During the Cold War, the Norden was widely seen as the model of an enlightened and antimilitaristic society that follows the principles of distributive justice and is morally superior to two alternative models of modernization: the United States and the Soviet Union. The two countries that best exemplified the Nordic model and neutrality were Sweden and Finland. (This is a somewhat longer draft version of a text published on 1.6.2022 in Le Monde Diplomatique in French as “Finlande et Suède brisent l’idéal nordique” [here]; in English as “The end of the Nordic ideal” [here], republished in The Nation [here]; also in German [here], Spanish [here], Portuguese [here], and Norwegian [here]).

This is a written interview for the Italian outlet Valigia Blu, in response to questions posed by Gabriele Catania. The published story is long and apparently “super-read”, but it only involves a few selected parts of my original answers. Here is the entire interview as I originally wrote it down — exceptionally I am publishing it as a blog. You can find more interviews in English (and other languages) here.

Most wars end in some kind of reciprocal peace agreement. The sooner some such is achieved, the sooner the killing and destruction in Ukraine will end and the lower the risk that the war will continue to escalate – possibly even towards a nuclear war. [This short essay was first published in English by Brave New Europe on 24 April 2022, though without endnotes. It is also available in Italian and Finnish.]

I was invited to contribute to Progressive Yearbook 2022 published by The Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), the think tank of the social democratic and socialist parties at the EU level. The text is a short overview of global developments analysed in classical Wellsian terms of our world ‘civilisation being in a race between learning and catastrophe’. The text makes an explicit reference to the scenarios I developed in the The Political Economy of Global Security (Routledge 2008), but some of these ideas I develop much further from a novel field-theoretical perspective in my forthcoming book The Three Fields of Global Political Economy (Routledge, March 2022). A new, slightly longer and up-dated version of the text written for the July 2022 conference “Unknown Wars” is available here.