Herfried Münkler, Welt in Aufruhr. Die Ordnung der Mächte im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Rowohlt 2023. (“World in Turmoil. The Order of the Powers in the 21st Century”).

The beginning is drastic. The promises of the future as progress that characterized the idea of modernization have disappeared. Progress cannot be expected to return in the foreseeable future, Herfried Münkler argues in his book on a world in turmoil (page 13). Disorder replaces progress in his depicture of today’s situation. Disorder has become the new key concept after the progress narrative (p. 17). Münkler does not stay at this observation, however. His ambition is to bring new order with a prognosis about a stable future through geopolitics by the big powers of the Earth.

The forecast: A pentagon for new stability

Using historical points of reference from Thucydides to Clausewitz and Carl Schmitt, Münkler drafts a prognosis for the future after the bipolarity of the Cold War. Münkler outlines from history a multipolar pentagon of the future: the US and the EU, China and Russia with India as the fifth power balancing and mediating between the two blocs.

Münkler is not clear about when the disorder began. At the end of the Cold War and bipolar geopolitics around 1990, or after 2008, when the hegemonic narrative on the one market world without alternatives rapidly eroded in the wake of the collapse of the global financial markets? Of course, Münkler doesn’t want to restore the bipolar Cold War order, but to revise it to become a geopolitical instrument against disorder.

The two Western and Eastern two-state blocs in the new pentagon give the multipolar order a bipolar dimension and well also a continuity to the Cold War. But also, through India to the role of Britain in Europe in the nineteenth century. Together, the five powers will form a kind of world directorate, externally and internally. Their individual strength and power can go up or down. New ones may emerge (South Africa, Indonesia for example) as an expansion of the pentagon or as a replacement of declining powers within it. For the sake of balance, and to avoid deadlock situations of two against two, it is important that the number of members is odd. So there is a certain dynamism in the model of the future but also a relative harmony, defying the anarchy into which the world order of sovereign states fell after 1990 or 2008. The future will be neither about Huntington’s clash of civilizations nor the liberal world market, Münkler argues. He recognizes the risks of making a forecast, but still dares to predict that his pentagon is the future.

Münkler’s pentagon scenario rises several questions. The perspective is geopolitical, centred on sovereign and interdependent states, but the world order around the pentagon lacks a clear North/South dimension. The pentagon’s axis is rather East/West. The distinction between the poor and the rich nations that characterized the half-century after the Second World War disappeared after 1990 under the ideology of a single world and remains lost. There is India but no place for Africa. Does this mean that world poverty is no longer relevant? Is the Global South, which used to be called the Third World, just an equivalent of the Global North, equal partners on the one global market as the globalization narrative argued when changing the name of the Third World? What about the roots of the accelerating migration waves from the South? What problem-solving capacity does the pentagon have? Are the problems only about war and peace and political and military balance of power? What capacity is there to prevent an existential climate catastrophe and to respond to resource scarcity and mass migration? At the end of the book, these questions become an unspecified human task for the entire planet, obviously beyond the pentagon, somehow transcending it, but how? Without further discussion, Münkler sees no threat of an abrupt collapse of the world order and does not discuss the concept of a tipping point, when everything irrevocably turns for the worse. A gradual collapse may occur, but it may be prevented by new technology for practical solutions. If not, the existing world order could come to an end without another taking its place (page 439).

The point of departure of Welt in Aufruhr is that the states as in the order before 1990 are the stability anchors and that today’s world experiences a return of disordering state-transcending and state-undermining solidarity but different from what Marx had in mind when he talked about international class struggle. The return is about Islamic and ethnic movements (pp. 228-9). One could add here the global capitalism legitimized by the globalization narrative after 1990, but Münkler does not address the cross-border solidarity of capital with the goal to transcend nation-state borders. Not transnational capitalism but Islamism and the ethnic movements question in his view the order of state sovereignty established in 1648, revised in 1815. That order was based on the state’s monopoly of violence. It was about a dichotomy between war and peace (Grotius, De jure belli 1625) and the distinction between state law and interstate law (international law). 

Chaos but from where?

Replacing the stability of the Westphalian (1648)/ the Vienna (1815) order, a grey twilight space between war and peace returns from before 1648 making the world chaotic and the future potentially dangerous. The line between civil war and war against an external enemy is becoming fluid, Münkler warns. Hybrid wars are a new phenomenon. One could add the privatization of military activities. Münkler wants to revive the Vienna order based on states and empires in balance, an order that survived two world wars and culminated with the Cold War. He is looking for an order bringing stability back in again. Münkler does not comment on the one world without borders based on the idea of a global free trade market that began in 1990, an order which replaced bipolarity with the aim to transcend national borders. The order lost all credibility in the 2008 financial bubble. Again, was the neoliberal global market order or disorder? Did the chaos that undermined national state borders begin in 1990 or in 2008? From where does the chaos and the disorder come and since when? The argument here is that it is crucial to get the origin of the chaos right before making forecasts on what will come out of it or how to confront it.

Münkler doesn’t go deeper into that question but refers to Islamism and ethnic nationalism undermining state borders. However, when reading him, the question emerges whether they aren’t the outcome of something rather than the origin. Münkler’s derivation of origin is vague and doesn’t convince. The elephant in the room in his book is the role of global capital movements and the operations of the multinational corporations, as they once were called, with the goal to transcend and escape nation-state borders. [1] The market-radical globalization narrative legitimized their work on making national state borders meaningless One might here in particular refer to the new global finance industry which broke through in the 1990s with their claim for free transnational capital movements, which with digital technology operating with nano seconds as time unit fully emancipated themselves from national government control. 

The populist-authoritarian (rather than ethnic as Münkler argues) nationalism, which emerged in the 2010s and caused disorder as a reaction to the failure of the story about a self-propelling market order, didn’t come from nowhere. Although the connections in many respects are little explored, it is reasonable to assume that the losers of the globalization found an expression for their frustration in a nationalist protest initiated and exploited by political entrepreneurs. The protest was more about internal national social cohesion than external ethnic conflict with other nationalities. A social nationalism or national socialism that became ever more authoritarian and populist. Later, growing numbers of refugees provoked an external exclusive dimension to the nationalist language. This populist-authoritarian nationalism became a general phenomenon in Europe and the USA, yes, an international movement. The movement began to cooperate internationally with the purpose to undermine the legitimacy of the liberal nation states, weakened after two-three decades of neoliberal preparatory work.

Didier Eribon has for France investigated this scenario where left voters abandon the left parties moving to the right populist and nationalistic parties because the left parties under the conditions of growing neoliberal hegemony abandoned the narrative about class struggle, about a social destiny given by birth to fight against. The left parties took over the neoliberal argument that there were only self-responsible individuals and no responsible social state. [2]

However, one must see this development broader, beyond the rust belt losers. There emerged with neoliberalism a general erosion of established social values around concepts like social justice, and feelings of lost political control emerged in the wake of the dictates of the market. Competition on a world market became a new lifestyle credo with the belief that only the strongest survive when labour markets changed fundamentally. Stable identifications with work disappeared for many. Work became a matter of survival with a perspective from day to day or week to week for many in the new globalized cleaning and nursery industries. The life planning around the expectations of stable employment and permanent progress towards a better future lost credibility. When, for others, who felt being on the winners’ side, the future became a market with endless opportunities, the future shifted for them, too, to the haze of a hectic present with consumption for the moment as elixir of life. However, it was a present with no stability. Among them, there was angst to end up on the loser side. The neoliberal society of a growing gap between losers and winners produced not only fury but also angst, unease and discontent. This scenario of polarized emotions began to ferment when the grand coherence-producing narrative on globalization collapsed in 2008.

Could it be that the sudden wake-up from the dream of the one market world was what brought Münkler’s chaos when the financial markets collapsed in 2008 and the globalization lost credibility? Already before the collapse of the globalization narrative from within in 2008, Islamism began the confrontation of the Western world view from without the centre with the attack on the twin towers in 2001 as the up-shaking and stirring event. 

The trentes glorieux after 1945, brought in a small part of the world progress, underpinning the modernization narrative about permanent progress and spread to the colonial world through expectations in decolonization and development until the story came to an end in the 1970s polycrisis with the argument that decolonization had only brought neocolonialism. Like the rabbit that jumped out of the hat, the globalization narrative ended the crisis creating new confidence in one world without a North/South division, however. A new thirty-year period of belief in permanent progress ahead followed. Yes, some believed even in the end of history, which must have meant the end of future, too. One endless and borderless market world in a permanent present. The globalization narrative became hegemonic beyond doubts and debates. The economists were the order’s high priests. And under the surface of the discourse national state leaders lost control of the moves of the capital owners. These state leaders are now under legitimacy pressure from populist and authoritarian internationally cooperating nationalist movements, or they became themselves authoritarian and nationalist populists in response to their powerlessness. 

Because of the functioning of the global economy under ever less government control, three connected major crisis clusters have emerged accelerating the experiences of chaos: 1. The climate change, the exhaustion of natural resources, and the environmental pollution making increasing parts of the planet uninhabitable; 2. The migration flows from the poor countries to the rich transforming the asylum rules to border barricades and push-back politics in the North; 3. Thirty years of neoliberal global bottom-up redistribution from the poor to the rich (Piketty). Taken together, the result is a collapse of established norms about social justice.

The nationalism that prevails is not primarily about ethnic emancipation from other ethnizes but about a populist wrath against the neoliberal market excesses and its consequences with dramatic impact on the three crisis clusters. It is reasonable to connect the rise of Islamism to these clusters, too. Authoritarian state leaders understand to take the lead of the movement of fury and angst about the future in campaigns against the deep state. The image emerges of the people standing up in the name of the nation against the economic and political elites, the cosmopolitans. This is the chaotic field of social protest where also Islamism is operating underpinning the disorder.

This outline of the three crisis clusters and the outcome of them is not pretended to be the result of a deep analysis. However, it constitutes arguably a reasonable scenario for a discussion of the origin of chaos. Instead of going into the question of from where chaos comes, Münkler rushes from just taking note of the disorder to the solution: the revival of geopolitics and the search for a history which he argues enables him to make a prognosis of it. There are strong reasons to doubt that his geopolitical prognosis is going to bring solutions and stability. Isn’t it when looking on historical experiences rather so that the pentagon will be used to canalize energy from domestic social frustration and unrest into foreign politics? What would that scenario mean for the future? 

On one point, Münkler is right. He links today’s situation to a simultaneous and connected space and time revolution in recent decades. Technological development has caused both space and time to shrink. The information comes more often and faster. The world is becoming more intense and compact. A crucial question here seems to be who controls the digital revolution. However, Münkler doesn’t go deeper into this question, in his eagerness to come to the solutions rather than staying with the problem and its genesis. What role do the global digital-operating corporations play? Their free capital movements across national borders and state power, operating with a time scale of nano seconds highlight their power. However, the digital revolution provides other instruments as well to undermine national control and order. The global corporations and their profit generating social media supply instruments for Islamism and the alt-right movement, both internationally cooperating, not with each other but each within themselves, to undermine liberal democratic state power. What would these movements be without the digital revolution and the social media with their boiling emotions? The liberal international state order is under attack from two connected directions, the social fury and angst, and the digital revolution. The global corporations are behind both.

Restoration of state power without visions about the future

Münkler evades the normative question of what to do to create a new order and new visions of the future in place of those that have disappeared (page 20). Instead, his concern is about taking note of an ongoing restoration of lost state power without paying attention to why it went lost. The concern is not about the stability of domestic democratic state power but about the international state order democratic or not. 

Münkler’s focus in the search for the future is a trend forecasting of geopolitical tendencies, a prognosis derived from a state-centered outline of the history, states as war and peace makers, where Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Schmitt are the historical points of reference. The teachings that they reflect in the grey haze of our time are rather gloomy without raising hopeful expectations for anything else than stability whatever that means. Power politics replaces norm politics in Münkler’s analysis. A history with Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, or Arendt as reference points had proposed a different future, without prognostic ambitions. There are alternatives to Münkler’s future although he pretends that there aren’t.

Münkler recognizes that his prognostic enterprise is risky and argues that it would be less risky if he confined himself to writing about the future of the world as a question of what is desirable (p. 28). The desirable might indeed have remained desires in the confrontation with actual developments (as so often when expectations turned into experiences of disappointments, Koselleck would have added), but the normative message as such would not necessarily have been burdened, Münkler states. The power-political prognosis is much more vulnerable, he writes, but politically much more necessary than ‘another round of wishes and hopes, which one already knows at the time of writing will not come true.’ Why is that? And must wishes and hopes be formulated in such a way that we know they will not be realized? Isn’t policymaking driven by visions of how to shape the future? Must the visions necessarily mean failure or success? Can’t they be gradually adjusted in response to new experiences in learning progresses? 

Two epigrams open Münkler’s book. André Malraux with the quote “He who wants to read the future must browse the past” and Karl Marx with the importance that “we do not dogmatically anticipate the world but that we will only find the new one through criticism of the old world.” But the goal of browsing the past and criticizing the old world was not to stop there, but to create a vision of the future, wasn’t it? Here it is important to distinguish between visions with an action plan based on human responsibility on the one side and sky-rocketing utopias and faith in inherent forces in history on the other side. The interpreters and exegetes of Marx went the latter way as we know. Visions for political implementation through trial and error in learning processes, a Koselleckian dynamic between criticism and crisis would be the realistic key to an alternative future. Visions instead of dogma. Simply browsing the past as Malraux suggests becomes just a conservative therapy that leads nowhere. Münkler’s belief in a reality-based forecast disconnected from visions and dreams is precisely a vision and a dream of being able to predict the future and not, as he claims, an alternative that stands above visions and dreams. It is a vision and a dream that will provoke alternative visions about geopolitical power and how to balance it. This is what history tells us.

The nomos of the earth and the struggle of land against sea

The long-term spatial revolution, which began centuries before the intensified phase of recent decades, brought with it a norm revolution that became a starting point for Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical thought. His distinction between land and sea in Nomos der Erde and Land und Meer reflected a shift in emphasis from the steppes to the oceans. This shift became the starting point for a revolutionary leap in human’s mastery of nature from around 1500, which also became the starting point for colonialism and imperialism in their modern form. Land powers were more clearly defined and militarily equipped, maritime powers more liberal and free trade orientated. It was in this global environment that Carl Schmitt operated with the concept of Großraum (Greater Space), with the ability to create lasting peace through the armament of the land powers. The maritime powers operated globally, where the global trade in capital and goods led to institutional disorder with political and military conflicts according to Schmitt. Not as controlled wars between states, as in Clausewitz’s view, but as Weltbürgerkrieg, world civil war without rules (pp. 115, 170-2). Schmitt anchored his anti-liberal and anti-capitalist multipolar Großraum theory in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which called on Europe to keep its hands off North and South America. In the same way the USA and Britain should keep their hands off Europe and leave it to the powers there with their greater spaces, extended to imperial interest spheres, to order their balance of power among themselves.

Schmitt’s theory was of course dead after 1945. It is interesting and worrying to see how his ideas began to flourish again at about the same time as the digital intensification of the shrinking of space and time. The demand for larger spaces can be seen as a response to the shrinking global space. The globalization narrative was an important tool for the digital shrinking of space and time after 1990, but Münkler does not develop any ideas in this direction with questions about who mastered and managed the market story. The problem becomes one of technology. However, much of what Schmitt claimed in the 1930s about the maritime powers (UK, US) echoed in the global crisis after the fall of the neoliberal order in 2008. The time of the land powers geopolitically ordering the world came back after the neoliberal parenthesis.

Reinhart Koselleck learnt to know the one generation older Carl Schmitt personally in the 1950s. He found Schmitt’s normative theory on Großraum and land and see powers interesting as a historical theory which has often been misunderstood as an agreement about its normative dimension. Because, what for Schmitt was an action-orientating meta norm was for Koselleck empirical history underpinning what he called the pathogenesis of civic society in a not very hopeful view on history. Koselleck’s focus was the discursive struggles about the political shaping of the future. In discursive struggles since the nineteenth century, the languages of liberalism and socialism, unified in the French revolution, split into two ideologies in the Cold War, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear extinction. Jürgen Habermas, in turn, who was close to many of Koselleck’s empirical observations, turned them in a meta-normative direction outlining a free and democratic deliberating society and the realization of the enlightenment ideals. Habermas’ deliberative model had strong appeal as a normative contrast to the realities of the Cold War. When the market forces in the 1990s began to permeate every pore of the civic society and transform it to the market society, the model lost credibility. This is the historical ground on which new visions of the future must be built. Continuing in the wake of Koselleck and Habermas instead of going back to Schmitt, maneuvering between threats and opportunities, realities and norms. 

Visions of the possible versus the impossible

The UN was conceived after 1945 as a unifying world organization, but the Cold War meant that the plan did not work. The bipolar split was compounded by the fact that the UN did not have its own resources but depended on Member States to provide them, which they were only willing to do when the UN’s objectives matched their own, Münkler argues. Member States’ claims to sovereignty apply equally to all states, one vote, big or small, and only in the General Assembly. Majority decisions there are not binding under international law. If equality really applied, there would soon be conflict between large and small states, as the former paid the most and wanted political payback for their efforts. The UN would not survive an open conflict between large and small, Münkler argues (pp. 184, 207-11). The possibility of a reformed UN is not a possibility but a senseless dream in Münkler’s scenario. When neither the UN nor the globalization narrative (after 2008) worked, Schmitt became the next hope in the attempt to stabilize the shrinking of time and space.

Münkler does not develop many ideas about North-South in this context, which is a pity. There is, for example, the Third World’s demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the early 1970s, where the poor countries under the name of G 77 sought to push through their demands through the majority in the General Assembly. The western part of the North created other instruments to reject the demands of the South. They formed the G7 for that purpose. The 1970s were G7 versus G77. The outcome we know. The NIEO came to nothing. It is true that the UN needs a comprehensive reform. However, a reform of the Security Council, for example, is not to be expected, Münkler writes. This is of course a well-founded prognosis. Or, as Münkler puts it: Not everything that is game theoretically possible and optimal is realizable. What can be said against this statement of realpolitik?

Is the fate of the NIEO a circular argument confirming that the impossible was impossible because it was impossible, limiting the possible to what is and appears to be? Could one imagine NIEO as anything other than a confirmation of the impossible? Something that could be worth trying again, adapting to today’s much more dramatic situation than half a century ago? Could the analysis of the world situation offer visions of what societies could be and should be? Could the analysis become input into work on new horizons of expectation? Such questions lie beyond Münkler’s horizon. He rules them out from the beginning.

The problem with this erudite book – a remarkable achievement that develops ideas about war and peace and the political organization of the world in time and space in a long historical analysis with references to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Schmitt, and others ‒ is the fixation on what was and is, displacing questions about what could, should and ought to be. The moral and normative questions disappear. Thoughts on alternatives are missing. Given the current situation of accelerating crises, it is reasonable to argue that it is high time to start thinking about another world, about alternatives to the current one. Shouldn’t a planet in existential crisis force co-operation for survival? Just as a nation at war tones down internal divisions for outward unity, the nations of the world should come together for a common struggle against the planetary problems of climate catastrophe and resource depletion. For survival. Is that unrealistic? Is the only realistic future the world as it was and is?

The forecast is about the pentagon’s power structure but says little about the content of its policies and its ability to solve the problems that appear increasingly threatening. States as an idea and institution are at the centre but the book does not discuss their major challenge since 1990, the flight of global capital from the governance of welfare states in the north to the latest trend under the concept of anarcho-capitalism where the goal is rather to destroy the state that once governed before it became helpless. It still functions as a bogeyman, the ‘deep state,’ against which to mobilize resistance despite its declining importance. New ideas of tax evasion and offshore capitalism are growing rapidly and systematically. As this review has already argued, the globally operating transnational corporations as a power factor do not play a role worth mentioning in the book. The possibilities of a globally operating organization to coordinate the world’s countries’ fight against the ever-increasing problems are not really discussed beyond stating that the UN has failed. There is no vision of an alternative future to the pentagon that has grown out of the history of geopolitics. The pentagon’s history revolves around geopolitics and power over land and sea. The basis of that power struggle has not disappeared, but it circumvents current and future problems. 

The final words of Münkler’s book are threatening: Not only the individual states of the pentagon can fail, but the entire world order as a whole, with terrible consequences. But these final words do not seem to be intended as a threat but as a reservation to the main thesis that, despite the difficulties, the world directorate of the five powers will hold the order together. Why not take the threats seriously and see them as a major and real risk, not a dreamed apocalypse? And begin to work for an intensive and serious world effort to prevent the apocalypse, which is not a dream but a very real threat, through planetary co-operation. From the outset, Münkler writes the pentagon as the agent of the future out of history, placing a faith in it that is possibly more unrealistic than the thoughts and visions of alternative futures that he dismisses as unrealistic dreams. 

Münkler’s pentagon is eerily reminiscent of the plan for a world order of balanced states created in Vienna in 1815. The order became more and more about the belief in empires in balance before it collapsed in 1914. The leaders of that time’s pentagon ‒ Wilhelm II, Franz Joseph, Nicholas II, Poincaré, Asquith, and Lloyd George ‒ ignored the power of the furious speed of military technology development and believed that they were still in the era of the cabinet wars. They were not sleepwalkers as is often argued but gamblers, feverish and alert but naïve and innocent about the power of the toys they played with. They were driven by domestic social conflicts they believed they could manage by turning the energy they generated outwards. Feelings of déjà-vu emerge when reading Münkler’s prognosis.

For an alternative view on what is realism and dream

The book’s major shortcoming is the lack of reflection on alternative courses of action and alternative learnings from history. The future becomes suffocatingly automatic. Everything will probably be fine. If not, we have a problem. For a different view of history and the future than Münkler’s, for an alternative, see Planetary Governance for Children of a Modest Star. That brave book opens up new perspectives about how to manage the planet.

It is not so that Münkler’s approach is extreme. It is rather mainstream and that is the problem. It was on the German bestseller lists for non-fiction literature. The French president Emmanuel Macron, eager and urgent like a lost soul, confirms the trend in an interview in The Economist:

“But the underlying principle, which suited everyone, was that the more economic trade links we have with other nations, the less likely they are to go to war, the less likely they are to confront us. Wham! Gentle trade was an era of humanity, but it’s no longer the era that works. Now it’s nasty trade. In other words, trade comes second. Geopolitics has taken over from geo-economics, and I believe that this is one of the fundamentals of the new grammar, and it represents a profound break with what we have known since the 1960s. It must be taken on board.” [3]

Macron talks about abandoning a key idea of the neoliberal globalization narrative and he does it in a way that is reminiscent of how that narrative once became hegemonic. Some economists began to talk about market and flexibility instead of state and rigidity as the solution to the 1970s crisis. Soon ever more voices in economics, politics and media chimed in the song and at the end it became a powerful chorus, without alternatives as states women like Margret Thatcher and Angela Merkel argued. It became the only way, the only future which would last forever. The chorus ended in a shriek in 2008. Is this the story that we are going to repeat? [4] Although with 1914 instead of 2008 as the end point. The story where what is argued to be realpolitik becomes the apocalyptic consequence of a utopia called realpolitik. The need for alternatives to the new emerging prognostic truth about geopolitics is urgent.

[1] Bo Stråth, The Brandt Commission and the Multinationals. Planetary Perspectives. London: Routledge 2023 Ch 3.

[2] Didier Eribon, Retour à Reims. Paris : Fayard 2009, ibid.,De la subversion. Droti, norme et politique. Paris : Cartouche 2010 ; ibid, La société comme verdicte : classes, identités, trajectoires. Paris : Flammarion 2013

[3] The Economist 2 May 2024.

[4] Cf Bo Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace. London: Bloomsbury 2016. 

How to quote:

Cit. Bo Stråth, “The Geopolitical Future. A Forecast Déjà Vu.” Blog. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/ordering-of-space-and-time/the-geopolitical-future/ Published 19.08.2024

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