History rarely announces itself with fanfare. More often, it arrives as fog: a faint crack in the wall, a prolonged silence no one quite knows how to name. By the time its presence is unmistakable, it is usually too late. We are living precisely in such a moment. One era is slipping away without ceremony, while another lingers unnamed. Without rules, without guarantees, without promises. One world is closing, but the door to the next has yet to open.

In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig chronicled the collapse of a civilization that believed it had escaped history. A Europe convinced that rationality had won its final battle; that war had become an anachronism; that progress was a law of nature. The tragedy of that world was not its idealism, but its certainty; its belief that the civilization it had built was permanent, shielded from danger.

History teaches us a harsher truth: nothing is more dangerous than a civilization convinced of its own security.

A century later, we are living our own version of that fading world. Our “world of yesterday” is no longer pre–World War I Europe, but the post–Cold War international order. It is the era of liberal multilateralism, the belief that trade would replace conflict, that institutions would discipline power, that economics would consistently prevail politics, and that geopolitics itself would be dissolved by technology and interdependence. Yet geopolitics never disappears. It simply waits, quietly, for its moment of return.

For nearly three decades, the global system operated under an unwritten pact: hard power would recede into the background, while soft power would dominate the discourse. Multilateral institutions became cathedrals of global order. NATO and the European Union were not simply alliances, but guarantors. The United Nations, for all its contradictions, remained the arena where even adversaries were compelled to face one another. The global economy was woven into a web so intricate that war appeared not only immoral, but irrational.

Perhaps it was the best period we have ever known, not because it was perfect, but because it was predictable. And predictability is the highest form of security.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall until Russia’s first revanchist move in Crimea, the international order appeared etched in stone. Some thinkers went so far as to proclaim the “end of history.” Today, that world is unraveling under the weight of three forces.

The Return of Power Politics

First, the brutal return of power politics. States once again speak the language of raw interest, of territory, force, and compulsion. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shattered the very premise of the post-1945 European security order. For the first time in nearly eighty years, large-scale war returned to the European continent, reminding us that borders can still be threatened to be redrawn by tanks, that history never truly ends, and that security cannot be outsourced indefinitely.

This reality has now been acknowledged even by those who long spoke the language of financial stability. At Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the shift with stark clarity: the age of efficiency is over; the age of security has begun. The global economy can no longer pretend that politics is mere background noise. Economic neutrality has become an illusion. Markets, like states, are now operating under the logic of survival.

The Fragmentation of the Global Order

Second, the fragmentation of the global system. Universal multilateralism is giving way to multipolarity, competing centers of power, and to minilateralism: smaller circles of trust, temporary alliances, agreements that last only as long as the interests sustaining them. Institutions once designed to generate stability increasingly produce paralysis. Rules that were once universal have become selective. Vetoes speak louder than resolutions. And a world governed by multiple rulebooks is invariably a world on the brink of collision.

As Finnish President Alexander Stubb has maintained in Foreign Affairs, we are entering an era of systemic competition, where democracies and autocracies are no longer contesting merely territory, but the very principles by which global order is organized. This is not simply a rivalry of power, but a clash of models. In such a landscape, neutrality is no longer a moral stance but an absence of position.

Everything as a Weapon

Third, the weaponization of everything. Energy has become a tool of pressure rather than exchange. Technology has become an instrument of dominance rather than progress. Where economic logic once prevailed, security logic now rules. An epochal shift.

Geopolitics (read: power, sovereignty, borders) always returns at the precise moment we believe we have transcended it. The world of yesterday forgot this. It forgot the generational struggle required to secure sovereignty. Living for too long in a zone of perceived safety, sustained by liberal multilateralism, it assumed that economic interdependence would produce moral responsibility, that integration would yield political convergence. History, as always, proved more cynical than theory.

Autocracies learned how to exploit globalization without transforming themselves. Democracies learned too late that trade does not guarantee peace.

Yet declaring multilateralism a failure would be an even graver act of historical amnesia. It remains the most successful order humanity has ever constructed. It reduced poverty, expanded opportunity, and crucially gave small states a sense that they were more than mere spectators in a game dominated by great powers. The failure was not the system itself, but the belief that it could survive without protection.

As Stubb warns, democracies erred in believing that norms could replace power. In reality, norms endure only when backed by the capacity to defend them. No order survives on memory alone.

A Tougher, More Honest World

The future will not be a nostalgic return to the world of yesterday. Nor is it destined for inevitable darkness. It will be harsher, more honest, less sentimental. A world in which a reconfigured multilateralism must rest on real power, and in which norms without force will sound increasingly like prayers. Alliances will matter only to the extent that there is willingness to defend them.

For the Western Balkans, this new world is not an abstract debate but a geographical reality.

In an era of reorganized power, small states survive not by ambiguity, but by using alliances as shields, not diplomatic décor. A clear Euro-Atlantic orientation is not optional anymore but existential.

As security becomes the new global currency, political stability and strategic coherence become capital. We cannot afford strategic ambiguity. Yet this era also presents a rare opportunity. In a world defined by uncertainty, stability acquires political value. In a region shaped by memories of conflict, predictability becomes strategic capital. And as Europe seeks security along its borders, the Western Balkans are no longer a periphery but a test case.

Zweig’s warning remains unchanged: civilizations do not collapse only through violence, but through forgetfulness. The world of yesterday vanished because people believed history had ended. The world now emerging demands something harder, not nostalgia for what was, but responsibility for what is coming.