The Interregnum

The old is dying. The new cannot yet be born. In this interval — the interregnum — the most dangerous things emerge. And the most interesting possibilities. Most people living through it do not know where they are.

I. The Concept

Interregnum is originally a constitutional term: the period between the death of a ruler and the coronation of a successor. No order has been abolished — but none is fully operative. The old laws still hold, but no one enforces them with conviction. The new norms exist only as premonition, as demand, as dispute.

Antonio Gramsci lifted the term out of constitutional law in the 1930s and generalised it to describe historical transitional phases. He wrote — in prison, under Mussolini — about moments when a social hegemony breaks down without a new one replacing it. His key sentence is concise and widely cited today without people knowing its origin: the old is dying and the new cannot be born — in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

“Morbid symptoms” — that is the word that matters. Gramsci did not mean only wars or catastrophes. He meant the subtler manifestations: disorientation, the aggression of the obsolete against the new, the inability to make clear decisions because no coordinate system is any longer beyond dispute.

II. What an Interregnum Feels Like

The strange thing about an interregnum is that most people living through it do not recognise it. They experience unease, contradictions, the feeling that something is wrong — but they interpret it as a temporary disruption, not as structural change. That is understandable: people are optimised for continuity. The brain seeks familiar patterns. What does not fit the pattern is filed as an exception, not as a rule.

That is why so many observers explain the present as anomaly. Trump is an anomaly. The Iran war is an anomaly. The disintegration of the transatlantic partnership is an anomaly. When the anomalies accumulate, the explanation is not revised — it is amplified. Each new anomaly confirms how far we have deviated from the normal. The return to normality becomes a political programme.

But normality has long since passed. What counts as normality — the liberal world order, the transatlantic partnership, the promise of growth, the stability of Western democracies — was itself a historical exception. A particularly fortunate phase that depended on the specific conditions of the postwar decades. Those conditions no longer exist. The normality one wishes to return to no longer exists either.

III. Clinging to the Dying

In the interregnum a peculiar political energy emerges: the desperate defence of the old by those who are at home in it. This is not stupidity. It is rational behaviour under false premises.

Whoever has built their life, career and worldview on a particular order has a fundamental interest in that order persisting. The European diplomat who has devoted a lifetime to the transatlantic partnership. The economist whose models rest on free-trade dogmas. The journalist who regards liberal democracy as the end-point of history. They all see the dying of the old — and interpret it as an attack to be resisted, not a change to be adapted to.

The clinging has a tragic dialectic: the more desperately one defends the old, the more visible its weakness becomes. The NATO declarations that grow ever more urgent. The commitments to the rules-based order repeated ever more frequently because they apply ever less. The European appeals to America that go ever more unanswered. Every repetition of these gestures shows that they no longer work — and is simultaneously impossible to omit, because the alternative would be an admission of the end.

IV. The Fear of the Nameless

The new is feared before it has taken form. That is not an irrational fear. It is the fear of the nameless — and the nameless is always more threatening than the familiar, however bad the familiar is.

A world order without American hegemony — what does that mean concretely? Nobody knows. A financial architecture without the petrodollar — how does it function? No one is designing it yet. A Europe that is strategically autonomous — what does it want, when it no longer knows what America wants? The questions pose themselves. The answers are absent. And in this vacuum of answers, fear flourishes.

The most dangerous actors in the interregnum are not those who defend the old — they are too weak to truly destroy. And not those who design the new — they are still too marginal to truly shape. The most dangerous actors are those who deploy the fear of the nameless as a political instrument. Who offer no new order, but mobilise the longing for the old. Who use nostalgia as a means of power.

Trump is the purest example. “Make America Great Again” is not a programme for the future. It is a time machine — an invitation to return to a past that never existed quite that way, but as an image is more powerful than any realistic alternative. That works because the interregnum offers no realistic alternatives — only the familiar and the unknown. And the familiar, even if it has passed, at least has a name.

V. What Becomes Possible in the Interregnum

Gramsci did not write only about the dangers of the interregnum. He also reflected on its possibilities — and that is the part less often cited.

In the interregnum, what is impossible in stable orders becomes possible: structural change. Not reform — reform presupposes an order to be reformed. But refoundation. The questions that may not be asked in normal operation — because they are too fundamental, because they touch too many interests, because they call the system itself into question — these questions suddenly become discussable.

Why must Europe buy its security from America? Why is the dollar the world currency? Why are wars fought to secure trade routes that a different energy supply would make unnecessary? These questions were always askable. But in the stable operation of the old order they went unheard, because too many actors had an interest in not asking them.

The interregnum does not destroy this silence through enlightenment, but through collapse. The answers to the old questions no longer work — so new questions must be asked. That is painful. It is also the only way out of the circle.

VI. The Archive of the Between

There is a specific task for people who see clearly in the interregnum — or clearly enough. Not the task of designing the new order: that would be presumptuous, because nobody knows what is coming. Not the task of defending the old: that would be futile, because it is dying.

The task is more modest and more lasting: to document the between. To record how things were. What worked and why. What did not work and why. Which questions were asked and which were not. Which alternatives were conceivable and why they were not taken.

This archive is not for the present. It is for those who come after the interregnum — who will live in a new order, who will not have experienced the transition, who will want to understand how the old world functioned and why it ended. For them, the archive of the between is the most valuable thing the interregnum can leave behind.

The interregnum is not a pause between two orders. It is itself a condition — with its own logic, its own dangers, its own possibilities. Whoever lives in it without knowing it is driven by it. Whoever recognises it can at least bear witness to what is happening.