Cultural shifts, 2026

The year 2026 starts with the Ukrainians gravely looking at possible defeat. They have not entertained this thought at any time since the days immediately after the Russian invasion in 2022 — when their then newly elected President Volodymir Zelensky choose to stay in Kyiv instead of taking flight — through to fairly recently.

Too, Europe is looking at Ukraine’s precariousness, in large measure because of the unreliable United States’ support, as their own vulnerability to Russian territorial aggression.

Preparing for what can come next, with a military official citing “increased peril,” France is upping mobilization of its volunteer military corps. Stopping short of compulsory service, France is nevertheless targeting an increase from today’s 45,000 reservists to 105,000 by 2035.

Expecting Russia’s Vladimir Putin to turn territorial aggression towards Europe, Germany is rearming. “Racing to re-arm,” says a television analyst in Europe. Germany is distancing from the antiwar stance it assiduously cultivated since after the second world war.

Japan, on the other side of the globe, is suddenly the world’s third largest military spender. This should be shocking to those who know of Japan’s Constitutional renunciation of war “as the sovereign right of nations” since 1945. But Japan’s officialdom had shed its post WW2 pacifism. Apparently, the Japanese citizenry (up to 48+%) agrees.

Meanwhile, Canada’s defense establishment “scrambles to figure out how to mobilize and equip” an envisioned supplementary reserve of some 300,000 citizens — even if it isn’t expecting invasion. And in South Asia, nuclear-armed India has cleared $8.8 billion for defense spending in 2026; nuclear-armed Pakistan, an increase of 20%, a similar magnitude as India’s, for updated armaments.

None of this would have been possible if not driven by enormous cultural shift.

COLD WAR 1
A world divided into two since the end of WW2 produced at least three generations of humans living entirely in their “half” of the world. People thought themselves denizens and champions of the “West” or the “East.”

The world order constructed after WW2 by the US, with the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization —that prevailed for 70-some years over the territories of winning Allied and the losing powers — was culturally solidified by the shorthand “the West.”

In hindsight, it got weirder. “The West” included Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and half of ASEAN. But, yes, this word “West” remains the nickname for a world built as free societies producing wealth from free-market capitalism.

In due course, freedom was found elusive in a capitalism unfree from overwhelming greed. Or untethered to restraint and social justice.

Western solidarity needed its opposite number. In the postwar bipolar world, the “East” was Russia, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, and Cuba. In specific periods, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru were, oddly enough if reckoned spatially, in the East.

It was a bizarre directionality, but this “East” stayed as a synonym for unfree peoples in whose collective name power was wielded by dramatic strongmen to maintain centralized economies.

In due course, people power was elusive under the fetters straightjacketing centralized economies.

Taking stock in the end — the Cold War evaporated in the last decade of the 20th Century with the demise of the Soviet Union — neither half of the twosome had a monopoly of dictators, poverty-producing forces, and breathtaking corruption.

Culturally, belonging to either East or West pivots on the power of imagination, albeit one which was cultivated by grand scale, ideologically driven social engineers.

Ideology can make a kind of life and way of thinking normal. But only culture makes a kind of life and way of thinking natural.

The Cold War naturalized the politico-economic projects of capitalism (making the word overlap with all variables of democracy and liberalism) and communism (making the word overlap with all variables of socialism and repression).

The world was never so simple, of course. (For example, where did the ancient European ideas of a “Middle East” or a “South Asia” really fit?) And it’s a big argument to make, so it is not for now — but there’s a way of summarizing the sustaining culture for this mega polarization.

This double, oppositional world was fed by a globally shared fear of another world war.

The imagined certainty of another global conflagration with unimaginable human costs made a Cold War vastly endurable (hence preferable) to a hot war. Even if low intensity conflicts with global coordinates kept going through the rest of the 20th Century.

COLD WAR 2
At the cusp of 2026, the political center Right of previous decades in different countries have swung to the Right. Some, to the far Right. What cultural shifts are making this happen?

Electorates in the US, Austria, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Hungary, Turkey, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, Greece, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, India, Japan, and Israel, have either allowed substantially greater power for, or outright elected Rightwing parties to, national leadership.

The ideological drivers are self-evident and seem formidable. The Rightward momentum emerged wholly charged from the interim 20-year period between 2000 to the 2020s, when a supposed unipolar world emerged and then imploded.

That single-superpower world is now blamed for runaway globalization; wars and climate issues that set off mass migration; peripheralization of previously dominant ethnicities (notably, white-Christian nationalists); economic downturns; and globally networked criminality. Populisms feed on simplifications of these problems.

Which means that peace-building strategies — simultaneous nuclear disarmament, unified markets, multilateral institutions, international law, and, at the start, the seemingly democratizing capacity of digital networks — now seem too soft on border policing and economic protectionism.

To peoples threatened hugely by an incomprehensively interconnected world, the go-to political and economic idea is exclusion. Cold War 2 seems similar to Cold War 1 in a Left/Right division of the world, but with a resurrection of racist-structured social hierarchy, this time writ very large, indeed; and a Biblical view of Judeo-Christian peoples against barbarians.

In this Cold War 2, Putin’s Russia belongs to the Judeo-Christian world together with the US, while Europe could very well be deemed barbaric if the Rightist leaders, in their own view, are not allowed full ascendancy.

That this is now a fully emerged global state of imagination brings to the surface the underlying culture: xenophobia. Another fear-based culture therefore: a distressed and even phobic view of the many ways of being human. Unfortunately, this overlarge identity politics is soldered to logics for increased militarization.

And increased militarization is in turn welded to an emergent idea of “spheres of influence” that idealizes a world under three superpowers: the US as overlord of the Americas, Russia as overlord of Europe, and China as overlord of Asia.

The fate of Ukraine (which will also be the fate of Taiwan, and the fate of Venezuela and Cuba) is being read at the cusp of radical rearrangement of the world.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.