The headlines scream of a world in flux. The rise of populist leaders, the erosion of global trade partnerships, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Gaza war and the specter of renewed great power competition all paint a picture of an international order on the verge of collapse.
But beneath the surface of these dramatic events, deeper currents flow. The French historian Fernand Braudel, with his concept of layered temporalities, offers a framework to comprehend these complexities — to put current events into perspective and to discriminate between what is being transformed in the international space and what is not.
Braudel proposed three distinct layers of historical analysis: “la longue durée” (the long term), characterized by slow, almost imperceptible change over centuries or millennia; “la conjuncture” (the conjuncture), encompassing broader shifts lasting decades or more; and “l’histoire événementielle” (event history), the realm of immediate events and political drama.
Adopting such a perspective alerts us to the possibility that what we have been witnessing in the last few years is more than just “event history.” The rise of China, the weakening of American hegemony and the fracturing of the global economic order are not simply passing episodes, but rather symptoms of a more profound transformation.
Adopting a Braudelian frame indicates that the transformations of the past decade or so do not portend any definitive shift in international order at the level of the longue durée. The fundamental drivers of international politics — the nation-state, the anarchic state system, the struggle for power, the search for security and the pursuit of prosperity — remain constant.
Rather, viewed through Braudel’s lens, the events of recent years suggest that we are witnessing the definitive end of one “conjuncture” in the history of international order and the painful birth of another.
The dying conjunctural order, of course, is the liberal........