How the post-1989 order exhausted its legitimacy, why crisis became the dominant political weather, and why that breakdown created room for new ideological projects, including the new right.
The “liberal moment” never described a single treaty or summit. It captured the belief, widespread after 1989, that open markets, open societies and a US-backed rules-based order would steadily expand and anchor global stability. Scholars of international relations show how this order grew out of a Cold War compact that linked open markets with welfare states and security guarantees within a limited Western club; when that compact was exported without its social foundations, the project became vulnerable in ways now visible. By the mid-2000s, liberal internationalism existed as a global language and infrastructure, yet confidence that it could organise the world’s crises had already begun to fray. That erosion is now widely read as a crisis of order rather than a temporary policy failure.
The global financial crisis of 2008 marked the first decisive rupture. The collapse of Lehman Brothers exposed a decade of highly leveraged financial innovation across US and European banking systems, forcing states to socialise private losses on an extraordinary scale. Governments in advanced economies stabilised their financial sectors through guarantees, liquidity injections and recapitalisation, but the subsequent recovery was weak and uneven, with asset prices and high-income gains outpacing wage growth. Empirical work links local exposure to job and income shocks from the crisis to rising support for parties hostile to globalisation and more sceptical of international cooperation.
The promise that globalisation would lift all boats had already been under strain, but the crisis made its distributive asymmetries undeniable. Trade and capital mobility increased aggregate output; they also accelerated deindustrialisation in regions less competitive in global value chains. Political economists describe this as a Polanyian moment in which markets have been disembedded from social protections, prompting demands for re-regulation and protection. In many democracies, those demands initially took the form of protest against austerity and technocratic crisis management; over time, they fuelled movements that blamed liberalism itself, rather than contingent policy errors, for hollowing out social purpose and national control. That intellectual opening is central to the new right’s rise.
The same crisis that bailed out the bank dispossessed the homeowner. That asymmetry became one of the political facts of the age.
The COVID-19 pandemic added a second systemic shock that reached deep into everyday life. Lockdowns, border closures and supply-chain disruptions contributed to an estimated loss of 8.5 trillion dollars in global output over 2020–2021, while informal workers and small firms absorbed disproportionate damage across much of the world. The pandemic also exposed dependence on fragile logistics systems and deeply unequal access to vaccines, care and productive capacity. For many citizens, it became a lived lesson in how interdependence could magnify vulnerability when institutions lacked the legitimacy or competence to manage it well.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 then shattered another assumption of the post-Cold War era: that interstate war on European soil was unlikely and that borders would not be redrawn by force. The war accelerated the breakdown of cooperative security arrangements between Russia and Western states. It also altered energy and commodity flows with global consequences, feeding inflation and straining budgets in import-dependent countries, particularly across Africa and the Middle East. The war made clear that global order had entered a harder phase in which power, territory and industrial capacity once again sit at the centre of politics.
Overlaying these shocks is what recent literature calls a polycrisis: multiple, interacting disruptions—financial, health, security, climate and technological—whose combined effects exceed the sum of their parts. The concept matters because it explains why crisis now feels permanent rather than episodic. Climate shocks intersect with debt distress, food insecurity and contested resource governance, while digital technologies reorder labour markets and information systems faster than public institutions can adapt. Politics under these conditions becomes a struggle over who can name the crisis, who can allocate the pain, and who can promise protection credibly.
At the same time, the material distribution of power has shifted. The rise of China and India, the assertiveness of Gulf powers and the growing coordination among states that identify as the “Global South” have eroded the idea of a durable US-led unipolar era. Analysts now describe a fractured or post-Western order in which regional powers and issue-specific coalitions shape outcomes as much as the formal hierarchies of the UN or Bretton Woods system. That shift matters greatly for Africa, because it enlarges both the field of manoeuvre and the risks of renewed external competition.
Africa illustrates both the opportunities and ambiguities of this environment. The continent holds around 30 per cent of global mineral reserves and a particularly high share of cobalt, platinum group metals and manganese, all central to batteries, fuel cells and other energy-transition technologies. Analysts forecast that critical minerals could reshape global power over the coming decades, yet many producer countries still face severe constraints in infrastructure, bargaining capacity and local value addition. The contradiction is plain: Africa occupies strategic ground in the next world economy while still receiving too little of the value created from its own endowments.
The race for critical minerals has already prompted governments in the United States, European Union and Asia to redesign industrial policy around supply-chain security, strategic autonomy and friend-shoring. African and international policy analyses warn that, without deliberate strategy, this scramble risks reproducing familiar patterns of enclave extraction, weak industrial linkages and limited local processing. The same demand surge also creates leverage for producer countries and regional blocs that can coordinate positions and negotiate from strength.
This is the environment in which the new right flourishes. Its intellectuals argue that the liberal order promised security, prosperity and a stable identity yet delivered recurring crises, stagnant living standards for many and cultural flux. They treat the polycrisis as evidence that liberalism exhausted itself: economic interdependence exposed societies to shocks their institutions could not absorb; universalist norms weakened majority cultures; multilateralism diluted sovereignty without guaranteeing protection. That argument has gained traction because it converts diffuse anxiety into a political diagnosis and turns disappointment into programme.
Politics after the liberal moment therefore unfolds as a contest over what replaces the old order. Technocratic centrists propose incremental repair; various left projects argue for socio-ecological transformation; the new right advances a restorationist vision organised around nation, culture and control. The outcome of that contest will shape how crises are governed, how extraction is structured and how emerging actors, including African states, turn structural leverage into durable agency.
Understanding the New Right
- 1. Politics after the “Liberal Moment” ← You are here
- 2. The global context: looming wars, extraction race, and fragmentation
- 3. Anatomy of the new right: ideas and infrastructure
- 4. What the new right wants
- 5. Beyond the West: resonances in Asia and the global South
- 6. Interim reflection: why this project fits this moment
