The most dangerous geopolitical errors do not arise from ignorance, but from categories that outlived the worlds that produced them. The concept of transition, once the master‑category of post‑Cold War development theory, is one such relic. To say it is outdated is to say nothing. It is an entire Recognition Architecture (a way of seeing that determines what can be seen) from a Vanished World. And because it was born in a world that no longer exists, it keeps on blinding the creators of geopolitical contexts of the present.
How the Transitions Category Was Formed
The category “transition” crystallised between approximately 1989 and 1993, in a specific intellectual and geopolitical hothouse. Its primary architects were economists from the IMF, the World Bank, and American and Western European universities, working in close institutional proximity to the foreign policy establishments of the victorious Cold War powers. The intellectual framework they drew on — neoclassical economics, modernisation theory, Weberian institutional sociology — was itself a product of the postwar American academy, formed in conscious opposition to Soviet political economy.
The category carried a hidden metaphysics: that history had a direction, that the direction was known, and that the variable was only velocity. The World Bank’s “transition economies” classification assumed a terminal state — liberal democratic capitalism — that had been rendered visible and final by the Soviet collapse. Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” was not the cause of this assumption; it was its most articulate symptom. The assumption was already embedded in the institutional architecture before Fukuyama gave it philosophical form.
Crucially, the category was formed during a period of absolute American unipolarity — a moment, perhaps the only such moment in modern history, when a single power had no serious geopolitical competitor, when its economic model appeared not merely successful but scientifically validated by its rival’s collapse, and when the institutions through which the category would be deployed — IMF conditionality, World Bank lending, USAID programming — were instruments of that unipolar power.
The category “transition” was thus not a neutral analytical tool. It was a recognition architecture formed at the apex of a particular distribution of power, encoding the assumptions of that distribution as universal developmental logic.
What It Made Invisible Then
Even in the 1990s, the category systematically concealed several things:
1) It made invisible the path-dependency of institutions
The assumption that economies and political systems could be redesigned from first principles — “shock therapy” — ignored the degree to which Soviet-era institutional patterns, informal networks, property understandings, and social trust structures would shape what any formal transition actually produced. Russia did not transition to liberal democratic capitalism. It transitioned to something the category had no name for — a patrimonial oligarchic system with residual Soviet institutional DNA, which the “transition” framework then classified as a deviation rather than an outcome.
2) It made invisible alternative modernities
The category assumed that East Asian development — Korea, Taiwan, Singapore — was a variant of the Western path rather than a distinct model. The developmental state, active industrial policy, and selective integration with global markets were treated as transitional phases en route to neoliberal convergence, not as a coherent alternative architecture that might persist or even propagate.
3) It made invisible the interests of the architects
IMF conditionality attached to “transition” programmes served the interests of Western creditors, opened markets for Western capital, and created structural dependencies that benefited the institutions deploying the category. The category naturalised these interests as developmental necessity.
4) It made invisible civilizational difference as a potentially stable variable
The category assumed that given sufficient time, institutional reform, and external support, any polity would converge on liberal democratic capitalism because that convergence was rational. The possibility that different civilizational traditions might produce genuinely different equilibria — not as failed transitions but as stable alternative attractors — was not representable within the framework.
What It Makes Invisible Now
The category has now survived its own world’s death by approximately thirty years — which is precisely the point about evaluative lag. And its survival is doing active damage.
It makes invisible the stability of the Chinese model as a model
The People’s Republic has not been in transition for forty years. It has been in a process of deliberate, state-directed development that has produced the largest reduction in absolute poverty in human history, the second-largest economy on earth, and a technology sector competitive at the frontier. Classifying this as “delayed transition,” “state capitalism awaiting liberalisation,” or “authoritarian development that will eventually face a Tiananmen reckoning” is not analysis. It is the application of a dead category to a living system — and it systematically prevents analysts from understanding what China actually is.
What China actually is, is a developmental civilizational state operating with a different theory of the relationship between markets, political authority, and social cohesion — one with deep roots in the Confucian administrative tradition, the Legalist strand of Chinese statecraft, and a particular historical memory of what happened when the state was weak relative to both foreign powers and internal fragmentation. This is not a transition to anything. It is a distinct political-economic form that may be more durable than Western analysts have been able to see, precisely because the category “transition” classifies its stability as provisional.
This is the first of two articles. It examines how the “transition” framework—born in the unipolar moment of 1989–1993—became a recognition architecture that made certain realities visible and others permanently invisible. The formation of the category, what it concealed then, and what it continues to conceal now: these are the subject of Part One. Part Two turns to the cases—China, Russia, the Global South—and asks what recognition would require if we took the historical formation of our own categories seriously.
