Civilization Is Not the Default. Violence Is.

On feudalism, Pax Americana and the changing world order

Detail from the Bayeaux Tapestry made in the 11th century, depicting (the very violent) Norman Conquest of England.

I read Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society for my yearlong book club on the development of the nation state, and the biggest takeaway is how tightly linked peace and development are. It sounds obvious but rarely do we see such a civilizational decline as the beginning of the Middle Ages.

When Rome collapsed, the Carolingian Empire rose up as a weaker, one-man (Charlemagne) attempt at continuation. It lacked the institutional depth of the Roman Empire, and coupled with the invasions of the Vikings from the north, Hungarians from the east, and Muslims from the South, it couldn’t maintain power.

Some networks remained like the city states along the Mediterranean, the Catholic Church, of course, and the Byzantine Empire, which survived for a thousand more years.

The first feudal age according to Bloch (roughly 860-1050) started after the fall of Charlemagne, when Europe became highly fragmented. It was a period of extreme instability and violence, which led to a declining population. Bridges and roads broke down, coin usage—and with it, trade—collapsed.

Towns and villages turned inward (often to local strong men) to protect themselves from chaos. This isolation forced each small community to rely on its own resources and customs, most went back to the very basic governance system of kinship. People depended precariously on subsistence farming (one frost and many would starve). Written laws fell into oblivion as most people became illiterate. Law became an oral tradition of custom, different from each village to the other.

Slowly, things changed.

Eventually, the Muslims were driven out of Spain. The Vikings integrated into the lands they had conquered (most of the UK and northern France). The Hungarians settled in the territory that now bears their name.

The “Peace of God” and the “Truce of God”, which prohibited war on holy days and protected civilians from war, were instituted by the Church around the 11th century to curb the rampant violence of the era.

The “second feudal age” (around 1050–1200) saw the beginnings of demographic recovery and commercial expansion. There was also a cultural renaissance as old Roman and Muslim works were translated. The study of Roman Law was revived in universities like Bologna.

It wasn’t until then, when peace grew, when nobles were able to focus on administration instead of warfare.

Increased trade brought a flow of coin and precious metals back into Europe. This allowed rulers to stop paying officials with land (fiefs) and start using money wages to hire a loyal, salaried bureaucracy.

Burgesses (bourgeois in French) became an important social class of professionals and merchants. They became frustrated by predatory local lords and often sought protection from monarchic governments. This alliance helped central authorities regain a monopoly on order and justice.

After four centuries of fragmentation, power gradually consolidated into larger kingdoms, each developing its own bureaucracy and, slowly, its own national identity.

Trust between strangers is foundational for civilization

The Roman Empire at its peak held a monopoly on violence which made complex civilization possible. It produced the physical infrastructure: roads, bridges, coins. More importantly, it produced the institutional infrastructure: law, contracts, enforceable agreements across distance. Together these created the conditions for commerce, which enabled specialization, which enabled everything else we call “civilization”.

These are public goods: things no individual actor produces on their own but everyone benefits from. And they require a dominant power to exist at all. Safe trade routes, standardized weights and measures, rule of law, none of these are maintained in a vacuum. They are the byproduct of hegemony.

The underlying logic is a reinforcing cycle: a monopoly on violence creates the institutional trust that enables commerce between strangers, commerce generates surplus, surplus funds stronger institutions and wider enforcement, which expand the radius of trust.

When the Roman Empire fell, the physical and institutional infrastructure collapsed with it and you got political fragmentation and erosion of trust, exactly what happened in the first feudal age.

Trade requires that strangers honor agreements, and that requires a power capable of enforcing them at distance. When that power disappears, you go back to subsistence economies and local strongmen.

Pax Americana

Is it a coincidence that the last 80 years—which have been the most prosperous in history—the period of globalization, of international rule of law, of deep economic integration, of innovation, happened during the Pax Americana?

Many love to hate the US—and the record is far from clean—but it’s largely because of American values and institutions that the world was able to develop as rapidly as it did, to integrate as tightly as it has.

I’m not talking about the absence of wars, there have been big wars (Vietnam, Korea, Iraq) but they’ve been more regional than global. Yet the US built and maintained specific institutions that reduced transaction costs and enabled the most rapid reduction in global poverty in human history: the dollar as reserve currency, US Navy guaranteeing sea lanes, or WTO dispute resolution.

The hegemon provides the scaling condition. The Roman Empire at its largest stretched from Britain to Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was the largest integrated political and economic space the Western world had seen, but it was always regional. At the same time, Han China dominated East Asia, the Parthian Empire controlled Mesopotamia, and the Kushans Central Asia. Linked by tenuous long-distance trade, each civilization operating largely within its own orbit.

What the US underwrote after World War II was the ability to scale and integrate all of the regional systems into a single global order. That had never existed before.

Now we’re seeing the fissures in a world order most of us took for granted, especially those of us from the West. The Roman and Carolingian collapses ended in centuries of fragmentation and violence. I don't think that's where we're headed, but there are some things I’m thinking about.

The erosion of the rules-based order

The institutions that were created after 1945 have lost legitimacy. Some because they have genuinely been co-opted. Remember when the WHO's director-general cut short a live interview rather than answer a question about Taiwan's exclusion?

Others, like the UN, read like satire at this point. Saudi Arabia chairing the UN Commission on the Status of Women, or literally a few days ago the UN Economic and Social Council nominated Iran to the committee that coordinates its programs on human rights, women's rights, and counter-terrorism. This is not a joke.

The weaponization of SWIFT during the Russian invasion of Ukraine has also made non-aligned countries wary of the “neutrality” of the institutions.

The rules-based order is as effective as the belief in the institutions that sustain it. Now, we see many countries openly defying them or simply not taking them into consideration.

The return of realpolitik

As the global institutional infrastructure weakens, raw power fills the vacuum. This is the natural state of things, just look at human history. What was unusual was this period of relative stability where countries didn’t need brute force because external institutions maintained order. That period seems to be closing.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine was the first large-scale territorial conquest of a recognized European state since WWII. Trump’s comments about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal, whatever you think of them, normalize the idea that borders are negotiable if you're strong enough to take them.

Violence and force are reasserting themselves as the primary currency of international relations.

Fragmentation and then multipolarity

What came after the decline of the Roman and Carolingian Empires was fragmentation. What comes after US hegemony will be a reorganization.

The US will not disappear, it will consolidate its own sphere: the Americas, likely Japan and Australia. Europe faces its defining choice: remain America's ally (which seems less and less likely), or build the military and economic muscle to stand on its own, especially against Russia.

China won’t replace the US as global hegemon. China is (and has always been) inward-looking. It will transact with whoever is willing, build strategic self-reliance, and expand economic influence without exporting ideology. China doesn’t care about the political structure of its trading partners, unlike the US which has always pushed for liberalism.

India will rise further and become a major pole. Nigeria, Indonesia, and the rest of the Global South won't cleanly choose sides. They will play all sides, pursuing self-interest through shifting alliances based on whoever offers the best terms at any given moment.

A multipolar world order is the likely outcome. An unstable one at that. Competing powers with expanding spheres of influence, with no dominant enforcer and no shared institutional framework.

The decline of Western ideals

This is the deepest loss for me.

Western ideals have been something genuinely new in history. The Enlightenment’s bet on reason, individual dignity, free speech, limited government, and the belief that human beings can organize their collective life through arguments rather than force produced the most prosperous, free, and peaceful societies in human history.

We assumed that this was the end of history, that all states to come would choose liberal democracy and capitalism and integrate into this global order. Then China came along and said nah man, I’m good. Its accession to the WTO in 2001 was based on the assumption that commercial integration would produce political liberalization. Instead China became the world’s largest manufacturer while consolidating authoritarian control.

As I discuss in “China is Eating the World”, other illiberal countries watched China’s rise and drew their own conclusions. You can have development without democracy. You can have order without liberalism.

But I feel the deeper threat is internal. A generation of critical theory and identity politics has captured universities, media, and cultural institutions. The Western tradition is now taught as a system of oppression rather than the foundation of the very liberties that make the critique possible.

That’s the irony. You can only accuse the West of failing its ideals by accepting those ideals as the standard. Free speech, free inquiry, institutional pluralism are what allow the critique to exist at all. And they’re exactly what’s being targeted.

The people most protected by liberal institutions are working hardest to dismantle them. We’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And while Western societies argue about their own foundations, illiberal models are quietly gaining credibility everywhere else.

Liberalism doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth defending. It needs to be better than the alternatives. And I see the alternatives—the CCP in China, Islam’s dogmatic militance in the Middle East and North Africa, socialist populism in Latin America, military coups in Sub-Saharan Africa—and none of them have produced societies I'd want to live in.

What comes next

Bloch wrote Feudal Society while trying to make sense of a world coming apart. He was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, never seeing what came after.

We’re luckier.

What Bloch understood is that civilization is not the default state of human affairs. Violence is. The first feudal age is the reminder of what the default looks like: violence, scarcity, a life bounded by whoever is strongest near you.

Every transition looks like an ending. And yet, every time the order has collapsed, humans have rebuilt. The collapse of Roman order produced feudalism, which eventually produced the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, and us.

Today, the stability of the past 80 years is shifting, the institutions are cracking, and the values that built them are being openly contested.

Civilizational transitions, as chaotic as they might be, are also the moments when new things get built. That’s what I want to explore next.

The Via Appia, built by Rome 2,300 years ago. Still standing.