In his “Prison Notebooks”, the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci noted that the nature of the crisis of his time “consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born: during this interregnum we observe a wide variety of painful phenomena.” Entering a new period of interregnum, small states in the international system face new strategic opportunities, as well as a cascade of crises that test their resilience.

Except for a small number of “rogue states” that populate the world, the past three decades of American hegemony have brought a number of economic and democratic advantages to small states, but at the cost of limiting the room for maneuver they had at their disposal. These countries had to follow the liberal prescriptions promoted by the West in order to take advantage of the international liberal order. This has brought enormous benefits to populations and societies that previously lived under constant repression by authoritarian and undemocratic governments. It also brought economic suffering for some and increased income inequality for many as neoliberal economic ideas spread around the world.

The end of American hegemony brings with it a wider room for maneuver for those small and medium-sized states that want to adopt different economic and political models, as we see in Serbia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or even Hungary. At the same time, the end of American hegemony comes with a “cascade of crises” or “polycrisis” that tests the resilience of small and medium-sized states, which can lead to the collapse of states with very weak institutions. Small and medium-sized states, democratic or not, will only be able to enjoy the opportunities opened up by growing opportunities in the international system if they can carefully manage their fragility and build internal resilience and cohesion. Unfortunately, recent trends indicate that increasing the stability of the state may in some cases come at the cost of destroying democratic institutions, especially in countries with a weak democratic culture. To prevent these trends, large liberal states should offer small states incentives and benefits higher than those offered by autocratic states, provided they remain democracies.

Hegemony, monopoly and glocalization

The liberal international order established after the end of the Cold War was built on two fundamental pillars: American military supremacy and the Western monopoly on the provision of global quasi-public goods. American military power was the stick, and the monopoly on the provision of global quasi-public goods was the gingerbread of global governance of liberal origins. In the 1990s and 2000s, if you wanted to develop, get foreign capital, get access to international markets on preferential terms, you had to meet the conditions imposed by liberal institutions created in the West. The institutions, money and power of global liberalism were, as the English say, “the only game in town“. Small and medium-sized states that wanted to take a seat at the table of global governance had to accept the rules of the liberal club.

These aspects enabled the emergence of globalization and glocalization as defining phenomena of the post-December period. Glocalization has changed the world economy and governance. This ensured an unprecedented level of trans- and international connections of industrial, energy, cultural and political networks. Local and global became more important than national. The political effect of this dynamic was to tie the hands of small states, which were ultimately forced to submit to a liberal political and socio-economic model if they were to continue to benefit from the liberal order. They have also had to give up the power to make laws and regulations in favor of local (“decentralization”) and global (international organizations) authorities. The result was an unprecedented level of economic, energy, industrial and often political interconnectedness. In such a context, the main disciplinary actor was no longer the state, this old Leviathan, but the market – the global monarch, which relentlessly exercised its disciplinary power. For all the benefits and costs it brought, such a global order could not endure. The liberal global monopoly had its own contradictions, which were eventually exploited by new competitors.

The end of the global order

Just as any monopoly in a market with low barriers to entry cannot last, neither can a liberal monopoly on the provision of global quasi-public goods last in the long run. American military superiority and the Western monopoly on the provision of global quasi-public goods have been destroyed by revisionist states seeking to capture a share of the “market” of international relations. States such as China or Russia do this in two ways. First, they use the economic opportunities provided by the liberal system to close the material gap with the West, accumulating an ever-increasing level of material power. The inevitable result is a decline in the relative power of the US vis-à-vis the rest of the world, but especially China. Second, revisionist states have developed alternative global quasi-public goods to those offered by the West. Their purpose is substitutive, offering alternatives to Western quasi-state services and goods, effectively eliminating the existing monopoly. This means that small and medium-sized countries no longer have to turn to the World Bank or the IMF with their neoliberal rules and liberal political conditions, but now also have alternative sources of capital. This was not possible in the 1990s or 2000s. This development ended the liberal monopoly on the provision of global quasi-public goods and created a new strategic market in which small states are buyers and large states are sellers, trying to sell their own global goods. quasi-public goods and own socio-political model. This increases the relative power of small and medium-sized states, which no longer find themselves in monopolistic, unified relations. If they are not satisfied with the conditions of liberal institutions, small and medium-sized states are now free to move to institutions created by China or even Russia, which have their own conditions and rules. The same can be said about collective security and defense guarantees. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro