In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville examined the differences between the French monarchy and the system that replaced it. The title of his book has since taken on a life of its own, becoming an almost hypnotic phrase used whenever someone compares the regime in which they live with one that disappeared relatively recently. Those wishing to sound more refined often reach for the original French expression: l’Ancien Régime.
This old vocabulary remains useful precisely because we live in a world where such regime-breaking transformations continue to occur. We have more or less grown accustomed to the idea that a “stable” political order is one that lasts a few decades. Given the steadily increasing length of human life, this means that most people will experience more than one regime in their lifetime. And matters are complicated further by the fact that regimes themselves evolve gradually. The style of governance in 2015 differed in many respects from that of 1995, even though we would hesitate to describe this as a change of social system.
It is therefore worth trying to impose some order on this confusion and to name the regimes that are most relevant to us.
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The socialism of the Soviet bloc until the late 1980s
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The postwar welfare states of Western Europe and the United States, lasting into the 1970s or 1980s
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The neoliberal regimes that followed and persist to this day—except in Hungary, where they ended more than a decade ago
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The emerging regimes of new national states
Each of these systems operates according to different economic rules, features a different distribution of power, and relies on a distinct mode of governance. Some underlying regularities apply across all regimes; others are unique to each.
And then there are regimes such as the Protectorate or the First Czechoslovak Republic—systems we know about, but only through memories that have grown faint and indistinct with time.