Summary of “Post-westphalian sovereignty in the post-global world"

In this article Evstafiev and Meghevic lay out the conditions of what they purport

to be the new contours of a post-westphalian and ultimately post-global world. Both

authors admit from the beginning that their analysis can only count as a preliminary

sketch of certain mega-trends that although carry consequences of universal scope and

that are seeming inevitable, are not yet developed for a more concrete and developed

discussion. Nonetheless their overall thesis seems to be that the world is undergoing

changes that render concepts like “westaphalian sovereignty” and “globalization”

obsolete, making urgent a redefinition of the core structure of future international

relations.

By the “westphalian world” they are referring to the world order established in

1648 after the thirty year world according to the principle “to whom belongs the land,

belongs the right to determine the faith”, that is, the full sovereignty of those who live

within the bounds of one’s own nation-state. This order has been sustained up to this

day they claim by several intermediary international organization ranging from the

Holy Alliance to the United Nations that to this day facilitate international

cooperation under the pretext that this is a cooperation between “sovereign equals”.

The reign of the principle of westphalian sovereignty has been coupled with the

seemingly inevitable process of globalization which has today come to its logical end.

As the authors confirm globalization has reached its peek in the 1980s and 90s

through three processes that they call the three D’s, citing a report from the World

Bank offered by the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman; that is, the increase of density of
urbanization, the shrinkage of distance between points of concentrated economic

wealth, and the qualitative development of interconnectivity between these points. All

of these processes have paradoxically led to the classical concept of sovereignty

becoming totally obsolete as suggested by the coining of new conceptions such as

“the death of distance”, “border-less/flat world”, “the end of geography”.

This essay does not focus of the specifics of how and why we are transiting to a

“post-global” world order and rather take it as a given. The focus is on what are the

main characteristics and consequences of such a mega-trend. Here the authors point to

a clear formalization of separate regional blocks through the utilization of territorial

(politico-economical)and para-terriotorial (financial, informational) resources based

on shared interests in a world of uneven development (or as the author defines it

development of “various speeds” “разных скоростей”).

The main problems that will emerge revolve around the synergy between these

territorial and para-territorial mechanisms and their effect on the sovereignty of

nations in a post-global world. The fact that the formation of regional blocks will be

according to geo-economic parameters and not on traditional boundaries or

institutions will render the concept of sovereignty unable to sustain such radical

changes. To facilitate these questions the author underscores the importance of the

politico-economic hybrid nature of the current times. This makes the concept of

sovereignty practical and not formal, until the boundaries that are at the moment being

redefined by the great powers have congealed into a more concrete setting.
 Summary of “Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’:The Belle Époques of British and

U.S. Hegemony Compared”

This ambitious comparative analysis of the symmetrical so-called double

movement of the British and American empires by Silver and Arrighi through the lens

of Polanyi is a masterful work, all the more prescient in the demanding times we live

in today. This double movement refers to the “belle epoques” and eventual fall that

each empire faced and is facing in the turn of the 20 and 21st centuries. The crux of

their argument is that each hegemony was buttressed by a artificially sustained period

of liberalization, the unraveling of which led to the collapse of the hegemony itself.

The British period of liberalization was undoubtedly centered around the global

gold standard that was formally set in place through the Peel’s Act of 1844. Ironically

as the authors mentioned it is more accurate to call it the global sterling standard,

since current account deficits of gold were constantly compensated by trade surpluses

of imperial colonies, mainly India. This is the first revelation of the artificiality of the

seemingly automated smoothly flowing liberal order. The second would be the

so-called liberalization of the global trade through the Poor Law Amendment Act of

1834 and the Anti–Corn Law Bill of 1846. This was propounded as a favorable move,

due to the fact that indeed British manufacturers have gained the most by harnessing

new technologies of the scientific revolutions of the time. However especially after

the Crimean War and the deflationary crisis of the 1870s and 80s that sprung out of it

as wartime production caused a surplus and production glut in the transit to the
domestic economy, chauvinistic and mercantile tendencies took the upper hand

rendering the “liberal” British world order obsolete.

Similarly the “liberal” global order that the US established was as fraught with

contradictions as its predecessor’s. Not only was the US manufacturing not as

competitive as was Britain’s, having to multiple times violate the very GATT

principles that they demanded of others; but they had to artificially rewrite the rules of

the game to increase their competitiveness on the world market in relation to Japan

and Germany, namely through the repeal of the gold exchange and the pegging and

devaluation of the dollar. Analogous imperial practices may be compared to today’s

situation where the oil price cap imposed on Russian oil or the ban on sales of

Chinese Huawei products betray the hypocrisy in the free trade ideology that stands at

the core of US hegemony. Silver and Arrighi go on to list other examples of such

“hypocrisy” from the times that they are writing in the beginning of the 21st century,

which goes to show the relatively short-lasting nature of the purported efficiency and

universality of these global systems of high-finance (haute finance in Polanyi’s

terms).

If from the point of view of geopolitics the main imperatives for each rising

power is the ability to control capital flows by right of the issuance of the world

currency, from an ideological point of view the task seems to be to convince all other

actors to accept this state of things as not only fair and sustainable, but also inevitable.

Once the former becomes no longer profitable for the reigning hegemony, the latter

loses its legitimacy as was proven in the double-movements.