The economic shocks from the Great Recession revealed fault lines as the social effects of longstanding cultural shifts generated political conflict in Europe and the United States. Rivalry between major powers also has been revived, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine being the most prominent example. Commentators rightly see the present moment as the end of the post-Cold War era and the start of something new.

What that new thing might be seems less apparent than the current system’s own turmoil. William Butler Yeats captured an earlier moment of crisis after World War I with the oft-quoted couplet, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Despite the undoubted dislocations, change then did not sweep them everything away, or at least not all at once. Much remained similar, if not the same. Indeed, the catastrophe of World War I highlights the difficulty of seeing the direction of change, let alone understanding it, as the dynamic unfolds.

James Sheehan, a noted American historian of Germany, highlights that problem of perception in Making a Modern Political Order: The Problem of the Nation State, written from a series of lectures at the University of Notre Dame in April 2015. Historical experience, he argues, shows that “people will recognize the new order only after they are within a new horizon of expectations.” It will surprise those who experience it, like their counterparts in 1789 amidst the French Revolution, and “then in retrospect they will come to regard the collapse of the ancien régime as inevitable.” The difference in perspective, Sheehan notes, will divide them from later generations who know how and when the old world ended without understanding what it was like to live without that knowledge or under the previous order.

Starting from the premise that every political system contains innate tensions so nothing about it can be considered stable, Sheehan examines the expectations that help understand and manage the contemporary order. Coercive power’s legitimacy, he insists, rests on “shared assumptions about how the political order should and does work.” Those expectations involve the nature and character of political space, how people relate to one another and their governments within a political order, and interactions of independent states within a system recognizing their sovereignty.

Stability, Sheehan argues, requires a broad consensus on what to expect that includes ordinary men and women for it to last. A breakdown in consensus, by extrapolation, puts the whole system under added strain, possibly even to the point of collapse. Sheehan traces this pattern with an overview of Western history from the early modern era to the present order.

Before Modernity

The story he tells highlights the gap between modern expectations and those that came before them in Europe. Sheehan describes the early modern landscape as “an ‘archipelago of communities’—villages, manors, landed estates, towns, and cities—in which most people lived” in face-to-face relationships. Religious affiliation, like the family, reflected birth rather than choice. The fact that leaving the faith meant breaking with the community made the stakes of difference in religion greater than modern observers recognize. While separate and bounded, those communities depended on both trade and incoming migrants. The movement of people, limited by the difficulty and danger of travel, transpired in tension with communities locally grounded. Sheehan also notes wider, less defined groups beyond the local include the nation, religion, and fellow subjects in a realm. Often power was dispersed and shared within states rather than monopolized by a ruler. Composite monarchies brought territories with separate laws, customs, and institutions under a single prince. Sheehan also describes conflict as “a chronic condition, not a violent interruption in the normal course of events” which underlines the importance of preserving order.

Localism coupled with relatively weak institutions made personality an important factor in setting expectations. Rulers personified the political community as much as they directed it. Their patrimony and household were tied up with the state and few would have thought to separate them. Heredity largely defined the legitimacy of rule, though subjects expected princes to provide good lordship by keeping the peace, administering justice, and generally upholding the common good. Breaking those expectations—or encroaching on established liberties—severed bonds of allegiance. Sheehan rightly points out William Shakespeare offers a better guide to early modern political expectations than Niccolò Machiavelli. Indeed, dynastic states whose rulers personified “a shared past and promised future” supplanted republics and trading cities over the sixteenth century.

The Previous Regime

Sheehan’s description of the world before modernity neglects as a separate order the Renaissance that emerged in the 1600s. The Renaissance sprang partly from disaffection with institutional failings that prompted renewed interest in virtue, especially public virtue, by drawing on models from classical antiquity. Renaissance statecraft, as Hugh Trevor Roper pointed out, faced its own crisis in the seventeenth century with rebellion and civil wars. Along with pressures from religious disputes, conflicts between states, rising inflation, and prolonged harsh winters and poor harvests, rulers struggled to hold support from competing elites that demanded patronage and offices to reward their own constituencies. The system forged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries failed to offer a different paradigm that brought a new political order with stronger institutions under dynastic monarchies.

Royal absolutism offered an alternative pioneered in Bourbon France that defined Europe’s ancient regime. England and the Dutch Republic went against the trend, but those commercial states also built strong institutions to mobilize state power even as they kept older representative bodies. Britain’s fiscal-military state mobilized resources to finance the massive costs of naval warfare from the 1690s through a system of parliamentary monarchy that linked ruler and elites. Institutionalization provides the common thread linking it with bureaucratic absolutism in Continental Europe. Fear of disorder, epitomized in the writings of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, shaped the development of strong states able to manage countries more effectively than their predecessors. Personality remained vital, as Sheehan notes, but making laws uniform and rendering society legible by careful record-keeping systematized governance in ways that anticipated the modern order that emerged after 1789. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville linked the centralizing project in France that subordinated aristocracy and local communities to royal bureaucrats to its expansion during the French Revolution as the last constraints on it fell.

A New Order

Behind the failure to manage a financial crisis, Sheehan sees the French monarchy as unable to meet changing expectations. In calling for statements of grievances prior to the assembly of the Estates General, it recognized implicitly “the legitimacy of a public whose collective opinion mattered.” Losing its support doomed Louis XVI and wider changes into the nineteenth century deprived established dynastic states of what Max Weber called their magic. Increasingly democratic nations succeeded their predecessors by forging communities of people sufficiently alike to trust one another with power. Making those communities “free enough to allow for individual will and cohesive enough to impose collective obligation” posed a lasting challenge. Embodying the shared past in a nation rather than its ruler addressed the problem with a magic of its own that set entirely new expectations.

Sheehan rightly emphasizes how people in a democratic order “expected to be governed by those like themselves” and the challenges it posed to multinational societies. The Habsburg Monarchy, with its collection of national groups, fared better at preserving ordered liberty than he credits. A certain magic in a dynasty that embodied government under law persisted reinforced by the experience of living together amidst growing prosperity. The exception, however, did not hide the larger trend of democratic nation-states which became the basis of a global order that expanded beyond Europe. As the link between war and revolution changed both the scale and stakes of war, conflict became something to be avoided or contained as a threat to stability. European states avoided general war among themselves until 1914 in a significant change from the eighteenth century. Two world wars accelerated the growth of the modern state and magnified expectations about what it should and could do for its people. Those conflicts became a struggle for survival that ruled out compromise by requiring the destruction of opponents.

Decolonization escalated the shift to nation-states along with a transfer of geopolitical power away from Europe now divided by the Cold War. The concept of a “Third World” not aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union deliberately evoked the “Third Estate” with its universalist ambitions during the French Revolution. Self-determination reinforced the importance of states. Nations claiming independence joined an international community determined to sustain the sovereignty they enjoyed. Wars since 1945 have more often been within countries than between them. Territorial conflicts became an exception to international politics rather than an accepted part of it and violence was a pathology to be checked. Sheehan closes by describing bounded political territories of states as an essential part of modern order for upholding individual freedom and the rule of law that he thinks unlikely to disappear.

An End to History

Amidst the dashed hopes of the post-Cold War 1990s, public attention focused again on political order as events revealed its fragility. Samuel Huntington had been an outlier during the 1960s in prioritizing the capacity of states to govern their territories and population over economic development. The problems he anticipated came into view even before conflicts along the developed world’s periphery spilled into its core decades later.

Is all then well in the modern world despite widespread dissatisfaction with the present and anxiety over the future? The breakdown of consensus reflects popular opposition first to a transformative cultural agenda pushed since 1968 and then later to grand projects in the post-Cold War era that failed even as their proponents avoided responsibility. More of the same only fuels backlash and alienation.

Sheehan thinks the reach and capacity of states along with the degree of popular participation make institutions stronger than they seem. Preserving order has always been an unending task. Expectations may not always be met, but he believes they have not changed in ways that portend a shift in regime. The search for permanent solutions to shortcomings that began in the Enlightenment strikes him as illusory because they imagine a world without politics that can never be. That leaves the less ambitious task of managing problems to preserve order against continued threats. One might add that on Sheehan’s own terms it would be hard to see an alternative until it appears as a new system relegating the present one to history.

These conclusions may not be especially satisfying given the present discontents, but they capture the balance of change and continuity in human experience. With the rapid pace of change over recent decades and the disruptions it has produced, more attention to continuities over the very long term offers a better map of the proverbial landscape. Not everything is as new as it seems.