The Collective West Is NOT Finished. How The Empire Fights Its Decline | Nel Bonilla

## Framing the moment: decline without collapse The contemporary Western project—centered historically on the United States and its transatlantic partners—finds itself in what looks, at first glance, like a classic moment of decline. But decline need not mean dissolution. The conversation at Kyoto reframes the typical narrative: rather than anticipating an inevitable collapse and the benign birth of a new multipolar order, the present is better understood as an interregnum in which weakened legitimacy, adaptive coercion, and institutional resilience combine to reproduce old patterns in new forms. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci and contemporary historical scholarship, Nel Bonilla offers a diagnosis: the “old” is dying, the “new” is not simply arriving, and in the gap the system adapts—sometimes brutally—to forestall genuine alternatives. ## Gramsci’s interregnum and the logic of adaptation Gramsci’s famous triad—the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in the interregnum monsters roam—was read not as prophecy but as an analytic lens. The key element is a crisis of authority: elites have lost consensual legitimacy, and the mass of people becomes skeptical of traditional ideologies. Yet this skepticism does not automatically produce new emancipatory formations. Bonilla stresses that elites, confronted by declining consent, do not passively await obsolescence; they experiment with new combinations of rule. Force and coercion increase not because the system is reverting to naked tyranny as a first resort, but because coercion becomes a strategically available tool to obstruct emergent alternatives while administrative, financial and logistical networks are retooled to preserve elite advantage. ## The Cold War as anomaly, not template One of the most consequential reframings in the discussion is temporal: the Cold War should be treated as an exceptional period of relative constraint on elite violence and extraction, not as the baseline of modernity. The mid-20th-century settlement combined organized working classes, anti-colonial pressures and a rival socialist bloc into a countervailing force that made social concessions and welfare policies politically necessary. These constraints shaped elites’ preferences and produced a denser social compact. According to Bonilla, many analysts today project Cold War categories—containment, diplomacy, welfare-era notions of legitimacy—onto a present where those structuring forces no longer hold. When we do that, we misread adaptive coercion for deviance and mistake paralysis for decline. ## The bunker state: institutional survival through enclosure To capture the qualitative transformation of state power, Bonilla advances what she calls the “bunker state.” This is not merely increased militarization, though that is part of it. The bunker state is a reconfiguration of institutions—fiscal, administrative, and regulatory—toward defensive, selective, and extractive ends. It blends austerity-driven governance with strategic repression, protected logistical networks, and elite enclaves designed for survivability. In this model, political elites do not need robust, society-wide consent. They only require pockets of reliable support and the capacity to manage coercive instruments that block or fragment organized alternatives. The bunker state is thus both a material project—fortified supply chains, hardened policy apparatuses—and an ideological one—producing vocabularies of threat, resilience, and strategic necessity that justify exceptional measures. ## Violence, capitalism, and the removal of constraints A centralanalytic claim is structural rather than moral: capitalism has always been interwoven with organized violence. Referencing historical scholarship, Bonilla highlights that markets, trade and accumulation frequently emerged through coercive means—colonial force, armed trade, dispossession. Periods of relative peace are historically contingent outcomes of strong countervailing social forces. When those forces weaken—through fragmentation of labor, the retreat of solidaristic politics, the erosion of international alternatives—violence again re-enters as a practical tool of governance. The present uptick in organized violence, from targeted interventions to securitized economic policy, therefore reflects the removal of constraints rather than a unique moral failing of contemporary leaders. ## Why the new is obstructed: language, coordination, and active repression If the new cannot be born, Bonilla argues, it is because it is repeatedly obstructed on multiple fronts. First, there is the politics of language: dominant elites have succeeded in normalizing strategic vocabularies—supply-chain security, strategic resources, choke points—that depoliticize competing visions and cast them as logistical risks. Resistance movements, diverse and often localized, lack a common conceptual grammar to translate grievances into a cohesive geopolitical critique. Second, coordination is thin. The organizational density that characterized earlier counterweights—the labor movement, anti-colonial blocs, international socialist solidarity—is now diffuse. Third, repression is active and adaptive: nascent movements are criminalized, co-opted leaders are absorbed, dissent is redirected into intra-societal antagonisms, and legal frameworks are recalibrated to delegitimate systemic alternatives. These are not isolated measures but elements of a strategic project to stall systemic reconfiguration. ## Europe, dependence and fractured opposition The symposium’s exchange highlighted Europe’s particular predicament. Economically linked and strategically interdependent with the U.S., European states face declining industrial capacities, aging infrastructures, and political fragmentation. Yet dependence on transatlantic networks complicates the possibility of autonomous policy reorientation. Bonilla points to the fragmented nature of opposition inside Europe: social movements, progressive parties, and heterodox intellectual currents often lack a shared horizon or institutional vehicle to translate critical diagnoses into scalable statecraft. The result is a dual fragility: European states cannot fully disengage from U.S.-centered architectures, while domestic resistances struggle to coordinate across borders and sectors to propose credible alternatives. ## Gramsci revisited: building a shared political language and institutionality If the obstacle to a new order is both material and discursive, the remedy must be dual as well. Bonilla stresses the need for a shared political language that is not simply the mirror of imperial strategic discourse. Such a language would recenter questions of social reproduction, ecological limits, and democratic planning, and it would make explicit the institutional steps—coordinated supply-chain governance, multilevel public investment, solidaristic financial instruments—needed to realize alternative horizons. Equally important is the architecture of organization: durable transnational institutions and networks capable of defending common gains, coordinating industrial bases, and protecting the political autonomy of those seeking to defect from existing hegemonic constraints. ## Democracy, capital, and the politics of defection The conversation reached a hard point about defection: why can’t states simply leave the current imperial order and pursue different developmental strategies? Bonilla’s answer is that defection is feasible only if supported by credible, organized alternatives that can withstand economic and geopolitical retaliation. In the Cold War era, certain forms of defection were bufferable by the existence of rival blocs and solidarities. Today, without that coherence, defection risks swift economic and logistical isolation. This reality reframes debates about democracy: the mere existence of formal electoral processes does not ensure the space for substantive policy shifts if capital and

The Collective West Is NOT Finished. How The Empire Fights Its Decline | Nel Bonilla Europe and North America are clearly on a declining trajectory, but that does not mean that have given up on their designs for World Domination. Something far more dangerous is going on. Kyoto University Symposium 2026: "Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters" Presentation 4: Nel Bonilla Nel Bonilla challenges the assumption that Western decline necessarily leads to collapse or a peaceful multipolar order. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci, she examines how weakened legitimacy can coexist with coercion, institutional survival and the obstruction of alternatives. Her account of the bunker state connects austerity, militarization and elite power. The Kyoto Symposium discussion considers European dependence, competing interests and the fragmented forces opposing the existing order, asking what shared political language, organization and institutions might make meaningful systemic change possible. Nel's Links: Worldlines: https://worldlinesletter.substack.com/ Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Introduction and Gramsci’s time of monsters 03:20 Authority, consent and coercion 08:42 Why the Cold War was an exception 15:09 Different crises and the assumption of collapse 22:40 Why a new order cannot be born 27:50 The bunker state 33:08 Q&A: state power and European dependence 50:30 Democracy, capital and political organization #Pascal With that out of the way, the next on our program is Nell Bonilla, who, again, has a very insightful Substack, and she's also finishing up her PhD at the moment. But I believe the topic that you're going to talk to us about is actually the core of your research, which is on elite networks and transatlantic... #Nel Bonilla Yes. So first of all, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here. And second of all, so I want to talk about, yes, actually, like one could say transatlanticism, elite networks, but I want to also, or rather, start with the title of the symposium, which is "The Time of Monsters," which is a paraphrase from a passage and a sentence that Antonio Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks. And I want to talk about it because I think many, many—like, there is a certain way to interpret the sentence, which is basically about, okay, the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in the interregnum, in the interval, symptoms, or rather monsters, appear, or sometimes it's paraphrased like monsters. And I think this reading leads to thinking about this historic inevitability, like reading it almost as a prophecy. And I want to go into this passage of Gramsci to show that it was actually embedded in -- 1 of 16 -- questions. It was about a crisis of authority that he talks about. And I also want to say, of course, so I'm not denying that if we call the U.S.-led transatlantic bloc, for example, an empire, that it is in many ways or at many levels in decline. There are many crises of a material, but also of human and ideological nature going on there. And that then we say, okay, the increased organized violence that we are seeing, those are actually the monsters. They are a symptom of decomposition. And I want to argue, or rather add an argument to this, that it is not only about this idea of an existential threat to the, let's call it, U.S.-led empire, but it's also about it adapting, like seeking adaptation. And why? Partly because it has shattered the constraints it had, for example, during the Cold War, and still some remnants during the moment that we call, like, unipolarity. And then I want to say, well, actually, because—and I will get into this in detail later—because these constraints have been removed, then we see the so-called morbid symptoms or monsters. So let's talk about the Gramsci passage. What he's saying is, as I said, the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and morbid symptoms appear. And in this longer passage, he asks—well, or rather he says—okay, the dominant classes have lost consensus. And because they have lost consensus, they aren't anymore leading, but they are using coercion, which is violence in all of its forms, more than before. So this is one part of the passage. And then he also says the masses, or the popular masses, no longer actually believe in the old order and the old and traditional ideologies and have lost that belief. And they now have skepticism. There is also a turn toward materialism. And at the same time, like, the old order or the old ideologies are not simply, like, vanishing, and that's it. At the same time, the same actors, the same, like, U.S. ruling strata in the case of today, are saying, well, but we will use force to make up for the lost consensus. We will use force to block any type of new frameworks through which we can see the world that could be a threat to our way of, in this case, since we are in a capitalist system, unrestrained capital accumulation, hyper- exploitation, resource extraction, and so on. And then he asks, can the old order actually use force to prevent these new ideologies from asserting themselves? And he answers, well, force cannot actually restore the old ideology in an absolute sense, but in a new combination sense, it can. And what he means, I guess, is that, of course, the police or the military cannot make or beat into the population that they have to believe again in the old ideology. In this case, for example, this idea that markets will bring prosperity, open markets or things like that. You cannot beat that into a population that is experiencing material deterioration. So that is one other part of the passage. So he's saying force can actually obstruct and stop the new from forming and asserting itself. And then a new combination emerges, but a new combination of what? Of the old order, which means it's not about trying to get back to the old ways, but finding new ways of rule, of domination, and so on. And I have, or try to work on, a concept that I call the bunker state, which is like a qualitative transformation of the state, mostly of what we could call the imperial core and its surroundings, but not only of that. And it's a tendency, a tendential development, but I will explain more about this -- 2 of 16 -- later. And so before I explain the one-crisis concept, I want to first also explain why it is that we perceive and experience the present in a particular way that then, for example, leads to this reading of passages or concepts through the lens of the past, right? So why, for example, do we see declining crises and then think of collapse, think that collapse will automatically maybe lead to emancipation and liberation or a more peaceful order? I'm not saying that's not possible, just that let's think about steps in between. So, in that sense, why do we read the present as a generalized time of collapse, possible collapse, and decline? There are several crises, for example, of—oops, sorry—more austerity, deindustrialization, more financialization, more polarized opinions, and many, many more crises and ways of seeing the decline of, well, in many countries, of course. In, for example, the U.S. and Europe, we see that, I think, more than in other ways, or in a more rapid way. And I would say that we then say, okay, this will lead to collapse because these categories and frameworks we use right now, all of us, were formed during the Cold War. And in the Cold War, we had very different, like, a different context than we have right now. #Pascal Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there. #Nel Bonilla And what do I mean by this? I mean by that that during the Cold War, there was an attempt by the U.S.-led power elites, the transatlantic elites, too, but more the U.S.-led elites, to make capitalism appear as capable of more progress, more peace. It doesn't mean that the Cold War was totally peaceful. No, of course not. #Nel Bonilla But there was an unusual combination of restraint and an unusually dense attempt at seeking the consensus of the populations in many countries, not only in the imperial core, but also even in countries in Latin America and Asia and so on, in Africa, through the theories, for example, of developmentalism and dependency theory and so on. So we had— and why was that? Because we had, on the one hand, the Soviet Union, the socialist bloc, the anti-colonial movements, liberation movements. We also had organized working classes, or more organized working classes than we have today, in a more coherent and massive manner in Europe, for example. So in that sense, welfare back then, or the social welfare, the common good, all of this appeared to be a normal product of modernization, of growing institutions. -- 3 of 16 -- Organized violence, for some at least, appeared maybe as an externality to the major form of modernity in capitalism. And even international organizations seemed to have some weight and meaning at the time. But why did all of this happen? Why were there these constraints? We could say there were even more levels of equality in many countries. There was not this inequality that we see today. Why was that? Because these were the effects, or partially because these were the effects, of an organized and coherent counterpower, let's call it. And it was even so much so that during the end of the 1970s, in the, for example, U.S. ruling strata, they were already thinking about, like, loudly, "Okay, here's actually too much democracy, too much equality going on." There was, for example, that so-called Powell memorandum of a judge called Powell, who sent this memorandum to CEOs of corporations and so on and said, well, there's too much going on with the people. They have too much influence in the government. We need to do something. So they actually were feeling that there were too many constraints for this logic of, for example, capital accumulation and so on, which then led, of course, to the slow and growing politics of neoliberalism, what we call today that. So that was one part of the story. And what I didn't mean by that is that today we mistake, like, the effects, the constraining effects that existed back then in the Cold War, for the achievements of just modernization, maybe even of capitalism for some. And it is not right. Not only that, it's rather that nowadays we have more organized violence carried out by the U.S. and transatlantic empire because this former counterpower that was more coherent, that had a common language and a common horizon, has been fragmented. Which doesn't mean, again, that there's no resistance at all today. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it is more fragmented. So now this is, of course, not only about saying there's more violence. Again, this is also about saying there's more, or an attempt at more, hyper-exploitation of resources and so on. So we are basically, I would say, reading the present through categories of the past. For example, and what I mean by that, for example, is also categories like diplomacy, like containment, like peace. All of that we think about, and we think, okay, why did it work back then and not now? And shouldn't it be that way? Wasn't it common sense? So in that sense, I would even add that it is not only that we think about the categories of the past and use them until now, where we have a different situation, but also that we are projecting our own experiences as citizens, as a population, our logic of everyday life, of social reproduction, in one way or another, to concepts that are then also used by these U.S. and transatlantic power elites in a very different way. So if we think a