Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – To understand today's world, according to Mark Leonard, we need a less solemn image than those that typically accompany discussions of the crisis of the international order. The 1930s, the Congress of Vienna, the Cold War: these comparisons are useful up to a point, because they suggest the reassuring idea of a history that, perhaps in different forms, we have already lived through.
Leonard prefers to start from the outskirts of large Chinese cities, where thousands of unfinished towers remained standing after the bursting of the real estate bubble.
In China they are called
lanweilou
, “rotten tail” buildings: structures sold when they still existed only on paper, paid for by families with their life savings and then abandoned when the builders went bankrupt.
The building is there. It's missing windows, plumbing, finishes, sometimes even interior walls. And above all, no one will ever come to finish it. For Leonard, it's a metaphor for what we like to call "rules-based order."
That too had been built for decades on the belief that the construction would never stop: more globalization, more institutions, more countries integrated into a single system. Then the work stopped.
It is from this image that we start
Surviving Chaos (Polity)
, the latest book by the founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
And it is from here that Leonard developed his reasoning, during an ECFR meeting in Rome attended by Adnkronos: Europe must not imagine how to restore the world of yesterday, but rather understand how to navigate what is taking its place.
Leonard uses a specific word: unorder, a phrase also used by Marta Dassù in her book “The Age of Arrogance,” which we wrote about here.
Disorder has always accompanied any international system. Even in moments of apparent stability, there have been wars, violations, double standards, and conflicts. In those cases, however, a shared, or at least recognizable, framework remained: states could violate the rules, challenge them, bend them to their own interests, but they knew what they were.
Today, that framework is becoming much more uncertain. In Leonard's formulation, international actors increasingly "operate without reference to a common framework." In many cases, the old rules aren't even being deliberately broken: they no longer matter.
The difference is substantial, because it also changes the type of possible response. If the problem were simply non-compliance with the rules, it would be enough to consider how to strengthen them. If, however, the very idea of a common grammar is lost, international politics moves onto much more unstable ground.
Leonard identifies three major movements.
The first is fragmentation, which proceeds without producing orderly blocs. Alliances are becoming more porous, interests are diverging even within formally compact coalitions, and economies are being segmented without a clear division of the world into two spheres emerging. The deepest fracture, for Leonard, is "epistemic": the shared understanding of facts themselves is weakening, that minimal basis without which diplomacy, science, and journalism struggle even to establish the object of debate.
Then there's contagion. Crises cross political domains with a new ease. In 2003, France and Germany could clash harshly with the United States over Iraq while continuing to cooperate with Washington on trade, terrorism, and security. Today, a military crisis tends to spread much more quickly to technology, finance, energy, and supply chains.
Finally, "strangulation": a broken marriage where neither spouse can leave. The things built together during the good years—the house, the money, even the children—become the tools with which one hurts one another when the relationship breaks down. Like energy, semiconductors, payment systems, shipping routes, data, and technology: they brought people and cultures closer together, today they can become choke points, bottlenecks through which to exert pressure on another country. Connections become instruments of coercion.
China occupies a significant portion of Surviving Chaos, even though the book is ultimately primarily about Europe. Leonard focuses on it because Beijing has developed a different way of thinking than the West over time and can offer some useful insights.
The distinction he proposes is that between architects and craftsmen.
Architects begin with the project. They imagine the desired order, build institutions and rules, and attempt, with varying degrees of success, to shape reality toward that form. The United States and Europe reasoned this way for much of the post-World War II era, especially after the end of the Cold War.
The craftsman works differently. He looks at the materials before him, understands how they can be used, and modifies the project as he goes. China, having returned to the center of world politics within a system it did not create and with which it did not share many of its premises, has had to develop this attitude: entering existing institutions, using them, bending some to its own interests, adding new ones, and continually experimenting.
Even behind programs like Made in China 2025, often seen in the West as monuments to Soviet-style centralized planning, there's a more experimental element: Beijing identifies strategic sectors, mobilizes capital, encourages a huge number of businesses, and lets many fail, in the hope that the process will yield a few winners capable of competing on a global scale. More Darwin than Five-Year Plan.
The formula is Deng Xiaoping's: crossing the river by feeling the stones. For Leonard, the difference in mentality became particularly evident after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Western leaders continued to talk about the "rules-based order," which must be defended and rebuilt. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, insisted on "great transformations unseen in a century," a phrase that in China evokes a very specific historical imagery and suggests a world undergoing profound changes, difficult to control in advance.
Beijing is preparing for the prospect that demographics, capitalism, climate, and technology could overturn many of the certainties upon which we have built the last few decades. The state's task, then, becomes to navigate these transformations without being overwhelmed by them.
Chinese reasoning not as a political model to imitate, but as an invitation to change our mindset.
To describe the intensity of these changes, Leonard uses another formula, "C4." The reference to the explosive is deliberate, and the four Cs indicate four forces capable of putting pressure on the existing order: capitalism, climate, chips, civilizations.
Global capitalism has become extremely complex, digitalized, interconnected, and, above all, increasingly exposed to the logic of national security. Countries that distrust one another continue to need one another, and this mutual dependence opens up new opportunities for coercion. Leonard therefore imagines a world still deeply connected, perhaps even more so than today, but in which economic networks are openly used for power politics.
Climate adds a further layer of instability, because it produces extreme events and migrations, redraws productive geographies and alters the balance between winners and losers.
Then there are chips, a category Leonard uses to summarize the technological revolution, and AI in particular. Here, his tone becomes curiously cautious. After speaking with interlocutors in the Gulf, India, China, and elsewhere, he admits that no one really knows what the winning strategy will be: own the most advanced models, rapidly deploy AI throughout the manufacturing industry, focus on applications, and wait for the models to become commodities. And no one yet knows what the employment balance will be.
The prediction he feels most confident about concerns the political and social effects: a transformation of this magnitude is unlikely to increase stability. If quantum computing and other emerging technologies are added to AI, the result will likely be a further dose of unorder.
The fourth C, civilizations, takes Leonard into more delicate territory.
The twentieth-century order emerged at a time when Europeans and Americans wielded a huge share of global economic, military, and cultural power. From that vantage point, it was possible to imagine that a set of institutions and values would gradually assume universal character.
The 21st century is moving in a different direction. The demographic and economic center of gravity is shifting toward Asia and Africa, while China, India, Turkey, Iran, and other players are once again telling their stories through histories that predate Western hegemony. Modernization is no longer necessarily interpreted as synonymous with Westernization.
"Other countries want to write their own histories," Leonard observes. And sometimes the very fact that Europe presents a proposal as universal makes it less attractive to others.
The four Cs, overlapping, produce what Leonard calls “compound chaos,” a “polycrisis on steroids” in which transformations don’t just add up, but multiply exponentially.
In his speech in Rome, Leonard shifts his focus from geopolitics to European democracies. The crises of global interdependence don't remain outside borders; they reach within societies and alter the relationship between citizens, governments, and institutions.
A very current example is the AfD in Germany: it emerged during the euro crisis; it changed its nature during the 2015 migration crisis; it pushed for anti-vax and anti-lockdown movements during Covid, and it transformed again with the war on green policies. There's a common thread: the perception that decisions made elsewhere, transnational phenomena, and external constraints profoundly affect daily life without the state being able to truly govern them.
Every crisis, in this reading, weakens traditional politics twice. First, because it exposes the limits of governments' capacity for control. Second, because it highlights, in the eyes of voters, who is protected and who bears the costs, and we always return to the issue of elites vs. people. The old communist parties sought the "contradictions of capitalism" as a starting point for advancing their agenda; many new right-wing movements build consensus on the contradictions of liberalism and globalization.
The consequence for Europe? Defense, industrial policy, energy, and technology matter, of course, but the question of European sovereignty is destined to remain incomplete until it also translates into voters' sense that someone is once again capable of protecting them.
At this point, one might expect a pessimistic conclusion about the European Union. Yet, while the rules-based global system is weakening, Europe can still be the place where those rules remain powerful, provided it frees itself from certain intellectual habits.
In this regard, the book explores a tension that has accompanied European integration since its origins. On the one hand, Altiero Spinelli, the architect of the federal project; on the other, Jean Monnet, who proceeds through concrete achievements, adjusting institutions as he builds them, and gradually transforming cooperation into political solidarity. Leonard has great sympathy for the second approach. "My point is not against architecture as such (my wife is an architect!). It's against the idea of a global architecture."
Europeans, he says, will continue to need to be architects within Europe. It's becoming much more difficult to imagine them being able to shape the order of the entire international system: the necessary power is lacking, the legitimacy is lacking, and, above all, there's no real demand from the rest of the world.
Within the Union, there remains ample room for development. Leonard even considers the obsession with a "United States of Europe" misguided, because the EU has already produced something far more original: a form of sovereignty that resembles neither a classic federal state nor a simple international organization.
This very peculiarity, often described as a weakness, could become useful in a more fluid world. Europe has already learned to combine different levels of government, variable geometries, common markets, and national sovereignty. It may need to do so much more.
Leonard also proposes a correction in terms of values. He says he has shifted from the ideas he supported twenty years ago, when he saw the European model as a force capable of spreading through enlargement, neighborhoods, institutions, and regional integration. Today, he believes Europe must recognize how unique its history has been and how difficult it is to automatically transform it into a universal trajectory.
Other societies will have different battles, different priorities, different compromises. Europe can defend what it believes in while avoiding the idea that its historical experience is necessarily the end point for all.
And above all, Leonard suggests, he would do well to devote a little more energy to convincing his own citizens. In recent years, he has often shown greater confidence when explaining to others how they should organize themselves than when speaking to those within European democracies who feel they have lost out to globalization and are now tempted by the idea of blowing up the entire system.
Eventually Leonard returns to the
lanweilou
.
When it became clear that many real estate developers wouldn't return to complete their buildings, some Chinese families stopped waiting. They moved into the still-unfinished apartments, covered the openings with tarps, set up makeshift kitchens, and found rudimentary systems for water and electricity. It wasn't what they'd bought, and it didn't resemble the renderings they'd seen. But it was a roof.
Leonard sees a lesson for Europe in those families. "We must go and inhabit the ruins of this collapsed world." Part of the old order can still be saved: segments of international law, institutions, rights, alliances, forms of cooperation. Other parts will likely remain unfinished. Continuing to wait for someone to return to complete the construction site is foolish, if not irresponsible.
This is especially true for relations with the United States. Leonard doesn't believe a change in the White House will be enough to turn back the clock. America's disengagement from its role as guarantor of the international order predates Trump and will likely outlive him in various forms.
Europe still possesses solid foundations, institutions, wealth, expertise, technological capabilities, alliances, and above all, a long history of transforming fragile compromises into lasting political structures. The difficult part will be accepting that the original project no longer exists and that no one will come to complete it for us.
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