Caesarism in the 21st Century: Crisis and Interregnum in World Order

By Eric Fattor

The troubles of the contemporary moment in history can be interpreted many different ways. Indeed, there has been no shortage of analysis and commentary on events like the attacks of September 11th, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring, the election of Donald Trump and the global pandemic. This book, however, argues that the most insightful analysis comes from the application of a neo-Gramscian framework that sees these events as “morbid symptoms” of an interregnum in world order between an older historic bloc of power losing its legitimacy and a still undefined new historic bloc in the process of being born.

Like previous interregnums, this period of transition is marked by eruptions of Caesarism where charismatic “men of destiny” boosted by populist fervor assume leading roles in the governing institutions of their states and make bids for global leadership or domination. Unlike previous eras, however, these “digital Caesars” have been most empowered by the proliferation of electronic information and media capabilities that have revolutionized human interaction since the end of the previous century.

At the head of superpower states and Silicon Valley technology companies, this new breed of Caesar is taking advantage of the loss of legitimacy in conventional institutions to remake the world according to their eclectic visions. Like previous Caesars, however, their power is fragile and will likely disappear assuming a new world order can take hold before they do permanent damage to human civilization.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781804130711

Eric Fattor

Eric Fattor is a member of the faculty at Colorado State University, teaching courses in international politics, security studies and political theory. His research and publications examine how media and information platforms constitute forms of power in global politics and play a key part in various forms of international conflict. 

Book preview

Caesarism in the Twenty-First Century

Caesarism in the Twenty-First Century

Crisis and Interregnum in World Order

Eric M. Fattor

First published in 2024 by

University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive

Exeter EX4 4QR, UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

Copyright © 2024 Eric M. Fattor

The right of Eric M. Fattor be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in research or for reviews, no part of this document may be printed or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, now known or hereafter invented or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.

https://doi.org/10.47788/FKUH3164

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-80413-070-4 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-80413-071-1 ePub

ISBN 978-1-80413-072-8 PDF

Cover image: The Chiaramonti Caesar. Musei Vaticani (Stato Città del Vaticano), Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: From Monsters to Caesars

1Caesarism and Crisis

2From Interregnum to Caesarism

3The Digital Revolution of Global Affairs

4The Caesars of the Twenty-First-Century Interregnum

5After the Fall of Caesar

Conclusion: The Paralysis of the Present

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

It is perhaps appropriate that a book about the crises and turmoil of the current historical moment almost never came to be due to the circumstances of one those very same crises. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced college and university teaching faculty around the world to move their efforts to online platforms, a process that required the consumption of an endless stream of emails, text messages and tutorial videos scattered across a wide array of media accounts affiliated with multiple institutions to properly coordinate. While many of these were obviously essential to bringing about the comedy of errors that was higher education between the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2022, a substantial majority were unnecessary and superfluous. Unfortunately, it was often difficult to tell the important ones apart from the superfluous ones. This was the case when Anna Henderson from University of Exeter Press reached out to me via email about writing a book for a new series on world order in the contemporary digital age. Believing it to be a solicitation from textbook sellers, I ignored it for several weeks. Only after going back to clean out the account did I realize it was something quite different, and quickly replied with as much contrition as one can convey through the notoriously impersonal platform of email that I would be interested in having a conversation about a possible book.

Anna turned out to be one of many great collaborators at the University of Exeter Press. She provided sage advice and shrewd insight in putting together the initial proposal and getting the project off the ground. Once the project was underway, Nigel Massen offered timely and essential feedback on where to make necessary additions and revisions that corrected some of the manuscript’s structural and conceptual flaws. Once the initial manuscript was done, David Hawkins provided a desperately needed review of the style and citations of the work. Together, they created a very positive and pleasant publishing experience.

A successful author also needs support from a wide array of professional and personal relationships. In the former, Micheline Ishay first introduced me to the thought of Antonio Gramsci and helped me make sense of a set of texts that are almost impossible to understand without the substantial assistance of a caring mentor. In terms of Gramsci’s thought applied to international relations, Jack Donnelly was not a big fan of this perspective, but upon seeing that I had taken a particular liking to it, figured it would be better for someone like me to lecture on it for his graduate students and gave me frequent opportunities to do so. This not only boosted my interest in doing research in the field of critical international relations, but also solidified my passion for teaching.

With regard to my tenure at Colorado State University, I have Michele Betsill to thank for very likely saving my academic career by bringing me on the faculty in 2018 and helping to make a temporary arrangement more permanent. I am also extremely grateful to Robert Duffy for being enormously supportive of both my teaching and my desire to be a fully fledged member of that esteemed faculty. I am grateful to all my colleagues for creating a warm and supportive environment at CSU but want to make special mention of my fellow teaching-oriented professors including James ‘Pigeon’ Fielder, Pamela Duncan and Marni Berg. Most importantly are the countless relationships I have built over the years with my students. If I were to name all the students who have influenced me in some way over the years, the list would be longer than the book itself.

On the personal side of things, I am blessed to have the support of a close network of family and friends who helped make this book possible. Sarah Hagberg was a great source of conversation on a number of topics related to the content of this book, as was Imke Voss both in our frequent correspondence and during those rare opportunities we get to talk in person. Blair Berg, Holly Walker and their daughter Lucille provided a tranquil Swiss summer setting for me to write substantial portions of the book. And as always, my parents Terry and Susie, my sister Kristie, her husband Jim and their son Thomas, and my brothers Nick and Troy have all in their own unique ways contributed to bringing this work to a conclusion.

Finally, I want to make special mention of my lifelong friend Shawn Kelly and his wife Glenda Kelly. Over the last few years especially, I have sought the comfort of their company and been grateful that they have always welcomed me into their home. I dedicate this book to them and their daughters, Katelyn and Krista. It is for their sakes, and those of their generation, that the crises of the current era must come to an end.

Introduction:

From Monsters to Caesars

World Order in Crisis

World order is in disarray. This observation has become conventional wisdom among observers and analysts of global politics.1 And at the heart of this observation is a debate about the fate of the United States in this newly competitive and contested environment. While many argue that the United States will remain (and ought to remain) at the center of any reconfiguration of global power, others quickly point to the rising power of China and the leading indicators that show Asia as the new center of gravity in the making of world order.2 Beyond the discourse focused on great power politics, developments pertaining to the growing volatility of global finance, the increasingly severe impacts of climate change, the struggle to confront and contain COVID-19, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia show the inability of the structures and institutions of contemporary global governance to meaningfully address these planetary challenges and the lack of leadership shown by the United States in confronting them.

Most curious, however, has been the emergence of a new breed of demagogue in positions of power, having ridden multiple waves of populist anguish and discontent brought about by these various crises. After what appeared to be an unstoppable wave of liberalization and democratization in places such as Russia, China and the Middle East, autocrats such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Prince Mohammed bin Salman and several others of lesser stature now rule their respective states with little recourse to democratic mechanisms or institutions. In more developed democracies, populist leaders have flirted with authoritarian power, showing little interest in constitutional procedures or historical precedent. Donald Trump is the most prominent example of this, but one can see Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey in the same light.3 Even if overtly authoritarian leaders are not occupying the highest offices, movements rooted in sentiments of exclusion and isolation, such as Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016, testify to a desire to reject traditional liberal principles. Of greatest interest, especially in the age of the revolution in digital media capabilities, is the rise of the ‘tech-lords’ of Silicon Valley and other hubs of digital information and commerce. Individuals such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel have access to information tools that make them arguably more powerful than any of the political leaders mentioned.

What has brought about such a dramatic turn of events? How did the liberal world order go from being described by Francis Fukuyama as ‘the end of history’ of which there was no alternative to Richard Haass writing, in 2018, Liberal World Order, R.I.P.?4 Without a doubt, one of the crucial answers to this question is the rise of digital media and communications technologies and the inability of the United States to adapt to the changes these new technologies made to the constitutive elements of the liberal historic bloc. At the core of this mismanagement was the assumption by the United States and the social interests and institutions that govern it that the revolution in digital production would be a boon to US power and the liberal world order that it protected. The digitalization of production and finance would generate vast sums of wealth and help facilitate economic growth in developing states. The leaps in military capability enabled by digital applications to the US armed forces would make US power unassailable and further entrench the structures and institutions of liberalism. Digital broadcast and social media would engender a ‘global village’ and a ‘flat world’ where pluralism and multiculturalism would take hold as the authoritarian regimes of the world toppled under the popular pressure that digital platforms created.5 Yet this has not happened. Instead of cementing an even greater legitimacy and acceptance of the fundamental tenets of the liberal world order, the rise of digital capabilities and the reorganization of society to which they have contributed have left the liberal world order in a position of existential precarity, and have empowered demagogues to attain seats of power in several states around the world.

Such losses of legitimacy and credibility among the institutions, ideas and material modes of production should not have surprised so many. A look back to the birth and rise of advances in industrial production, the creation of a mass working class and the emergence of more democratic forms of state shows a new configuration of power that created an existential threat to the then prevailing world order, which was rooted in landed aristocracies ruled by hereditary princes or regal emperors. The incompatibility of those newer liberal components of world order consisting of civil and political rights, mass-produced goods and republican forms of government meant that the maintenance of the old order could no longer be serviced by the prevailing hegemonic sponsors of global power, and the new liberal configuration of power would grow to replace it. The various revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the process of tearing down the old structures and reconstructing them with something new that constituted the new historic bloc. What the world is witnessing now may be the beginning of a similar transformation and reconfiguration.

Yet beyond the ability to recognize and describe the disruptions of the present age, prominent scholarship and foreign policy analysis seems frustratingly limited in what to make of these phenomena. While terms such as ‘crisis’ and ‘transition’ feature prominently, they are often not teased out with any theoretical rigor and remain descriptors of events rather than analyzers. If there is a deeper theoretical analysis, it tends to come from mainstream status quo perspectives that continue to assume all is well in the current assemblage of global power and that deeper and more structural problems do not exist—perhaps even a rebirth of liberal internationalism is on the horizon.6 Much of the reason for this is the difficulty much contemporary analysis has with the idea of major changes in world order. Indeed, the theoretical literature—especially the liberal mainstream perspectives that take the arrangement of global governance over the past seventy-five years for granted—has little to say about wholesale systemic change in global politics. Other theories, such as that of realism, may do a better job of studying change, but usually explain these changes in very elegant ways that do not go beyond mechanistic frameworks such as the balance of power and polarity.7

The Neo-Gramscian Perspective of World Order

Amid this lack of satisfactory explanation, interest has grown in more critical explanations for the current troubled times. In some of the less prominent academic and policy journals, as well as in pockets of alternative digital media output (including video and audio podcasts, subscription-supported newsletter writers and social media accounts), an intriguing line from a somewhat obscure Italian political thinker has gained substantial prominence and generated an enormous amount of discussion: The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.8 The line turns out to be a rather obscene mistranslation of the following line in Italian: La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.9 A direct translation of this phrase would read: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. However, owing to some artistic license by subsequent translators that is rarely corrected, the line is usually rendered to include the reference to ‘a time of monsters.’10

The original quote (however it is translated) comes from early twentieth-century political thinker and politician Antonio Gramsci, who wrote the line in his Quaderni del Carace (Prison Notebooks) while serving a twenty-year sentence. His incarceration began in 1926 and was part of a wave of arrests by the newly installed fascist government of Benito Mussolini, who was seeking to eliminate and silence his political enemies. For the next eleven years, Gramsci passed the time in his cell reading whatever material he could access and writing commentaries and analyses of the events happening around Europe (when he was able to learn about them). This was the period between the two world wars, when the classical liberal assemblage of power was in crisis, fascism was on the rise and socialists were trying to expand their own influence in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Gramsci was released from prison in 1937 owing to his deteriorating health, and died shortly afterwards.11

Despite the brutal and unforgiving conditions in which they were written, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks have been a great source of theoretical insight and serve as the jumping-off point for many rigorous studies of politics, political economy, sociology and history. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of international politics, where prominent scholars including Robert Cox, Stephen Gill, Mark Rupert, Claire Cutler and Kees van der Pijl have used Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as foundational material for the development of an entire critical theoretical tradition in international relations theory.12 This approach, alongside other conceptual traditions with more critical orientations, features a historical sweep and often serves to give sophisticated accounts of significant change in global politics. The various expressions of the current historic moment as a ‘time of monsters’ implicitly recognize the virtue of such a perspective (mistranslations notwithstanding), and for this reason this Gramscian perspective of international politics can offer a more satisfying explanation for the current crisis-ridden era in world order.

What is World Order?

The first of these intellectual contributions begins with a unique conception of world order itself. However, this is an idea that has many iterations, and to understand the uniqueness of Gramsci’s notion of world order it is worth looking at how the term is used in conventional discourse of world politics and US foreign policy. Henry Kissinger gives perhaps the most standard definition of world order by identifying the existence of an international system of sovereign states that include a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down.13 This take on order emphasizes the existence of a system or society of states that are bound to each other through a set of norms and behaviors to which all members or participants in the group subscribe. When all states are in agreement on what is and is not acceptable behavior, the conflicts and violence normally associated with an anarchic world subside as states see conforming to the rules as being in their interests, along with desiring to avoid the punishments that might come with flouting these rules. Both realist and liberal approaches to global politics can accommodate this idea of world order, though realists tend to see this order as coming about through power relations, while liberal world orders emphasize the essential role of international institutions and norms of nonviolent conflict resolution.14

The current crisis-ridden world order associated with US leadership is largely understood as a liberal world order as it rests upon a foundation of political, economic and institutional actors and ideas that manage and maintain it.15 According to Scott Lawless, each of these elements can be thought of as suborders that together comprise the much larger global structure or world order. This begins with a security order that posits the existence of rules and norms that prevent states from acting on their most aggressive or paranoid instincts and plunging the world into violent chaos; this is managed by such institutions as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or bilateral defense agreements between the United States and regional allies. Next, there is an economic order that further suppresses violent conflict through the elevation of trading relationships and the emphasis on power generation through national wealth accumulation, managed by such institutions as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Finally, there is a political order that buttresses key ideas such as territorial integrity and the recognition and upholding of international human rights norms through institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the EU.16 The period between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War saw this notion of world order become the prevailing framework of international relations among Western states before leaping to a worldwide operating system after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of globalization. This process of globalization, however, was never fully accepted by states outside the Western purview, who often protested vigorously at the prospect of having the institutions and practices of the liberal world order imposed on them.17

With this in mind, a more sophisticated and dynamic conception of world order comes from the scholar Amitav Acharya. This emphasizes some of the elements at the core of traditional realist and liberal accounts, such as the prominence of a system of states bound together by norms of Westphalian sovereign autonomy and leading roles for international institutions, but also draws the observer’s attention to the contested nature of this order and the place of non-Western states, nonstate actors and subnational social groups in challenging the primacy of the prevailing world order. This greater conception of the diversity of actors operating within the larger global environment in ways that do not necessarily conform to the norms and behaviors of the dominant world order reveals alternative perceptions of what world order should be and how it should operate. Upon recognizing the abundance of actors and alternative conceptions of world order, Acharya argues, there exists, despite some homogenization through international institutions and norms, local and regionally specific understandings and approaches to international order that remain a vital aspect of global order-building.18

World Order as a Historic Bloc

The neo-Gramscian perspective on world order differs primarily from the realist and liberal perspective in that it sees world order as a historical phenomenon that conforms to the dominant political, economic, and moral forces of a specific moment in time. For Gramsci, a political formation was composed of an assemblage of different elements tied to the material conditions of a particular historical era, including the various national political parties, the relations of production including the tensions between the social classes that owned, controlled or influenced this productive infrastructure and those that were subject to its discipline, and ideological agents that drafted a ‘conventional wisdom’ of what constitutes moral or virtuous thought and behavior. These might include leaders in churches and religious movements, schools and educational institutions, and thought leaders in media outlets. In his writings in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci draws his observations and experiences of these elements of political order mostly from the level of national politics or European politics. However, he also suggests that the dynamics at play at this level of analysis would be reflected in international politics: Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no question that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through its technical-military expressions, modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the field of international relations too.19

Scholars who have attempted to analyze global politics using this