12.10.2025, Germany.
We can hope for a slow transition to multipolarity, and we should equally fear that this will be accompanied by major military conflicts
Wolfgang Streeck is one of the most renowned European scholars working at the intersection of sociology and political economy, and is the honorary director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. In his book Between Globalism and Democracy: Political Economy in Late Neoliberalism, the German scholar describes the gradual transformation of capitalism under the influence of neoliberalism, followed by the emergence of a unipolar world with the United States as the hegemon.
According to Streeck, this formation was initially unstable, and a moment had long since arrived, starting from which the US could maintain its hegemony only through constant warfare. The growing dominance of China has brought the world to the threshold of a new Cold War, and the claims of rapidly developing countries to expansion and dominance always carry the threat of large and bloody conflicts.
In an interview with Lauren Balhorn, editor-in-chief of Jacobin magazine, Streeck spoke about his understanding of current world processes and possible paths of development in the context of the Middle East conflicts, the Russian special operation, and the growing role of BRICS on the world stage. Rossa Primavera News Agency publishes an abridged translation of the interview.
Lauren Balhorn: Let’s talk about the turning points of the last 30 years. I wonder — we could now look at the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, as triggers for certain fragmentations, but can we consider the point after the financial crisis [in 2008] as when all this began to break apart?
Wolfgang Streeck: Yes, yes, I show that in my book as well. The curves on the graphs showing the increase in world trade, the increase in capital movements after 2008, are flattening out or going down.
Lauren Balhorn: Yes, and at the same time, China is beginning for the first time — well, not the first time, but more and more — to build an independent industrial policy.
Wolfgang Streeck: They essentially had it before, they just kept quiet about it. That is, to formulate a hypothesis very boldly, one could say that China is a nationalist state that supports a capitalist economy. And America is a capitalist economy that supports a state. And these are completely different dynamics. If we consider the rise and fall of neoliberalism — and I say it is exhausted, it’s finished off — then we can take these 30 years and examine it.
The place where neoliberalism began to rot with grave consequences is American society. The number of prisoners in jails, the number of deaths from drugs, destroyed families, the Midwest, which began to fall apart along with deindustrialization… And we always look at San Francisco and New York! I mean, not you and I, but Europeans. And they say, “everything is just wonderful.” Nothing is wonderful there! And it is a truly sick society.
I have a memory of this. In 1992, I think, when Clinton was elected <…>, we saw how the machine-building industry migrated from Milwaukee to the south.
We saw that it could have been retained with the right HR policy, and to build something that would strengthen the workers’ bargaining position relative to the employers. Harley Davidson was one of those companies. And then we saw that even the unions had this problem — partly, they had long since laid down their arms.
And another situation was added to this. In the first two years of Clinton’s administration, there was this Dunlop Commission, which was looking for ways to strengthen the trade unions. And you have to imagine that — in the American political economy! This whole entertainment had lasted for two years, and then there were the midterm elections [in the US Congress] — and control passed to Newt Gingrich (Republican, Speaker of the US House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999 — note by Rossa Primavera News Agency). It took two months for Clinton to completely change the government’s policy. And then neoliberalism went into full force, abolishing social policy, social, as it was called, welfare. “Welfare as we know it. Yes, we are cancelling it.“
It became clear how thin the ice of the remnants of social democracy in America was. And then one could observe how in the United States everything moved more and more in that direction. Until the moment came when this unipolar world could only be maintained through constant warfare. Since 1990, there hasn’t been a single day when the United States hasn’t been at war with someone.
And then the “war on terror” began, and then you could see how the curve of military spending in America, in a very short time, rose above the peak spending of the Cold War era. Then these insane operations began — Iraq and so on. The destruction of all state structures in the Middle East. Libya and others — all smashed into pieces, except Israel.
And this was an attempt to transfer the superiority, which was once economic and cultural, to military power: “If you can’t learn anything else from us, then you must at least obey.” And I was, in a way, a witness to this transition — the dismantling of the post-war order, and then the transition to the neoliberal path, which then, in fact, failed, and this was already visible from the crises of that time.
We are still suffering from it now, because they [the US] thought that when you pump incredible sums of money into the economy — that’s Keynesianism. Only they forgot that in Keynes’s theory, these debts must later be repaid. But nothing is repaid there, it all continues. And Biden did it again later because he thought it was supposedly industrial policy. I just want to say that the fish began to rot from the head, but then it armed itself to the teeth and tried to catch another fish.
And when all this was implemented, one no longer had to take one’s own society into account. And then they were confronted with this hopeless demagoguery of Trump, who now offers them something like a kind of fantasy of omnipotence.
Lauren Balhorn: Yes, absolutely. But I mean your previous description of the Midwest, as extinct, dissolving. It also describes my childhood impressions very well. Significant parts of the country are truly dissolving. Social ties are disintegrating. This is a social degradation that Europe sometimes cannot quite imagine, I think.
Before that, you said that neoliberalism is finished. In 2008, there was the famous Newsweek cover “We are all Socialists now,” meaning we’ve been hearing for 15, even 17 years, that this system is finished.
Nevertheless, if you look, for example, at how many large corporations have their headquarters in the US, how many reserves are held in dollars, then the centrality of the US remains, in my opinion, undeniable. If we look at the last, say, four years, with the war in Ukraine, with Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT system and from various international connections, do you think this war has accelerated deglobalization and brought [the world] to a new level? Because, in my opinion, we are now facing a cold war with China. Many countries of the Global South probably do not agree with the sanctions, but does the financial system created by the US remain, by and large, stable, or not?
Wolfgang Streeck: No, no, no. I don’t see it that way. Let’s say, with predictions, I have always been and remain very, very cautious, precisely because I adhere to historicism, according to which the theory of history must allow for coincidences and, so to speak, strange occurrences. For example, when there is a war — Clausewitz said that war is a game of dice — you no longer know how things will go. Everything can go this way or that. And there are many wars now.
But I want to say, the sanctions against Russia are not working. Many see this. The BRICS countries are trying right now to establish a Development Bank in the financial system that will allow them to build the technology of a settlement system that no longer uses the dollar. At first, people will shrug: “My God, why shouldn’t they pay in dollars?” But this is a glaring problem because the Americans derive the global claims of their economic-legal system from the fact that today no one can pay anyone anything in such a way that the funds do not pass through some New York bank. And this means they can fall under any sanctions.
Lauren Balhorn: Yes. That is what is a problem for Russian elites right now.
Wolfgang Streeck: Yes, exactly. And that’s why they are starting to build something of their own. And they need it. And as I see it, all this is leading to a kind of new multipolarity. In other words — the Americans will not succeed in restoring unipolarity. But they will try. And it can end up very bloodily. Lately, the thought came to me that major manifestations of capitalism in its drive for expansion are always associated with major wars.
The Dutch displaced the Genoese from the world with their fleet. The English, with the Anglo-Dutch war, moved the center of capitalism from Amsterdam to London. On the European continent — the foundation of the German Empire, which should not be underestimated at all: modernization, a new capitalist power. The First World War is very important — the destruction of the traditional empires that still existed from feudal times, their replacement by nation-states, and at the same time the Treaty of Versailles, which, by the way, is very interesting because for the first time it provided for collective agreements, autonomy, and trade unions, they were even included in the Versailles Treaty.
And in the section that establishes the International Labour Organization, it speaks of injustice in the sphere of labor, in industry, etc., and therefore something had to be done. And for that to happen, we need freedom of assembly and freedom to form organizations, and the like. And in 1918, in the [Versailles] Treaty, the International Labour Organization is created for this. I call this the First Postwar Settlement. But none of it works. Partly, one can say, because the Americans did not participate in it. And because the British Empire was fundamentally broken and could no longer play the role of hegemon, and the Americans did not want to.
And then the question arises, should, and could, Japan and Germany become independent centers of predatory capitalism? But then follows the “second postwar settlement.” The Second World War solves these problems and puts capitalism on “new feet,” on the “feet” of the Bretton Woods system.
I wonder, there was also the end of another war, namely 1990 — the end of the Cold War, which of course was also connected with the arms buildup in America: “we will drive them to death” and all that. Gorbachev understood in time that it was better for him to get out of this with his skin intact. And then the question arises: after 30 or 35 years, has the situation again reached a point where a major “cleanup” in a war between America and China is looming?
Lauren Balhorn: In this respect, is Ukraine at best a secondary theater of operations?
Wolfgang Streeck: In this respect, Ukraine, let’s say, is a place where various world forces have learned that you can’t just free yourself from the Americans so easily. That the expansive force of American capitalism and militarism is getting closer and closer to a nuclear state.
Although the Americans themselves have no security problems. You know the country better than I do. They sit on a continent, a huge continent. They have only two borders, which are essentially not borders: one with Mexico and one with Canada, and besides that — two oceans. This huge country has everything it needs. They can lose as many wars as they want — they won’t even notice it.
They lost the war in Iraq. Now imagine, after the war is lost, the Iraqi fleet, the Navy sails up the Potomac River and demands that George Bush be handed over to be delivered to a military tribunal in The Hague. Complete absurdity — even though the Americans lost the war. They don’t even notice it.
And in this regard, I believe that in the world (in Brazil, China, etc.) — the idea has nevertheless taken hold that if you want to break out of these shackles and destroy the hegemony… By the way, in my book, I calculated: the imperial rent that the hegemon [receives] must exceed the costs of [maintaining] the empire. And something must be redistributed within the metropolis so that the citizens agree to maintain this colossal military power. One could say that at some point this balance became negative for the Americans. That’s when MAGA appeared.
Now we have a falling hegemon who doesn’t know what he wants. Does he want to heal the economy by squeezing even more out of others, or does he want to heal the economy by putting his own house in order and leaving others alone? With Trump, it was never clear which of these two [options] he wanted to implement. I think the world has realized that we need to do something.
I am now reading about plans to create a BRICS Development Bank, which operates with a currency other than that of the United States. And then I hear that in America there are discussions that “we will attack the first one who makes a contribution to this bank, because this [contribution] is a declaration of war.” I would say that we can hope for a slow transition to multipolarity, and we should equally fear that this will be accompanied by a war for restructuring. Wars can be used to write off debts. And at some point, this debt must be written off.
Lauren Balhorn: If we look at the not just looming, but already ongoing conflict between the United States and China, if you read the press releases or statements of the Chinese Foreign Ministry lately, they constantly say that they want to protect the rules of free trade and the world of free trade. That is, they present themselves as defenders of the status quo. I am not an expert on Russia, but in my opinion, the Russians have no clear ideas at all about how the world market should be structured.
So what is the essence of the conflicts then? The elites of this world perhaps desire a certain emancipation from American domination. But I see no other competing ideas about a different economy, a different social structure.
Wolfgang Streeck: I believe that such development happens not through ideas, but through the intolerability of the existing situation. They must feel it — it can’t go on like this. As Lenin defined a revolutionary moment: “the upper classes cannot, and the lower classes do not want to.” And that the upper classes can no longer is indeed visible from the accumulating crisis symptoms. That at the last moment they are forced to resort to violence if they want to try to hold on to anything at all.
And the lower classes must begin to perceive the dominance of the large American tech conglomerates more and more as a problem for their own sovereignty. And then they will have to muster the courage to do something. And they are watching each other. How strong is he? What is this Trump doing?
Just yesterday I saw this email that [NATO Secretary General Mark] Rutte wrote to Trump. God! He writes like a field commander [would write] to Emperor Caligula! Licking his feet! One can say that when a system collapses, then you see madmen coming to power, because others can no longer [come to power]. If you look at how the madness has intensified in recent years, one can say that the Chinese remain the only ones who think more or less sanely. Chinese foreign policy is always a policy of stability. It is quite possible that they understand that if a war starts now, they are by no means certain to win it.
In America, the discussion about Thucydides among strategists is becoming increasingly acute. Thucydides explains the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War by the fact that the Athenians attacked Sparta, the Spartans, not early enough, while they were still so weak that they could have been easily dealt with. They missed the right moment, and yes, in American strategic discussions, as far as I can follow them, this always plays a role. When? Shouldn’t it be now?
Lauren Balhorn: If we consider the current political situation: the upper classes perhaps can no longer, the lower classes no longer want to, but those social actors on whom we, perhaps 30-40 years ago, still relied, are incredibly weakened compared to that time. In Germany, probably a little less than in the Midwest, but overall, all social actors to which the left historically related are weakened. Do you see potential sources of resistance or creation of a new world? Is there hope anywhere?
Wolfgang Streeck: Well. As a scientist, I would say: we really need to “bundle up.” There are very few remnants of a reliable peaceful world order left, both in domestic politics and in the world, on which one can still rely. “Bundle up” means really start preparing, as it could have catastrophic consequences.
I was born in 1946 and, after a temporary stay in a refugee camp, grew up in Münster. It was a pile of rubble then. I still remember these ruins, we played in them as children. My mother was always terribly afraid that we would step on some unexploded shell. After the war, reality looks like that!
But [the new] generation, these people, these ‘baerbocks‘ or whatever they are all called, they have no idea about this at all! They think that war is a tool that can be used to do good. No, no, it’s something completely, completely different. It is the potential unleashing of violence that hangs over us, and at the same time the demoralization of people who no longer recognize a collective capacity for action, who sit and say “well yes, every man is the architect of his own fortune,” and all that.
Back in union training, they told us: “Guys, no, no, no, the lessons of the past are quite different, you can achieve something, but only if you show solidarity.” Where does that still exist today? And here I can say: if something is not restored by all possible means, then the future could be extremely bad.
Lauren Balhorn: Encouraging words from Wolfgang Streeck. Thank you very much for a very interesting discussion.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
