We are living through a period in which instability is no longer episodic but structural. Energy systems are strained, ecological boundaries are tightening, fiscal buffers are thinning, supply chains are reconfiguring under geopolitical tension, and informational environments are fragmenting. These pressures do not arrive one at a time. They compound. The result is not ordinary volatility but degenerative volatility: a condition in which shocks are chronic, mutually reinforcing, and increasingly expensive to absorb.
Under such conditions, the behaviour of political systems changes. Not because leaders suddenly become more ideological, nor because cultures lose their moral compass, but because the structural incentives embedded in the system shift. To understand the drift now visible across much of the industrial world, we have to begin with the architecture of the modern Westphalian state.
The Westphalian state is a territorial sovereign entity built on a handful of core capacities: the monopoly of legitimate force within borders, taxation authority, bureaucratic coordination, industrial-scale infrastructure, and mass procurement. Its historical strengths lie in legibility and mobilisation. It can count, tax, regulate, police, and, when necessary, mobilise industry and labour at scale. These are not incidental features; they are the deep grammar of modern sovereignty.
Industrial states layered on top of this structure are metabolically intensive. They depend on continuous throughput of energy, minerals, food, labour, data, and capital. Growth is not merely a political aspiration; it is a stabilising mechanism. It services debt, funds welfare commitments, sustains corporate profitability, and underwrites legitimacy. Slack—whether ecological, fiscal, or economic—makes plural governance possible.
Degenerative volatility erodes that slack.
When shocks are chronic rather than episodic, misalignment becomes expensive. Delays in coordination become destabilising. Fragmentation ceases to be merely inefficient; it becomes dangerous. Under such conditions, the state’s objective function shifts. In stable periods, governments can optimise for welfare expansion, distributional negotiation, and procedural legitimacy. Under constraint, the primary objective becomes continuity. The quiet question changes from “How do we flourish?” to “How do we prevent breakdown?”
Once continuity becomes dominant, coordination costs matter more than plural legitimacy. Systems under stress search for compression. They reach for mechanisms that reduce friction, accelerate decision cycles, and align disparate actors rapidly.
The Westphalian state does not invent new architecture in moments of pressure. It activates the control surfaces it already possesses: fiscal instruments, security apparatus, regulatory authority, procurement systems, and borders. These are high-leverage tools. They can steer capital, redirect production, restrict flows, and enforce compliance.
The first structural drift under degenerative volatility is toward intensified extraction. Industrial states require revenue to service debt, resources to maintain infrastructure, and corporate vitality to sustain their tax base. When growth slows and costs rise, the system faces a dilemma: contraction threatens solvency and legitimacy. To preserve continuity, it intensifies throughput. Natural resource extraction expands. Financial extraction deepens. Labour is compressed. Data and attention are monetised more aggressively. Ecological and social costs are externalised wherever possible. Extraction becomes not a choice but a stabilisation mechanism.
Extraction, however, increases internal tension. Distribution becomes harder. Inequality sharpens. Legitimacy thins. As constraint rises, governing through consent becomes more expensive. Plural veto points slow response time precisely when response time feels critical. Under these conditions, a second drift emerges: authoritarian compression.
Authoritarianism, in this context, need not begin as ideology. It begins as coordination optimisation. Centralising decision authority shortens cycles. Expanding executive discretion reduces negotiation overhead. Increasing surveillance and compliance capacity lowers enforcement costs. Limiting contestation reduces friction. These moves are instrumentally rational when the primary objective is continuity under constraint. They reduce transaction costs in a stressed system.
Parallel to these structural incentives from above are psychological pressures from below. Chronic volatility generates cognitive overload. When causality becomes opaque and the future unreadable, citizens seek legibility. They want simplified threat models, visible authority, and decisive action. Pluralism is cognitively expensive; complexity is exhausting. Authoritarian clarity offers coherence at low cognitive cost. Concentration of power is therefore often socially licensed, not merely imposed.
The third drift, closely linked to the first two, is toward war or war-like mobilisation. War is not only destruction; it is a coordination regime. It aligns industry, labour, finance, and narrative around a dominant objective. It justifies accelerated procurement, industrial steering, and fiscal expansion. It reduces political fragmentation under the banner of survival. Externally, it can redirect instability outward through sanctions, proxy conflicts, trade restrictions, and geopolitical realignment. Internally, it compresses plural aims into a single organising principle.
Under degenerative volatility, war logic becomes attractive because it solves alignment problems quickly. It provides a ready-made template for high-speed coordination. Even absent formal war, states can adopt war-like economic and security postures as a way of minimising breakdown risk.
These three drifts—extraction, authoritarian compression, and war—are mutually reinforcing. Extraction funds security capacity. Security narratives justify expanded control. Control reduces friction for further extraction. War legitimises both extraction and concentration of authority. What appears at first as a series of policy decisions reveals itself as a stabilisation loop.
Degenerative volatility raises coordination costs. Rising coordination costs shift optimisation toward continuity. Continuity optimisation activates control surfaces. Control surfaces intensify extraction and compress authority. Extraction and compression stabilise the apparatus but degrade distributed adaptive capacity—local resilience, civic trust, institutional experimentation. Degraded adaptive capacity amplifies future volatility. Amplified volatility justifies further compression.
The system becomes path-dependent.
None of this depends on a particular ideology or party. It emerges from structural incentives embedded in industrial Westphalian sovereignty under constraint. When slack declines and shocks compound, command architectures are rewarded. The apparatus stabilises itself in ways that may ultimately undermine the conditions of its own long-term survival.
The deeper question is whether this drift is inevitable or interruptible. The decisive variable is where adaptive capacity resides. If resilience is concentrated at the centre, volatility compels further centralisation. If resilience is distributed—embedded in diversified local production, trusted institutions, civic competence, and reduced metabolic dependency—then emergency coordination can remain bounded and reversible.
The challenge, therefore, is architectural. Can modern states maintain continuity under degenerative volatility without defaulting to intensified extraction, authoritarian compression, and war-like coordination? Can they generate legibility and stability without collapsing into permanent emergency logic?
If not, the drifts we are witnessing will not feel like political choices. They will appear as the natural physics of strained systems. The future of the Westphalian order will be decided not by rhetoric, but by whether it can redesign sovereignty for an era in which slack is gone and volatility is structural.
I think there are a few steps missing in the development of the State from Westphalia to now, the most important of which is nationalism. It is a force that supports aligned effort by telling people they are working “for the good of the country/people” - you might almost call it a Mission model.
This is not to defend nationalism but it is a force that can manage soft coordination - and it means the state is not the possession of the Ruler as under Westphalia, but also the common possession of the Nation.
Unwinding that, as we must in today’s world, is going to be difficult.
Granted, structure is important but a culture/society is in its essence/core spiritual upon which all - economics and politics is built. Unless we address that, we remain in our cycle of destruction.