The news streaming across our screens shows us monstrous, strangely familiar images. A month ago: a dirty cat wanders the streets of Bucha, Ukraine, among the houses with wooden fences and common ditches. Three months ago: among the golden icons of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias engages a nuclear power in a holy war – there is no forgiveness for those who organize a Gaypride, he says. Ten months ago: bodies clinging to a plane taking off crash on the runway of Kabul airport. Two years ago: At the peak of the pandemic, the President of the United States announces that the Dow Jones has just reached its all-time high. This week: in Pakistan it is more than fifty degrees Celsius.
Each of these images is too frenetic to be iconic, too powerful not to leave a deep trace. Together they produce a fundamental impression: we are experiencing a multifaceted crisis that seems inevitable. We use many words to describe it: the end, the disorder, the collapse, the chaos parasitize our gaze. Our time, we know with certainty, is out of bounds.
This impression is neither superficial nor absurd. For more than a decade, we have been going through upheavals that we could define as “world-crises”: everything changes because of the economy, terrorism, the pandemic, the war – everything is changing in the climate emergency. Each of these ruptures, of these sudden transformations stuns us. On television, in the main newspapers, on social media, economists have been replaced by epidemiologists. Today, the invasion of Ukraine replaces them with more or less real experts on Russia and armed conflicts. How to orient yourself in this vertigo?
The vanishing point of the Ukrainian tragedy
For almost three months, the war has created a new fault: the coordinates that had deluded us that we could turn the page and find a post-pandemic equilibrium have been brutally shaken. Faced with this new acceleration of history, we do not know if we are struggling, suspended in the balance, or if we are falling.
To orient ourselves, we must take a step back to understand the symptoms of a deeper phenomenon. These upheavals, these telluric changes are the effect of the dislocation of a world. We live in a moment of profound transition because we are collectively, in a disordered and conflicting way, looking for a new point of balance. On all geographical scales, from the space of the metropolis to that of the great continents, old political forces are confronted with new technologies and industries. In our twenties, we are witnessing the return of an interwar period. Are we heading towards the precipice of a second cold war or a third world war?
In this space of latency, which can be more or less long, the tendencies of a restructuring emerge that cannot be described in a definitive way. Provisionally, we propose to call it “interregnum”.
The notion of interregnum allows us to define the interval, the emptiness of a power. If we use it to describe the period we are experiencing, we can situate this series of dizzying upheavals that disorient us in an open sequence, historicizing this unstable state. This methodological principle allows us to organize a reasoning and overcome the superficiality of the controversy. Suspended in this intermediate situation, we still see a possibility emerging.
In fact, to draw a map, even an approximate one, it is first necessary to orient it. What are the key points that structure “interregnum policies”? In the first paper volume of the Grand Continent published in French by Gallimard we identify at least three: the geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States, the climate question between “green war” and ecological planning, and the political crisis in the twenty years of anger.
Beyond the shock caused by the return of a symmetrical war a few thousand kilometers away, the fundamental context of the Ukrainian crisis sees these three filigree themes emerge. If each new crisis increases the sense of vertigo and forces us to renew the terms with which to speak of the world, in reality a structure emerges. The vanishing point of what we observe at the borders of Europe lies somewhere at the intersection of these three lines: what will China do? How can ecology be reconciled with war? Will societies that have even forgotten out of habit what peace meant be able to build themselves in the spiral of armed conflicts that we live in and that await us? These are the crucial questions that we will ask on May 17 to about twenty signatures of the Grand Continent during an international conference that will take place in the prestigious “Grand Amphithéâtre” of the Sorbonne, in partnership with The Republic, the world, The country: “After the invasion of Ukraine, Europe in the interregnum” (compulsory registration at this link).
The magazine of the interregnum
Due to its ability to combine different moments, taking into account the political dimension of the changes taking place, their indeterminate aspect, the notion of interregnum embraces a temporality surprisingly neglected by the European debate: that of a magazine conceived for the 21st century on a continental scale.
The form of the magazine seems outdated. Yet it can encounter contemporaneity when it manages to articulate the time of the tweet with the time of the book. It is in this interstice of our hypermodernity that concepts capable of dealing with things are born. In a world that is increasingly less understandable and faced with a fragmented temporality, it is possible to enrich the technical questions of contemporary politics with an intellectual need suited to the peculiarities of the European space. However, it is necessary to think on several scales, crossing various disciplines, favoring the richness allowed by difference and linguistic diversity. To grasp the shape of the interregnum, it is not so much useful to position oneself on one of the squares of a constantly moving political chessboard, as to understand and show how the pieces move – to be structuring, unstructured.
While many ideas or lines of force are ignored or left uncultivated, the disciplinary fields compartmentalized, the intellectual energies untapped, the space opened by a magazine allows us to think of a renewal that does not get lost in a generational rhetoric.
An idea can bring us together: if disorder is certain, chaos is not yet a necessity.
Gilles Gressani is the director of the Grand Continent. Mathéo Malik is the editor-in-chief
Interregnum policies (Policies of the interregnum), editorial success of the French spring is the first volume of the magazine Grand Continent. Published by Gallimard, it collects about twenty contributions including articles by Alessandro Aresu, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Lorenzo Castellani, Giuliano da Empoli, Paolo Gerbaudo, Simone Pieranni and Nadia Urbinati