How the world can avoid anarchy 

That the whole world is now in an extremely dangerous and precarious phase is surely beyond argument. On that at least there is broad agreement. 

With the Ukraine scene spiralling down into wider war, with Israel and its enemies set on mutual annihilation, with tensions still boiling over into violence in Syria, the two Sudans, Afghanistan, Myanmar, to name a few, with China’s threat to strangle Taiwan, with migrant millions continuing to build up, poised to break the dam and move North and West, with evidence of on-coming climate violence, and with no-one having a clue which way President-elect Trump will move first, it would be hard to conclude otherwise

Youval Noah Harari, the widely-read author of Sapiens , speaks in his latest book, Nexus , of humankind being “on the edge of a precipice”.

Or, to take another slightly chilling voice of authority, here is Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Deep Minds and author of the bestseller The Coming Wave , talking brilliantly about how everything in our lives and times is now far less secure than it appears. We are looking, he says , into the abyss. His reckoning is that we have about a 50 per cent chance of finding and staying on the narrow pathway to survival (from collapse and chaos), and successfully containing the new empires of connectivity with their enormous powers of influence – for good or evil. There is no magic fix, he warns, and a giant wave of contradictions and dilemmas coming our way to be faced.

There’s The Assault on the State , in which the two authors (Hanson and Kopstein) depict left and right forces attacking and diminishing state power from different angles, but perhaps not quite realizing that a third assault, namely fragmenting, ever accelerating technology itself, tearing trust apart and promoting dissension and fear, is the greatest threat of all to the balance between state and citizen.

Here, also, is Jürgen Habermas, said by some to be the wisest philosopher in Europe, in his short but profound work, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (2023) , reflecting on the altered and over large areas of broken relations between the citizen and the state, and on the growing scarcity of deliberative discussion, compromise and respect for the law. These are the key ingredients of the functioning democratic state and the liberal capitalist system, without which neither will work. 

Here, too, we see numerous other mourners of democracy, the prophets of a new dark age, crowding the shelves of every bookshop. And here in support are the piles of books about ”broken Britain”, unable these days to govern itself effectively or, goes the warning, at all. Here is Hans-Herman Hoppe’s chilling assessment of democracy as The God that failed , or Sam Freedman’s Failed State (that’s us!).

If that’s not enough, we have Richard Whatmore’s End of Enlightenment or Lord Runciman’s How Democracy Dies, or Parag Khanna’s The Future is Asian, or Dambisa Moyo’s How the West was Lost, or one of my favourites, the marvellous Anne-Marie Slaughter’s The Chess Board and the Web. Old intergovernmental diplomacy has gone, she argues. A new network world has emerged driven by populist pressures and overwhelming connectivity. This changes everything and creates entirely new political priorities and methods the world over. And further back, at the turn of the century . we had Robert Kaplan’s book The Coming Anarchy. 

The list goes on and on. These are serious books from powerful minds. All find different places to perch on the spectrum, starting at the mild end from “just another crisis” in the unending cycle of crises which is modern life, to the other extreme end: the ultimate catastrophe of violence, collapse and lawlessness, the plunge of nations into the abyss. We don’t have to agree with all their views — indeed, we cannot — but we would be mad to ignore their messages.

Enough said. We do not need to go all the way with the doom-mongers’ story. Great dangers lie ahead, but they are not inevitable. Avoidance is possible. Tables can be turned. Powerful undercurrents, often little understood or discussed, can be harnessed at least to stave off catastrophe, or even to take us in the direction of better times and a safer world. Technology, which comes into everything, can be made to work our way. 

And even if the past year seems to be an annus horribilis, it had its patches of sunshine. 

There were the glorious Olympics, hosted with skill. imagination and taste (mostly) by the wonderful French nation. We, les Anglais, (did someone call us perfide ?) have had our moments in history with our nearest neighbours, but somewhere inside us is the comforting feeling that as long as France and England stick generally together, the world cannot come to too much harm. 

No mention of that in book after book of pessimism pouring out during the past year, especially from American commentators, but with no shortage either from this side of the Atlantic.

That is why, if you read on from here, you will find the outlines of a slightly more hopeful story than most of the above. Is that anything more than spitting onto the wind? Realism dictates that a collapse of trust by everyone, a loss of respect, a rise of impatience, a polarised contempt for moderation, and glorying in extremism, while present in human societies since the beginning of time and the formation of social groups, could all be fatal in the hands of an empowered and fully e-enabled populace.

Yet the emerging story here is that they can be contained, diverted, avoided if they are understood. 

There are golden threads which, if we have the nous, the impulse, the knowledge, the perception – all of us – to pick them up, can lead us safely through. 

The anarchy so often predicted, both international and within societies, and linked with the widespread loss of trust and respect, the shrivelling of deliberative discussion and compromise on which the democratic “bargain” depends, and the loss of faith in liberal capitalism itself, may, I argue, have a positive side. When it comes to facing the feared chaos ahead, the forces holding our societies together may be stronger, if properly harnessed, than the forces tearing our societies and our world apart.  

But for things to go this way, we have to first recognise that we are not just in troubled times but, thanks to the tiny silicon microchip, at a key point in human affairs affecting the very pattern of human relationships and the history of human institutions. The reality, which too many people of influence, especially those involved in governance, have yet to understand fully, is that the microchip has reshaped the world in all aspects. This means we are in the midst of a truly defining series of moments, comparable to the invention of the printing press, equal to the Enlightenment and even greater (and swifter) in impact, social and political, than the steam age and the industrial revolution. 

In short,while rising anarchy, intermixed with hybrid and novel forms of warfare, is now a possible scenario, a marker of the end of progress which has lifted humankind’s hopes for centuries. But it is not inevitable.

If most of us can at least agree on that, if most of us can cling firmly to that hope, then with the next analytical step comes the stage where general consensus and broad agreement are not so easily come by, where opinions inevitably divide. For now we have to ask the next key question for every policy-maker and every opinion-former of our times, and in doing so, to make the choice which humanity and its leaders cannot avoid.

Is this part of a new phase in human history, a permanent and historic shift in the conditions of a human existence and society, or just a dip, albeit a big one, in the steady evolution of mankind?

Are we at a point in history comparable to Gutenberg and the printing press, and to all the wars and upheavals which followed? Are we at a moment comparable in significance to the Enlightenment — this time the end of it and the need for a new one! — and to John Locke and human understanding, to the French Revolution and its bloody sequels? To the Industrial Revolution and its explosive political and social consequences? Or are we just at a deep dip in the rolling evolution of world affairs, with a return to normal to follow before long? 

Or to put it in terms of graphic topicality, did the bestiality of October 7th, 2024, as Hamas broke loose and butchered its neighbours on a worse than medieval scale, mark the end of Western progress – a fundamental threat to the international order and the steady advance of humanity in which we had all been long taught to believe? Or just a ghastly interregnum, now prolonged by Israel’s incontinently exercised response (Hamas delenda est) , 

I have not attempted here to disguise my conviction that, unless checked, we are on the fast track to the former state, at a point of historic shift in human affairs, brought on by the march of technology and, so far, its near fatal non-containment or non-restraint. That shifts the gear. That means we move from fatalism, plus insouciance, from the eat-drink-and-be-merry state of mind, to a serious focus on what has gone wrong, what can be repaired and how the horrors of our times can be checked before they destroy us all. 

Let us calmly look at the weakest points, the tears in the fabric of the liberal world order and see which of them can be repaired. Populisms, both of the Left and of the Right are plainly here to stay. Asking what comes after populism is an empty question, like asking what comes after modern medicine. It can no more be reversed that the digital age itself. Even posing the question betrays ignorance of what is happening in the world of the digital age and the way the microchip has re-created it. 

Populism comes in many guises, creating, as it were, ripples of impact across our lives and the lives of our societies and nations. Capitalism, depending for its liberal conduct on trust, becomes unstuck. Democracy, relying on degrees of trust and respect to work at all, ditto. International order and rule of law, which must have trust – the same again. The national bargain between state and citizen – protection and security and care in exchange for obedience to the rule of law, agreement to sound majority decisions and to pay taxes — crumbles. Parliaments and law lose authority. Election procedures and results are questioned. Compromise is demoted and the Middle Ground made uninhabitable. All outcomes become uncertain. Energy chaos replaces the order of well-powered social civilisation. Sensible and practical responses to climate change give way to panicky “solutions” which half the world does not believe in and does not care about . A growing rash of tensions and hatreds — some of them deep rooted in history, some more recent — boil over into violent mini-wars in Asia and the Middle East, Taiwan, the South Seas, Africa East and Central, small islands, breakaway and separatist states.

I conclude with that off-putting thing – a To-do list. After all, it’s usually the first question in such situations. From the back row the hand goes up and the accusation comes – “You have analysed the world to pieces. But what do you propose to do about it?”

Well, here are some, not policies or actual measures, but at least overarching starting points of realisation and understanding in the push-back we should all long ago have embarked upon.

1. The world is faced with an entirely new set of uncertainties and threats, which the ideologically based politics of the last hundred years does not address and cannot solve or even connect with. 
2. Technology-enabled populism has arrived, widening divisions, emphasising inequalities, changing the basis of governance, altering business relationships and the nature of the corporation, undermining the rules based intentional order, and, as we can see in Ukraine and the Middle East, transforming the nature of war itself. 
3. Past challenges – migrants, climate threats, energy dangers – have been everywhere greatly amplified by the information and communications revolutions and by the destruction of the middle ground of reasoned and patient evaluation, which previously helped temper them . 
4. The binding forces which have created and held nations together since the rise of the modern state – the “glue” which holds societies together within the law — are all weakening rapidly.
5. Liberal capitalism, which ought to be the obvious victor over the warped and corrupt versions now practised in the autocracies, is failing to spread its benefits as widely as it once did and now demands major world reform.
6. The United Nations institutions must be built upon and strengthened to meet new world conditions. 
7. This is not the American century. If it is anybody’s (and the whole concept may be redundant), it belongs to the giant amalgam of new platforms and networks that have grown out of the age of hyper-connectivity, some of which now lay claim to be treated as entities as powerful as, or more powerful than, states inherited from the Westphalian system of nationhood.
8. Out of this new patchwork, new global bodies are being conceived and born, concerned not just narrowly with trade but with the entire pattern of investment and growth ,and with the security without which all progress halts.
9. Bodies such as the CPTPP, the African Union and Asian focus points such as APEC, have already partly replaced the old 20th century order, the world of the G7, OECD and other purely Western catallaxies, offering new safe ground for nations in today’s turbulent conditions. These are what the former Director of Chatham House, Sir Robin Niblett, perceptively described as “the neo-non-aligned” – the states that wish to be neither part of either the Chinese or American hegemonies and refuse to view, or accept, the international order as seen through a Manichean lens, so favoured across the Atlantic. Their aspirations are broadly liberal and democratic, but in their own way and at their own pace. There is an interesting parallel here with the membership of the modern Commonwealth. 
10. Volatility is becoming the new norm in all human affairs — generating an atmosphere of permacrisis, which the media machine inevitably amplifies vastly. The dream of a violence-free world peace is receding. Containment of constant disputes and de-escalation of tensions will more likely be the limits of achievement, together with the patient repair of broken armaments treaties and some slowdown — perhaps — of nuclear proliferation. 

So to summarise all these summaries: 

1. Those who seek to shape, govern and lead have to understand what is really happening in all its immense new complexities — that the societal network is crumbling and the old binding forces of nationhood and of international order of some kind, with their roots deep in the Westphalia system, are also crumbling. No use pretending otherwise. (American pundits from the Trumpian Right to the Council on Foreign Relations liberal Left, please note.)
2.  Having understood, we have to stop shrugging shoulders and wringing hands, and turn to practical and workmanlike repairs on many fronts, pinpoint accurately where the rain is coming in and the roof of reasonably peaceful co-existence is collapsing, and mend the many holes and leaks before it is too late. 

It can be done – if we learn where to start and how to start — and, of course, when to stop. 

This is an edited version of a speech given to a recent current affairs conference in Bucharest earlier this month.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.