Wolfgang Streeck: 2008 was a first warning that this way of life of capitalism — to live on a continuously growing mountain of borrowed money — could not continue forever. And then, of course, came the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The latter in particular, in my view, signified the end of a world which US capital could penetrate at will, to sustain a regime run out of Washington and Wall Street that was meant to include the rest of the world, including Russia and China, and the Global South anyway.

Ewald Engelen: Does that imply that we may have a false conception of what the end of a regime actually looks like?

Wolfgang Streeck: We tend to think that the temporality of regimes is the same as the temporality of human beings, that the regime shifts we see coming will happen somehow during our lifetime. That mistake was made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who expected to witness the end of capitalism in person. The same for Joseph Schumpeter, certainly for Max Weber, and for Werner Sombart, who in the 1930s thought that he was living in “late capitalism.”

So, in that sense one can say that human beings are prone to misread fundamental change. With the war in Ukraine, it comes to mind that the three major historical moments in the reorganization of capitalism were three major wars. There were the Dutch-English wars of the seventeenth century, when the center of capitalism moved from Amsterdam to London. Then there was World War I and the postwar settlement after 1918, which expedited the end of empire, launched a world of nation-states, and prepared another territorial shift, this time from London to Washington. The third was after World War II, with the Keynesian settlement, which embedded nation-states in a United States–dominated global trade regime.

Maybe we now see a repeat in the sense that capitalism adjusts itself to new conditions, in ways that we cannot yet predict. What is coming to an end now is the liberal international order, backed by US imperialism, which was the result of the breakdown of the Soviet Union: in that case the change happened without a war, but related to the arms race of the 1980s.