By Romina Kuko
History does not come with a noise. It appears like a mist, first like a slight crack in the wall, like a prolonged silence that no one knows how to name. When you realize it has come, it is usually too late. Today we are at this very moment: one era is leaving without being announced, while another still wanders without a name, without rules and without promises. One world is closing, but the door to the new has not yet opened.
In his book The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig described the end of a civilization that had believed it had escaped history. A Europe convinced that rationality had won the final battle, that war had become an anachronism, that progress was a natural law. The tragedy of that world lay not in its idealism, but in the conviction that that civilization was permanent, that it had passed beyond danger.
Tragically, history teaches us that nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that believes it is ultimately safe.
A century later, we are living our own version of that world that is disappearing. Today, “the world of yesterday” is no longer pre-World War I Europe, but the post-Cold War international order. It is the age of liberal multilateralism, of the belief that trade would replace conflict, that institutions would discipline power. Economics would always be a stronger lever than politics, and that geopolitics would be replaced by the impulses of technology. But geopolitics never disappears. It just sits there, waiting for its moment.
For about three decades, the world functioned on an unwritten agreement: hard power would remain in the shadows, while soft power would rule the discourse. Multilateral institutions were transformed into cathedrals of global order. NATO and the European Union, more than alliances, were guarantors. The UN, with all its paradoxes, was the place where even enemies were forced to speak looking each other in the eye. The global economy was built as a network so complex that war seemed not only immoral, but irrational.
It was perhaps the best period we have ever known. Not because it was right in every detail, but because it was predictable. And predictability is the highest form of security. For 25 solid years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the return of the first Russian boot in Crimea, the world order seemed to be written in stone, so much so that thinkers went so far as to declare the end of history, the end of war. Today, this world is crumbling under the weight of three forces.
The first is the brutal return of power politics. States once again speak in the language of naked interest, territory and force. The war in Ukraine was a rupture in the very idea of the post-1945 order. The first war on the European continent in nearly 80 years proved that borders are still threatened by tanks, that history has refused to close, and that security is not a service that can be delegated indefinitely.
This was understood even by those who had spoken the language of financial stability for decades. In Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made it clear in his epochal speech: the era of efficiency is over; the era of security has arrived. The global economy can no longer behave as if politics were background noise. Economic neutrality has become an illusion and markets, like states, have been plunged into the logic of survival.
The second is the fragmentation of the global order. Universal multilateralism is being replaced by multipolarity, i.e. poles of power competing with each other, as well as by minilateralism, i.e. smaller circles of trust, by temporary alliances, by agreements that live only as long as the interests that keep them alive. Institutions that once produced stability have now become obstacles and produce deadlock. Once universal rules have become selective and vetoes have a louder voice than resolutions. And a world with multiple rules is always a world on the verge of collision.
Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, in his analysis for Foreign Affairs, defines this era as a time of systemic competition, where democracies and autocracies no longer clash just over territory, but over how the world order itself is organized. Rather than a rivalry of power, this should be understood as a clash of paradigms, a clash in which neutrality is a lack of position, no longer a moral stance.
The third is the transformation of everything into a political weapon. Energy has become a tool of pressure and is no longer just a means of exchange, technology a tool of domination and not progression, where once the logic of economic development ruled, today the logic of security rules. A change of era.
Geopolitics (meaning: power, sovereignty, borders) always comes back to the moment you completely forget it. The world of yesterday forgot, forgot the struggle of previous generations to guarantee the sovereignty of their countries. Forgetting what it is like to live without any risk, in a zone of complete security such as that offered by multilateralism and liberalism, it was believed that economic dependence would produce moral responsibility and that integration would bring political convergence. But as always, history turned out to be more cynical than our theories. Autocracies learned to use globalization without transforming themselves. Democracies learned, belatedly, that trade does not guarantee peace.
However, to declare multilateralism a mistake would be an even graver act of historical amnesia. It was the best order we ever built. It reduced poverty, broadened horizons, and for the first time gave small states a sense that they were not mere extras in the game of the big ones. The failure was not in the system. The failure was in our belief that the system would survive without protection.
As Stubb warns, democracies have been wrong to believe that norms replace power. In fact, norms survive only when they are supported by the capacity to defend them, because no order survives on the basis of memories alone.
The future does not seem to be a nostalgic return to the world of yesterday. But neither is it inevitable darkness. It will be a harsher, more honest, less sentimental world. A world where multilateralism, now reformatted, will have to rely on real power and where norms without force will sound like prayers. Alliances will be worth only as much as the willingness to defend them.
A more real world
In an order where power is being reorganized, small states do not survive by remaining ambiguous but by using alliances as a shield and not as diplomatic decor. Euro-Atlantic identity orientation is vital to guarantee the full integrity of the region.
For the Western Balkans and our country, this new world is a geographical debate and strategic alliances, zero theory anymore. In foreign policy, the difference between mediocrity and statesmanship is simple: one sees the headline, the other looks at the map and works to balance it, guaranteeing advantages for their own country.
In this context, Albania emerges as a significant exception in the region, due to an increasingly rare element in this era: stability and strategic coherence. Albania is today the only country in the Western Balkans with a clear, unequivocal Euro-Atlantic orientation; a member of NATO, an active contributor to the regional security architecture and without identity dilemmas in foreign policy.
In a world where, as Carney said, security is becoming the new global currency, political stability and strategic coherence are capital, and in this sense, this region does not have the privilege of strategic ambiguity and pragmatic navigation. This era also brings a rare opportunity. In an uncertain world, stability has political value. In a region with a memory of conflict, predictability is strategic capital. And when Europe seeks security on its borders, the Western Balkans are proof, no longer the periphery.
Zweig's warning remains unchanged: civilizations do not collapse only through violence, but through oblivion. The world of yesterday faded because people believed that history had ceased to exist, but this world that is now coming demands something more difficult from us. Let us no longer wander in nostalgia for what was, but let us quickly understand and take responsibility for what is coming. In the new world, history will not reward those who wait, but those who take a stand.
