Pax Economica and Its Discontents

Too early to say," answered Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in response to a question from Henry Kissinger sometime in the early 1970s about the historical impact of the student protests in Paris of 1968. 1 A popular, if alas apocryphal twist on this reported encounter has led to a much-repeated anecdote: that what the Chinese statesman was saying to his American counterpart, on the eve of their détente, was that it was still too soon to assess the world-historical impact of the French Revolution. 2 Fifty years on, is it still "too early to say" about 1968-or indeed 1789?According to some eschatologies, it may be constitutively, and thus perennially too soon to conclude anything, at least up to the very "end of history."But for more mundane purposes, the year 2025 seems an apt one to reflect on the shifts in world order taking place within a system that, to put it roughly, came out of 1789 and was given its current inflection around 1968.Our present form of economic globalization emerged out of the imbalances and realignments of the late 1960s, with their social and geopolitical convulsions including anti-war agitation, decolonization, radical student protests, and the rise of the New Left and its associated social movements.These convulsions reflected the end of one era-the immediate post-war generation-and ushered in the next, a period of rapid social change and economic liberalization often called "neoliberal." 3 They did so in a system that had its constitutive foundations in what we can call "1789"-a "modern" system of nation-states