Symptoms of the Interregnum
A short musing on the events of a day and the issues of an age.
The global political collapse is now picking up speed, as the climate collapse has been doing for years. Today’s pressure points are South Korea and France. In South Korea, immensely unpopular — 19% approval rating in a recent Gallup poll — right-wing, pro-US President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law last night, declaring the opposition party to be “anti-state.” Within the day, though, National Assembly members of his own and the opposition party joined to overturn the decree and . Who’s to say what will come next after all that high drama?
In France, the right and left are joining forces in an attempt to boot out the immensely imposed by immensely unpopular President Emanuel Macron. High drama is probably in the offing.
Interestingly, both national government crises were triggered by end-of-year budgetary issues, on the surface at least. More fundamental cracks in the governing consensus lie beneath that surface. And prospects for both presidents are under a cloud following their missteps in relation to the legislature.
It’s also worth contemplating that both today’s chaotic crises are taking place just before Donald Trump moves back into the White House in Washington. He has threatened to impose tariffs on all of Europe, France included, for a confusing bunch of stuff. And he’s called South Korea a free-loader and demanded it pay for more of the cost of stationing US troops on the Korean peninsula to protect against a belligerent North Korea.
No one knows where either country is headed, politically or otherwise — something that could be said of a lot of countries these days. And each nation in some ways typifies what are broader political and social maelstroms enveloping its continent.
Where Have All the Babies Gone?
Since Asia, rather than Europe, is where the economic and social action has been most intense over the last half century, let’s focus on South Korea. All the more so because it’s home to what is surely one of the most significant acts of protest the world has seen for a very long time: A sex strike by South Korean women. It’s reminiscent in some ways of the one dramatized almost 2500 years ago by — which was adapted and republished just this year by a Greek publisher.
So the idea is old. And its ongoing Korean manifestation isn’t all that new. From nearly six in 1960, the women — the number of births per woman — has fallen to roughly 0.7 now. Women being marginally under half the population, the demographic rule of thumb is that each woman needs to have just over two babies to keep the population stable. South Korea’s fertility rate of well less than one child per woman is the world’s lowest and will lead to a collapse in the population later this century if the number stays where it is.
That’s a very big if. Things will probably move one way or another. Nothing about the country (or the world, for that matter) feels stable at the moment. And the hasn’t been smooth so far. After falling sharply from the early 1960s to the ’80s — even as economic growth soared by an average 8% a year in the “Asian Tiger” economy — the birthrate plummeted to a population-maintenance level of 2.1 in 1983, before leveling off in a range of 1.2–1.6 births per woman from 1986 to 2016, when it started sliding again.
South Korea’s population as a whole is forecast to begin falling next year as the long tail from the decades-earlier baby boom finally ends. Calculations show the population in less than 50 years — and much faster after that.
Why is a harder question to answer. High housing and education costs after the rapid economic growth is a frequently cited explanation, and the government has tried direct payments and lower interest rates to parents as fixes. It hasn’t worked so far. Then there’s the “radical feminist” explanation related to the 4Bs movement, as it’s come to be known in the West — “bi” being the Korean word for no and the four negatives being marriage, dating, childbirth, and sex.
As explained by Korean-American writer for US news site , the 4Bs is a response to “growing gender inequality and violence.” She writes: “Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.”
The situation is bad enough to unnerve even the older men who dominate South Korea’s tightknit political and economic establishment. A year or so ago, the country’s finance minister was quoted as comparing the fertility rate to the iceberg that sank the Titanic — noting it could no longer be turned around by demographic means alone. The connection to the upheavals over martial law may not be direct or obvious, but they aren’t implausible either.
Broader Collapse
These events of this wintry day bring to my mind a talk economic historian Adam Tooze gave the day after Trump’s election triumph back in over-heated early November. He was speaking from New York by Zoom to an Asia Society gathering in Switzerland. A globalized event if ever there was one. But the topic was the polycrisis that is characterizing the decline — I suspect end, but Tooze didn’t say that — of the era of US-led capitalist globalization.
“For Europe,” Tooze noted, “Trump personifies the polycrisis,” while for Asia, he is “a morbid symptom of an interregnum and the future to come will be something different.” What that something will be like remains to be seen, but Asia is likely to be much more important, with the US and Europe relegated to a lesser role on the world stage. Against the backdrop of Europe’s insecurity and Asia’s self-confidence, Tooze goes on to discuss the position of various Asian countries during this interregnum.
He caps it off with an assertion that China’s decisions on carbon emissions will be the biggest determining factor of what comes next in Asia — and particularly South and Southeast Asia, given their extreme exposure to climate change. It’s an intellectual tour de force well worth watching , or reading the transcript .
I myself have explored in some depth the notions of humanity being in an Interregnum with no end-point in view and of China being the determiner of the shape of the energy transition. And I’m happy to close out this offering with Tooze’s admonition to Westerners: “We have to understand massive regional diversity and not allow ourselves to be seduced by simple stories about one or two countries. And we have to track events as they happen in real time as history, not as a series of sort of potted narratives, but as something that urgently concerns all of us.”
