A New World Order: How Media and Diplomacy Can Avoid a Liberal Apocalypse

At the Milton Wolf Seminar 2025, during the first round of questions, someone dared to ask about a potential new world order. Beyond wars, corrupt heads of states, or authoritarianism. For a fraction of time, I think all of us tapped into an eerily utopian version of our world. And, while we were promptly recalled to be realistic, the thought has not left me since then. After a week discussing the future of the public sphere with a group of individuals as brilliant as they were fascinating in their own unique—sometimes rebellious—ways, I cannot help but think that this new world order might not be as outrageous as it sounds. In this essay, I’ll explain why that is and how to progress towards it.

Hosted at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna with the Annenberg School of Communication (University of Pennsylvania) and the Austrian American Foundation, the 2025 Milton Wolf Seminar offered a rare space to explore the interplay of media and diplomacy in a period of profound uncertainty and transformation. Conversations explored subjects from geopolitical tensions to censorship and media capture, but beneath it all ran a shared undercurrent: the urgent need to reimagine how we engage with power, information, and ultimately each other.

The End of History… or Multilateralism

The collapse of the so-called “liberal world order” is no longer speculative, it’s already underway. The “end of history” thesis, famously proposed by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, underestimated the resilience of authoritarianism and the fragility of democratic infrastructure. Multilateralism, in its current form, has not only failed to evolve, it was arguably flawed from inception, privileging powerful actors at the expense of equitable cooperation [1]. The United Nations Security Council stands as a monument to this imbalance and inadequacy to tackle contemporary security challenges, whether that is Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

At the seminar, we examined how our political institutions are ill-equipped for a polycentric, pluralistic world. Their rigidity, amplified by weaponised identity politics and algorithmic manipulation, deepens division [2]. To escape this “ouroboros”—the theme of our seminar, a serpent eating its own tail—we must reject the illusion of liberal superiority and confront the uncomfortable truths: the “free world” was never truly free, and democracy is only as strong as its most disillusioned voter [3].

Rebuilding Trust

The erosion of trust emerged as a result of this realisation, both in institutions and among individuals. In a recent interview, my therapist remarked: “we don’t have trust anymore, but we still freaking need each other.” That paradox lingered. As Pippa Norris has shown, skepticism is not inherently damaging; it can be a sign of a healthy, engaged citizenry. But when trust erodes without alternative sources of legitimacy, democracy decays.

The digital age, for all its promise, exacerbates this challenge: vast information flows overwhelm our cognitive capacities, fostering confusion rather than clarity. Meanwhile, electoral systems concentrate too much influence in too few moments, making democratic life feel passive and highly susceptible to manipulation. If we are to avoid the liberal apocalypse, we must create new ways of building trust in democratic governance. We need new systems that foster regular political engagement, digital and media literacy, as well as structural safeguards reducing the impact of misinformation.

What Role for Media and Diplomacy?

There is hope. When cooperation is possible, there can be a stable, intuitive path to sustain it, one that is robust even in the presence of deviants or bad actors. This model reflects the kind of world order we must now aspire to: decentralised, accountable, and emotionally intelligent. States, bound by international systems that reward competition over collaboration, are unlikely to initiate such change. But media and diplomacy can.

The media must embrace plurality and community-building functions. The transparency and independence requirements imposed on EU media by the European Media Freedom Act (2024) are a big step in the right direction. However, much more is needed to foster a media ecosystem that is as vibrant and diverse as its society. To start, we need to upscale support for alternative media models and organisations that prioritise public service and community accountability over profit-driven narratives (e.g. Bellingcat, ProPublica, GroundNews, Correctiv).

Diplomats should reorient from state-to-state relations toward empowering civic actors and championing public diplomacy. Public engagement, transparency, and co-creation must be their guiding principles. Here, technologies like Web3, blockchain, and AI could provide the architecture for this decentralised governance, and gamification could reinvigorate democratic participation, as recent democratic innovations in Taiwan and Estonia show. We must use more deliberative and participatory formats to directly involve the public in decision-making about key social issues. This enhances awareness, cooperation, and trust.

Looking Ahead

The paradigm shift will not come without resistance. Nation-states, like monarchies before them, are designed for self-preservation. They are enshrined in laws, beliefs, and bureaucracies that resist decentralisation. But as history reminds us, permanence is a myth. Before the French Revolution, the idea of life without a monarch seemed absurd. Today, a world without dominant nation-states may seem equally implausible, but it’s already emerging in the margins.

Civil society, transnational communities, and digital ecosystems are laying the groundwork for a different kind of global order: one that values community, equity, and ever-changing identities. Constructivist International Relations theory reminds us that norms and values are not fixed; they are socially constructed and therefore can be reimagined. If we build systems with better incentive structures, those that encourage cooperation, foster shared values, and promote transparency, we will not only survive the collapse of the old world order; we will flourish beyond it.