In the Time of Monsters: The Global Interregnum , Seen from the Caribbean
In the Time of Monsters: The Global Interregnum, Seen from the Caribbean
By Prof C. Justin Robinson,
Prof. C. Justin Robinson is a national of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, He obtained his PhD in Finance from the University of Manchester, UK. A Professor of Corporate Finance, he is currently Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus. Professor Robinson also serves as a Director of the Central Bank of Barbados, Member of the Fiscal Responsibility Mechanism, St. Vincent & The Grenadines, Director Jamaica Money Market Brokers International and Director WIBISCO. He also serves as Chair of the Ratings Committee of CARICRIS (the Caribbean’s sole credit rating agency), and President of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
Lord, we live in a topsy turvy world. Our heads are spinning as we try to make sense of local, regional and global events. Antonio Gramsci, writing from one of Mussolini’s prison cells in the 1930s, gave us this perspective: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The popular paraphrase, “the old order is dying, the new order struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters,” is not quite what he wrote. But it is exactly what he meant. When one order collapses and another has not yet arrived, politics fills with monsters. Look around, the monsters are not coming, they are here.
The old order, the post-Cold War, American-led, market-knows-best consensus, is visibly expiring. Its funeral is not a single event but a daily ritual. The trade rules are broken by the powers that wrote them. The international courts are defied by the nations that drafted their statutes. The “end of history” has given way to the return of land grabs, spheres of influence, and the casual redrawing of borders. Global military spending now approaches three trillion US dollars a year, its eleventh consecutive year of growth, while the United Nations Secretary-General laments that at the moment we need international cooperation most, we seem least inclined to use it.
Meanwhile, the new struggles to be born. No power, not China, not a fragmented Europe, not a distracted United States, not an aspiring BRICS, has stepped forward with legitimacy, coherence, or a vision beyond its own survival. What we have instead are fragments, a “multipolar” world that looks less like balance and more like a brawl with no referee.
The symptoms of this interregnum are familiar to anyone reading the news. War has returned as the grammar of politics, from Ukraine to Gaza, to Sudan, to Venezuela, to Cuba to a grab for Guyana land. Democracy seems exhausted, by most credible counts, global freedom has now declined for two consecutive decades, and authoritarianism no longer markets itself as repression, it markets itself as efficiency, order, sovereignty, and revenge. The climate emergency, after the hottest decade in recorded history, is still treated as a policy sector rather than the condition under which all politics now occurs. Artificial intelligence is arriving not as a collectively governed transformation but as a private arms race. And human displacement has been normalized, roughly one in every seventy human beings on Earth is now forcibly displaced, in a world where capital, weapons, carbon, and data cross borders freely, but compassion is stopped at the frontier.
This is Gramsci’s diagnosis in global form but I want to ask a different question. What does the interregnum look like from the Caribbean?
Here is the uncomfortable truth, we never owned the old order. We were its periphery, its plantation, its offshore ledger, its tourist brochure. The dying consensus promised integration without justice, growth without ecological limits, and rules that bound the small while exempting the strong. Lloyd Best taught us to see the plantation economy not as history but as structure and the old order was, in many respects, the plantation gone global. We should shed no sentimental tears at its funeral.
But neither should we romanticize collapse, as a vacuum is not liberation. When the rules dissolve, the strong do not become generous; the weak do not inherit freedom, they inherit exposure. For small open economies dependent on trade, tourism, remittances, correspondent banking, and imported food and fuel, an ungoverned world is not a liberated world, it is a more dangerous one. When the referee leaves the field, it is not the heavyweight who should be worried.
And the monsters do not respect our size. The hurricane intensified by a warming we did not cause does not check our carbon footprint before landfall. The de-risking decision taken in a New York boardroom does not pause to consider what it does to a Caribbean bank, a Caribbean diaspora, a Caribbean grandmother waiting on a remittance. The algorithm that decides who gets credit, insurance, or a visa was not trained on our realities and answers to no parliament we elect. These are the morbid symptoms, arriving on our shores ahead of any new order to govern them.
So what is to be done in the time of monsters? Three things, I would argue.
First, abandon the waiting posture. I have said it before and the interregnum makes it more urgent: No one is coming to save us. There is no restored Washington consensus, no benevolent new hegemon, no global conference that will write rules in our favour while we watch from the gallery. The interregnum is precisely the period in which the furniture of the next order is being arranged and those absent from the room will be on the menu rather than at the table.
Second, build regional architecture as if our lives depend on it, because they do. The institutions we already possess: CARICOM, the OECS, the ECCB, the CCJ, the University of the West Indies, these are not ornaments of flag independence. They are the scaffolding of survival in a fragmenting world. Deeper capital markets, regional food systems, pooled negotiating capacity, indigenous research and data, a single domestic space in fact and not merely in treaty: this is not idealism. In an interregnum, it is insurance.
Third, claim authorship of the new technologies rather than merely consuming them. Trinidadian philosopher C.L.R. James reminded us that ordinary people, organized, have repeatedly outrun the categories assigned to them. Artificial intelligence will reorganize labour, education, finance, and governance whether we participate or not. The choice before small states is not whether AI arrives but whether it arrives as something done to us or built with us trained on our data, governed by our values, serving our development.
Gramsci’s warning is often read as fatalism. It is the opposite. An interregnum is dangerous precisely because it is undecided. The monsters appear when history stalls, but they do not have to rule it. The new world will not be delivered by optimism, nor by a saviour. It will be built, slowly and imperfectly, by institutions, movements, laws, and choices strong enough to make despair less persuasive.
The old world is dying and the new one is struggling to be born. The Caribbean has spent five centuries on the receiving end of other people’s world orders. The only question that matters now is whether, this time, we will be spectators to the monsters, or midwives of something better. The interregnum is asking, and it is asking us by name.
This Article First Appeared in the Kiskadee Watch ( Diaspora Voices) Sunday, June 21st 2026.
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