Week signals: Third personalism
Plus: watch points for Costa Rica, Ukraine, Russia, the US, Colombia, and Greenland.
Hello,
In this edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. Feudalism redux, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘world order’, high-networked individuals.
UP AHEAD. Tests in the Americas, security in Eurasia, volatility in the markets.
And don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Week Signals is the Saturday note for clients of Geopolitical Strategy, also available to GD Professional subscribers on Geopolitical Dispatch.
The Week in Review: Strong men, weak systems
The week began with a shooting in Minnesota. It ended with warships in the Gulf. In between, Xi Jinping purged his deputy on the Central Military Commission — a childhood friend and fellow Communist Party princeling — and the US flirted with another shutdown.
The year continues at a blistering pace. It’s at times chaotic and confusing. But the outlines of a new logic are appearing. And one of these is the return of what Foreign Affairs this week called a personalist global order.
As the article lays out, three of the world’s most consequential powers — the US, China and Russia — are each under personalist rule. This doesn’t mean all three are totalitarian dictatorships. Far from it. But even Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters would agree that America’s democratically elected president is doing things his own way, only constrained, as he put it to the New York Times, by his own morality. Like Putin and Xi, Trump is a big man.
It’s perhaps only natural that we ended up in this place. Popular culture, aided by consumer technology, has progressively moved society from ‘we’ to ‘me’. Wall Street is no longer dominated by the bureaucratic titans of IBM and ExxonMobil — built on a standard operating procedure and the sameness of their executives — but by highly personalistic firms, as known for their CEOs as for their products. Without Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, Elon Musk at Tesla, or Jensen Huang at Nvidia, would any of these companies trade at the same multiples, or enjoy the same political access?
Francis Fukuyama, one of today’s best-known political scientists, warned against the rise of political personalism in his magnum opus, Political Order and Political Decay. Though best known for erroneously predicting the “end of history” in 1989, Fukuyama makes good on his liberal theories in a trenchant historical review of what works, and what doesn’t, across human civilisation. No prizes for guessing. Impersonal rule — of law, not by law, and accountable institutions — beats systems of kinship and patrimony every time. And periods of “repatrimonialization”, like the one we are arguably in now, are not only damaging for economic growth and human flourishing, but dangerous for peace and stability.
Personalistic order, built on feudal patrimony and family ties, was the organising principle for most societies until the Enlightenment revolutions in the late 18th century. From that point on — with exceptions like Napoleon in the early 19th century and outliers like the Russian czars — technocratic and procedural systems would become the standard across the Western world, accountable either to a democratic electorate or a dispersed elite.
This order would continue until the First World War, when the previous hundred years’ economic and territorial growth would reach its limits. The next thirty or so years would then be defined by the return to patrimony, and of authoritarian, personalist leaders, and a race-based ultranationalist social order. The Second World War would end that era in another bloody climax and the Cold War – pursued by two global empires at the opposite ends of the liberal, impersonal spectrum — capitalism and communism — would take us through to the early 1990s, before being replaced by the Pax Americana rules-based order, which seemingly finished sometime between the 2008 financial crisis and Mark Carney’s 2026 Davos speech, depending on who you ask.
Like in the 1920s and 1930s, patrimony is back — the third personalist global order. It doesn’t necessarily mean war, or blood-and-soil fascism (though many argue it already does), but it does mean adding leader psychology to the list of geopolitical data points, and assuming what we’ve called “Putin’s razor” to explain national decision-making (i.e., “never attribute to public interest that which is adequately explained by personal interest”).
It also means a radical reimagining of the operating environment for multinational firms and investors. Moreso than the last decade’s personalistic revolution in corporate affairs (where the HR department was defeated by the tech bros), the personalistic repatrimonalization of political affairs is altogether more profound and more at risk of staying put. As Carney said, this is a rupture, not a transition. And it requires new strategies, new competencies, and a new set of risks to consider and mitigate.