A Neo-Royalist Future?

As we struggle to make sense of Trump’s maneuvers in Venezuela and elsewhere, a couple of international relations scholars have a new term to describe this possible shift in the world system order. This term is “neo-royalism”, and is described in a paper written by Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman which was published a couple months ago in the journal International Organization. This paper has seen a lot of interest in the past several days including many mentions on Bluesky and a MetaFilter post about it.

International relations scholars view the liberal international order as a system that is in decline, but they have tended to think that this shift may be a fallback to what preceded it, that is the Westphalian great power system, where systems of global governance are weak and states are sovereign and acting to pursue their own best interests. What Goddard and Newman are suggesting is that we might be have to look back before the Westphalian system for an analogue (the Treaty of Westphalia was 1648). As they put it:

A plausible emerging order, which we label neo-royalism, would be a major break from both [the liberal international order and the Westphalian system]. It centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns, seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.

They give as examples of royalist cliques the Khanate “great houses”, monarchical families such as the Tudors or Hapsburgs, or conglomerations such as the Medicis in Florence. Today’s analogues would be Trump and his circle of course but also Putin, Modi, Orbán, Modi, bin Salman, and others.

They see neo-royalists maintaining their power through rent-seeking rather than a rules-based order. As they say:

The goal of rent extraction is not simply self-enrichment; it amasses wealth from both the domestic and international peripheries so as to perpetuate and extend clique political dominance.

Or as Newman just expressed it on Bluesky: “Why target Venezuela/Greenland? Because they offer rents that can be extracted and distributed to the insider clique. The broligarchs have a long term interest in these places.”

I’m afraid to say it but I think Goddard and Newman are onto something here. This has a lot of parallels to discussions around neofeudalism but perhaps neo-royalism as a concept has more descriptive power. Maybe it’s time for medieval and early modern political historians to educate us all about the world before states.