On events and Events
The century of humiliation begins here. Year zero, baby.
Will history look back at this as the moment when the hegemonic transition began? USA goes down, China goes up.
Maybe. The US defeat in Iran threatens to be of greater consequence than Afghanistan and Iraq. And China is the ultimate beneficiary. Even Robert Kagan, arch-neoconservative, now struggles to “think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored”… other than this, now. It can’t be ignored, and there will be “no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done.”
The pieces are being rearranged:
Iran becomes a dominant regional power and the US-allied Gulf states will have to adapt. The chain of causation starting with the Hormuz-closure energy shock is long, very long; not for nothing that energy independent power have been most outspoken against the US-Israeli war. And American military credibility has taken a major hit.
But the question mark over the return of History isn’t just about the waning of US dominance – the stuff of missiles and bases and alliance networks. It’s about, well, this meme:
Pandemic, Peak Woke, the end of Left-Populism and the 2010s decade of protest, Russia-Ukraine War, Israel-Hamas War, Trump’s return, LLMs and the AI boom… to put it blandly, lots of things have happened in the past half-decade or more. Lots of things have happened since we published The End of the End of History in 2021.
But what does this mean for me and my weekend?, I hear you ask. Good question. If History has returned, you’d think you’d hear it knocking at the door. Moreover, you’d think it would involve you somehow – and in a way more compelling than billing you higher energy prices, or killing you with a drone.
The most significant evidence one can cite for history’s return is in the geopolitical realm: the relative rise and fall of powers and the conflicts generated and the way this shapes fortunes of different people, and peoples. At most, we can say, with Fukuyama, that China seems to have pioneered a new (though mostly hybrid) model, which competes and indeed outcompetes Western liberal democracy. And that these events, most recently the US defeat against Iran but extending far back, are accelerating History itself. Indeed, if the definition of a capital-E Event is that it is a happening whose consequences exceed its causes, is not the Iran war just such an Event?
But this is all in the areas of life most distant from citizens, and in which ordinary citizens are pawns at best, and at worst utterly superfluous. But history is young still and it is worth recalling that the end of US unipolarity is not just an international relations thing, something for political analysts to argue over but which doesn’t even feature as election talking points, let alone touch ordinary people’s lives in a direct way. US hegemony shaped so much of what we take for granted that its disappearance will be noted, felt – and the more suddenly it happens, the more so these affective effects.
So, as we’ve argued before, the critical question today is how this emerging disposition worms its way into the inner life of nations – and opens up choices, and thus the possibility for democratic political action. The reality is that we are not in a period of hegemonic transition (“Mr. China, please come up and collect your prize”) but rather of apolarity, a non-hegemonic age. The new order is disorder, and the mental maps of the past – even if carefully updated – may not be much use.
So we’re taking the opportunity to do a live event, entitled…
History’s Back, Baby!
Thursday 28 May, 7pm, @ Verdurin, London
Details here, get your tickets now. Bungacast subscribers use the code: SILVIO
It is obvious today that the “end of history”, postulated by Francis Fukuyama in 1992, is over. Liberal democracy as the final form of human organisation? Pah! The arc of history tending towards justice? Pah!
Will the end of twentieth-century modernity be the start of something new? The building blocks of the past – political parties, ideologies, and institutions – are decaying around us, and nothing new emerges to take their place.
Yet history now has new protagonists: states, corporations, and oligarchs, often acting in synthesis. What if history’s back but not as we wanted it? The stakes are high: the sunset of the US hegemony is in sight and even Fukuyama now agrees on the impending primacy of the “Chinese model”. Yet even such geopolitical shifts aren’t leading to the creation of a new hegemony – disorder is the order of the day.
They say that “nothing ever happens”. Pah! Something ever happens.
It’s been five years since The End of the End of History has come out (and seven since we started putting it together), so Alex Hochuli, Philip Cunliffe and George Hoare talk, while contributing editor Lee Jones and friend of the pod Nina Power will provide responses.
Alex will talk about global culture war as the dead-end of a revivified politics. Making struggle symbolic and geopolitical removes it from the reach of citizens.
George will argue that politics and history exist only in zombified forms. And when you look closely, the zombies are far more frightening than those from horror films...
Phil will explain that the end of the end of history is the end of American empire, with no replacement. But that there is a world of political opportunity for those willing to take advantage of the absence of global hegemony.
The rest of this newsletter is available at Substack