My new book and how it fits within the concluded tetralogy. Should there be a pentalogy?
My books so far have been attempts to describe the current moment in world history. I probably would not be writing geopolitical books at all if I was not convinced we are going through a moment of radical transformation in the deeper structures of world politics and the world society.
As you might expect, the first two books are more modest in scope and more traditional. In Dawn of Eurasia and Belt and Road I am interested in the transformation taking place in the system of states. They are books about the emergence of a multipolar world system. In part, this is about China, but not only: the concept of Eurasia is meant to reflect a much more complex picture where many different models are forced to coexist in the same integrated space. In Belt and Road I attempt to look at the Chinese vision for the world order from the inside. In both books this Chinese vision is one among many. I never take seriously — well, not for more than a few pages — the possibility that the existing system might survive with China replacing America at the apex.
The third book, History Has Begun, is more ambitious — by a few orders of magnitude. On the one hand, I became concerned with changes happening not at the level of the system but within one of its units. On the other, discussing the structural transformation of the United States, the dominant piece in the world system, forced me to advance concrete notions not about the global distribution of power but about much deeper historical forces: culture, ideas and that Holy Grail of historical reflection, the transvaluation of values. How do new ideas and new values enter history? I suspect that even if I end up writing a dozen books, History Has Begun might remain my favourite and boldest book.
And yet, something was missing and to fill that gap was the task for Geopolitics for the End Time. In an obvious sense, this is an even more ambitious book than History Has Begun. In the new project I am not interested in the system of states or the units forming this system but in the emergence of a new actor or force: nature or the external environment. As the pandemic made obvious, the system of states does not exist in a void. It must be placed against an external environment. Neither its dominant units nor the system as a whole can be understood without reference to the most powerful vector in the schema.
The pandemic signaled a change. If power is understood as the ability to change and shape social reality, then the virus quickly revealed itself as the new superpower. All policies were quickly measured and evaluated according to their ability to stop the spread of infection, and a number of dramatic changes to the way we live were imposed with little or no democratic deliberation, as if the final arbiter to which one must appeal had been transferred from the people or the general will to nature or the natural environment, of which the virus stood as representative. Even the most radical political movement could never have dreamt of what the pandemic brought about: a radical and uncontested change to collective life.
The question for my readers: does this complete the projected tetralogy or is anything missing? Once you have discussed the system of states, its most important units and the external environment where everything happens, what is left?