The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s demise is in the news. Once again, the last days of socialism are trumpeted far and wide. But so are the new threats of cold war, and especially between Russia and the so-called west. Can we expect new walls to sprout around the world in the years to come? How tall could they ever get? Here and there, touches of nostalgia can be discerned, as well. A generation ago, walls divided different visions of the future, or at least different ideologies, but today they have to do with petty national interests, or even puerile squabbles between the rich and powerful.

I wonder. Socialism is no more, but capitalism is splintering in ways that are far from ideologically trivial. Liberal capitalism is now threatened by a growing variety of state capitalisms that defy straightforward definition, let alone classification, but they cannot be subsumed any longer under capitalism pure and simple. Russia and China offer glimpses of very different capitalist futures than those that can be gleaned from America and Europe, for example. This can be said of India and Brazil, as well, but the differences between them and today’s rich world are a bit less pronounced than those concerning the former socialist countries. In particular, Russia and China now offer models of state capitalism that can easily be transformed into new brands of feudalism.

The new cold war is likely to be shaped by divisions pointing, as it were, backwards. And different visions of the future can be radically different in this context. The ideological strife can thus be expected to grow over time, and especially if prodded by rapid climate change that cannot but strongly affect the distribution of wealth across the globe. Most important, the very mention of feudalism is likely to be avoided like the plague. Soon enough, it will become more pernicious than the mention of communism in its heyday. On the whole, the new cold war promises much excitement in not so distant future. Warring ideologies will return with a vengeance as capitalism splinters and recoils.