competing with the US and challenging the international order it had established. [6]
But what followed was not a new geopolitical and geoeconomic pattern, but a multilevel vortex of superimposed and conflicting patterns – what has come to be known as the “polycrisis.” These incomplete and jostling patterns form less of a new order than a kaleidoscopic, often vertigo-producing turmoil.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the US, China, and Russia all launched “revanchist” programs — aiming to recover real or imagined lost territory or status. For Russia, the prime expression was Putin’s notion of reannexing historic territories of the Russian empire, notably Ukraine. In China, Xi Jinping called for a “national rejuvenation” that would restore China’s traditional power and prestige. In the US revanchism was embodied in the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again”; substantially the same policies were continued by the Biden administration. As “The Second Cold War,” a study of the evolving relation between China and the US, put it, these projects “enthrall political imaginations around the world” and “animate contemporary geopolitics.” [7]
Ultimately Xi’s ‘national rejuvenation’ and Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ entrenched antagonistic foreign policy in both countries, leading to a consensus that the two are locked in zero-sum competition – in other words, a clash of restorative projects.[8]
The same could be said of Putin’s efforts to restore Russia’s dominance in the lands of the USSR and, indeed, of the Russian Empire.
Because they embody mutually incompatible aspirations, these projects have led to direct conflict among the great powers and wars around the world. Many powers – great and not-so-great — aim to resist US hegemony in their vicinities, but so far none realistically aspire to replace the US as the global hegemon. And so far, no power has succeeded in constructing a geographical contiguous bloc like those of the Cold War era.
While this great power rivalry marks the end of the era of globalization as we knew it, the result is not re-nationalization. Global economic integration fragmented but also persisted. It became neither a system of national economies nor of regional territorial blocs. National economies continue to be economically interdependent – even among arch-rivals like the US and China. One indication of this is that world trade continues to increase, notwithstanding the rise of economic nationalism.
As “The Second Cold War” notes, the result is “a struggle by all competing powers to hegemonize global networks within a still globalized political economy.” They add that “the drive to hegemonize global networks” has not prevented “the move toward more conventional military preparation and even confrontation.”
Disalignments
Unipolar globalization has been replaced by ongoing polycrisis. Its diverse power centers attempt to build blocs and alliances, but so far have not been able to consolidate them. These aspirational structures are unstable, shifting, overlapping, and in conflict. For that reason, it is not possible to provide a credible structural analysis of the current era. But we can single out four axes of conflict that are playing significant if ambiguous roles in the maelstrom of the polycrisis:
US hegemony and its resistance: The US remains by far the world’s most powerful country, deploying the greatest economic, political, and military forces. While no other country can contest with it to be the global hegemon, countries throughout the world are resisting its domination over them and attempting to establish various kinds of blocs to lessen its influence.
The three Great Powers: Russia, China, and the US are engaged in a three-way struggle for power. Like the three alliances portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984 (inspired perhaps by the antagonism-friendship-antagonism of Germany and the Soviet Union in the early days of World War II), these alliances can shift rapidly and unpredictably. US-Chinese cooperation, for example, has broken down, while Russian-Chinese rivalry has turned into a degree of cooperation – though how far that cooperation will extend remains an open question. (If Donald Trump were to become President, it is not hard to imagine a new alignment of Russia and the US.) These three nations do not have a monopoly on power: They face dozens of “lesser powers,” and even “non-state armed groups,” that can act independently outside of Great Power control.
The West against the rest: The former European colonial powers and white settler colonial states often function as a bloc. They often characterize themselves as liberal democracies, but they include many countries that are authoritarian; conversely, many countries excluded from this select club are at least as democratic as countries in “the West.” Their heritage of white colonialism is what they have most in common. “The rest,” which includes Russia and China as well as regional powers like South Korea and Iran and the less developed and developing countries of the Global South, are highly diverse in interests, ideologies, and political and social structures and are hardly consistent in their attitudes and actions toward the West.
The non-aligned: In the Cold War era, many nations resisted pressures from both sides to align with one superpower or the other. A large number of them joined a formal bloc of Non-Aligned Nations. That bloc promoted nuclear disarmament and a New International Economic Order that would allow less developed countries to develop their economies through favorable trade arrangements. In the era of unipolar US dominance, such non-alignment largely faded from relevance. In the face of renewed great power rivalry and the polycrisis, however, many countries are proclaiming their non-aligned status and pursuing some degree of cooperation. This is seen, for example, in Great Power-defying actions in the UN General Assembly in response to military aggression, war crimes, economic hegemonizing, and climate change.
These multiple, overlapping, non-congruent alignments make it dubious to reduce polycrisis dynamics to simple dichotomies like the US vs. the Global South or tripartite rivalry.
In the Cold War era, an understanding gradually developed that the opposed nuclear powers were actually part of an interactive system which at any point might go out of balance and lead to nuclear Armageddon. Detente and partial nuclear disarmament were in large part a result of this realization. That learning has apparently now been lost. What is largely missing in the era of polycrisis is an understanding of the world order as an interactive whole and the nation-state and Great Power systems as composed of competing elements jostling each other toward mutual destruction.
We need a similarly systemic but more complex understanding of today’s polycrisis. Instead, geopolitical discourse is dominated by a “blame game” in which parties accuse and threaten each other with apparently no recognition of the ways they are thereby aggravating the very results they purport to forestall.[9]
Folly indeed!
[1] Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, “Globalization from Below,” South End Press, 2000. P xiv. https://www.amazon.com/Globalization-Below-Jeremy-Brecher/dp/0896086224
[2] John Gerrard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” International Organization, vol 47, No. 1, Winter 1993.p. 149. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/abs/territoriality-and-beyond-problematizing-modernity-in-international-relations/4AB6ACDA3A2D435465AC7918DB9CE1D2
[3] I have drawn throughout this commentary on the analysis in Adam Tooze, “The Second Cold War”; Lockdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, Viking, New York, 2021, and in Gilbert Achcar, “The New Cold War ,” Haymarket, Chicago: 2023.. https://www.spsonline.it/Corsi/Agora/Letture_libri/Tooze_Shutdown-How-Covid-Shook-the-World_s-Economy.pdf and https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2053-the-new-cold-war
[4] For a review of the early stages of this process see Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, “ Global Village or Global Pillage,” South End Press, 1999, p. 53ff. https://www.amazon.com/Global-Village-Pillage-Second-Reconstruction/dp/0896085910
[5] Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility, Basic Books, New York: 1994, p. 127. https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Mean-Landscape-Corporate-Flexibility/dp/0465069428
[6] Ronald O’Rourke, “Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense – Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, updated February, 2024, P.4. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43838. Also, Seth Schindler et al., “Second Cold War: US, China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks,” Geopolitics, Vol 29, 2024 – Issue 4. US, China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks,” Geopolitics, Vol 29, 2024 – Issue 4 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432?src=
[7] Seth Schindler et al, “The Second Cold War”, Ibid.
[9] This interpretation draws on the heuristic presented in Jeremy Brecher, “Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction,“ PM Press, Oakland, 2021. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1095