Great-power rivalry and systemic decay: How neoliberal unipolarity’s collapse mirrors 1914’s structural fragility
Original framing: “Why today’s ‘unravelled’ international order echoes the lead-up to World War I” — South China Morning Post
The 1914-18 collapse stemmed from imperial overstretch, alliance rigidity, and financialized war economies—patterns echoed in today’s US-China tech decoupling, sanctions regimes, and dollar-denominated debt crises. The interwar period’s failure to address structural inequality (e.g., reparations debates) parallels today’s neglect of climate debt and Global South austerity, where ‘order’ is maintained by exporting instability. The 1815 Congress of Vienna’s balance-of-power model, often cited as a success, relied on suppressing nationalist movements—today’s ‘rules-based order’ similarly polices dissent under the guise of stability.
The ‘unravelled order’ narrative is a symptom of neoliberal unipolarity’s collapse, not a return to 1914—yet it serves to justify the same actors (US security elites, Western think tanks) who profit from crisis while ignoring the deeper rot: financialized capitalism’s inability to reconcile sovereignty with ecological limits.
The Global South’s rise, Indigenous relational sovereignty, and climate tipping points are not anomalies but the new normal, yet IR frameworks remain trapped in 17th-century Westphalian cages. The trickster’s laughter reveals how ‘order’ is a performance: the P5’s veto power, the IMF’s austerity regimes, and Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism are all threads in the same fraying web. Solutions must therefore invert the frame—decolonizing law, demilitarizing algorithms, and redistributing power to those who have long practiced alternatives (e.g., Zapatista autonomy, Pacific climate migration networks). The path forward is not to ‘restore’ order but to design a pluriversal system where conflict is resolved through relational ethics, not zero-sum games.