winforbet gaming The Regimes of the Post-Post-Cold War World

My last newsletter before Thanksgiving was devoted to an argument about the potential resilience of both liberalism and democracy, even in a world where the post-Cold War liberal order becomes a distant memory. So naturally, this week, the president of South Korea, one of America’s most important democratic allies, decided to declare martial law.

Yoon Suk Yeol’s bizarre quasi-coup failed quickly and ignominiously, so you could say that it served, in its own way, as proof of liberal-democratic resilience. But if two weeks ago I was emphasizing the ways in which liberalism might benefit from a return to the more multipolar and ideologically contested pre-1989 world — by trading hubris for hardheadedness, absolutism for realism — in South Korea’s modern history and its present situation you have a reminder of just how much more fraught that world can be.

The non-totalitarian half of the Korean Peninsula became a stable democracy only in the last years of the Cold War, and even in the End of History era its internal politics have been anything but smooth. So if the post-post-Cold War world ends up looking more like 1945-89, we should probably expect more convulsions in countries that came late to the liberal order — and particularly in countries like South Korea that are especially shadowed by the world’s birthrate crisis and that have threatening enemies at their door.

But at the same time, as Yoon discovered, going directly from liberal democracy to Caesarism takes a lot more than just a brazen act of will. So in thinking about what a more contested world order might mean, it’s useful to start with the political formations that might take shape if liberal democracy isn’t simply overthrown, but instead evolves into a variety of regimes that mix liberal and post-liberal elements.

Such formations are taking shape already. Start with the model that many populist and right-wing parties have been seeking — a kind of fortress nationalism, in which the aim of the regime is to preserve and protect an embattled national identity and culture, a set of ethnic and linguistic and religious distinctives, by sharply limiting immigration and using state power for culturally conservative ends.

This is the model of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, most notably, but also the direction sought by many of the nationalist parties in Europe — with Giorgia Meloni’s in Italy and the Law and Justice Party in Poland being the most politically successful examples, and a rightward-shifting Israel representing a variation on the theme as well.

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