Occasionally you can see eternity in a speck of time, and occasionally you can see the logic of an entire historic moment in one event. And so it was with the Group of 7 summit meeting last weekend in Quebec.

The failure of that summit wasn’t fundamentally about trade, or even the Western alliance. It was about the steady collapse of the postwar order and the way power structures are being reorganized and renegotiated across societies and across the world.

The postwar order was a great historic achievement. The founding generation built a series of organizations and alliances to fight communism, create a stable trading system, combat global poverty and promote democracy.

But the next generation lost the thread.

European elites were so afraid of nationalism that they fell for the illusory dream of convergence — the dream that nations could effortlessly merge into a cosmopolitan Pan-European community. Conservatives across the Western world became so besotted with the power of the market that they forgot what capitalism is like when it’s not balanced by strong communities.