The End of the “World”

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.

Czesław Miłosz, A Song on the End of the World

If one listens well to the whispers of our local Zeitgeist and considers what emotion dominates public life in Western countries today, it is probably a sense of decline. There seems to be an increasingly widespread belief here that, as an international community, we are standing on the edge of a precipice. Apocalyptic visions of climate catastrophe, war psychosis, economic instability, social polarization, mental health crisis, the addiction epidemic—all strike a common tone in our collective mood.

It seems that the corporate media and the major press titles are even encouraging us to get excited in the key of a millennialism, ramping up its intensity and probably hoping to sell the related dangers as though they were celebrity scandals. However, this sense of deep crisis in our entire political and social system in no way undermines the equally widespread belief that we, here, in this part of the world, are the model for all conceivable societies today and in the future. Even standing on the precipice, we continue to chart a route that others should follow in our footsteps without hesitation.

Or maybe this peculiar inconsistency is just a mirage, an illusion? Maybe it actually hides a much deeper consequence of our attitude than an affect analysis would indicate? It seems that this sense of the end simply has a different real object than the one on which it overtly fixates each time. That it involves a displaced emotion whose real reference is something that must not be touched without the threat of real disintegration. The sense of unfulfillment is not so much about a world that is headed for disaster, but about a certain deep form of experiencing it, the contours of which are so broad that they have completely disappeared from our horizon. Like the protagonist of Truman Show, we have somewhat over-scaled the boundaries of what we consider the world. And, like him, we are beginning to have an uncanny feeling that something is slowly beginning to wobble in the foundations of this little parochial area in which we have become accustomed to living and which we have taken for so long to be the whole earth, nay – the cosmos!

Sleepwalked counter-revolutions[i]

The truth is that we have collectively slept through a couple of important systemic transformations that profoundly reshaped what we imagine the world to be in general. These were, moreover, specific transformations for which the traditional political dictionary reserves the name counterrevolution. Rather than bringing a spirit of change, opening up new possibilities, and fostering social transformations designed to emancipate increasing numbers of the globe’s inhabitants, these processes took the exact opposite direction. Their advocates even often used revolutionary rhetoric, employed a progressive, or at least modernizing, imaginary, or aroused the same collective sentiments one wants to live by hoping for one’s own empowerment. Their effect, however, has been to build an increasingly hierarchical world in which opportunities, rights and privileges are reserved for an increasingly select few.

The first in a series of these counter-revolutions was undoubtedly the transformation of capitalism carried out in the West. Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote about it, as usual, earlier than others: “Capitalism today is the protagonist of a great internal revolution: it is transforming itself, in a revolutionary way, into neo-capitalism. Contrary to what I said earlier, I could say that the neo-capitalist revolution is putting itself in the role of a competitor to the world forces that are going to the left. In a sense, it is moving away to the left itself. And, oddly enough, while going (in its own way) to the left, it tends to embrace everything that goes to the left. In the face of this revolutionary, progressive and unifying neo-capitalism, an unprecedented sense of world ‘unity’ has emerged.”[ii]

The essence of the transformation described here is the removal of real constraints on capital accumulation (from a communist or socialist alternative to a social-democratic correction) while activating “revolutionary” social energy to help experience the process as a profound emancipation. It’s a bit like someone removing a chair from under our seat, but in the process of our falling down convincing us that we’ve just learned to fly. And when one examines the meanderings of the “new spirit of capitalism,” this is exactly how it looks. In this perspective, the student movements, May ‘68 or the counterculture with its neo-avant-garde supplement conceal a deep ambivalence. Having to create alternatives at the cultural level, they may in fact have served to destroy alternatives at the level of deep economic and political structures. Today’s culture wars or identity revolutions are already taking place precisely in the social vacuum created at the time, which makes even the most insane and contradictory alliances possible. It is no wonder that the CIA or the arms industry today legitimize themselves with inclusiveness and defense of minority rights.

The second revolution that our collective mind sleepwalked through was the managerial revolution. Neo-capitalism developed a new and highly influential social class that is still a key component of the renewed system today. The professional managerial class (PMC) is today the benchmark and the main driver of capitalism, which has dealt effectively with all possibilities of its reform or overthrow. As Catherine Liu writes, this class plays a role of a “proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for polity change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of ‘giving back’ or reified forms of self-transformation. (…) It its politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance”[iii].

In a system tailored to the PMCs, democracy will be what serves the managers, culture will be what they enjoy, and politics will be what they can fulfill their ambitions in. Morality, on the other hand, will mean the sphere in which this class will apparently be able to distinguish itself from the rest and affirm its uniqueness. This is not, of course, some kind of simple appropriation or hegemony, but tectonic movements, in which the circulation of capital, the transformation of state institutions and a revolution in human habits come together in the production of a unified and maintained system that holds a monopoly on basic social values.

One can, of course, see traces of the transition from democracy to oligarchy in this transformation, although it should be noted that it is taking place not only with the approval of the majority of society, but as a result of the realization of its deepest, albeit entirely engineered, aspirations. In this sense, this counter-revolution is democratic, since most of us voluntarily entrust our fate to a select class for whom contact with the general public is a source of inconvenience rather than a source of pride. Like sleepwalkers, we follow the trends it indicates.

Today we are undergoing another, third counterrevolution, which of course emerges directly from the previous ones. Since democracy now means what an influential minority of the managerial class wants, and populism means what used to be called democracy, it is no wonder that we will have to sleep through this profound process of transformation as well. One can call it a transition from capitalism to techno-feudalism, as Yannis Varoufakis argues, or one can try to find in it the birth of a new, modernized fascism, as Pasolini prophesized back in the ‘70s. Either way, today’s transformation represents the final sanctioning of a world without alternatives[iv]. An order of organized and closely guarded monopoly that is beginning to resemble visions hitherto found only in dystopian sci-fi literature.

To the broader public, these revolutions were not noticeable at all, just as they escaped most of the commentators harnessed to support the changes taking place rather than to criticize them. Not surprisingly, in international politics, too, we have slept through the neoconservative revolution (a kind of necessary complement to these others), which now encompasses the entire world of Western politics. It jams the rhetoric describing the political system into stories straight out of Star Wars or The Fellowship of the Ring, so as to effectively caricature any alternatives that appear on the horizon. Even if their difference from the approved model is in fact negligible, in the public perception they must appear as figures of ultimate Evil, a universal existential threat.

After all, the rhetoric is meant to guard the validity of the vision of the end of history expressed by Francis Fukuyama immediately after the collapse of the USSR. This seemingly idyllic vision of the extinction of superpower conflicts actually meant the enactment of one of the craziest versions of messianism in history, whose reach was to be literally global. In addition, it is a messianism that recognizes that the messiah is already here and, moreover, has taken the form of the state apparatus of the United States of America. At the current late stage of the system of supposedly smooth flows and flexible identities, it takes less and less effort to see that this Truman Show-derived global Potemkin village the whole world was supposed to turn into actually has quite ruthless administrators and very greedy owners.

Today’s millenarist sentiment may be indicative not so much—or rather, not only—of real threats to continued life on earth, but of problems in maintaining the current system in the shape set by the effectively accomplished counter-revolutions. All indications are that this time we are not dealing with temporary turbulence that will only make the journey in the predetermined direction unpleasant, but with a powerful shock. Even if we can’t imagine it yet, that does not mean we are not starting to experience it.

For now, we can see mainly the convulsions of the system based on the TINA [There Is No Alternative] principle, which, having hit the wall, is still trying not to slow down. It turns out that without ideological alternatives, we will also have no viable political, economic, social, etc. alternatives. We will try to solve all the problems generated by this system through its own mechanisms (so adding fuel to the fire we want to extinguish) or project them outside and hold some exemplary external instance responsible for them. You wanted a world without alternatives, well, there you have it!

Even “climate catastrophe,” while trying to name a real threat, is actually a phrase that is somewhat conformist, as was the earlier “refugee crisis.” For we don’t have a problem with the climate or the refugees. We have a fundamental problem with a capitalist system that mass-produces climate destruction and the drama of mass migration. At the same time, the social groups and institutions fighting against these phenomena are not in a position to resist its sources—that is, the armed maintenance of US hegemony—alive. This is because they would have to go against the very foundations of their own position and placement in the world.

From this point of view, one can risk the thesis that the exercise of millenarist excitement by the mainstream of public debate is meant to sustain in us an atrophy of imagination, according to which (as Mark Fisher, Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson like to say) it is easier to think of the end of the world than any modification of the current system. Then apocalyptic sentiment would be as affordable as possible, representing the new currency printed by the Authority.

Legitimization of hegemony

As a result of a series of sleepwalked counter-revolutions, a unified world was created, which more or less successfully obscures the real mechanisms of the political process. The generation of a system of dams that prevented actual change was the most significant achievement of the builders of this order. And it is not just pure military power (although that too), but a whole range of intellectual, emotional, rhetorical and social habits that block the chance for a viable alternative as effectively as an anesthetic injection cuts off a patient’s pain. In the archive of the world we are currently experiencing, there is not even a compartment, however empty, reserved for authentic revolution—even if on the market of ideas and theories nothing sells as well as radical revisions and profound transformations.

Nonetheless, this system also has a legal dimension. It can be seen most clearly, in the institutions set up to express the beliefs and carry out the expectations of the “civilized world,” sometimes also called simply “the world.” One of these was the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the true culmination of the process of dismemberment of the country, which then—after the agony was over—the “world” still decided to judge. Although it purported to represent the triumph of reason and law over the nationalist carnage of the civil war, in fact, as some insightful commentators point out, its very creation involved undermining the basic principles of international law enshrined in the UN Charter.

For, since its validity is based on the belief in the “sovereign equality of all members,” it becomes problematic who actually judges whom at the ICTY. And since no one has brought before it, for example, the perpetrators of NATO’s unlawful bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, it is hard to avoid the impression that the “ICTY was empowered only to indict the victims of US and NATO assault, not the aggressors. The Court was ‘war by other means’, the corruption of international law and justice to pursue enemies.”[v]

The quintessential ICTY activity was, of course, the trial of Slobodan Milošević, accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. However, this most spectacular trial of the “butcher of the Balkans,” as the Western media liked to call the accused, was, as John Laughland, among others, convincingly demonstrates, a true travesty of the legal process. And not only because from the beginning everyone acted as if the accused had long been convicted and held responsible for all the cruel deeds and tragic events of the Balkan war. Not because numerous prosecution witnesses turned out to be completely unreliable and some even admitted that they had been blackmailed by prosecutors. Not even because during the trial Milošević was deprived of the possibility of a personal defense: first, he was forced to hire a public defender, and then he was tried even in his absence. All these admittedly preposterous circumstances cannot compete with the simple fact that the ICTY was a miscarried creation from the very beginning and essentially lacked proper legal grounds. It was widely legitimized which does not mean it was legal at all.

Laughland has consistently shown that the establishment of the Tribunal marks a seminal event indicative of an attempt to challenge the very basis of international law, which is state sovereignty. Henceforth, an institution can be established whose activities will, in essence, challenge this principle by giving the newly created entity the ability to transcend a state’s legal system. Consequently, the hitherto “horizontal” system of international law based primarily on mutual agreements between states will be replaced by something “vertically structured and coercive.”[vi] Indeed, since the ICTY was established by a UN Security Council resolution, this means that a minority of states can de facto create a judicial body capable of prosecuting international leaders without recourse to the laws of their states.

Although the founders of this Tribunal often cited the example of Nuremberg as a prototype for their actions, in fact, as Laughland shows, they exactly reversed the principles behind its origins. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed in 1948, required precisely state authorities to implement its provisions. That’s why Nazi criminals were tried by German courts. In the case of the ICTY, the same prerogatives have been given to a tribunal funded by selected countries (mainly NATO), which raises the reasonable suspicion that it constitutes a de facto military court over Yugoslavia, which was defeated in an illegal war. Moreover, the mediation of state institutions is necessary insofar as the court is also supposed to invoke the social contract and at least formal democratic control over its decisions. In the case of the ICTY, there can be no such thing.

In effect, then, the International Tribunal, which was intended to emulate solutions for bringing justice after the greatest trauma and greatest shame of Western politics, which was Nazism, in practice turned out to serve the establishment of a monopoly of Western states, especially NATO, to exercise legal sovereignty over the entire world. In this way, the participation of countries such as Germany and the US in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia disappeared from view giving way to a media hunt for a new incarnation of Hitler. And the embarrassment of the whole endeavor is completed by the fact that it was virtually impossible to prove Milošević’s alleged acts and the prolonged hearings increasingly justified his own arguments about the purely political nature of the trial itself.

How the “world” runs

The establishment of the ICTY, like the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002, were, in the words of the latter’s longtime employee and critic, Juan Branco, “the last promise of universality prepared by our declining civilization.”[vii] For it was a universality that was anything but biased and selective, as the activities of these institutions perfectly demonstrate. They do not represent any international community, but only the will of the most powerful actors, who, with the help of these institutions, established orders on the global stage that were convenient for themselves.

It is the formation of “the world”—that entity which we unknowingly refer to when we say and write that “the world” isolates someone, condemns someone or aims at something—or the “civilized world”, i.e. the Western world exercising indivisible control over all the rest, that was noticed by Peter Handke when he observed Milošević’s trial first-hand. He himself, by the way, was accused by the media, (and therefore, according to the new procedures, convicted) of endorsing the accused or defending his policies. However, reading Handke’s texts on the war in Yugoslavia, which most commentators shy away from, one can easily see that most of these accusations have nothing to do with reality.

Looking at the activities of the ICTY, Handke draws the conclusion that, lo and behold, this institution actually judges the accused “on behalf of the world,” whose “protagonists and creators” at the same time are prosecutors and judges. The functionaries of such a court become parties, since “paid by the ‘international community’ they will never use their office against that community (the European Union, NATO, the U.S., etc.), but exclusively against the now almost entirely voiceless rest of the world, they are indeed parties … moreover, powerful and equipped with all kinds of coercive and violent means.”[viii] Thus we are communing, Handke argues, with “an upside-down world that has become a reality.”[ix]

In a “world” constructed in this way, the question of what really happened in Yugoslavia and how responsibility for it is shared by various parties to the conflict becomes completely irrelevant. What is important is the image or narrative that “the world” wants to present to itself and adjust reality accordingly. Anyone who does not accept this image is accused based on… this very image. This construction forms a perfect circle, although it presents in fact an upside-down reality. The judge is the accuser and the policeman, the witnesses are the accusers, the journalists are the judges and the accused is the already convicted. The law is lawlessness and the show trial is justice.

Handke, who studied law in his youth, also draws attention to the institutional peculiarities of the ICTY, which is being transformed from a criminal tribunal into a stage for the theater of “the world,” in which order and democratic authority are performed on behalf of those who deem themselves their embodiment. And this self-presentation of theirs is not subject to discussion nor judgment nor even critical examination. The victors take it all, write history and construct “the world” in their image and likeness.

Not only the ICTY, but also the International Criminal Court (ICC) has a peculiar identity of quasi-universality. It abolishes state sovereignty claiming the right to represent all of humanity. At the same time, however, it does not bring to justice the most influential states, which are sometimes responsible for destabilization leading to acts of extreme violence and war crimes in failing political institutions. Juan Branco even argues that this produces a Hobbesian state of nature, that is, a state of pre-state violence, wherever, such as in the Congo, the jurisdiction of the state and the reach of its stabilizing prerogatives are abolished locally.

In a state of nature, politics also disappears giving place to a permanent struggle for survival in the face of multiplying acts of lawlessness. And yet, by no means do countries of this type suffer from some natural backwardness or lack of wealth. On the contrary, precisely because of their potential, they often fall prey to arms dealers, international cartels and corporations or rebel movements financed by important international actors. Such a permanent crisis, a state of emergency that becomes the rule, becomes an element that the International Tribunals are supposed to remotely order although their selective actions sustain the very causes of these crises. Instead of the promised universality, there is only the fostering of chaos in which the superpowers and criminal groups, or criminal groups financed by the services of the superpowers, are best able to navigate.

As Juan Branco argues, the contribution of creations such as the ICC to maintaining rather than combating lawlessness also lies in the fact that instead of “judging the perpetrators after conflicts have ended,” they have begun to “legitimize a posteriori the moral superiority of the victors.”[x] A great example of this is again provided by the war in Yugoslavia and the Milošević trial, in which the ICTY sanctioned NATO bombing by drawing the attention of “the world” to the crimes of someone who had just been targeted for assassination (the president’s house was shelled by NATO forces). In the context of the many conflicts around the world, in the instigation of which Western countries have sometimes taken an active part, the question formulated by Branco arises: “what right do we have to judge for ourselves the fighters of the abandoned world of modernity, who could never have become fighters if they had not been paid and armed by external and multinational forces”?[xi] Among these forces one can also easily find states supporting ICTY or ICC financially and profiteering off of selective justice of those tribunals. In this sense, instead of representing any potential universality, these institutions provide a cover for the interests of the most powerful.

And how the “world” runs in its normal course can be seen by learning about the “American Service-Members’ Protection Act” adopted in the US in 2002. This law is also sometimes called more bluntly the “Hague Invasion Act.” It states outright that, as Human Rights Watch wrote, “military force shall be authorized to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S. allied country being held by the court, which is located in Hague.” In other words, the United States thus guarantees complete impunity not only for its own citizens committing, for example, war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq or other countries pacified by representatives of “the world,” but also for anyone who decides to join such a mission in an organized and official manner.

Today, as the main ally of the U.S. commits genocide in Gaza, “the world” is in for a real shock, since the ICC has decided to bring under its jurisdiction and try Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was immediately met with a written response from more than a dozen U.S. senators, who openly threatened Attorney General Karim Khan and his family with sanctions. As reported in The Guardian, various forms of pressure and threats against the ICC offices have been used by Israeli intelligence for nine years. In a recent interview, Khan revealed that a high-ranking U.S. politician told him that “this tribunal (the ICC) was created, after all, for Africa and thugs like Putin.”

After the Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, the U.S. administration actually officially admitted to ignoring international law by not only failing to recognize the ICC’s decision, but in the words of Mike Johnson admitting that “we don’t put any international body above American sovereignty.” It is worth recalling that just a year ago Joe Biden enthusiastically welcomed the tribunal’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, which his administration now considers illegal. Once again, the truth is confirmed that only a broken tool reveals its full functionality.

The end on the horizon

In an attempt to imagine what a climate catastrophe might look like, some researchers have decided to look for historical prefigurations of such an experience. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski even recognized that in order to find out “what it’s like” when the world ends, one must find out how the indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced colonization. “The indigenous population of the continent, larger than that of Europe at the time, may have lost—by means of the combined action of viruses (smallpox in particular being spectacularly lethal), iron, gunpowder, and paper (treaties, papal bulls, royal encomienda concessions, and of course the Bible)—something of the order of 95 percent of its bulk throughout the first one and a half centuries of the Conquest. They would correspond, according to some demographers, to a fifth of the planet’s population.”[xii] This is how the Western “world” and its civilizational privileges were born.

There are many indications that the cultural, political, social and population shock that accompanied colonization may soon become the experience of the privileged center of the global system. And not just because the combined effects of polycrisis will force our governments to use increasingly ruthless forms of repression against pauperizing societies, but also because the so-called Rest of the World is just declaring disobedience to the West. And not only through the leaders of Russia, China or Iran, but also of West African or South Asian countries. The end of the “world” in which our beloved oligarchs have so comfortably arranged themselves is beginning to loom on the horizon.

The ICC’s recent rulings targeting Israel undoubtedly represent one sign of this transformation, even if they appear to many to be punitive and in no way change the political nature of the court itself. One does not preclude the other, as Ali Abunimah showed in “Electronic Intifada,” declaring the arrest warrants issued simultaneously against Israeli and Hamas leaders to be both historic and cynical. Why? Even if it is impossible to compare the scale of suffering caused by the activities of the two organizations, more Hamas activists than Israeli politicians are expected to sit on the indictment bench. Besides, the two who will be there have ceased to be convenient for the US administration anyway, which, building a symmetry of blame, will no doubt want to erase the traces of its own complicity in the genocide. Besides, the ICC did not even formulate genocide charges against Israeli leaders, but only accused them of crimes against humanity and war crimes, again on par with Hamas leaders. Mentioning the systematic rapes carried out by Hamas on October 7, or the absence of allegations of torture of Palestinian prisoners, are evidence of succumbing to repeatedly debunked hasbara reports. So is the failure to note the lawless nature of the Jewish settlements being erected in the West Bank, the failure that seems to sanction the notion that the conflict began barely last year.

Despite all these serious reservations, Abunimah is aware that the decision to deal with and actually prosecute representatives of “the world” at all has the character of a historic breakthrough. Not surprisingly, Joe Biden immediately saw the decision as an expression of “false symmetry.” The point is that any symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians, any concretely applied and realistically recognized equality between them will have a dimension of scandal for him. After all, he is one of the most perfect representatives of a globally applied Western chauvinism, according to which for what “we” do in broad daylight, “you” should rot in prisons for years.

Perhaps the collective spleen of our societies  comes from the premonition that this asymmetrical “world” in which we have come to construct our habits and consider them quite natural is just coming to an end. And that in the face of the Rest of the World’s growing desire to organize the system in quite a different way maintaining the existing rules may only prove possible at the price of World War III and a nuclear apocalypse, not to mention the climate costs of a new arms race. No matter how much domestic politicians, commentators or intellectuals insist that they are still about preserving democracy and justice, no one outside of their circles can even pretend to believe this anymore. This brings us to a situation where the only way to save the world will be to agree to the end of the “world” and all the associated—undoubtedly most painful for the deepest insiders—consequences. The famous ending of Czesław Miłosz’s poem—which functions in Polish almost like a proverb—says: “there will be no other end of the world”. It’s still to some extent up to us to decide whether, effectively, there will be no other end than the end of the “world.”

Notes:

[i] I refer here and try to build upon a concept created by Andrzej Leder, Polish philosopher, in his book Sleepwalkers’ Revolution. See, idem, Prześniona rewolucja, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warsaw 2014.

[ii] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Quasi un testamento, in: idem, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, Mondadori Editore, Milano 1999, p. 861.

[iii] Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders. The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 2021, p. 1-2.

[iv] Somewhat similar observations could be found in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, where the profound homogeneity of the otherwise polarised world is presented very succintly. Guy Debord, with his notion of the society of spectacle – operating on both sides of the iron curtain – also comes to mind.

[v] Ramsey Clark, Foreword, in: John Laughland, Travesty. The Trial of Slobodan Milošević and the Corruption of International Justice, Pluto Press, London – Ann Arbor 2007, p. XI.

[vi] John Laughland, Travesty. The Trial of Slobodan Milošević and the Corruption of International Justice, op. cit., p. 34.

[vii] Juan Branco, L’ordre et le monde. Critique de la Cour pénale internationale, Fayard, Paris 2016, p. 13.

[viii] Peter Handke, Rund um das Grosse Tribunal, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 21-22.

[ix] Ibidem, p. 22.

[x] Juan Branco, L’ordre et le monde. Critique de la Cour pénale internationale, op.cit., p. 77.

[xi] Ibidem, p. 156.

[xii] Deborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, Translated by Rodrigo Nunes, Polity Press, Cambridge & Malden 2017, p. 104.